The Mountain Man

The sound began before the sun was up. Tak. Tak. Tak. A thin man in a worn cloth was standing on a bare, rocky hill, striking the stone with a hammer and a chisel.

Each blow chipped away a piece no bigger than a fingernail. The hill was enormous. The villagers of Gehlaur, passing below with their goats, shook their heads. Some of them laughed. They said Dashrath had lost his mind.

He did not stop. He would not stop for twenty-two years.

The village behind the hill

Dashrath Manjhi was born in the village of Gehlaur, in the Gaya district of Bihar, in eastern India. His family belonged to the Musahar community, among the poorest and most shunned people in the region. They owned no land. They worked other people's fields for very little.

Gehlaur sat in the shadow of a long ridge of rock. The nearest town with a hospital, a market and a proper school lay on the other side. To get there, people either climbed over the hill on a narrow, dangerous track, or walked all the way around it. The way around was many kilometres long. For a sick person, or a woman about to give birth, that distance could be the difference between life and death.

As a young man, Dashrath left the village to work in the coal mines of Dhanbad. Years later he came home and married Falguni Devi. He worked on the far side of the hill, and each day she would cross the rocky track to bring him food and water.

The fall

One day, as she climbed with her water pot, Falguni slipped on the rocks and fell. She was badly hurt. Reaching proper medical help meant the long journey around the hill.

The details differ from one telling to another, but the end is the same. Falguni did not recover, and she died.

Dashrath was heartbroken. He could not bring her back. But as he stood looking at the hill that had stood between his wife and a doctor, an idea took hold of him. If he could not move the hill, he could cut through it. Then no one in Gehlaur would ever have to make that journey again.

Tak, tak, tak

He sold his goats to buy a hammer, a chisel and a crowbar. Then, around 1960, he climbed the hill and began.

He had no machines and no explosives. He had no money and no help from the government. He had only his two hands and a stubborn heart. He worked in the scorching summer, when the rock burned to the touch, and in the monsoon, when it ran with water. He still had to earn enough to eat, so he did paid labour for part of the day and spent the rest at the rock.

People called him mad. Some called him a fool. A few, as the years went on, began to bring him food, or a new tool when the old one wore out.

Slowly, slowly, a notch appeared in the ridge. Then a groove. Then a passage that a person could walk through.

Twenty-two years

By around 1982, the work was done. Dashrath Manjhi had cut a path through the hill roughly 110 metres long and about 9 metres wide. In places, the walls of rock on either side rose several metres above a walker's head.

The journey from Gehlaur to the town of Wazirganj, which had meant a trek of many kilometres around the ridge, was now only a short walk. Children could reach school more easily. Farmers could reach the market. And the sick could reach a doctor in time.

He was by then an old man. He had spent more than half his adult life on one task, for no pay and no reward.

The Mountain Man

Word slowly spread beyond the village. Journalists came. People began to call him the Mountain Man.

He did not grow rich. He spent his last years asking officials to turn his path into a proper paved road, and travelling, sometimes on foot, to press his case. He once walked along the railway line towards Delhi to try to be heard.

Dashrath Manjhi died of cancer in August 2007, in Delhi. The Government of Bihar gave him a state funeral, an honour usually reserved for important public figures. Years later, a proper road was built along his route through the hill.

In 2015, a Hindi film, Manjhi: The Mountain Man, told his story to millions of people across India.

Today, people visit Gehlaur to walk through the gap in the rock. They stand between the stone walls, where every inch was cut by a single man, by hand, and they try to imagine the sound of it. Tak. Tak. Tak. For twenty-two years.

Want to read more?

The film Manjhi: The Mountain Man (2015), directed by Ketan Mehta, brought his story to a wide audience, though it adds drama of its own. For the facts, the news reports published in Indian newspapers around the time of his death in 2007 are a good place to start.