dhruv
I’m a researcher and writer interested in politics, history, media, and contemporary affairs. My work focuses on digging into facts, examining narratives, and understanding the ideas and events shaping India and its public discourse.
Every year on November 15, India pauses. Schools hold assemblies. Chief Ministers give speeches. Government schemes and celebrations are announced in his name. The Government of India has declared his birth anniversary Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas, the day of Tribal Pride. Since 1989, his portrait has hung in the Indian Parliament Museum. He is the only tribal leader ever given this honour. He stands poised with a bow, arrows on his back, fist clenched.
Birsa Munda is, officially, a national hero. And yet, walk into JNU’s Ganga Dhaba, where student organisations march under the banner of the “Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association”, open social media on November 15, attend any left-wing rally in the tribal belt. And you will find his name placed under a slogan:
“Brahmanvaad ki chaati par, Birsa, Phule, Ambedkar.”
Three names. Always the same. Birsa Munda’s name is always first.
Every time I see this slogan, one question stops me cold. How did Birsa Munda end up here?
To answer that, you first need to understand what this slogan is actually saying and what it is not saying. It says Brahmanvaad. Not Hinduism. That choice of word is deliberate. Because Brahmins, in the context of this slogan and in the history behind it, are not merely a caste. They represent the cultural, intellectual and spiritual custodians of Hindu civilisation.
Xavier understood this in 1543 when he wrote to the Society of Jesus in Rome: “If it were not for the opposition of the Brahmins, we should have them all embracing the religion of Jesus Christ.” He was not targeting a caste. He was targeting the civilisational backbone of Hindu society. Remove that backbone and conversion becomes easier. Anti-Brahminism, as a missionary strategy, was never about caste justice. It was about dismantling Hindu civilisation from within.
The slogan says Brahmanvaad because it is more surgical. More deniable. But the target is the same.
And that strategy was manufactured in missionary offices in the 16th century, which is what Birsa Munda’s name is now being used to carry forward. Because here is what that slogan never tells you.
Birsa Munda left Christianity. He was betrayed by the very missionaries who had promised his people salvation and land. He named the British and the Church as his enemies, not Hindus or Brahmins. A British government report from 1895, informed by missionaries themselves, recorded in black and white that he was “no longer a Christian”. And standing outside the mission school that had just expelled him, twenty years old, betrayed, with nothing left but clarity, he said five words:
“Saheb? Saheb ek topi hai.” (Saheb is just a cap)
All whites, the British and the missionaries, wear the same cap.
Not Hindus. Not Brahmins. His own words. His own verdict. So how did that finger, pointed so precisely at the Church and the Crown, get turned around to point at Brahminism instead? Someone did that. Quietly. Deliberately. Over decades. This article is about who, and how. We go back to the actual history, which is documented, sourced, and archived, of what this man believed, who he fought, and what his movement stood for. The answers were always there. Someone just decided you should not know them.
To understand the Birsa Munda, we need to understand the land he came from, not as geography but as identity. The Mundas of Chhotanagpur did not simply live on their land. They were the landowners. Generations of Munda families had entered the dense forests of what is today Jharkhand, cleared them with their own hands, made them farmable, and built their villages on them.
Clearing land from the forest was not just labour. It was the founding act of ownership. In the Munda world, the family that cleared the land became its owner. Their children owned it. Their grandchildren owned it. There was no paperwork required. No court needed. No zamindar needed to give permission. This system was named Khuntkatti. It was not written down anywhere. It did not need to be. Every village knew whose ancestor had cleared which field. Every community remembered. The land was not owned by one person, but it was held by the entire clan, the entire lineage. One person could not sell it or take it away. For generations, it worked, but then the British arrived. And they brought with them a system built on three words that would destroy everything the Mundas had built: paper, courts, and rent.
Under the British zamindari system, land belonged to whoever held a written deed. Not whoever had cleared it. Not whoever had framed it for five generations. Whoever had the paper. The Mundas had no papers. They had never needed them. Their ownership lived in memory and tradition, and memory and tradition meant nothing in a British court.
“Dikus” refers to the outsiders and exploiters who came into tribal areas during British rule in India. Dikus who came flooding into Chhotanagpur under the shelter of colonial law walked into those courts with written documents, but the Mundas had nothing to show against them. The courts ruled against the Mundas every time. It got worse. The Raja of Chotanagpur began giving land grants called Jagirs to his own relatives for their maintenance. Those relatives gave similar rights to their creditors and dependants. Layer by layer, tribal land passed into outsider hands. A new class of landlords named Thikadars emerged from this new system.
