Dombari Hill

Birsa Munda, the healer his people called Bhagwan, the rising of Christmas 1899, and the hill above Etkedih on 9 January 1900

Twenty years of Munda petitions had failed in the courts when a young healer named Birsa Munda told the Mundas of Chhota Nagpur that the land was theirs. His Ulgulan opened on Christmas Eve 1899 and broke under police rifles on Dombari hill on 9 January 1900. He was captured weeks later, died in Ranchi jail on 9 June 1900 at twenty-five, and eight years after that the law the petitions could not win was passed.

The Hill Above Etkedih

It is the morning of Tuesday, 9 January 1900. On a low hill called Dombari, above the village of Etkedih near Khunti in Chhota Nagpur, a few thousand Munda men and women are gathered in the cold. Some carry bows and quivers of arrows. Some carry only axes and sticks. The hill has a flat top and an old tank on it, and from up there you can see the sal forest running away in every direction.

They are waiting for a fight, and they believe they cannot lose it. Their leader, a man of twenty-four, has told them that the white man's bullets will turn to water. His name is Birsa Munda, and for five years the Mundas of this plateau have called him Dharti Aba, the Father of the Earth.

By the afternoon the hill is a killing ground. A column of police and soldiers has come up from Khunti with rifles. The Mundas shoot arrows down the slope. The rifles answer. Nobody has ever agreed on how many Mundas died on Dombari that day. The official file gives a small number. Munda tradition in the villages below gives a very large one. Both cannot be right, and the honest answer is that we do not know.

What we do know is that Birsa was not on the hill when it ended. He got away into the forest. In the weeks that followed, his own people were asking one question. What does a movement do when its leader has promised that bullets cannot touch him, and the bodies are lying on the hill?

Twenty Years of Losing in Court

To see why the Mundas were on that hill, start with the land.

The Munda system of land was called khuntkatti. A village was cleared from the forest by a founding family, and the descendants of that family held it together as kin, not as tenants of anybody. There was no landlord in the arrangement, because the clearing was the title.