The Great Tumult

He was about twenty-five when he died in Ranchi jail in June 1900, and the movement he led lasted barely three years. It changed the law of British India, which almost no other rebellion managed.

What was being taken

The Munda people of the Chota Nagpur plateau held land under khuntkatti.

Under it, the families who had originally cleared the forest held the land collectively. As the descendants of the clearers. It was not tenancy. There was no landlord, because the land had never belonged to anybody else.

Through the nineteenth century that was dismantled. Outsiders were granted, or acquired, rights over Munda land. Moneylenders, contractors, landlords. Together they were called dikus.

And they did it through a legal system the Mundas had no access to. And did not recognise. Forced labour, beth begari, was extracted. Access to the forest was restricted by the colonial forest administration. Missionary activity added a further pressure.

A community that had held its own land since anyone could remember became tenants and labourers on it, by paperwork.