Description
The article seeks to contribute to the burgeoning literature on decolonizing memory within the discipline of International Relations by highlighting the contradistinction between the material forms of memorialisation carried within the post-colonial Indian state. It argues that the state-led statue erections of adivasi leader Birsa Munda are attempts at selectively framing and freezing his legacy as an anti-colonial icon. These material-hegemonic framings of national memory tend to depoliticize the contemporary struggles of adivasis living under abject conditions of dispossession subject to paroxysmal violence. Rather than treating statues as passive objects, the article explores the simultaneity in attempts at appropriation and obfuscation of memory-orders by the state. Drawing on Maurice Halbach’s framing of collective memory and Mathew J. Allen’s work on political economy on memory, the article attempts at highlighting the commemorative practices of adivasi populations through the empirical referent of the Pathalgadi movement. The quotidian acts of memorialisation embodied in the materiality of ‘smadhi sthals’ are subaltern attempts at reclamation of Birsa Munda’s legacy. In exploring these sites of memorialisation also doubling as symbolic performances, the article aims at unpacking their disruptive potential as mnemonic labour in the present times.
