Where did the revolt of Birsa Munda take place ?

Question

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Correct — A, Ranchi. Birsa Munda's Ulgulan — the word means Great Tumult — was fought in the Munda heartland of the Chota Nagpur plateau, and every place-name in the record sits inside what was then Ranchi district. Birsa was born on 15 November 1875 at Ulihatu in Ranchi district of the Bengal Presidency. The rising itself is documented as concentrated in the Munda belt of Khunti, Tamar, Sarwada and Bandgaon; about seven thousand men and women gathered around Christmas 1899 to herald the Ulgulan, and it spread through Khunti, Tamar, Basia and Ranchi. On Christmas Eve 1899 Birsaits attacked churches in Ranchi and Singhbhum; on 5 January 1900 two constables were killed at Etkedih; on 7 January the Khunti police station was attacked; and the Deputy Commissioner and Commissioner brought 150 men to Khunti to put the rising down. Birsa was taken in the Jamkopai forest near Chakradharpur on 3 February 1900 and died in Ranchi jail on 9 June 1900, aged twenty-four. Khunti, where most of the fighting happened, was itself carved out of Ranchi district only on 12 September 2007 — a full century later — so at the time of the revolt, and for the whole period any exam question can mean, Khunti was Ranchi. That is why UPSC, matching this same revolt to a region in 1997, keyed it to Bihar: Chota Nagpur was part of Bihar until Jharkhand was created on 15 November 2000, on Birsa's own birth anniversary.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Champaran in north-west Bihar is the site of Gandhi's indigo satyagraha of 1917 — his first in India — against the tinkathia system under which peasants had to plant indigo on three kathas of every bigha. It has no connection with Birsa Munda, and it belongs to a different century, a different community and a different method of struggle. It is on the option list because it is the most famous protest site in Bihar.  (c) Ballia is in eastern Uttar Pradesh, on the far side of the Ganga from Bihar. Its two claims on Indian history are Mangal Pandey, born at Nagwa in the district, and the 'Ballia Republic' of August 1942, when Chittu Pandey's Quit India volunteers held the district free of British control for about a week. Neither has anything to do with the Munda country.  (d) The only argument for this escape is that the fighting centred on Khunti, and Khunti is a district in its own right today — but it became one only in 2007, and in 1899-1900 it was part of Ranchi district, where Birsa was born, tried and died. A 'none of the above' option is correct only when each of the other three can be shown to fail, and here the first one does not.

Concept: The Ulgulan was the last and the most political of nineteenth-century India's tribal risings, and it had three grievances stacked on one another. The first was land: the traditional khuntkatti system, under which the clan that cleared the forest held the land collectively, was being dissolved by outside landlords and moneylenders — the dikus — who converted Munda cultivators into rent-paying tenants. The second was forced labour, beth-begari, exacted by those same landlords. The third was cultural: Birsa, who had studied at a mission school, turned against the missions and preached a purified faith of his own, so his followers called him Dharti Aaba, Father of the Earth, and his movement was millenarian as much as agrarian. Two years of attacks on police posts, landlords and mission stations followed his call at Christmas 1899. The state won the fight and lost the argument: in 1908 the colonial government passed the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, which barred the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals — the single most durable protection Adivasi landholding in the region has, and still in force in Jharkhand today.

State PCS 2025 Q53 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q53 — History PYQ with Answer