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"The Political Life of Memory examines the representation of Birsa Munda's political life, memory politics and the making of anti-colonialism in contemporary Jharkhand. It offers contrasting features of political imaginations deployed in developing memorial landscapes. The framing of Birsa in the heroic narrative through a grand scale of memorialisation, often in the form of the built environment, curates a selective version. This isolates the scope of elaborating his political ideas outside the confines of atypical historical records and their relevance in the contemporary context. This book argues that everyday politics through affective sites such as memorials and statues produce political visions, emotions and opportunities. It shows how such symbolic sites are often strategically placed and politically motivated to inscribe ideologies. This process outlines how the state and Adivasis use memory as a political tool to lay claims to the past of the Birsa movement"--
List of contents
Abbreviations; Glossary of Hindi Terms; List of Illustrations; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Claiming the Munda Raj from the Margins: Land, Missionaries, and the Making of Birsa Ulgulan in Chota Nagpur (1845-1900); 3. Memories Set in Stone: Political Aesthetics and the Statue of Birsa Munda in Postcolonial Jharkhand; 4. 'Burying the Dead, Creating the Past': The Making of Memorials, Stone Slabs and Birsa in Jharkhand; 5. Echoes from the Graveyard: Pathalgadi, Birsaites and the Landscape of Memory; 6. Conclusion; Manifesto: Script for the Counter-memorial; Manifesto: Pathways to Anticolonialism, and Thinking about Subaltern Present Past; Appendix; Primary Sources; Published Sources.
About the author
Rahul Ranjan is postdoctoral research fellow at the OsloMet University, Norway. Currently he is working on the collaborative project titled 'The Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on the Rights of Rivers' funded by the Norwegian Research Council. His interests broadly encompass the fields of political ecology, environmental studies, anti-colonial politics and South Asia studies. He has also edited the volume titled At the Crossroads of Rights which is forthcoming in Spring 2022 with Routledge, London.
Summary
Focusing on Birsa Munda, the book brings a new scholarship on resource and identity politics in India. It draws attention to memorialisation as a political process that brings crucial changes in the emergent political discourse. Crucially, it offers competing political claims about the historical past of Birsa and its representation today.
