Rahul Ranjan’s book The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) examines the representation of Birsa Munda’s political life through the role of affective politics, to argue how memory-making has emerged as the new form of doing politics in contemporary Jharkhand. The author argues that as Jharkhand undergoes large-scale land dispossession, Birsa’s significance is increasingly limited to being an anti-colonial icon. This is a betrayal of Adivasi heritage for the unfolding political processes cannot be adequately explained only through official state archival records. Memory politics is conceptualized as crucial to understanding how Adivasi groups utilize the memory of Birsa to stake their claims from the State, underscoring the continuing relevance of Birsa in Jharkhand.

The author utilizes contrasting narratives of political imaginations through the register of memory politics among Adivasis and the State to highlight how despite the political parties’ attempt to selectively frame and political freeze the memorialization of Birsa, Adivasis have been able to control his memory for political purposes. Objects such as statues, memorials and stone slabs are shown to be embodied with forms of memory that produce counter-hegemonic subaltern politics. Memory Politics as a framework thus provides a nonlinear entry point into studying contemporary politics, by learning from how the Adivasi community in Jharkhand is doing politics, wherein affective politics are imagined through sites of memory exemplified in the Pathalgadi movement. The book excels in providing alternative imaginations of understanding politics and conceptualizes a point of departure for side-stepping stringent binaries in scholarship. For instance, although using subaltern as a methodological tool for an ethnography of political memory, the author side-steps the concept’s framing to acts of counter-insurgency. Instead, the book highlights how speech has always been present among Adivasis but has not been heard as scholars have lacked ‘structures of hearing’. An ethnography of political memory as present in the everyday lives of Adivasis, allows for tracing how the past is remembered in the present and mobilized through affective sites, challenging hegemonic structures of remembering.

The book argues that Adivasi worldviews embedded in resistance movements such as Pathalgadi, show how the past is not perceived as a distant static eventful ‘thing’ in time, thereby necessitating broadening our structures of listening to subaltern groups. Such cleavages expose how our epistemes of hearing have been limited, and the author implores scholars to avoid reproducing epistemic injustice which renegades Adivasi knowledge to secondary sources. An approach paying closer attention to how the built environment may constitute speech in non-verbal form to expand our modes of remembrance and submitting to indigenous knowledge systems is envisaged as a way for using material memory as a source of telling the history and disrupting the coloniality of power.  

The book is structured across three sections, the first being the introduction which provides the conceptual framework. The second section is based on new archival sources situating the historical importance of stakeholders such as missionaries. The third section encompasses the theme ‘ethnography of memory, objects and resistance’ and consists of three chapters, dwelling on an ethnographic exploration of statue making and processes of commemoration associated with Birsa Munda through samadhi sthals and memorial pillars, highlighting how the political elite muffle Adivasi voices. The intriguing final chapter studies the Pathalgadi movement, which the author argues exemplifies how the movement draws inspiration from the historical practice of sasandiri, to produce emerging political imaginations through memories of the legacy of Birsa.

In the first chapter, the author lays the ground for the argument that Birsa’s rebellion in 19^th C continues to hold relevance in contemporary Jharkhand as Adivasi groups utilize his memory as a metaphor. They, do not accept Birsa’s memory as a passive and politically frozen canon, limited materially to aesthetic display or symbolically to the resistance against the British. The book departs from the kind of scholarship that focuses solely on mysticism associated with the legacy of Birsa and suggests that Adivasi communities lack political consciousness. Instead, by positioning memory as a tool of appropriation and resistance, the author highlights those selective narratives of Birsa Munda as only an anti-colonial figure which removes the possibility of understanding how Birsa continues to be relevant in contemporary Adivasi struggles through memory politics. Birsa’s continued relevance is then utilized conceptually to argue against scholarship that frames colonialism as a spatially and temporally limited phenomenon, thereby obfuscating the continued forms of dominance by the modern post-colonial State. Such affective sites are shown to also produce political imaginations in the way they are strategically placed making Birsa at times a malleable figure.

The second chapter provides the historical context for the book, outlining the conflict that emanated through surveys and laws, missionization and zamindari exploitation in the 19^th Century. It highlights the role of key groups such as missionaries. Focused on Birsa and his ulgulan (The Great Tumult Movement), the book shows the narrow and limiting nature of historical records which confines Birsa’s significance to the rebellion against the British. The author described how regional icons of resistance are binarized into either being part of nation-making narratives or becoming submerged under the hegemonic narratives of the elite.

