By Sunil Kumar
“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” – Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe
Johar, Namaskar- We have heard these words on the national forum from our first tribal president, who now resides in Rashtrapati Bhavan which merely a century ago was the Viceroy’s palace. The mere thought would have those colonial rogues and their acolytes turning in their graves.
Birsa Munda- Bharat Mata Ke Veer Putra is one of those books that tells you the story of a great freedom fighter who was vilified and hunted by one of the most savage and organized empires in the world – the British. Full of pathos and imagination, this semi-fictionalized account has vivid imagery and drama that manages to bring an often forgotten and neglected historical figure to life.
The popular imagination of India has been suffused with Nehruvian myth-building that has largely neglected many significant figures who were more instrumental in igniting a true spirit of a struggle for freedom in the masses. This has undergone a slight change in the past decade, in which many figures have again been brought forth from the shadows. This year’s mega-success ‘RRR’ has capitalized on this feeling and attempted to rectify the fixation with a few, namely Gandhi and Nehru.
Narrative building has been done over decades and will continue. Pitched battles will be waged over every figure of the past. But, keeping that aside Tuhin Sinha and Ankita Varma have really made an earnest attempt to understand the time frame and it reflects in their writing, which is both poignant and thought-provoking. It gets depressing and heart-rending at times, as it brings alive the many tragedies the Indian subcontinent has had to suffer at the hands of cruel and oppressive rulers. Our cup of woes continues to the present day, but at least we are apparently ‘free’ and live in the world’s biggest democracy- a small consolation.
Birsa Munda died young like all great revolutionaries but in that short age of twenty-five he did more than people do over several lifetimes. There is no denying the fact that the man had charisma that inspired a poor and oppressed society to rebel against an unjust system composed of the British and their loyal servants, the zamindars as well as the usual pliant ‘Gunga-Dins’ who staffed the constabulary and civil society. The brown man’s burden continues till the present day with the hypocritical posturing of the West on practically every issue under the sun.
German Lutheran missionaries and other Victorian proselytisers come across as one of the main villains in the oppression of the tribals and an attempt to crush their native beliefs by the British. Birsa’s life trajectory is interesting and he even converts to Christianity in childhood due to poverty becoming Birsa David for a while. His keen intellect realises and rails against the cunning missionary apparatus as he realizes their true malafide intentions.
This continues to the present day in the state of Jharkhand, itself an initiative of the BJP and Vajpayee to respect tribal aspirations and as a partial homage to the legend of Birsa Munda. From Mahasweta Devi to the supposedly ‘woke’ tribe in cinema and media, his story will come to us in various avatars to conform to the ideology of whoever helms their respective ‘creative’ project. Legends like Munda and Bhagat Singh succumb to votebank politics and revisionism and their spirit of true patriotism is often obfuscated beyond belief.
Altering historiography or a gratuitious assault on the core Indic/Dharmic tenets of this country’s civilization was an avowed and very important colonial project. From Monier Wiliams of partial renown for his Sanskrit dictionary to the loyal footsoldiers of a dystopian and made-up ideal today; the dharmic underpinning has undergone centuries of assualt and indoctrination.
“When the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahmanism are encircled, undermined & finally stormed by the soldiers of the cross, the victory of Christianity must be signal and complete”- Monier Williams.
This book shows us how Victorian proselytisers with the active connivance of the British government attempted to coerce and convert the most vulnerable sections of Indian society, and how they fought back. The much ‘derided’ Macaulay and his acolytes were and continue to remain the motive force for our intellectual enslavement nearly two centures later.
Another plus point of the book is that unlike a dull academic tome that may provide you with more factual detail and in the process bore and fail to bring the main message home, this book is cinematic, vivid and engaging. It reads like a screenplay.
Two books I read recently conform to the factual but boring definition: ‘The Ivory Throne’ by Manu Pillai and ‘Black Spartacus’ by Sudheer Hazeerasingh.’ Accustomed as I am to reading English, it was slightly tough going in the beginning as the Hindi version was provided. From a slightly slow start, it picks up pace to riveting battles and invigorating and inspiring battles in the end.
