Description

This rare pamphlet, written in Santali language and published by one of the missions in Bhowanipore, now a part of Calcutta, contains various short moralistic stories for educational purposes. Today still various scripts are used for writing Santali, a language spoken in eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, but the most common script became Ol Chiki, invented by Raghunath Murmuto in 1925.

The first publications in Santali were made by Jeremiah Phillips in 1850s, after the Baptist Missionary Society sent their missionaries in the area, where the language was spoken in 1830s. The greatest contribution to the language was made by a Norwegian missionary Lars Olsen Skrefsrud (1840 – 1910), who came to India in 1863 and ten years later published the first Santali-language grammar using the Roman script. In 1874, he was one of the founders the first Santali-language/Roman script printing press at the Benagaria Mission.

We could not trace any institutional examples of the book. Worldcat lists two examples of a book with the same title and same number of pages, printed in 1876 in Calcutta, possibly including the same text, with two examples housed by the University of Oxford and Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (OCLC 640352434).

References: Cf.: Nishaant Choksi, From Language to Script: Graphic practice and the politics of authority in Santali-language print media, eastern India, Modern Asian Studies, September 2017, Vol. 51, No. 5 , pp. 1519-1560.