K.S. Singh’s book ,titled Birsa Munda and His Movement 1874-1901, writes about the “creatures of the colonial system”. They had not cleared any forest. They had not farmed any field. They simply arrived, with papers, with connections, and with the full weight of British law behind them. By 1874, the year before Birsa Munda was born, the authority of Munda and Oraon chiefs had been “almost entirely effaced”. In some villages, tribals had completely lost their proprietary rights and had been reduced to the position of mere farm labourers, working on the land their own ancestors had bled to clear.
And then they came with the taxes. According to the reports, a child was born; pay a tax. Someone died in the house; pay a fine. A marriage happened; pay a tax. A religious Puja; pay a tax. When the landlord was found guilty in court, you paid his fine. When the landlord went on a pilgrimage, you accompanied him without payment, without choice. And on top of all this came Beth Begari, forced labour without wages.
In a large number of villages, a farmer had to give ten to fifteen days of free service every single month to his landlord. A tribal person wrote at that time, which is mentioned in the same K.S. Singh book: “Under forced labour, blood trickles from my shoulders. Day and night the zamindar’s man irritates me. I do not have a home. Where shall I get happiness? Alas.” This was the world Birsa Munda was born into in 1875. Not a world of Hindu oppression. Not a world of Brahminical domination. A world of colonial destruction, systematic, legal, and deliberately designed to break a people so completely that when someone arrived offering salvation, they would have no choice but to accept it. That someone was already on their way.
Before 1813, the East India Company heavily restricted the entry and activities of independent Christian missionaries in its Indian territories, not out of respect for Indian religion or culture but out of pure commercial calculation. They feared that religious interference would anger Indians, cause rebellion, and destroy the trade routes that were making them extraordinarily wealthy. So for decades, the missionaries waited at the door. Then, on 21st July 1813, the British Parliament passed the Charter Act. On the surface, it was a routine renewal of the trading charter for the East India Company. But buried inside it was a clause that would change the course of Indian history and the fate of the Mundas of Chhotanagpur forever.
According to Clause XLIX, it was to be established, for the first time, an official Anglican ecclesiastical establishment in British India. A Church of England hierarchy in British India with one bishop and three archdeacons, one each for Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. The East India Company was legally required to pay their salaries. The salaries of the archdeacons were funded by the same taxes collected from the tribal communities that would soon be targeted for conversion.
In the same act, Clause LII went further. It granted missionaries legal ecclesiastical jurisdiction inside India, which means official religious authority, backed by the Crown, to operate within British Indian territories. The door was not just opened. It was thrown wide.
Now here is the interesting part: the tribals of Chhotanagpur did not invite the missionaries. The British Parliament sent them. And made Indians pay for it.
The evangelical lobby that pushed this legislation through was called the Clapham Sect, a group of wealthy, well-connected British Christians led by William Wilberforce. They had tried once before, in 1793, and failed. The East India Company directors struck down their missionary clauses on the floor of Parliament. Wilberforce recorded the defeat in his own journal – twenty million Indians left, in his words, ‘to the providential protection of Brama.’ Twenty years later they came back with 900 petitions and a three-hour speech in Parliament. In 1813, they finally won. The missionaries walked in. They did not set up in Calcutta or Bombay, where educated Indians would ask difficult questions, debate them on their own terms, and expose the contradictions in their theology. They went to the forests. They went to the hills. They went to the places where people had lost everything and had nothing left to negotiate with. They went to Chhotanagpur. The choice was not accidental.
Look at what Chhotanagpur was in 1813 and the decades that followed. The Khuntkatti system had been dismantled. The Dikus had taken the land. The British courts had legitimised the theft. The Mundas who had farmed their ancestral fields for generations were now tenants, paying rent to outsiders, performing forced labour, and paying taxes from birth to death. Their chiefs had lost authority. Their community structures were fracturing. Their children were hungry. The missionaries did not arrive in Chhotanagpur despite its poverty. They arrived because of it.
A desperate people are the perfect target for mass conversions. And nobody in 19th-century India was more systematically broken, legally, economically, and socially, than the tribals of the Chhotanagpur plateau. The German Evangelical Mission arrived first, reaching Ranchi in 1845. The Roman Catholic Jesuit Mission followed in 1869. Both set up churches. And both carried the same message to the Mundas: Convert. And we will get your land back.
