Includes bibliographical references and index.

Claiming the Munda Raj from the Margins : Land, Missionaries and the Making of the Birsa Ulgulan in Chota Nagpur (1845-1900) -- Memories Set in Stone : Political Aesthetics and the Statue of Birsa Munda in Post-colonial Jharkhand -- 'Burying the Dead, Creating the Past' : The Making of Memorials, Stone Slabs and Birsa Munda in Jharkhand -- Echoes from the Graveyard : Pathalgadi, Birsaites and the Landscape of Memory.

"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"--