Raghunath Murmu (1905–1982) was a visionary linguist, educator, and writer best known for inventing the Ol Chiki script, the first writing system developed specifically for the Santali language, spoken by millions of tribal people across eastern India, including Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Bihar, and parts of Assam.
Before his invention, Santali was a rich oral language but lacked a script of its own. It was often written in Bengali, Odia, or Roman scripts, which failed to represent its phonetics accurately. Murmu recognized that this was not just a linguistic gap, but a cultural void and he set out to give the Santali people their own written identity.