That was the reality; churches and schools were established not to find spiritual peace, to accept Jesus or go to heaven. The promise was specific, material, and deliberately targeted at the one wound that would not close: their land. ‘We will get it back. Stay Christian. Follow our instructions.’ This was not a spiritual offer. It was a transaction. And it worked because of people who had watched Khuntkatti dissolve into Zamindari, who had seen their chiefs stripped of authority, whose children performed forced labour on land their own ancestors had cleared. This transaction felt like the only door left open.
Birsa’s own father walked through that door. Sugana Munda had converted to Lutheran Christianity. The family entered the missionary world, its schools, its churches, its promises. And young Birsa, born in 1875, the son of a convert, was sent to the German mission school. He was given a new name to go with his new faith. He was called Birsa David. He sat in those classrooms. He learnt their prayers. He studied their scripture. He was, by all accounts, a sharp and attentive student. And he believed, not cynically, not reluctantly, but genuinely and completely, that the Church would deliver what it had promised.
That the lands his people had lost would come back. That the dignity that had been stripped away would be restored. He was not naive. He was desperate. And desperate people believe in promises because the alternative to believing in nothing is unbearable. But here is what Birsa David did not know yet, what he was about to learn in the most painful way possible, sitting in that mission school classroom in Chaibasa. The conversion was the point. The land was never coming back. Once a tribal person converted, they were separated, psychologically, socially, and spiritually, from the broader civilisation around them. They now belonged to a different community, answered to a different authority, and looked to a different institution for protection.
The missionaries had no intention of, and in truth, no power to restore stolen land. In many cases, they were themselves acquiring it. What the missionaries gave the Mundas instead of land was something more durable and more dangerous: a new identity built on the ruins of the old one. A kid named Birsa sitting in that classroom, calling himself David, was about to find out exactly what that meant.
To understand what happened to Birsa Munda inside that mission school, we first need to understand what was happening outside it. By 1885, the Jesuit mission in Chhotanagpur had found its method. A Belgian priest named Fr. Constant Lievens had arrived in the region and had figured something out that his predecessors had not. The earlier missionaries had spent years trying to convert tribals through theology and scripture and had achieved, in their own recorded words, “little success in terms of response from the people.”
Lievens changed the approach entirely. He studied the land crisis. He understood that the Mundas had lost their Khuntkatti lands to Dikus and Thikadars, legally, through British courts, because they had no written documents. And he made a promise. Not a spiritual promise. A material one. He told the tribals directly: “I have come here, among you, for your eternal happiness. But in this life too, I can make you happy. Confide your difficulties to me. I shall help you as much as the law allows.”
He went to court on behalf of tribal families. He got some land restored. And the result recorded in the Jesuit mission’s own documents, written by the missionaries themselves, was immediate and dramatic: “They poured in like a flood. Village after village got converted. People themselves came to the Jesuits before the Jesuits could set foot in the villages.” This was the world Birsa Munda entered when he walked into the German Evangelical Mission school at Chaibasa in 1886.
He was a teenager. The son of a convert. He arrived with a name they had given him: Birsa David. Because of Lievens’s approach, Birsa himself and many people arrived with a genuine belief that the Church would deliver what it had promised. He had watched the land promise work on the people around him. He had seen tribals pour in like a flood. He believed he was on the right side of that promise. He was about to find out what happened when it stopped working for you.
Chaibasa was not just a school. It was the operational heart of missionary activity in the Munda belt. The German missionaries ran it with discipline and conviction. They taught English, arithmetic, and scripture. And in return, quietly, as a matter of institutional design, they expected tribal students to become instruments of the Church. To bring more converts. To legitimise the missionary presence among their own people. Birsa was smart. He paid attention to the lessons but more to what was happening around him. The Sardars and community leaders were in agitation. They had tried petitions. They had tried legal routes. Nothing had worked.
One day inside the Chaibasa mission, Dr Nottrott stood before the tribal Sardars and made a promise which Fr. Lievens had made across Chhotanagpur. Stay Christian, follow his instructions, and he could get back all the lands they had lost. According to K.S. Singh, Birsa heard it, and he took it to heart. For someone whose most crucial thing is land for survival, it was hope and the only way to get it back. Birsa believed him.
Then came 1886–87. The missionaries severed their relationship with the Sardars. The same institution that had promised land rights turned around and called the Sardars cheats and agitators. No land came back. No dignity was restored. Then Dr Nottrott, the same man who had made the promise, called the Munda Sardars robbers and plunderers in a sermon. The men he had promised salvation to. ‘Robbers. Plunderers.’ Birsa stood up. He criticised Nottrott publicly and objected to the humiliation of his people. The mission school expelled him.
