Commissioned Book Review: Rahul Ranjan, The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231195458 |
| Author | Alok Ranjan |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
Political Studies Review
2024, Vol. 22(2) NP7 –NP8
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1195458PSW0010.1177/14789299231195458Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2023
Commissioned Book Review
The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in
Contemporary India by Rahul Ranjan. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2022. 326 pp., $110,
ISBN 9781009337908.
Indigenous people’s struggles and icons of the
past have increasingly garnered scholarly atten-
tion, as they are crucial to different histories of
state formations and possibilities of political
alternatives. The Political Life of Memory inter-
nally differs from such scholarship as it goes
beyond studying Birsa Munda’s specific initia-
tives in their time and examines how their mem-
ories continue shaping interactions between
indigenous communities and the extractive state
in India. Rahul Ranjan moves away from the
historical method that attaches events to linear–
chronological time in centring memory as an
analytic and political tool that implicates history
in ordinary cultural living and collective poli-
tics. A combination of subaltern history and
political anthropology approaches allows the
book to bridge the temporal distance between
the past and the present.
Born in 1875 in the Munda tribe in eastern
India’s Chhotanagpur region, Birsa Munda led
an insurgent movement for the protection of
indigenous people’s land rights and socio-polit-
ical freedom being harmed by the colonial
power, landholding elites (Zamindars) and mis-
sionaries. Birsa employed the emotive idea of
Munda Raj – meaning Munda rule – to instil an
imagination of the lost autonomy of his com-
munity and the need to establish self-rule. This
history of resistance against all forms of domi-
nation, the author notes, still informs the collec-
tive consciousness of subalterns in the region
resisting continued regimes of dispossession.
The contestations over the nature of Birsa
Munda’s struggle represent the conflictual poli-
tics of history in post-colonial India. The book
locates the politics of memorialization in the
meanings projected onto three kinds of material
objects: statues, mausoleums (Samadhi Sthals)
and stone slabs. These objects embody the past
contrastingly narrativized in the official memory
that compresses the historical Adivasi rebellion
into a celebration of anti-colonial heroism and
subaltern memory that recalls it as an ongoing
struggle in the face of the persistent conditions
of subjugation. Interlocuters, in chapter 3, evoc-
atively express this difference in a manner of
retrieving their icon Birsa from his statues to
emphasize that regimes of extraction are not
over but have multiplied under the post-colonial
development paradigm. This contrasting nature
of remembering is exemplified when political
activists underline the symbolic significance of
handcuffed Birsa for representation of the con-
tinued domination and violence against the
Adivasis (indigenous people), while the state
government orders the removal of handcuffs
from his statue to signify the context of an inde-
pendent nation.
Commemoration of the dead reinforces a his-
torical community in the present. However, as
the author shows, it is an empty modality ame-
nable to political and capitalist projects. Birsa’s
birthplace, the hills where he fought the British,
and the state capital are marked with his statues
and memorial pillars that platform political
elites characterizing him as an anti-colonial icon
and host tourists interested in ‘heritage sites’.
The fourth chapter analyses these forms of com-
memorative celebration as betraying the mate-
rial conditions of deep poverty, absent healthcare
and dispossession of physical resources by the
state-backed corporate power. Nevertheless,
memory is not exhausted in official discourses.
An alternate mode of memory politics structured
the Pathhalgadi movement, which was trig-
gered by aggressive land acquisition campaigns
by the state. Pathhalgadi is a customary tribal
practice of installing stone slabs in memory of
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