Ranchi led Jharkhand's statehood fight and kept its waterfalls
Ranchi is Jharkhand's capital and most populous district, long the hub of the movement that sought a separate state for tribal belts of South Bihar and neighbouring regions. Nicknamed City of Waterfalls, it ranks among Jharkhand's oldest urban centres.
Jagannath Temple and Ratu Palace mark older elites; special economic zones and new sectors now push rapid growth. Folk etymologies credit British captain Thomas Wilkinson's mishearing of Oraon Archi, bamboo forest, or Mundari words for cattle sticks and black kites.
Iron slag, potsherds and iron tools show people working in the Chota Nagpur region by around 1400 BCE. Magadha held indirect sway until Ashoka's time, Samudragupta's armies marched through toward the Deccan, and in the 4th century CE the Nagvanshi king Raja Pratap Rai made Chutia, now part of Ranchi, his capital. After the Battle of Buxar the Nagvanshis became East India Company vassals, and in 1817 the British demoted them to zamindars and ruled directly. Wilkinson shifted his frontier agency headquarters from Lohardaga to Kishunpur in 1843, and the place was called Rachi until 1927.
The city sits 651 metres up on the southern Chota Nagpur plateau near the Tropic of Cancer, and its hills and forests keep it milder than the rest of the state, with summer highs of up to 42 degrees and about 1,430 millimetres of rain, though deforestation has pushed temperatures up. Heavy Engineering Corporation made it an industrial town in 1958, and statehood in 2000 set off a wave of job-seeking migrants. The 2011 census counted 1,073,427 people in the municipal corporation. Hindi is the common tongue and Nagpuri the regional language, while Urdu, Bengali, Kurukh and Mundari are also widely spoken.
Source: Ranchi