Expelled. Betrayed. Barely twenty years old. His father had converted for the same promise that was broken by the missionaries. He had sat in those classrooms, learnt their prayers, and carried their name for this. And standing outside that school, Birsa said something that would define everything that followed: “Saheb, Saheb ek topi hai.” All whites, the British and the missionaries, wear the same cap. Five words. His enemy was named. And it was not Brahmins. It was the white saheb, whether in a colonial uniform or a priest’s robe, and Dikus, the outsiders who, aided by the laws of the Sahebs, were exploiting the tribals.
The same oppressor in different clothes. Birsa and his family withdrew from the German mission completely. Birsa David was gone. He went to Anand Panre, a Hindu Vaishnav saint in Chaibasa, and sat with him. Under Anand Panre’s influence, Birsa studied the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. He adopted Vaishnavite practices, including wearing the sacred thread. The man who is today placed on anti-Brahmin posters adopted the very practices that Brahminical tradition upholds. He was not replacing one religion with another. He was returning to something that had existed long before. And the missionary machine he had left behind was about to discover something it had no answer for.
What happened after Chaibasa is the part of Birsa Munda’s story that gets told the least. Because it is the part that most directly destroys the narrative being built around his name today. After leaving the mission school, Birsa did not drift. He did not look for another institution to replace the one that had betrayed him. He went to Anand Panre, a Hindu Vaishnav saint in Chaibasa, and sat with him. He absorbed traditions and learned from a world the mission school had spent years telling him was primitive and backward. He was not replacing one religion with another. He was peeling back everything the missionaries had layered over his identity and finding what had been there before. Then came the vision.
In 1895, Birsa is said to have seen a vision of a supreme God, Singbonga, the highest spiritual principle of the Mundas. He emerged transformed. He began healing the sick. He began preaching. Word spread village to village, not through any institution, not through any foreign funding, not through any promise of land. Through people telling other people that something had changed in a young man from Ulihatu. The Mundas, Oraons, and Kharias flocked to Chalkad to see him and be cured of their ailments. Folk songs from this period record that even caste Hindus and Muslims came to him. He became Dharti Aba. Father of the Earth.
When Birsa announced that people should gather at Chalkad, six to seven thousand people came from the Munda, Oraon and Kharia communities, according to folk songs of the period. No missionary had achieved this. No British administrator had this kind of hold. Six thousand people moved on the word of one man who had no institution behind him, no foreign funding, and no legal promise to offer. Only identity. Only dignity. Only a God that was their own. According to the Rev. Hoffmann, a Roman Catholic missionary, an eyewitness wrote about what he saw: “I distinctly remember how the known Sardars were urging common people to go on pilgrimage to Birsa Bhagoan. At first I took no notice of what I considered mere acts of semi-savage foolishness.” This is how an educated European missionary described a tribal people’s spiritual revival in 1895.
This contempt, not just the land theft, not just the broken promises, but what Birsa was fighting for, is rathe evident. The account has a subtle declaration that ‘your God is primitive, your healing is superstition, your traditions are savage.’ Then Hoffmann saw the crowds growing. Armed men settling permanently at Chalkad. He got scared and reported to the British. Here is what that tells you: you can suppress an armed uprising with police and courts. You cannot suppress six thousand people who have found their God again without anyone’s permission. That is what truly terrified the Church about Birsa Munda, not his bow and arrow, but his ability to make his people feel whole without a missionary’s approval.
Within Birsa’s own movement, a Mundari man named Bonga, alias Dharma, was going from village to village in Singhbhum, telling Kols to “become strict Hindus and abstain from forbidden articles of food.” This is not an interpretation. This is documented in British government records from 1895. His own people. His own movement. Asking tribals to embrace Hinduism, not reject it. So when someone places Birsa Munda’s name on a poster against Hinduism today, they are not honouring his legacy. They are directly inverting it.
We have discussed the story. Now here is the proof, no interpretation or political reading. Three pieces of documented, sourced, archived evidence from three different origins.
In one of his meetings, Birsa raised his voice against the exploiters of his people. He shouted. He threw his hands. The people around him grew afraid. Then he stopped and explained himself. According to the book titled “Birsa Munda and his movement 1874-1901”,
“He explained that his anger was directed against the Dikus, and the people were not to call him Babu after them.”
‘Dikus’ means the colonial middlemen and outsider exploiters, the non-tribal outsiders. Not ‘Hindus’ or Brahmins. And the instruction not to call him “Babu” was a term associated with the educated colonial class. It was a deliberate rejection of the colonial identity. He was not fighting Hinduism. He was fighting the system that had destroyed his people’s land and dignity. He named that system precisely. And Hinduism was not in it.
