Place · Munda rebel villages · India
Ulihatu / Khunti
The Chota Nagpur plateau villages of Ulihatu and Khunti in Jharkhand — Ulihatu was the birthplace of Birsa Munda on 15 November 1875, and Khunti the operational centre of his Ulgulan ('Great Tumult') rebellion of 1899-1900 against British land dispossession and Christian missionary pressure on the Munda people. Birsa (1875-1900) proclaimed himself Birsa Bhagwan, declared the end of the dikus (outsiders), and led a short-lived rebellion with 7,000 followers before his arrest at Jamkopai forest on 3 March 1900 and death in Ranchi Jail on 9 June 1900, aged 25. The 1908 Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act, protecting tribal land, was a direct result of the Ulgulan. 15 November 2000 was chosen as Jharkhand state foundation day; 2021 made it Janjatiya Gaurav Divas nationally.
- Date
- 1895–1900
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Condition
- living memorial landscape
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.340, 85.280
Connections (4)
- Adivasi anti-colonial historyBhognadih
Bhognadih in the Santhal Parganas and Ulihatu in Chotanagpur are the memorial centres of two Adivasi risings forty years apart — the Santhal Hul of 1855 under Sidhu and Kanhu, and Birsa Munda's Ulgulan of 1899. Neither was organised with the other and they belonged to different peoples, but both were against the same combination of revenue demand, moneylending and the conversion of collective land into tenancy, and both produced legislation.
- CampaignBirsa Munda
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.
- Power passed toNavratangarh
The Nagvanshis held Chotanagpur for some nine hundred years, and the Munda khuntkatti tenure survived under them because they took tribute rather than title. What broke it was the colonial settlement's insistence on individual ownership, which let outside landlords and moneylenders in — and the Ulgulan of 1899 was fought against exactly that, two centuries after Doisa was abandoned.
- BirthJaipal Singh Munda
Jaipal Singh Munda was born on 3 January 1903 at Takra village in Khunti district, in the Munda country of southern Chotanagpur. The village of Ulihatu that already stands in this repository as the birthplace of Birsa Munda is less than twenty kilometres away; the two Munda leaders came from the same clan network. Educated at the German Lutheran mission school at Burju and at St Paul's College Ranchi before Oxford, he carried the Khunti Munda political tradition from Birsa's ulgulan into Constituent-Assembly-era Adivasi self-rule politics and the demand for a separate state of Jharkhand.
On these journeys
Sources
Ministry of Tribal Affairs repository; colonial records and modern scholarship on Birsa Munda.
Open Ulihatu / Khunti in the repository →