The past eight years in India have seen a slight revival in revisiting forgotten figures from the past. A former IAS officer, an established sycophant of the dynasty, who infamously asked Pakistan’s assistance to remove the incumbent PM and called him a tea-seller exemplifies the Nehruvian myth building we have been subject to for generations, swallowing it hook, line and sinker.
RC Majumdar had condemned the establishment in his 1973 essay ‘Indian Historiography- Some Recent trends’ accusing it of distorting history to suit their own objectives.
“I know from personal experience how the Government of India has sought to utilize history for the spread of ideas which they have elevated to the rank of national policy to their own satisfaction. They are not willing to tolerate any history which mentions facts incompatible with their ideas of national integration and solidarity”
In recent times, attacks on the ‘Brahmanic’ state(in Arundhati Roy’s words) have intensified, polarising and hateful invective has reached endemic levels, and we have been hapless spectators to people being killed merely for expressing their opinion.
As the India-born George Orwell of ‘Big Brother’ fame once mentioned, ‘ The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history’ . The fact that Brahminic learning has to be suffused with a Kshatriya spirit to battle comes across clearly when we read Birsa Munda’s life journey and his mentor Anand Pandey.
We have a surfeit of intelligentsia in this country that has recently reached new nadirs in appeasement and building fake narratives.
Churchill, avowed India-hater once remarked aptly, ‘ While the Hindu elaborates his argument, the Moslem sharpens his sword. Between these two races and creeds, containing as they do so many gifted arid charming beings in all the glory of youth, there is no intermarriage. The gulf is impassable.'(winstonchurchill.org). However, east is east and west is west, and the twain has been meeting albeit to a limited extent, so we have always have hope for the future.
Some episodes in this book like the dalliance between the zamindar Tribhuvan Singh and the English official’s wife with the active encouragement of the husband would have seemed fanciful, had I had not read the raconteur Khushwant Singh’s many raunchy reminiscenses of the Nehru-Edwina age apart from British Historian Andrew Lownie’s ‘The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves’ and ‘Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire’ by Alex von Tunzellman’ and the ‘Crown’ all of whom openly discuss the promiscuity of the ruling Empire.
The indifference of the Empire and its barbaric cruelty remained a constant feature, most notably in the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre in 1919, nearly two decades after the death of Birsa Munda in prison by ‘poisoning’ as hinted by the authors.
Official accounts are always ‘whitewashed’ however, along with the connivance of a pliant and ‘eager-to-please’ machinery. The most disgusting aspect is this servility that alllowed a mere 40-50 thousand Englishmen at any time to govern a vast land of nearly 300 million at the time.
The fact that the British underestimated the power of ‘pagan’ tribals and the charisma of Birsa Munda is constantly reiterated in this book.
Academic and Marxist ideologues are quick to discard the ‘patriotic’ element and Pandey’s mentorship and harp on the ‘revolutionary’ dialectic and contradictory aspects of Munda’s ‘back to roots’ approach that suit the ‘subaltern’ and ‘proletariat’ aspects of West-transplanted ‘Communist’ ideology that are foisted on India’s “Dharmic’ past. Jharkhand along with Chattisgarh and a few other states remain part of the extreme left Maoist Naxal belt that was evocatively described by Sudeep Chakravarti in his book ‘Red Sun- Travels in Naxalite Country’
The authors have mentioned the divinity ‘Singobaba’, ‘Ulgulan'(great revolt) and ‘the slogan ‘Abua Disum, Abua Raj’ very often that engendered a spirit of camarederie among the oppressed tribal population at the time as well as during the ‘Jharkhand’ movement for the formation of a tribal-empowered state in the Indian Union.
Sadly, as mentioned in the epilogue and media narratives to the present day, proselytization and missionary activity and coerced conversion continues to the present day. Sarnaism, the tribal belief system in Jharkhand comes under the ambit of Sanatana belief like the Lingayats in Karnataka but is being actively pushed as a ‘separate’ religion to further divisive votebank politics.
This book is not exacly a ‘hagiography’ but close to that, and some more complex issues related to Birsa Munda could have been discussed. We see him dithering between ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence’ and certain mystical, supernatural activity that justify the ‘Bhagwan’ moniker, but a more objective account could have taken some more realistic aspects of his personality into consideration. 
