Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the tech-savvy ways that beginning in 2012, the Indian government, state and central, has memorialized, for political purposes, the slaughter on 17 November 1913 of Bhil “tribals” who were reputedly gathering for prayer at Mangadh Hill on the Gujarat/Rajasthan border.

Paper long abstract:

On 17 November 1913 Bhil “tribals” known as Bhagats, followers of the religious reformer, Sri Govind Guru (or Giri), were gathered at Mangadh Hill on the Gujarat/Rajasthan border. Accounts of what transpired differ. According to the colonial government, the Bhagats were engaged in treasonous activity; in the effort to counter it over 400 Bhagats lost their lives. According to Bhagats, the combined forces of Britain and various princely states ruthlessly slaughtered over 1500 innocent devotees as they gathered for prayer. In comparison to the much more famous slaughter at Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, in April 1919, this hatyakand – massacre, mass murder – seemed to have disappeared into the mists of history … until it re-emerged as its hundredth anniversary approached. In 2012 Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, now Prime Minister of India, began an ongoing campaign to memorialize the victims of the massacre. He presented them as “tribal” martyrs whose contributions to the Indian freedom struggle had been unjustly overlooked for far too long. Subsequent efforts to memorialize the victims of Mangadh Hill have exploited and interwoven the possibilities afforded by both physical space and cyberspace. They include most prominently the development of the Mangadh Hill site itself, which Mr. Modi now envisions (as of November 2022) as a global tourist destination, and the establishment of Sri Govind Guru University, which serves students in the so-called tribal belt of eastern Gujarat. The political utility of these efforts is difficult to overlook. Memorializing the victims of Mangadh Hill as not just social and religious but also political martyrs aims to integrate a large but marginalized population more tightly into the Indian state. Just as important, it provides a means for Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to try to attract voters on whose support its rival, the Congress Party, had depended.