The Kherwar Movement’s Quest for Tribal Renaissance

In the rugged terrain of what is today Jharkhand, a quiet but determined revolution was taking shape in the latter half of the 19th century. It did not begin with armed marches or loud proclamations. It began with a question the Santal people had been living with for decades: how do you reclaim who you are when everything around you is pulling your identity apart? The Kherwar movement – also known as the Safa Hor or Sapha Har movement – was the Santals’ answer. It was a deeply layered response to colonial oppression, religious encroachment, and the slow erosion of tribal selfhood, and it remains one of the most philosophically rich chapters in the history of tribal resistance in India.

Who were the Santals, and what did they stand to lose? 🔗

The Santal people are an Austroasiatic-speaking Munda ethnic group – among the largest tribal communities in India today, spread across Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, and beyond. Traditionally, they led a relatively self-sufficient life, deeply connected to their forests, their land, and a cosmology woven from nature and ancestral spirits known as bongas.

That world began unravelling under British colonial rule. The introduction of the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 made local landlords the primary tax collectors, and Santals who were unable to repay loans had their lands seized and were forced into bonded labour. The displacement of the Santals during the colonial period produced a split in their clan system as they spread out to find employment in indigo factories or in building railways, and being in debt became the only way to be at home in colonial modernity.

The armed Santhal Rebellion of 1855-56 was a direct eruption of this accumulated rage – led by brothers Kanhu and Sidhu, who claimed to have been instructed by a divine spirit to rid their territory of outsiders and establish Santhal rule, the rebellion was eventually quashed, leading to an estimated 15,000-20,000 Santhal deaths. In the aftermath, the British created the Santhal Parganas district and introduced some protections, but the structural inequalities remained. The Kherwar movement, which refers to the concerted political and religious activities by the Santals between 1858 and 1900, abandoned the violence of the 1855 rebellion as a means of restoring Santhal solidarity – partly because the state had demonstrated its repressiveness against violent revolt. A new strategy was needed. That strategy was the Kherwar movement.

Origins and leadership of the Kherwar movement 🔗

The Kherwar movement was one of the non-violent tribal struggles against British rule. It was initiated by the Santhal tribal community in 1868 in Bihar (Chota Nagpur region) under the leadership of Bhagirath Manjhi. Bhagirath was not a warrior in the conventional sense. He was a hermit, a spiritual figure the Santals called “Baba” – a man who spoke the language of the soul rather than the sword.

He played a crucial role in mobilizing the Santhal community, inspiring them to adhere to monotheism, abstain from animal sacrifice and alcohol, and follow a strict code of conduct based on traditional values. His leadership was instrumental in shaping the movement’s socio-religious character.

Bhagirath Manjhi proclaimed himself the king of the Santals and the representative of God. He demanded the introduction of a Santhal Raj and wanted the Santhal tribes to stop the sacrifices to the “evil bongas.” He was arrested in 1868 as an instigator of disturbances. Yet the movement did not die with his imprisonment. After his release in 1877, Bhagirath worked quietly, and it was later discovered that the Kherwar movement was actually growing in a discrete manner. In 1879, Bhagirath attained samadhi. In 1880, there was another demonstration of Santhal unrest, and a new figure – Baba Dubia Gossain – continued his work, touring through all the Santhal regions and preaching against the British, the zamindars, and Christian missionaries.

The name “Safa Hor” and what it meant 🔗

The movement’s alternative name, Safa Hor, is telling. The term means “clean man,” emphasizing purity. A central tenet of the movement was the worship of one supreme God – often identified as “Thakurji” or “Marang Buru” – moving away from polytheistic practices or the worship of multiple deities. This focus on cleanliness was not merely ritual; it was moral and political. To be safa – pure – was to be free from the corrupting influence of outsiders: the dikus (non-tribals), the zamindars, the missionaries, and the colonial administration.

The religious and political activities of the Kherwar movement were linked to the idea that certain individuals had received a divine calling to reform Santhal religious practices. Religious reforms were often seen as a way to improve the Santhals’ material lives, and sometimes as a precursor to a new era. The movement, in other words, treated spiritual transformation as the necessary foundation for social and political liberation.

The shift to monotheism: rejection and reconstruction 🔗

One of the most philosophically significant aspects of the Kherwar movement was its stance on religious belief. The Santals had traditionally practiced animism – a worldview in which forests, rivers, ancestors, and spirits all held sacred power. The bongas were not simply gods; they were part of the living fabric of Santhal existence.

Yet the Kherwar movement called for a break from this. The movement wanted Santhal tribes to stop the sacrifices to the “evil bongas.” The religious mood of the Kherwars was a kind of fervour similar to that observed among Christian converts – a number of Santhals in Santal Parganas tried to interpret what they understood as the social breakdown of Santal society. The old spirits, in this new reading, were not sources of strength but symbols of a subjugated past. A single, transcendent God – powerful, uncompromising, and free of the caste hierarchies embedded in the Hindu pantheon – offered something the bongas could not: a deity who demanded dignity.

