Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on a close study of Birsa Munda's ulgulan (1895-1901) to critique secular-rational notions of politics that underpins much scholarship on millenarianism and social protest during capitalist agrarian transformations.

Paper long abstract:

The capitalist transformation of the countryside has, historically, been accompanied by apocalyptic visions of prophets seeking radical democratic futures. The history and theory of "millenarianism" draw as much on the examples of the Anabaptists and Levellers in Reformation Europe as the Sioux Ghost Dance and the Maji Maji uprising. These examples highlight the strikingly similar material contexts and cultural forms. Yet they also insist on what Eric Hobsbawm famously termed "primitive rebels," inchoate and pre-political actors in a social landscape not marked by the demonstrable modernity of class struggle

Subaltern Studies advanced one of the first critiques of the notion of primitive rebels. For Ranajit Guha and his colleagues, millenarian prophets and the followers, far from being pre-political, had overtly political aims guiding their everyday actions. For the Subalternists, the politics of primitive rebels revealed themselves uniquely in millenarian moments of madness directed against the modern state and the capitalist world economy. "Politics" here, as for earlier scholars of millenarianism, was a wholly secular, rational-instrumental affair. What the politics of class struggle meant to Hobsbawm thus came to be analogous to what the politics of anti-colonial resistance meant to the Subalternists.

This paper questions the secular notion of "politics" that underpins much scholarship on millenarian movements during capitalist agrarian transformations. Focusing on the Birsaite ulgulan in colonial Chotanagpur, I seek to understand what millennial visions mean at the level of belief and praxis to their adherents, and how these visions contain an eschatology of radical democratic futures.