Birsa Munda Died in Ranchi Jail on 9 June 1900, Five Months After Troops Fired on His Followers at Dombari Hill. The Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act Followed in 1908.

On the night of 24 December 1899, Munda men in the country south of Ranchi began shooting arrows into churches and into congregations singing Christmas carols. They called the rising the Ulgulan, a word the historian Sumit Sarkar translates as the Great Tumult. Its leader, Birsa Munda, was dead in Ranchi jail by 9 June 1900, and the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act, which protected the Mundas’ oldest village land from sale, is dated 11 November 1908.

K. S. Singh’s study, which quotes the government’s own files, is the backbone of this account. He first published it in 1966, and the Oxford edition of 1983 is cited here. It is checked against the 1917 Ranchi district gazetteer, the anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy’s book of 1912 and the text of the 1908 Act. Where the sources disagree, the disagreement is stated.

What the Mundas were losing

The Mundas are an Adivasi (original inhabitant) community of the Chotanagpur plateau. Roy records the rule their villages were built on: the family that first cleared the forest owned the village, and everything inside its boundaries, “cultivable as well as waste”, was held in common. Such a village was called khuntkatti, and its holders were khuntkattidars.

Outsiders, whom the Mundas called dikus, moved in during the nineteenth century. Singh describes how the Raja of Chotanagpur gave jagirs (grants of villages for maintenance) to relatives, who passed tenures on to dependants and creditors, and how British rule added cash rent, law courts and thikadars, revenue farmers who leased the right to collect a village’s rent. By 1874 the thikadars had almost entirely pushed aside the old Munda and Oraon village chiefs. Judges who did not understand joint ownership treated khuntkatti villages as ordinary zamindari estates, meaning private landlord property, and the outsiders’ written papers outweighed the Mundas’ unwritten custom.

Labour was the daily grievance. A rent the Mundas had once paid collectively as a token of loyalty became an individual charge, with extra dues and unpaid labour, called beth begari, added on top. In 1839 John Davidson reported that the Kols, an older collective name that included the Mundas, would give three days’ ploughing, three days of other work and the same number of days at planting and harvest. Singh found that in many villages a tenant now owed ten to fifteen days’ service, and he quotes a Munda lament that says “Blood trickles from my shoulders”. A land revenue report for 1897 to 1898, quoted by Roy, said that in Lohardaga district (now Ranchi) the zamindars were “said to take all they can in the way of rent and labour out of the raiyats”.

The government had tried to fix the land problem. The Chota Nagpur Tenures Act of 1869 sent special commissioners to map the privileged lands of tenants and landlords in 9,482 villages, a survey that ran until 31 March 1880. The gazetteer says it left the khuntkatti villages out. A Commutation Act of 1897 let the government order unpaid services turned into cash, and the gazetteer says no such order was ever made. Roy adds that 1897 brought the severest famine in the district within living memory, 1898 a cholera epidemic, and 1899 a total failure of the winter crop. The wider drought years are traced in the piece on the grain that left while India starved.

Singh adds that in Khunti and Tamar, where Birsa’s movement began, the khuntkatti system was still largely intact, and he reads the rising as a reaction to the collapse in neighbouring districts.

A sharecropper’s son who claimed a vision

Birsa came from a poor family of sharecroppers and grew up at Chalkad. His birth date is disputed. The Government of India marks 15 November as his birth anniversary, and the Prime Minister’s Office opened his 150th birth anniversary year on 15 November 2024, which implies 1875. Singh calls 15 November 1875 “too exact to be true” and prefers 1874, because Birsa was confirmed as a Christian at Chaibasa at the age of twelve, on 7 March 1886.

He studied at the German Lutheran mission school at Chaibasa until about 1890. In 1895 he announced a vision. The gazetteer says he declared himself the prophet of a new religion from Sing Bonga, the Mundas’ supreme god, said the Queen’s rule was over and the Munda raj had begun, and promised that soldiers’ rifles would turn to wood and their bullets to water. Police arrested him at Chalkad in late August 1895, and a court gave him two years. Singh records his release on 30 November 1897.

