A group of students from Odisha performed Shakespeare plays in Santali at the International Shakespeare Festival 2026 in Craiova, Romania, marking the 100th year of the Ol Chiki script of the tribal language.

The students staged Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth in Santali at the festival, which featured 71 universities and more than 3,000 participants from around the world.

The Santali language is spoken by roughly 7.6 million people across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. It has been an officially recognised Scheduled Language of India since 2003 and serves as an additional official language in States such as Jharkhand and West Bengal.

The Ol Chiki script of the Santali language marks its centenary in 2026. In 1925, Guru Gomke Pandit Raghunath Murmu from Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district developed the script. He created the distinct 30-letter writing system specifically for the Santali language to accurately capture its unique phonetic features.

Ten students each from Odisha’s Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), who had travelled to Romania, also performed the Shakespeare plays in Santali at a special programme organised with the Romanian Embassy in New Delhi on June 5 and 6.

The students were in Romania under the fully funded Erasmus+ KA171 Student Mobility Programme, according to teachers from KIIT who were part of the delegation accompanying them. The two-month academic and cultural internship programme was held from April 1 to May 31.

“It is not a theatre event alone, but also a tribute to indigenous languages and cultures. For the first time, Shakespeare’s plays have been written and enacted in Santali, the language of an Indian tribe that has a glorious history of resistance against British colonialism,” Dr. Suryasnata Mohanty, Joint Director, KIIT and KISS, said.