Abstract
Rarely, but rarely, does one get to read a book which arrests you in its syllables and forces you to think why you did not get to read such a book before. The bookshelves of India and the world are full of writings on the stories of India’s struggle for freedom from and the miseries, struggles and vicissitudes of foreign rule, but most of these writings relate to us the stories of well-known personalities—freedom fighters. There has been a growing interest in recent years in learning about those heroes of the past whose contributions to our freedom, and whose valour in confronting the colonial dominance in India, are not so well documented, let alone celebrated, as they should have been. India retrieved its freedom through many wars, particularly in the nineteenth century, which need to be added—and many have been—to history books, sung to the people of India and the world. But how many schoolbooks will tell you in detail of the valour and sacrifices of our heroes in India’s tribal regions, who fought and gave up their future for ours? Their stories often remain a distant echo, in the memories of the people of that region or in those ethnic, tribal groups—one may get to hear them, sometimes, in the local legends of that region—but not in the standard books of Indian history. Therefore, when the authors Tuhin A. Sinha and Clark Prasad bring to us the moving stories of the bravery of two brothers, Sido and Kanhu, of the Murmu clan of the Santhal (‘a proud ethnic group spread between the present area of Bhagalpur and Purnia in Bihar, the northern parts of Jharkhand and the fields of adjoining West Bengal,’ pp. ix–x), their magnetic passion for freedom from their oppressors, from the British Empire, flashes before the mind of the reader as a gigantic film being projected on a vast canvas of India’s landscape. Their war cry, Hul! Hul! Hul!, rings like the sound of Lord Shiva’s drum (Damaru) in our ears, from which emerge the cosmic syllables Om! Om! Om! and which inspires thousands and thousands of Santhals to follow the two brothers, to join them in their sacrifice and service for the Murmu tribe and their sacred land, also for the motherland, Bharatamata.
While there are books on the Santhal rebellion, like Peter Stanley’s, these often focused on how the British quelled the Santhal’s Hul, the unassailable, vigorous, often victorious, challenges. The present book, on the other hand, curates a beautiful story of Sido and Kanhu: how they inspired the people around them, how they led the movement from the front and sacrificed their lives for the land, for India, which the Santhal believed never belonged to the white colonials. For example, in one of the poignant sections of this book (pp.79–84), the authors describe the events of the Great Rally before the Hul in the Night, 30 June 1855, when the clarion call from the Murmu brother (Sido and Kanhu) stirred the hearts and minds of the entire Santhal region. Their message, Let’s go to Bhognadih!, spread among the people like wildfire, and the sea of the Santhal people—young, old and elderly—gathered to catch a glimpse of their heroes, to listen to their awe-inspiring words. The gathering moved Sido, and then the speech he delivered to that crowd; the crowd listened to him in rapt attention as he continued to explain the misery and the vicissitudes the British colonial rule had brought to the people of Santhal: ‘our beliefs define us, and we were never meant to live as we do now, paying such high taxes and lagan on our hard-earned labour’ (p. 80). This heart-wrenching speech by Sido standing ‘on the elevated stony surface’ reminded one of the sermons of the Buddha on the mound (Sarnath?), and the enthused and inspired by Sido and Kanhu, the mighty crowd agreed that henceforth, they would decide how much taxes to pay for their income. One of the seniors from the crowd even recited for the gathered people a poem, as he would describe it, ‘born from our pain’:
Sahib rule is full of trouble, Shall we go or shall we stay? Eating, drinking and clothing – For everything, we face trouble. Shall we go shall we stay? Ido, why are you bathed in blood? Kanhu, why do you cry, ‘Hul’, ‘Hul’? For our people, we have bathed in blood, For the trader thieves.
The source of the Santhal’s struggle led by Sido and Kanhu, and the inspiration and valour they bring in through deeds and words are beautifully captured in this volume. The syllables of this poem and the stories woven around them in this volume inspire a literary genre of a heightened sense of history through poignant words, ‘Sahib rule is full of trouble’. Sinha and Prasad conclude the gently curated history of these two formidable freedom fighters with personal stories they carry with them, and this story, too, narrates the human urge to know their past: ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where will I go’? Also, perhaps, what to do with the past? The book, based on sound archival material, also gives us a sense of how writing about the great personalities and souls, one becomes intertwined in history. Tuhin Sinha’s, indeed Clark Prasad’s, brilliance and reflections on the stories of Sido and Kanhu, in turn, become the story of their own, their life of writing such a history; they write themselves into it. Their encounter with a descendant of the Murmu clan, travelling from a distant land to smell her past, to the land of her ancestors, with the urge to read her own past—‘Who were my ancestors? I need to go and ask James for the next part, I need to go to India, and I need to go to Jharkhand’—makes the end even more enchanting. This volume reminds us, too, how effectively history can be written through authentic stories.