Birsa Munda and the Forest That Was Fenced: India's First Tech-Dispossession

Birsa Munda is remembered today as Bhagwan Birsa Munda, a god to millions, yet he lived barely twenty-five years and died a prisoner in a colonial jail. He was a young Adivasi leader from the Munda community of the Chhotanagpur plateau, in what is now Jharkhand, and the enemy he rose against was not an army in the ordinary sense. It was something quieter and, in the long run, far more powerful: a body of law. What Birsa Munda confronted at the close of the nineteenth century was the earliest, starkest instance in Indian history of what I have come to think of as tech-dispossession — the moment a new instrument of power redefines something people have always shared as something now owned, and turns the people who depend on it into tenants, debtors, and trespassers on their own ground.

We do not usually call a land law a technology. We reserve that word for machines, for engines and algorithms. But a law is a machine too. It is an instrument built by people to produce a specific output, and the output of the colonial land and forest laws in Chhotanagpur was the transfer of the commons from the community that held it to the state and its intermediaries. It ran on paper — surveys, registers, revenue rolls, tenancy records — and paper, wielded by a distant administration, proved more relentless than any cavalry. This is the pattern I keep returning to, because it does not stay in the nineteenth century. It runs straight through to the way land, data, and knowledge are enclosed today.

Who Birsa Munda was

Birsa was born around 1875 into a poor Munda family in the Chhotanagpur region. The Munda are one of the Adivasi — literally “original inhabitant” — peoples of central and eastern India, communities who had farmed, foraged, and worshipped in these forests and hills long before the machinery of empire reached them. His childhood was ordinary in its hardship: herding, odd labour, a spell of missionary schooling that gave him a close look at Christianity and, later, a firm reason to reject the way it arrived bundled with colonial authority. He absorbed influences from many directions — Christian, Hindu, and the older Munda traditions — and fused them into something new.

By his early twenties he had begun to preach. He spoke of one God, of moral reform, of dignity; he asked the Munda to give up certain practices and to hold their heads up. His followers called him Dharti Aba, the Father of the Earth. That name matters, because the earth was precisely the thing being taken from them. What began as a religious and social awakening hardened, as the injustices around him sharpened, into open political revolt. People came to see him as a healer and a prophet. The colonial government came to see him as a threat, which, to the order it was building, he unmistakably was.

The technology he faced: land redefined as property

To understand what Birsa rose against, you have to understand the khuntkatti system — the older way the Munda held land. Under khuntkatti, land belonged not to an individual but to the lineage that had first cleared the forest and settled it. It was communal, inherited through the founding families, worked in common, and it carried customary rights to the forest around it: the right to graze, to gather firewood and fruit and honey, to hunt, to take timber for a house. There was no single owner because ownership, in the exclusive modern sense, was not the operating idea. The land was held in trust across generations. It was, in the truest sense, a commons.

The colonial state could not read this system, and what it could not read, it overwrote. Empire needed land it could survey, register, tax, and assign to a named holder who was answerable for the revenue. So a new legal grammar was imposed. Communal forest and land were reclassified as either private property — handed to landlords, moneylenders, and revenue farmers known as dikus, outsiders to the Munda world — or as state property, the forest fenced off as a government reserve. Overnight, on paper, the Munda who had cleared and held that ground for centuries became tenants on it. Their customary right to the forest became, in the eyes of the new law, trespass. Gathering firewood where your grandparents had gathered it was now, in some cases, a crime.

The forest did not change. The map of who owned it did — and the map now had the force of law behind it.

This is the move I want to name plainly, because it is the engine of the whole story: redefine a commons as property, then dispossess the people who depend on it. No wall had to be built on the first day. The wall was a legal category. Once the land was reclassified, everything else followed with the calm inevitability of paperwork — rent demands, forced labour called beth begari, debt bondage, eviction. The dikus and the administration did not have to seize the land by open violence, though violence backed them. They only had to make the community's own presence illegal and then enforce the register. Dispossession by paperwork is slower than dispossession by the sword, and for that reason it is harder to fight. There is no single villain to confront, only a system that always seems to be simply following its own rules.

I have written before about the enclosure of the commons in England — the centuries in which common fields, held and worked collectively, were fenced off into private holdings and the commoners turned into landless labour. What happened in Chhotanagpur is the same logic exported and accelerated under imperial administration. The English enclosures took centuries and Acts of Parliament. In Chhotanagpur the same transformation was compressed into decades, imposed from outside, on people whose entire way of holding land the new owners neither understood nor cared to.

The Ulgulan: the Great Tumult

Grievance had been building for a long time before Birsa gave it a shape. There had been earlier Munda and Adivasi resistance across the century — Chhotanagpur was never quiet under the pressure of the dikus. But Birsa did something new: he fused the religious awakening with a political demand. He told his people that the land was theirs, that the Munda should rule their own country, that the reign of the outsiders and the alien administration should end. He gave dispossession a name and a target, and he gave scattered anger a centre.

