your bridge home
True Valor
The land was never taken by an army. It was taken by a clerk, writing somebody's name in a column.
He was twenty-five when he died in Ranchi jail, and the land law of the whole region changed eight years later.
Birsa Munda was born on the 15th of November, 1875, at Ulihatu, in what is now Khunti district in Jharkhand. He was a Munda, of the Chotanagpur plateau.
And he was named, following the custom, for the day of the week he was born on.
He was educated, unusually. He went to school at Salga, under a teacher named Jaipal Nag.
And then, in order to attend the German Mission School, he was converted to Christianity. And given the name Birsa David.
Around 1890 he left, and he and his family left the church with him and went back to Munda religion.
That sequence matters. He was not somebody who had never encountered the colonial world. He had been inside its school system. He had taken its name. And he had walked out.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.