- Lived:
- 15 November 1875 (the official date; the sources allow a year or two either way), Ulihatu village in the Chotanagpur plateau (today’s Khunti district, Jharkhand) → the Munda country around Chalkad and Khunti; died 9 June 1900 in Ranchi jail, aged about twenty-five
- Field:
- Adivasi leadership — prophet of the Birsait faith and leader of the Ulgulan, the “Great Tumult” of 1899–1900, the Munda rising against landlords, missionaries and the British Raj
- The Big Idea:
- A landless boy schooled and then lost by a mission declared himself Dharti Aba — Father of the Earth — fused a new faith with an old land-claim, and led his people’s last armed rising. He died in jail without a verdict; eight years later the empire wrote his people’s land rights into an Act that still stands.
- In their words:
- “Abua raj ete jana, maharani raj tundu jana” — “Let our kingdom begin; let the kingdom of the Queen be ended.” (the Ulgulan’s watchword, as the Munda tradition and the trial records both carry it)
- If you remember one thing:
- Twice in fifty years, in the same forested plateau, an Adivasi rising was crushed and then won its case anyway — the Santal hūl forced the law of 1855, and Birsa’s Ulgulan forced the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, still in force today; and the boy who died in jail at twenty-five now has a state founded on his birthday.