The Political Life of Memory
Birsa Munda in Contemporary India

Situating Birsa Munda as the canon, the book demonstrates how political parties and civil societies mobilise and reproduce his memory.

Rahul Ranjan (Author)

9781009337908, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 May 2023

320 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.3 cm, 0.54 kg

'Dr Ranjan is a gifted anthropologist. His capacity to involve diverse voices has yielded a rich series of insights. These pertain to the political and cultural afterlives of Birsa Munda, an infamous Adivasi revolutionary from the pre-independence era. Ranjan weaves together the variously social, ideological, aesthetic, archival and religious dimensions of this freedom-fighter's posthumous significance. He carefully documents cultures of memorialisation and counter-memory and uses Subaltern Studies frameworks to address issues like identity-assertion, legal pluralism and inequality. How are narratives of Adivasi resistance, power and belonging configured and reconfigured in modern India? To find out, let us now listen to someone who knows how to listen.' Daniel Rycroft, University of East Anglia

This book examines the representation of Birsa's political life, memory politics and the making of anticolonialism in contemporary Jharkhand. It offers contrasting features of political imaginations deployed in developing memorial landscapes. Framing of Birsa in the heroic narrative through a grand scale of memorialisation, often in the form of the built environment, curates a selective version. This isolates the scope of elaborating his political ideas outside the confines of atypical historical records and their relevance in the contemporary context. The book argues that everyday politics through affective sites such as memorials and statues produce political visions, emotions, and opportunities. It shows how such symbolic sites are often strategically placed and politically motivated to inscribe ideologies. This process outlines how the state and Adivasi use memory as a political tool to lay claims to the past of the Birsa Movement.

Abbreviations
Glossary of Hindi Terms
List of Illustrations
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Claiming the Munda Raj from the Margins: Land, Missionaries, and the Making of Birsa Ulgulan in Chota Nagpur (1845–1900)
3. Memories Set in Stone: Political Aesthetics and the Statue of Birsa Munda in Postcolonial Jharkhand
4. 'Burying the Dead, Creating the Past': The Making of Memorials, Stone Slabs and Birsa in Jharkhand
5. Echoes from the Graveyard: Pathalgadi, Birsaites and the Landscape of Memory
6. Conclusion
Manifesto: Script for the Counter-memorial
Manifesto: Pathways to Anticolonialism, and Thinking about Subaltern Present Past
Appendix
Primary Sources
Published Sources.

Subject Areas: Demonstrations & protest movements [JPWF], Political activism [JPW], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Ethnic studies [JFSL], Social groups [JFS], Cultural studies [JFC], History of other lands [HBJQ], Regional & national history [HBJ]