Backstory 2024: When a guru of a little-known religion told my fortune

I had almost wrapped up reporting for my story on the attempts of Hindutva groups to appropriate the Adivasi icon Birsa Munda. I had visited the legend’s hometown and spoken to his descendants, as well as several activists and scholars. But one group of people were proving elusive – the Birsaites.

In Jharkhand, while the warrior leader is widely seen as an Adivasi icon, many also believe he was a god – Birsaites, the followers of the religion he created, believe this particularly strongly.

The Birsaite community is not very visible today. After the British arrested Birsa in 1899, most Birsaites went underground and continued to keep low profiles for several decades – even today, members of the community mostly keep to themselves. Whenever I asked someone I spoke to where I could find a Birsaite to interview, they gave me the same response – that members of the community live like ascetics and don’t use cell phones.

“You should speak to this guru named Mangru Munda,” said a resident of Khunti who had worked on the Birsa Munda museum in Ranchi.

“But how do I find him?” I asked, only to be met with silence and a sympathetic smile.

I am based in Ranchi, and know only a few people in Khunti district, where I was reporting. I did not think it would be effective to go around villages looking for Birsaites without any prior information or contact with locals.

But it felt to me that the story would be incomplete without the voices of Birsaites, and so I was determined to find one.

One evening, a chance text message exchange with an old friend led me to realise that a mutual friend of ours was in Khunti to conduct fieldwork for his doctoral research.

I contacted him and asked if he knew how I might find a Birsaite to speak to. “I see Birsaites at the weekly market all the time, they’re the ones dressed in all white!” he told me over the phone. “Let me ask them if they would be willing to speak to a journalist.”

The following Saturday, I received an excited phone call from him. “There’s an old man here with me at the market and he’s willing to speak to you,” he said.

My friend then put the man on the phone, and we fixed on a date and location for our meeting. Then, I asked him his name.

“Mangru Munda,” he said.

“Oh, it’s you I’ve been looking for, dada!” I said.

The next day, I set out in a car for Khunti early in the morning with two friends, one of them a Mundari speaker, who had offered to help if I needed translation.

Mangru’s village, Anigara, is just a few kilometres from Khunti town, but we could not find it on Google Maps, so had to stop and ask for directions a few times. When we finally arrived at Anigara, we found it was a tranquil village with small mud houses, surrounded by paddy fields.

Mangru was outside his house. He wore a white lungi and turban, and had a long white beard. His family members were busy winnowing paddy.

With a twinkle in his eyes, Mangru greeted us politely and seated us on stools in his front yard. He spoke in a mixture of Hindi and Mundari. I asked Mangru about the lives of Birsaites today. His response lasted around half an hour. He spoke about Birsaites and their beliefs, noting, for instance, that community members typically refrained from eating meat and drinking alcohol. He also narrated the history of Birsa’s final battle and arrest. Other questions elicited similarly long answers. After I had finished interviewing him, Mangru had his own questions for me and my friends, about the places we were from, and our families.

We were interrupted by a visitor who had come to seek help for persistent stomach aches. As a Birsaite guru, Mangru is not only a spiritual leader to his community, but also serves as a healer. He excused himself, took the man aside and spoke to him at length.

The visitor brought out a small water bottle containing his urine. A woman from the household walked up to Mangru and handed him some mustard oil. Carefully, without touching the urine, Mangru poured it into a bowl made out of leaves and then poured the mustard oil on top of it. “Look at the pattern it’s forming,” Mangru told the patient. “Someone has put a curse on you.”

He then rinsed the bowl and threw it away in a plastic bin. Then he advised the man on what foods to eat and what to avoid and sent him off, saying “You will get better now.”

Mangru turned his attention back to us and said that although he had not attended school, he was skilled in healing common illnesses, and was also knowledgeable about astrology and palm-reading.

He then insisted on reading my palm. After studying it for some time, he assured me that I had a bright future ahead of me. He also advised me to marry in accordance with my parents’ wishes. On hearing his advice, my friends, who were minutes earlier fascinated with Mangru’s diagnosis of the visitor, decided against having their palms read by him.

As we prepared to leave, Mangru thanked us for visiting him. “It is good that you came to see me,” he said. “I don’t like to venture very far from home because I have to carry my own food and water everywhere.”

When I asked why, he explained that all Birsaites avoided eating food prepared by non-Birsaites, and that even when they travelled long distances they ensured that they cooked and ate their own food.

This convention, he noted, originated in a belief about Birsa’s death. Specifically, though many believe that Birsa died of an illness, Birsaites argue that this is unlikely because he was a physically strong man, not a sickly one. “We believe he was poisoned to death,” Mangru said.

He noted that after the British arrested Birsa, if they had publicly executed him, they would have been faced with a public uproar. “And so the British poisoned him to ensure a quiet death,” Mangru said. “In memory of this great tragedy, we always ensure that we prepare our own food.”

Although this story is not recorded in any official history, it left me stunned. Several legends about Birsa Munda abound in Jharkhand, but this was the first time I had heard the story that he had been poisoned. As we left Khunti, I wondered how many more stories about Birsa still lived on in his people.