Flaming fields and forest fires: Agrarian transformations and the making of Birsa Munda’s rebellion

The purpose of this article is to question the overarching notion of ‘millenarianism’ as well as its applicability to various ‘tribal’ rebellions and social movements in British India. I do so by carefully re-reading the colonial archives and secondary sources concerning the Birsaite uprising afresh in order to rethink how certain forest-dwelling groups who came to be defined as ‘tribes’ in colonial times actually encountered the modern state as well as Christianity in the late nineteenth century. Why did the Birsaites take up arms? Who rebelled? Against whom? What was the role of religion in their uprising? In answering these questions, I follow the Subalternist’s injunction to take the lifeworlds of the marginal and oppressed seriously in their own terms without imposing, in a vanguardist manner, the pre-existing conceptual order of ‘millenarianism’. Yet I also intend to be faithful to the social historian’s desire to uncover and examine the social location, aims and methods of Birsa and his followers.