The third chapter shows how statute governance is strictly controlled by state actors and political elites, who dislocate Birsa and make him an ‘empty signifier’. Describing the making of the Birsa Chowk statue, the author dwells on the symbolism of how the Birsa statue’s chains were removed by the BJP  government in 2016, under the pretext that the chains would be uninspiring and antithetical to development agendas. The incident highlights how the state controls cultural artefacts and attempts to push the narrative of capitalist development in Jharkhand through the built environment. Moreover, projects of heritage buildings that commemorate the memory of Birsa through statues are shown to do little to change the status quo of Adivasi everyday lives. This Justifies the prominent activist Barla’s take that the chains on Birsa’s body were, in fact, reflective of Adivasi realities under the capitalist state. The chapter highlights the affective quality of statues, and how they have the power to make political subjects and function as a ‘political text’,  that resonate with the contemporary statue wars under the incumbent central government.

In chapter four, the author expands on the role of political elites and the state by exploring sites of commemoration. Samadhi Sthals and the making of Dombari Village as a landscape of memory, reveals how political power controls the process of remembering and forgetting through organized practices of commemorating. Such ‘memory work’ by political elites allows the entry of the State and capital into Adivasi lifeworlds and impinges a linear logic of time onto the object, making the sthals affect-laden with the political ideology of the State. Although the author doesn’t allude to it directly, the chapter also provides an indispensable saga for suturing together a new register for studying contemporary political urbanization. Highlighting how the State devises models for the memorialization of the past through the built environment, may provide a point of departure to study how the incumbent government activates its presence through the logic of state-led capitalist urbanization. This allows the State to make inserts into rural political landscapes by ‘recovering subaltern memory’ under the aegis of nationalist ideologies, by symbolically transforming Birsa -remembered as an equal among Adivasis- into ‘Birsa Bhagwan’ (Birsa God). Spatial belonging, and spatial political discourse imposed and produced by the political elite are shown to supersede mere urban versus rural politics or eurocentric norms of settlement-based politics and is instead structured in part by the built environment. Similarly, visual senses of the arrival of Mughlai food and bottled water coinciding with the Pathalgadi movement stones sensorially represent the intermixing of urban and rural in a landscape, where belonging to land is designed by cultural memories.

The last chapter explains how the use of memory comes together with customary practices of the community in the Pathalgadi movement, as graveyards became a marker of territorial claim. It highlights empirically the conceptual claim of the book, that Birsa’s memory of the Adivasi community was not limited to one event of the past, or only to external colonizers. The movement revealed how Adivasis establish links between struggles of the past as they invoked his memory to assert their resistance against the privilege of knowledge assumed by elites. Pathalgadi as a political strategy utilized modern tenets of the constitution to stake claims against attempts to expand capitalist corridor and defiance to such change revealed how land meant more than just a settlement type or property, but is entrenched in the collective and cultural meaning of landscapes of memories for Adivasis. Essentially providing a new register to understanding spatial belonging, the chapter highlights a gap in understanding land and its socio-political belonging for oppressed communities, which again underscores the book’s relevance for sociopolitical discourses on spatial dispossession. The resistance memory of the movement showcased how memory as a tool for the Adivasis was critical to articulate their political consciousness, as an attack on their land was seen as a disruption to their territorial boundaries as well as their cosmic culture.

The book makes an important intervention in understanding the subaltern cosmological relationship between humans and land, through the landscape of memory. Studying Adivasi territorial notions of belonging in Jharkhand, the book intervenes in developing a new register for studying indigenous resistance against dispossession by dikus (outsiders), through the politics of memory which emerges at the intersection of cultural milieus such as burial practices, and images of the past when Adivasis articulate their political desire for territorial power. Although structured as a work of political anthropology its utility expands to providing an indispensable framework for analyzing contemporary political resistances against right-wing neoliberal governance, as the movement cloaked itself in strategic nationalist fervour, consciously framing Birsa as a politically frozen anti-colonial icon, which prevented Adivasis from being labelled as anti-nationalist. Such political shrewdness the author reminds us, resembles Birsa’s methods in the past who mobilized under the religious canopy to articulate the Adivasi community’s political consciousness of Adivasis. Written from a place of intense and humble solidarity, the book should find its place among classic works of oral history such as Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from and the Partition of India, as well as more contemporary eclectic works on the affective politics of built environment such as Kajri Jain’s God’s in the Time of Democracy, in the astute yet conscientious way it brings the political use of Birsa’s memory into mainstream studies of politics in Jharkhand.

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Chetna Kuanr is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Northeastern University.