Night meetings followed. In the last three months of 1899, Roy writes, they were held across the Munda country, and one prosecution witness described a meeting at court. Birsa, he said, told those present to make weapons for “killing Thikadars and Jagirdars and Rajas and Hakims and Christians”. That testimony needs care. Singh notes that most witnesses at the later trials were former followers who spoke from fear of the authorities, and that they exaggerated the conspiracy and Birsa’s part in it.

Arrows on Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve was the day fixed, Singh writes. Attacks came in six police station areas: Chakradharpur in Singhbhum district, and Khunti, Karra, Torpa, Tamar and Basia in Ranchi district. At the Roman Catholic mission at Sarwada a godown (storehouse) was set alight, and a steel-headed arrow hit Father Carbery in the chest.

Singh counts 38 incidents in Singhbhum and 25 in Ranchi in this first phase, while Roy says more than a hundred attacks were deposed to at the trials. Singh also analysed who was hit. All the victims but about eight were Christian Mundas or missionaries, and he could identify no moneylender or zamindar among the eight.

The authorities had heard rumours and could confirm nothing. The Deputy Commissioner of Ranchi toured the district in December, then went back to Ranchi for a conference on 27 December about amending the Chota Nagpur rent law. Two days after Christmas, Father Hoffmann reported, Birsa’s men began telling villagers that their enemy was the sahibs and the government, and that any Munda would be spared.

The march on Khunti and the hill at Dombari

On 5 January 1900, police sent to Etkedih, probably to arrest a follower named Gaya Munda, were attacked, and a constable named Jayram was killed. On 7 January a crowd that Roy puts at 300 attacked the Khunti police station, where five constables had two rifles between them, and killed another constable.

On 9 January the Commissioner, A. Forbes, and the Deputy Commissioner, H. C. Streatfeild, came on a large gathering at Sail Rakab, a hill a few miles from Saiko. Singh notes that Munda songs and later accounts call it Dombari hill, and Roy and the gazetteer write Dumari. The hill rose 250 to 300 feet, and the Mundas had built eleven sangars (low stone breastworks) along the top and brought their families up with them. Streatfeild called on them through an interpreter to surrender. A Munda named Narsing answered that the raj belonged to them, and that it was the troops who should lay down arms.

Captain Roche’s troops fired three volleys from a neighbouring hillock. The first had no effect, and the Birsaites took that as proof of Birsa’s promise that bullets would turn to water. After the second, two men were seen to fall and got up again. The third brought down two or three more, and the troops charged up the hill with bayonets. The defenders ran down a gully into the jungle, and the troops fired on them as they went. Three women were shot dead in the pursuit, Singh says, before Forbes asked Roche to stop. The search afterwards found four dead and three wounded on the hill, and three dead women and a badly wounded child in the jungle below. The army had no casualties.

Counting the dead on the hill

Nobody agrees on how many died. Singh lists the estimates. The official figure, after what he calls careful and exhaustive enquiries, was ten Mundas killed and seven wounded on Sail Rakab on 9 January. Father Hoffmann put the total at twenty. A Munda source said two hundred or more. Another source gave four hundred, and the Mundas’ defence lawyer, Jacob, and his people supported that. Singh judges that the official figure is probably close, and cites a contemporary witness who backs it. The report that Roy quotes from the Government of Bengal gives four Mundas killed and three wounded, plus the bodies of three women and a boy found in the jungle.

The Government of India took its own view, according to Singh. It held that firing at the stockade before the summit was reached was legitimate, but that the troops were not justified in firing on the fugitives once the position was taken. Forbes was censured in very grave terms for not reporting the full facts at once.

Whether Birsa was on the hill is also disputed. The Munda account says his followers persuaded him to hide at Bortodih, while Singh thinks his presence was entirely possible.

