Noor Mohammad

Haji Noor Mohammad was the zamindar of the two major areas of Ratu and Kadru of the Ranchi district, capital city of the present-day state of Jharkhand in India.

Sheikh Haji Noor Mohammad (his full name) was the son of Badi Mian. He lived all his life in the locality of Purani Ranchi, Ranchi which was one of the early residential settlements in modern Ranchi. His house locally known as Bada Ghar (Big House) included a number of plots interconnected & inhabited by his sons and their families. Supervising land-revenue collection and farming during the British Raj, he was famous in the region for his religiosity, righteousness, and generosity. So much so was he respected that people in the surrounding areas would come to him in case a matter needed to be resolved - judicial or non-judicial - and would go back happily satisfied with his disposition. Besides land business, he owned some brick-making factories (brick-ovens) and, and had owned an orchard of guava trees numbering 10,000 in the region of Ratu in Ranchi. Later, on the same plot of land a residential colony came up that is known today as Amrood Bagan (Guava Grove). A constantly smiling face, Noor Mohammad lived until mid-1970s admired equally by old and young, rich and poor alike.

Noor Mohammad had 5 sons. The eldest one was Mohammad Yasin who joined government service and worked all his life as a bureaucrat in the Ranchi district administration. He rose to become District Naazir. Mohammad Yasin had two sons from his first wife: Azizur Rahman & Mohammad Habibur Rahman, and a daughter named Bano who he lost while she was around 4-5 years old. He also lost his wife immediately followed by this tragic incident.

Other sons of Haji Noor Mohammad included (in order of seniority): Mohammad Ahmad (a businessman), Mohammad Hasan aka Sufi sahab, Mohammad Ibrahim, & Mazhar Husain (government service). Of all these brothers, the oldest was a sister. Moreover, Noor Mohammad also had a brother whose offsprings were involved in the same businesses a remarkable example of which was an upscale restaurant (one of its kind in entire Ranchi) called Cosy Nook: Supper Bar. Cosy Nook, in the days of the British Raj and the period followed by Indian independence in 1947, used to have its own ice-cream manufacturing unit, a crew of waiters and an a la carte, comparable to the best in the industry today.

Though most non-political, Noor Mohammad took a firm stand when a band of mobilizers from the Jinnah-led Muslim League reached Ranchi asking Muslims to flee to Pakistan in 1947. Noor Mohammad and his family vehemently opposed it, and thus Muslim League hardly had any impact in Ranchi, or so to say the Jharkhand region/the southern part of the erstwhile Bihar state.