Phulbani — the beautiful name of this headquarter town of Kandhamal in Odisha, which hit the headlines in the recent past for all the wrong reasons, literally means ‘a flowery voice’. Where on Earth would one find a tribal land with a far-fetched, non-ethnic name full of poetic olfaction like this, unless it was planned and well-thought? Someone had perhaps successfully absolved the later settlers of any guilt for re-naming this pre-dominantly tribal highland with a creatively thought, meticulous but very beautiful name with a whole mainstream over touch, by inventing an equally agreeing, beautiful folklore to it.
The unfortunate, christening myth of the town is tragic and implicit with pathos. Myth and folklore has it that a poor native girl named Phula (flower in Odia) to whom the town reportedly owes its good name, was either sacrificed or ravaged at a tender age by some unidentified person. Many amateurish researchers suspected the culprit to be the Englishman who was bossing around the area at that time due to his magisterial posting with reckless abandon.
The planned headquarters town of the tribal district of Kandhamal was only like a rough draft sketch on her deceased architect’s table not very long ago. It was planned and built by its last English magistrate Alfred James Ollenbach, who its people can neither well remember nor forget fully, thanks to a high school named after him; and a small, unrushed branch post office the government had started in later decades that identified itself with a plank signboard that it had named after a sparsely dwelt street where it was located — The Ollenbach Nagar Sub-Post Office.
The English officer who had so lovingly planned the peripheral design of the town with punctilious presence of thick mango trees all over on the sides of the roads in and around the town, starting some 30 miles from the border of the district, had left behind no architectural or colonial legacy beside a community hall that was built following a circular British design for small meeting halls. It was destined to live forever in the innocent questions of the ever-growing successive settlers who soon outsmarted the thin presence of the natives, the locals and other early settlers in the town.
The school, like the town, nurtures no memory, not even a vague portrait of its founder in the headmaster’s room or elsewhere.
Horror stories still do rounds in the fancy of many old timers about the planned growth of slow urbanisation in the town. From the British suppression of human sacrifices to the advent of well-dressed child lifters who the locals suspected used to hide among the new faces. The fake ghostbusters who treated and killed people merely by a spell of fear are still doing business in the countryside and urban outskirts.