With over 1.4 billion people, and being the most populous country in the world, India is an incredibly diverse place. With its diversity, also comes many languages, and writing systems used to write them. However, most of these writing systems have a similar pattern. Each consonant letter carries its own inherent vowel, and its vowel value is modified by the strokes added around this character. That is an alphasyllabary, or an abugida.

Name just about any Indian writing system and you would find that it is an abugida. Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Odia, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Bengali-Assamese, they all are abugidas. But not this one. And before we move on, no, it is not the Latin alphabet, although it is widely used throughout India. We are talking about an alphabet made by an Indian, for a language spoken in the Indian subcontinent. This is Ol Chiki.

Unlike other writing systems officially recognised in India, Ol Chiki is a relatively recent invention. Its origins trace back to the 1920s, to a writer and educator called Pandit Raghunath Murmu. He spoke the Santali language as his mother language, but was educated in the Odia language. He was also known to draw shapes in the earth as a child, which some thought was the start of Ol Chiki’s development.

But why did Raghunath Murmu invented Ol Chiki in the first place? Well, Santali was traditionally a spoken language, where information was transmitted orally. Later on, Santali became written using the Latin alphabet, Bengali-Assamese, Devanagari, and Kalinga scripts. Yet, some sounds of Santali could not be adequately represented by any of these writing systems, requiring modifications to adapt them to the Santali language.

Pointing out how little of his education then was done in Santali, he was motivated to create his own script to write Santali. And in 1925, at age 20, Raghunath Murmu created Ol Chiki. In the coming decades, Santali literature was created, and the Ol Chiki script began to popularise. Raghunath Murmu was known to visit different Santali villages to spread his script, reaching ever more Santali speakers.

Ol Chiki is a true alphabet consisting of 30 letters. But the shapes of these letters were not drawn at random. Linguists have noted that these shapes do bear some inspiration from the names given to the letters. These names were actual Santali words, like the letter ᱫ ‘ud’, which resembles a mushroom, and ‘ud’ translates to ‘mushroom’.

There are two ways each letter can be printed, and by that, we do not mean uppercase and lowercase. Instead, the two ways are called chapa hand, or print and digital forms, and the usara hand, or the handwritten forms. The former is used in publications and digital stuff, and the latter is used in handwriting, although digital fonts do exist for usara. In usara, letters can be strung together to form a cursive form, allowing various cursive ligatures that are not found in chapa. One particular example is with the diacritic ahad, or ᱽ, which marks deglottalisation in a word final, such as ᱜᱽ being read as /g/ at the end of a word instead of /k’/.

In addition to the 30 letters of the Ol Chiki alphabet, there are also 6 diacritic marks, including the ahad mentioned earlier. Firstly, there is the găhlă ṭuḍăg, represented as ᱹ . Yes, it resembles a period, and it is written after one of the three vowel letters it modifies. This accommodates the vowel sounds of Santal Parganas dialect, although phonetic differences are not really clear-cut.

Next, there is the mũ ṭuḍăg. Instead of resembling a period, this one is a raised dot, written as ᱸ. Written after the vowel letter it modifies, this diacritic nasalises the vowel to be modified. These two diacritics can be combined together to form the mũ găhlă ṭuḍăg, which bears a marked resemblance to a colon. Written as ᱺ, this diacritic indicates a nasalised and extended vowel. This applies to the one of the three vowel letters modified by the găhlă ṭuḍăg.

Next up, there is the relā. Resembling the tilde, this ~ diacritic lengthens any oral or nasalised vowel. Unlike other alphabets that normally write this diacritic above the letter it modifies, the relā, like all other Ol Chiki diacritics, is written after the vowel it modifies. But when combined with vowels that have the găhlă ṭuḍăg, like ᱮᱹ, the relā comes after the găhlă ṭuḍăg.

Lastly, we have the hyphen-looking diacritic, called the phārkā. This one functions quite the opposite of the ahad. Instead of deglottalising the consonant it follows, this diacritic preserves the glottal or ejective sound of the consonant letter it follows. This can also apply even in a word-initial position.

As many of these diacritics resemble punctuation marks commonly used in other writing systems, there has to be some distinctions to be made in Ol Chiki. As such, the period is not used in Ol Chiki, although it does use the comma, exclamation mark, question mark, and quotation marks. Instead of using the period to mark breaks in sentences and paragraphs, Ol Chiki has the mucăd for a minor break, and the double mucăd for a major break. Ironically, though, these punctuation marks strangely resemble the single and double quotation marks, as they are written as ᱾ and ᱿ respectively.

Pandit Raghunath Murmu dedicated his entire life to the creation and education of Ol Chiki for the Santali language. His contributions to Santali literature were recognised through the various awards he received, among which was the adoration and respect from the Santali people. The Santali people finally had their own writing system, and their own linguistic identity.

However, Raghunath Murmu did not live long enough to see Ol Chiki’s official recognition by the Indian government. He passed away in 1982, and it was not until 2003, in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution of India, when the Santali language was included. Thereafter, some state governments also recognised the Santali language, and started to include Santali as a medium of instruction in schools in predominantly Santali areas. For his contributions to the Santali language and the community, their significance definitely cannot be underscored. Ol Chiki is now widely used for the Santali language, and has become India’s only true alphabet (of Indian origin) in the official scripts of the Indian Republic.