Rock paintings in Jharkhand State of India are under threat.

10,000 year-old-rock paintings found few years ago in Tangari Basli block some 40 kms from the state capital Ranchi is now under threat.

Threat is from the stone quarrying due to which these paintings have been exposed to the flying stone dust and open atmosphere. Most of the paintings now have been faded.

Drawings are made on granite and granite gneiss rocks. In these paintings red ochre has been used. Dancing is the major subject of all these paintings.

Two years ago one small news was published in the local news paper about this rock paintings. The next day I reached the spot. To my surprise I found lots of laborers cutting the rocks to be used as foundation stone for the railway tracks, having ancient drawings on them. It looks like that all the paintings were earlier inside the caves which is now exposed due to quarrying. All the local peoples of the village are not aware of the importance of these ancient paintings.

Such types of rock paintings or cave paintings are rare and are concentrated in only few places in Jharkhand.

The paintings in red ochre include dancing people and a dancing man with a stick. In another picture a man is found wearing mask having long ears on his head resembling to deer. Still today some of the tribal group follow the same sequence of dancing with little changes.

Ochre are mixture of hematite, clay and limonite with 15 to 80% iron oxide, and yield yellow and brown colours. When roasted they yield reddish brown. In Ranchi district red ochre are mainly associated with phyllites.

Rock art falls into two categories. The first is petrograms or pictographs, which are paintings done in white or red ochre. The second is petroglyphs, figures chiselled out on the rock surface. In Jharkhand almost all the rock paintings falls under the pictograph categories.

The earliest evidence of painting derives from archaeological sites in two rock-shelters in Arnhem Land, in northern Australia. In the lowest layer of material at these sites there are used pieces of ochre estimated to be 60,000 years old. Archaeologists have also found a fragment of rock painting preserved in a limestone rock-shelter in the Kimberley region of North-Western Australia dated at 40 000 years old.

Jharkhand government should come forward to protect all such types of rock paintings which is either being destroyed by stone quarrying or exposed to the atmosphere for weathering.