The revolt he led is remembered as the Ulgulan — a Mundari word usually translated as the Great Tumult, or the Great Commotion. It came to a head around 1899 and 1900. His followers, moving through the forests and villages of the region, attacked the symbols and agents of the new order: the estates and outposts of the dikus, the police, the machinery of an authority they saw as thieves dressed as law. It was a rising against exploitation, against forced labour, against the erosion of khuntkatti, against being made strangers on their own earth.

The Ulgulan was not, in cold military terms, a match for the colonial state, and it was put down with the force such a state could always summon. But to weigh it only by whether it “won” is to miss its meaning. The Ulgulan announced, at full volume, a truth the administration preferred to keep buried under its registers: that the transfer of the commons had been theft, whatever the paperwork said, and that the people it robbed knew it, named it, and were willing to die contesting it.

His death in custody

Birsa was captured by British forces in early 1900. He was held in Ranchi jail, and there, in June of that year, he died. He was around twenty-five. The colonial record attributes his death to cholera. Many among the Munda and among later historians have viewed a death in British custody, at that age, of a man the authorities urgently wanted silenced, with the suspicion such circumstances invite. I do not have the evidence to state the cause with certainty, and I will not pretend to; what is certain is that a young leader who terrified an empire died a prisoner of it, and that his death cut short a life the colonial state plainly wanted ended.

What the state could not do was end his meaning. Killing Birsa did not restore the khuntkatti land or undo the injustice; it made him permanent. He became Bhagwan Birsa Munda — a revered figure, a folk hero raised toward the divine, whose name is carried today by a university, an airport, a stadium, and by the pride of Adivasi communities across India. His portrait hangs in the Indian Parliament. That a poor Munda boy who died in a colonial cell now looks down on the legislature of the free republic is not sentiment. It is a verdict on who was in the right.

The paperwork remembered

There is a coda that matters, because it shows the fight was never only symbolic. Not long after the Ulgulan, the colonial government passed the Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 — legislation that recognised and gave some protection to Munda customary land rights, including the khuntkatti tenure, and restricted the transfer of Adivasi land to outsiders. It was a limited, imperfect concession, wrung from an administration that had caused the crisis in the first place. But it was a concession, and it came because the Ulgulan had made the cost of ignoring the Munda too high.

The instrument of dispossession was paper; so, in part, was the instrument of protection. The question is never whether we have law, but whose interest the law is built to serve.

This is worth sitting with. The same technology — the codified, registered, enforceable land law — that had been used to strip the Munda could, under pressure, be turned partway to defend them. That is the lesson I take from figures like Ambedkar, who saw law and the modern state not as neutral tools but as instruments whose direction depends entirely on who holds them and to what end. A machine that dispossesses can, redirected, protect. But it will only be redirected when the dispossessed force the issue.

The through-line to now

I keep coming back to Birsa because the move he faced never went out of use. It only changed its clothing. Look at how a technology gets captured and handed to whoever already holds power, and you find the same three steps every time: take something that was open and shared, redefine it in a new legal or technical language as ownable property, and then charge — or exclude — the very people who once used it freely.

The forest became a government reserve and the Munda became trespassers. Centuries earlier, the English common became private and the commoner became a wage labourer. In our own time, the pattern has moved off the land and onto less tangible ground. Knowledge that was shared gets fenced behind patents and paywalls. Seeds that farmers saved and replanted for millennia get redefined as intellectual property they must buy afresh each season. The data we generate simply by living — our movements, our purchases, our words — is enclosed by companies that treat it as their asset and us as the raw material. In each case the commons is redefined as property, and those who depend on it are dispossessed, quietly, through paperwork and terms of service rather than fences and cavalry.

And in each case the question is the same one Birsa forced into the open: who takes, who pays, and who is allowed to fight back? The Munda were told the land was no longer theirs by men who had never cleared it, in a language they had no part in writing, backed by an authority that answered to nobody they knew. The reply, when it comes, tends to look like the Ulgulan — sudden, dismissed as chaos by the people it frightens, and only later understood as justice. It looked that way again, much more recently, in how India's farmers won their long standoff against laws they read, correctly, as another enclosure of the ground beneath them. The vocabulary updates. The struggle does not.

Birsa Munda died at twenty-five, having failed by every metric the colonial state used to measure success. He did not liberate his people. He did not stop the machine. And yet his name outlived the empire that jailed him, while the officers who registered the Munda commons out of Munda hands are forgotten. That is because he understood, before the language existed to say it cleanly, that the deepest theft of the modern age is not carried out at gunpoint but at the desk — that you can take a people's whole world from them and never once call it taking, if you have the paperwork and the power to make it stick. He refused the paperwork. He called the taking by its name. For that, a poor boy from the Chhotanagpur forest became a god.

The forest that was fenced is still, in a thousand new forms, being fenced. Birsa Munda is why we should recognise the fence for what it is, however politely it is drawn — and why we should never mistake the calm of an administration for the justice of what it is quietly carrying out.