Hazaribagh

Hazaribagh is the Headquarters of the North Chotanagpur Division. The old District has been greatly lessened into a number of smaller districts. The town is of middle size with a  number of satellite villages surrounding it. The charm of the village market in the centre is the produce of the countryside available there. Hazaribagh town is situated in a large clearing dotted with villages and surrounded by forests and many hills, each having a significant  role in determining the history of the place. To the north of the town is the National Park which is an attraction for visitors. The climate is pleasant at about seven hundred metres altitude, the rainfall moderate from July to September. The region is famed for its festivals, especially Ramnavmi, Karma, Dussehra and Sohrai in the harvest-time in autumn, and the great spring festival of the tribals, Sarhul, in the spring. Being an area rich in tribes both the tribal and non tribal festivals are celebrated in an atmosphere of traditional gaiety. The original name of the place is after two villages Okun and Hazari which the British found when they came here around 1770. A mango grove (Bagh) in the south part of the town belonged to a man named Hazari , and the British called the place Okun-Hazari, later the name “Hazareebaugh” being used in the early nineteenth century. An old British map of 1862 shows the plan of the town much as it is today, and great changes do not seem to have been made. The town is described in the Lonely Planet tourist handbook as “A pleasant, leafy town”, famous for the number and variety of its indigenous variety of trees, not a modern “Gulmohur town” of weedy floral fast-growing shade trees that is so common elsewhere.

The Hazaribagh region in Jharkhand is a heavily forested plateau with deep river valleys, and exotic forest tribes. This area has been found to have magnificent Mesolithic rock art (10,000 B.C) , that may be directly traced as the distant ancestor of a unique style of wall paintings in the villages of Hazaribagh