A British government report from 1895, which was filed by colonial officials, informed by missionaries themselves, recorded the following about the man leading the agitation in Chhotanagpur:
“He was no longer a Christian, who had earlier led an agitation against the forest dues.”
This is not written by a Hindu nationalist. This is not written by a Birsa sympathiser. This is written by British colonial officials, the very people trying to suppress his movement based on information provided by the missionaries who opposed him. His own enemies confirmed in writing that he had left Christianity and was fighting colonial forest policies. If the British government and the missionaries both agree he was no longer a Christian and was fighting colonial policy, then what exactly is the basis for calling him anti-Hindu? Or, if we ask the right question, was Birsa against Christian missionaries and exploiters? From all the evidence we talked about till now, yes!
According to pages 59-60 of K.S. Singh’s book, it records one more detail from the same period. A Mundari man named Bonga, alias Dharma, a sannyasi from within Birsa’s own circle, was going from village to village in Singhbhum, telling Kols to:
“Become strict Hindus and abstain from forbidden articles of food.”
His own people. His own movement. Carrying a message of return to Hindu practice as protection against colonial exploitation. This is not a fringe detail. This is documented in British Sub-Inspector of Police reports from August 1895 preserved in colonial records and cited by K.S. Singh, from Oxford University Press.
Three sources. Three different origins. The first comes from Birsa’s own mouth, recorded by an IAS officer. The second comes from British colonial government files. The third comes from the testimony of his own followers, preserved in police reports from 1895.
All three point in the same direction. Birsa Munda’s movement was anti-colonial and anti-missionary. It was not anti-Hindu or anti-Brahmin. The two are not the same thing. And confusing them, deliberately or otherwise, is not a new mistake. It is a very old strategy. One that Birsa Munda himself saw through in 1895. Standing outside a mission school. Twenty years old. Five words on his lips. The question is whether we are willing to see it too.
Birsa Munda died on 9th June 1900. He was twenty-five years old in British custody. The official cause was cholera, though his death, coming just months after his arrest, has never been fully explained to the satisfaction of his people. Some historians point to severe torture in custody. Others suspect poisoning. The British records say cholera. The tribals of Chhotanagpur have never fully believed them.
And that machinery did something clever after his death. It did not try to erase him. Erasure would have created a martyr too obvious to ignore. Instead, it did something more sophisticated. It waited. And then it picked up his name, the name of the man who had defeated it and slowly, deliberately, began to reattach it to a different story.
Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan, his great revolt, created the political pressure that forced the British to finally act on tribal land rights. Fr Hoffmann, the same missionary eyewitness who had called Birsa’s movement ‘semi-savage foolishness’, then translated that pressure into legal language. The Ranchi Jesuit Province’s own published history records that Hoffmann ‘wrote almost single-handedly the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act 1908. Birsa bled for it. Hoffmann drafted it. The result was a law that legally prohibited the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals.
In June 2026, the Jharkhand High Court sought responses from the State Government, the Central Government, the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, and the Deputy Commissioners of four districts on a PIL alleging the illegal transfer of thousands of acres of tribal land to Christian missionary institutions, in direct violation of that same CNT Act.
The circle is complete.
On November 15 every year, India garlands Birsa Munda’s portrait. Politicians give speeches. Schemes are announced in his name. The government calls it Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas, the Day of Tribal Pride. But pride requires truth. And the truth about Birsa Munda is sitting in a book dedicated to Birsa, in British colonial government records from 1895, in the Jesuits’ own mission history, and in police reports filed by the very officials trying to suppress him.
Birsa Munda left Christianity. He fought the missionaries. He named the British and the Church as the same enemy. His own movement asked tribals to become Hindus. A British government report, informed by missionaries themselves, confirmed in writing that he was no longer a Christian.
The man could not have been clearer about who his enemies were.
But this is only the beginning of the story. Because the betrayal Birsa experienced at that mission school was not one man’s broken promise. It was the visible surface of a much larger machine, one built on a British Parliament Act most Indians have never heard of, on census classifications that ran for sixty years, and on an anti-Brahminism strategy that traces back not to any tribal village but to a Portuguese missionary writing to the King of Lisbon in the 16th century. That machine is still running. And in the next parts of this series, we follow exactly how it was built and who is still operating it today.
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Selected issues, clear explanations and thoughtful perspectives—delivered when we publish.
