Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, Grantha: India's scripts grew over centuries, and no one can name the person who invented them.
Ol Chiki is different. It was designed by one man, Pandit Raghunath Murmu, in 1925, for Santali — a language spoken by millions that had no script of its own.
A hundred years later it is taught in schools, encoded on your phone, and used to print the Constitution of India.
The Language Came First
Santali is spoken by about 7.6 million people, according to the 2011 Census, mostly in Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar and Assam, and also in Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. It is one of India's largest tribal languages.
It does not belong to either of the big Indian language families. Santali is Austroasiatic, from the Munda branch, so it is not a relative of Hindi, Bengali or Odia, nor of Tamil or Telugu. Its nearest relatives are spoken in Southeast Asia.
For centuries it was written down only by outsiders, in whatever script they used: Bengali, Odia, Devanagari or the Latin alphabet of missionaries. Each fitted the sounds of Santali imperfectly, and none belonged to the people speaking it.
The Man Who Designed It
Raghunath Murmu was born in 1905 in the Mayurbhanj area of present-day Odisha, and worked as a teacher. He is known among Santals as Guru Gomke, the great teacher.
He devised Ol Chiki in 1925, when he was about twenty. It was first shown publicly in 1939, at an exhibition in Mayurbhanj state.
He then spent decades making the script usable: a primer called Ol Chemed, a grammar called Ronod, poems and plays, including one that tells the story of the script's origin. In 1964 he founded a cultural association, usually known by its initials ASECA, which taught the script village by village.
How the Script Works
Ol Chiki has 30 letters and runs left to right. It is a true alphabet: vowels are full letters in their own right, not marks attached to consonants as in Devanagari or Bengali. There is no upper and lower case.
Each letter is named after a Santali word, and its shape points to that word. The letter for the sound l is called ol, meaning to write, and is drawn like a hand holding a pen. Learning the alphabet and learning the vocabulary reinforce each other.
It also has its own numerals, and two styles of writing — a printed form and a cursive one. The full stop is avoided, because a dot could be mistaken for a diacritic; vertical strokes are used instead.
Why Invent a Script at All
The practical argument was fit. Santali has sounds, including a set of consonants formed by closing the throat at the end of a syllable, that neighbouring scripts handle awkwardly.
The deeper argument was ownership. A community whose language is only ever written in someone else's letters is always a guest in print. A script of one's own changes who decides how the language looks.
This is why Ol Chiki spread as a movement rather than a government programme. For decades it was taught in village classes and pushed by Santal associations, long before any state recognised it.
From Village Classes to the Constitution
In 2003 Parliament added Santali to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, by the 92nd Amendment, which received assent in January 2004. Santali is the only Munda language on that list, and it joined alongside Bodo, Dogri and Maithili, bringing the total to 22 languages.
Santali is an additional official language in Jharkhand and West Bengal, and it is taught in schools in several states. Students can take examinations in it.
In 2008 Ol Chiki was added to Unicode, in version 5.1, at the code range U+1C50 to U+1C7F. That is the quiet step that lets the script exist on phones, in web pages and in search engines, rather than only on paper.
On 25 December 2025 the Ministry of Law and Justice published the Constitution of India in Santali, in Ol Chiki, for the first time. President Droupadi Murmu, herself a Santal from Mayurbhanj, released it.
The Centenary
On 16 February 2026 the President inaugurated a year-long commemoration of the script's hundredth year, at the Dr Ambedkar International Centre in New Delhi, with the Ministry of Culture and the Santali monthly Fagun.
A commemorative coin and a postage stamp honouring Raghunath Murmu were released at the event.
On the dates: the script is dated to 1925, so the centenary falls across 2025 and 2026, and the official year-long commemoration was opened in February 2026. Some reports give 2025 and some 2026 for that reason.
What a Script Solves, and What It Doesn't
A script is a beginning, not a conclusion.
What a living script needs after it is invented:
- Teachers
- Textbooks
- Fonts and keyboards
- Exams and jobs
- Publishing
- Readers
Many Santali speakers still read their language in Bengali, Odia or Devanagari letters, because that is what they were taught. A script is only as strong as the schools that teach it.
Typing it remains harder than typing Hindi or English. Unicode support exists and free fonts exist, but keyboards, autocorrect and the general assumption that a phone speaks your language lag behind.
What makes Ol Chiki remarkable is not that the problem is solved. It is that a schoolteacher in Mayurbhanj decided his language deserved its own letters, and a century later a head of state used them to publish the Constitution.
Most writing systems have no author. This one has a birthday, a name, and a photograph of the man who drew the letters.
Sources & Further Reading
- PIB: Centenary celebrations of the Ol Chiki script — Official note on the 16 February 2026 inauguration, the coin and the stamp.
- Ministry of Culture: President inaugurates the year-long centenary commemoration of the Olchiki script — The ministry's own record of the event.
- PIB: Constitution of India translated into Santhali, released by the President — The first publication of the Constitution in Santali, in Ol Chiki, December 2025.
- Unicode Standard: Ol Chiki code chart (U+1C50–U+1C7F) — The official character chart for the script.
- Ol Chiki script (Wikipedia) — Structure of the script, its two styles, letter names and Unicode history.
- Santali language (Wikipedia) — Language family, speaker numbers and official status.
- Raghunath Murmu (Wikipedia) — Biography of the script's creator and his later works.