How Birsa Munda led the Ulgulan and won tribal land rights

Birsa did not win a following by talking only about rent. He gave a broken community something bigger: faith, dignity and a name for what it wanted. Around 1895, after his own brush with mission schooling and a spell of illness, he began preaching a new path. He told the Mundas to give up drink, animal sacrifice and superstition, to worship one god, and to hold to their own identity rather than dissolve into either the missions or the Hindu fold. This became the Birsait faith, and his followers began calling him Dharti Aba, 'Father of the Earth'. Word spread that he could heal the sick and end epidemics; thousands came just to see him. But the spiritual message carried a sharp political edge. Birsa taught that the land belonged to those who had cleared it, not to dikku landlords or the British, and he called for Abua raj — 'our own rule', a Munda kingdom on Munda soil. That fused two hungers at once: the wish to be respected as a people, and the demand to get the land back. Reform gave the movement discipline; the land promise gave it fire. By 1899 he had turned a religious revival into an organised revolt.

Birsa Munda — the young Munda from Ulihatu who founded the Birsait faith, was hailed as Dharti Aba, and led the Ulgulan of 1899-1900 before dying in Ranchi jail at 25. Gaya Munda and the sardar leaders — the older village headmen and land agitators of the sardari larai movement, whose decades of legal struggle prepared the ground Birsa built on; several became his field commanders. The dikku landlords and moneylenders — the outsider zamindars, thikadars and traders who held Munda villages as rent-paying estates and extracted forced labour, and who were the first target of the revolt. The British administration — Deputy Commissioner of Ranchi and the colonial police and army units that garrisoned Chotanagpur, put down the rising at Dombari Hill, and jailed Birsa; Commissioner-level officers later ran the enquiries that led to reform. The Christian missionaries — Lutheran, Anglican and Catholic missions whose schools first educated Birsa but whose conversions and land dealings he came to resist. Later chroniclers — writers and officials, and much later historians and Adivasi activists, who carried Birsa's memory from a hunted rebel to a revered figure of tribal pride.

Legend: Birsa was a god who healed the sick and raised the dead. In his own lifetime, followers called him Dharti Aba and believed he could cure disease, stop epidemics and work miracles; that faith gave the movement enormous power and survives in the reverence for 'Bhagwan Birsa Munda'. As documented history, Birsa was a charismatic young preacher and reformer whose healing reputation grew from his message of clean living and self-respect, not from supernatural feats — and honouring him does not require the miracles to be literally true. Disputed: how he died. Colonial records state that Birsa died in Ranchi jail on 9 June 1900, most likely of cholera, which was then sweeping the prison. But because he was a young captive whose death was so convenient for the British, many Adivasis have long suspected he was poisoned. The honest position is that the official cholera account is what the surviving records say, while the poisoning belief is a widely held suspicion that the sources cannot confirm or fully rule out. What is solid: a real man born in 1875, a real Birsait faith, a real armed Ulgulan in 1899-1900, a real death in custody at 25, and a real legislative aftermath. The devotion is genuine; some of the miracle detail is faith, not documented fact.

The Ulgulan was crushed with force, and ordinary Munda families paid the price. When Birsa's followers gathered on Dombari Hill near Sail Rakab in January 1900, British-led police and troops opened fire on a crowd that included women and children. The official toll was low, but Munda memory counts hundreds of dead, their bodies said to have filled the hillside; the place is still called Topped Buru, the hill of the dead. Hundreds more were arrested across the plateau, tried, jailed or transported, and Birsa himself died in custody that June. For a moment it looked like total defeat. Yet the sheer scale of the rising forced the colonial state to ask why the Mundas had risen at all — and the answer was land. The enquiries that followed fed directly into the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, which recognised khuntkatti rights, restricted the transfer of Adivasi land to non-tribals, and curbed the forced labour that had ground the Mundas down. For countless ordinary families, that law meant they could no longer be so easily thrown off ground their ancestors had cleared. Birsa did not live to see it, but his people's revolt bought a protection that outlasted the empire that killed him.

In 1900, Birsa Munda was, to the British, a dangerous outlaw — a jungle prophet with a price on his head, run to ground and dead in a cell before he turned 26. To the Mundas he was already Dharti Aba, but to the colonial state he was a problem solved. For decades afterward, outside his own homeland, he was barely a footnote in the history of empire, remembered mainly in Adivasi song and oral memory on the plateau. The contrast with today could hardly be sharper. Birsa's portrait now hangs in the Central Hall of India's Parliament, one of very few Adivasi leaders so honoured. Ranchi's airport is named Birsa Munda Airport, and his statues stand across Jharkhand and beyond. In 2021 the Government of India declared his birthday, 15 November, as Janjatiya Gaurav Divas — Tribal Pride Day — a national day marking Adivasi contribution to the freedom struggle, timed to the year Jharkhand itself was carved out as a state. The hunted rebel of 1900 has become a founding icon: proof of how a people once written out of the imperial record can, a century on, place their hero at the very centre of the nation's memory.

Birsa Munda matters because his story overturns a comfortable idea about how rights are won. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act was not handed down by a kind empire; it was forced out of a frightened one by a revolt it could not ignore. The lesson of the Ulgulan is that the theft of ordinary people's land is a political fact, not a natural one — and that dispossessed communities can bend even a colonial state when they organise around identity and land together, as Birsa fused faith with Abua raj. His fight also shows how India remembers, and forgets. For most of a century a leader who saved tribal land was a footnote, because the story of the freedom struggle was told mainly through the cities and the big Congress names. Bringing Birsa to the centre, with his portrait in Parliament and a national Tribal Pride Day, is a correction with real stakes: it says Adivasi resistance was part of the national story all along. The deeper impact is still unfinished. The tenancy protections Birsa's revolt won are challenged even now by mining, dams and land acquisition, so the honest tribute is not just to garland his statue but to defend the land right his 25 years bought — because that, not the miracles, is what his life truly means.