This was not, however, a straightforward rejection of all things Hindu. The commonest ritual innovations within the Kherwar movement were Hindu in nature – including the slaughter of pigs and the adoption of Hindu sacred thread and Hindu rituals. The movement navigated a complex terrain, selectively borrowing from Hinduism while simultaneously rejecting the social inequality that Hinduism’s caste system imposed on tribal communities. As a study published in The Criterion notes, Kherwars assimilated certain Hindu cult elements and the concept of “cleanness” as introduced by the leadership.

Why adopt Hindu practices at all? 🔗

This question gets at the pragmatic genius of the Kherwar movement. The Santals were not adopting Hinduism out of admiration for the caste system. They were using the dominant religious grammar of the region to construct a new identity – one that could claim legitimacy on the same cultural terrain where they were being marginalized. By speaking a language that outsiders partially recognized, the Santals could assert their own version of purity, their own claim to spiritual authority, and their own vision of social order. It was resistance dressed in borrowed robes.

Socio-political aspirations: the dream of Santhal Raj 🔗

The Kherwar movement was never purely a spiritual affair. It was unique because it attempted to establish a parallel Santhal Raj with a system of revenue collection, seeking to create an alternative governance model for the Santhals, distinct from the colonial administration.

The movement emphasized the need for self-rule and promoted the idea of a separate Santhal identity based on traditional practices and customs. Bhagirath Manjhi envisioned a society where the Santhals would have control over their economic resources, particularly land, and would function autonomously without interference from British authorities.

The movement initially taught monotheism and social reform, but just before its suppression, it took the form of a campaign against the activities of revenue endowment. It gained momentum in 1874 with significant support from Santhal tribals after exorbitant rents were imposed on them. The religious and the political were inseparable: to worship a God who demanded freedom was to also demand freedom from colonial revenue officers and landlords.

The golden age: myth as political vision 🔗

At the heart of the Kherwar movement’s philosophy was a powerful idea – the recovery of a lost golden age. The Santals believed they had once lived as free people, masters of their own forests and fields, answerable to no zamindar and no colonial officer. This memory, whether historically precise or mythologically constructed, gave the movement its emotional and moral fuel.

This is a recurring pattern in tribal and indigenous movements worldwide: the invocation of an ancestral time of wholeness and freedom, not as nostalgia, but as a political demand. For the Kherwar leaders, religious reform was the path back to that original condition. A purified community, worshipping a single sovereign God, living by a strict moral code, and refusing complicity in colonial economic arrangements – this was not just a religious vision. It was a blueprint for tribal renaissance.

As the Springer volume on tribal reform and resistance argues, the reform mode of protest launched by Bhagirath Manjhi and others did not get due place in the history of tribal resistance to colonial rule – instead, these protests were presented as mere revival or socio-religious movements, when in fact the leaders subsequently directed the course to resist all types of exploitation in colonial rule, which they also justified through religious teachings.

Legacy: what the Kherwar movement left behind 🔗

The Kherwar movement did not achieve immediate political success. British authorities arrested its leaders, suppressed its gatherings, and ultimately curtailed its spread. But movements measured only by their immediate victories miss the point entirely.

Some of the ideas developed by the 19th century movements are still alive today. Many adivasis feel that it is imperative for them to assert their cultural distinctiveness. The Kherwar movement modelled a form of resistance that did not rely on weapons alone – it relied on identity, belief, and collective moral commitment. In doing so, it laid conceptual groundwork for later tribal movements, including the Birsa Munda movement and the broader Jharkhand movement for a separate tribal state.

The movement also anticipated a debate that continues to this day in tribal communities across India: the tension between preserving indigenous religious traditions in their original form and engaging with – or strategically borrowing from – dominant religious systems. The Santal community has agitated for recognition of their traditions in the census as a separate religion, Sarna Dharam, for which the Jharkhand assembly passed a resolution in 2020. That ongoing demand for a distinct religious identity is, in many ways, a continuation of the same philosophical question the Kherwar movement was wrestling with over 150 years ago.

A movement ahead of its time 🔗

What makes the Kherwar movement philosophically compelling is precisely its complexity. It was neither a simple return to tradition nor a wholesale embrace of outside influence. It was a conscious, creative negotiation – an attempt to forge a new identity strong enough to survive the pressures of colonialism, religious competition, and economic dispossession. The Santals, through the Kherwar movement, demonstrated that tribal communities were not passive recipients of historical forces. They were active agents, philosophically sophisticated and politically determined, shaping their own responses to an overwhelming crisis of existence.

What do you think? The Kherwar movement chose to borrow certain Hindu practices while simultaneously resisting the social order that Hinduism’s caste system imposed on tribal communities – is selective cultural borrowing a form of pragmatic survival, or does it risk eroding the very identity it seeks to protect? And nearly 150 years later, as Santal communities continue to fight for recognition of Sarna Dharam as a distinct religion, how much of Bhagirath Manjhi’s vision of tribal sovereignty can be said to have been fulfilled?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santal_people
2. https://www.britannica.com/event/Santhal-rebellion
3. https://www.the-criterion.com/V8/n4/HM08.pdf
4. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-0059-4_20