Person · Munda leader · India
Birsa Munda
The Munda leader of the Ulgulan, the Great Tumult of 1899–1900 in the Chotanagpur plateau — a rising against the dikus, the outsider landlords and moneylenders who had turned collective Munda khuntkatti land into tenancy, and against the missions and the colonial courts that had underwritten it.
- Date
- 1875–1900
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 23.230, 84.950
Worth knowing
He died in Ranchi jail at twenty-five, probably of cholera. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, which recognised khuntkatti right and barred transfer of Adivasi land, came directly out of the rising and is still the basic land law of Jharkhand.
About the place
Placed at Ulihatu in Khunti district, his birthplace and the centre of the Ulgulan. He died in Ranchi jail.
Connections (5)
- AnalogueRani Gaidinliu
Gaidinliu in the Zeliangrong hills and Birsa Munda in Chotanagpur led risings a generation apart that shared a structure: a religious reform movement — Heraka, Birsait — that rejected both colonial authority and Christian mission, turning into an armed refusal of tax and of outsider land control. Both leaders were captured young, both are now official national heroes, and the movements they led are still politically live in the regions they came from.
- AnalogueBhognadih
The Santhal Hul of 1855 at Bhognadih and Birsa's Ulgulan of 1899 at Khunti are the two great Adivasi risings of the Chotanagpur plateau, forty-four years apart, and both were against the same combination — revenue demand, moneylenders, outsider tenancy and the courts that enforced all three. Each produced legislation afterwards, the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act and the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, which remain the basic land law of Jharkhand.
- PrecursorSidhu Murmu
Forty years and two hundred kilometres separate the Hul from the Ulgulan, and the mechanism was the same in both: land held by clearing right, moneylenders and landlords inserted over it by a revenue system that only recognised individual title, and a religious idiom in which the resistance was expressed. Each produced a protective tenancy act, and each act came only after the rising.
- CampaignUlihatu / Khunti
Birsa preached from the Chotanagpur villages around Ulihatu and Khunti, and the Ulgulan was fought there in 1899 and 1900 over khuntkatti tenure — land held by the descendants of the families who had cleared the forest. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 recognised khuntkatti and restricted transfer, eight years after he died in Ranchi jail.
- Life routeNetarhat Plateau
Birsa Munda, the Munda ulgulan leader of 1899-1900 who declared himself Birsa Bhagwan at Chalkad, studied as a boy at the German Lutheran mission school at Burju near Netarhat and worked across the Netarhat plateau and the Palamu-Lohardaga belt in his years of underground political organising. The plateau's Oraon and Munda villages were the recruitment ground for the ulgulan — the Great Tumult — in which he was captured near Jaikaran at Dombari Buru in March 1900 and taken to Ranchi jail, where he died of what the colonial record calls cholera on 9 June 1900.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Birsa Munda”. K.S. Singh, Birsa Munda and His Movement 1874–1901 (1983); the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act 1908 and its enquiry papers.
Open Birsa Munda in the repository →