Arrested on 3 February, dead on 9 June

Singh writes that on 28 January the leaders Donka Munda and Manjhia Munda gave themselves up with thirty-two others. The government had offered 500 rupees for Birsa. On 3 February seven men from Manmaru and Jarikel saw the smoke of a camp fire in the forest near Sentra, waited until Birsa was asleep, and rushed him before he could use his two swords.

The date is disputed. The 1917 gazetteer says Birsa was arrested in Singhbhum on 3 February. Singh agrees, and cites a French-language mission history that has him captured near Bandgaon in the night of 3 to 4 February. Sarkar says he was caught three weeks after the fight on 9 January, and Chandra and his co-authors place it at the beginning of February. A 2020 article in The Organiser gives 3 March 1900 and the Jamkopai forest near Chakradharpur. None of the other sources opened for this article gives a March date.

Birsa was taken to Ranchi to be tried as an ordinary criminal, charged with abetting murder and arson. Officials framed no charge over Sail Rakab, Singh says, partly because a trial would have drawn attention to the shooting.

He fell ill in court on 20 May. On 1 June the Deputy Commissioner was told it was cholera. Birsa recovered, relapsed on 8 June and died at 9 a.m. on 9 June. The jail superintendent, Captain A. R. S. Anderson, held a post-mortem that afternoon. Singh says the search for poison found no trace, and the finding was death from clotting of blood on the left side of the heart, following dysentery and cholera. J. A. Craven, who held the inquiry, reported on 10 June that Birsa died of natural causes, his body weakened by dysentery, but that how he caught cholera would stay a mystery. The Lieutenant-Governor saw no foul play. The Organiser article says Birsa never showed symptoms of cholera, which does not match the jail record Singh describes.

Singh adds an argument of his own. Life imprisonment could not have removed the threat Birsa posed, he writes, so “poisoning him was thus not improbable”. That is reasoning from motive, and the post-mortem record he cites found no poison.

The trials and the law that followed

Of the 482 people arrested in Ranchi and Singhbhum districts, Singh reports, 98 were convicted. Fourteen died while their cases were pending, and sixty who were held for a year were finally acquitted. The Calcutta papers The Statesman and The Bengalee attacked the proceedings, Surendra Nath Banerjea raised them in the legislative council, and Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, closed the matter by calling the provincial government’s defence hardly satisfactory. Singh gives the hanging date for Gaya Munda’s son Sanre as 22 October 1901, and says the High Court cut Donka Munda’s death sentence to transportation for life. Roy and the gazetteer count two executions, and Sarkar says three men were hanged.

The law moved faster than the trials. Singh says Forbes argued that the troubles would continue unless a survey and record of rights covered the whole Munda country and beth begari was abolished. Father Hoffmann’s own entry in the Encyclopaedia Mundarica says the Lieutenant-Governor feared a survey might provoke a fresh outbreak, and that he told the Judicial Commissioner the cultivators wanted one. A Bengal government order of 18 February 1902 started survey and settlement on 1,846 square miles of the Munda country, Roy records. The Chota Nagpur Tenancy (Amendment) Act of 1903, which Singh calls the first recognition of the Mundari khuntkatti system, stopped all mortgages of such land except one kind.

The Act itself, Bengal Act 6 of 1908, consolidated the earlier laws. In the consolidated text published by the Lal Bahadur Shastri academy, section 8 defines a Mundari khuntkattidar as a Mundari who has acquired a right to hold jungle land to bring under cultivation, with his male-line heirs. Section 240 bars the sale of such a tenancy and allows only a bhugut bandha mortgage (where the lender takes the profits of the land until the loan is treated as repaid) for no more than seven years. Section 101 forbids any new praedial condition, meaning a service or due on top of rent. The gazetteer adds that the settlement converted all existing services into cash payments.

Historians read the outcome in different ways. Sarkar writes that Chotanagpur’s tribals won legal protection for their land a generation ahead of most Bihar peasants, and that “Seeking a conscious all-India nationalist in Birsa is obviously futile.” Singh calls the movement agrarian and defensive, and says the Act came too late for more than nine-tenths of the tribe: only 156 villages could be secured as intact Mundari khuntkatti villages.