The Political Life of Memory : Birsa Munda in Contemporary India

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.

"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 confinesof 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"--