Tana Bhagat Movement: A Call for Tribal Purification and Resistance

In April 1914, in the forested highlands of the Chotanagpur Plateau, a 25-year-old from Gumla named Jatra Oraon declared that he had received a divine message. The supreme god of the Oraons, Dharmesh, had spoken to him – calling his people to purify their faith, reclaim their dignity, and resist the forces crushing them from every direction. What followed was one of the most striking episodes in India’s tribal history: the Tana Bhagat Movement, a simultaneous act of religious reformation and social rebellion that reshaped how an entire community understood itself, its God, and its oppressors.

The world the Uraons lived in 🔗

The Uraon (or Oraon) people are one of the major tribal communities of the Chotanagpur region, now part of present-day Jharkhand. By the early twentieth century, their world had been badly disrupted. Colonial administrative reforms, including land surveys conducted between 1869 and 1910, had formalized individual land tenures in ways that eroded the communal land rights the Uraons had traditionally held. Uraons in western Chotanagpur were paying rent at significantly higher rates than their Munda neighbours to the east. On top of this, landlords – called dikus, meaning exploitative non-tribal outsiders – demanded unpaid labour. Uraons were made to act as forest beaters during hunting expeditions and were forced to carry police baggage for near-nothing wages.

The zamindari system compounded all of this. The illaqadars – those who had been granted land by the Maharaja of Chotanagpur in exchange for services – exercised a ritual and economic hold over Uraon cultivators that extended well beyond rent collection. Their subordination was total: economic, social, and even spiritual. The Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, though intended to protect occupancy rights, frequently registered lands incorrectly in revenue records, favouring privileged intermediaries over less empowered Uraon cultivators. With legal channels blocked and suffering widespread, conditions were primed for something to break.

Jatra Bhagat and the divine call 🔗

In April 1914, Jatra proclaimed that he had received a message from Dharmesh, the supreme god of the Oraons, to revive the Oraon Raj. This was not framed as personal ambition or political strategy – it was presented as a direct divine mandate. Jatra declared that the Uraon people had strayed from their original, pure faith. Their misfortunes, he argued, were spiritual in origin: the community had drifted from the true religion, which the Tana followers called the Kurukh Dharam – the original religion of the Kurukh or Oraons. The Tanas argued that their religion had been corrupted and required cleansing, and that the belief in ghosts and spirits was not part of their ancient tribal faith but a later importation from the Munda religious system – the very reason for their present degraded state.

The name “Tana” itself is telling. It comes from the practice of using mantras and incantations to tana – to pull out – ghosts and evil spirits from the community. By naming themselves after this act of purification, the movement’s very identity was rooted in the idea of expulsion: driving out corruption, superstition, and foreign domination alike.

Religious purification: what the movement demanded 🔗

The religious programme of the Tana Bhagat movement was sweeping. Jatra advocated that Oraon religion should be freed of practices like ghost hunts and exorcism, belief in bhuts or evil spirits, animal sacrifice, and liquor drinking, replacing these with vegetarianism, austerity, and restraint. Followers were expected to wear white clothing, chant mantras, and adopt a strictly ascetic way of life. The symbolic use of the bow over the plough pointed to a vision of an older, freer existence – one unshackled from the degrading conditions of agricultural servitude under non-tribal landlords.

The shift to monotheism 🔗

Perhaps the most theologically significant aspect of the movement was its insistence on monotheism. The Tana Bhagats directed their worship toward Dharmesh Baba or Bhagwan Baba as the principal god, though other deities from the broader Hindu pantheon – Suraj Baba, Indra Baba, Brahma Baba – were also invoked in prayer. This move away from the fragmented, spirit-filled religious world of traditional Uraon practice toward a more unified, monotheistic framework was simultaneously a spiritual and a social act. It reduced the religious power of the traditional priests, the pahans, who had held authority as intermediaries between the spirit world and the community. By worshipping directly, Tana followers bypassed this priestly hierarchy entirely – a profound challenge to the internal power structures of Uraon society.

The rejection of spirit worship 🔗

Traditional Uraon religion was deeply animistic. The spirit world was not distant or abstract – it governed daily life, agricultural cycles, illness, and fortune. The offices of the pahan and the mahto (village headman) were central to how communities navigated this spirit-saturated world. The rejection of this spirit world was, in effect, a critique of the entire settled agricultural economy and its hierarchies – a refusal of the social order that had made subjugation possible. By dismantling the spiritual structures that maintained these hierarchies, the Tana movement was dismantling the foundations of local power itself.

Asceticism as resistance 🔗

The austere lifestyle demanded of Tana followers was not merely spiritual discipline. It was also a deliberate act of separation from the colonial world. Followers were urged to refuse forced unpaid labour and to stop paying revenue to the British. The communities refused to work as coolies for non-Oraons or for the government. Believers were even ordered to avoid the colour red – including chillies and red paddy – because red represented the British whom the Uraons were to resist. True education, it was declared, would come from Heaven; accordingly, children were kept from missionary schools, which were in some cases forcibly closed. This bodily and cultural withdrawal from colonial life was as much a political statement as a religious one.

Communal prayer and the making of collective identity 🔗

From the beginning, the Oraon movement was a collective enterprise, its ideals learnt and propagated orally. Teachings were imparted by an enlightened man or guru who taught the doctrines of the new faith and showed followers the way to the “True Religion.” Meetings were held at night, where songs were sung and mantras recited. People were urged to become bhagats – devotees – and a chain of communication was established: Tana mantras were taught to selected youths, who then returned to their villages to spread the teachings further.

This communal dimension was critical. The movement was not simply a private act of religious conversion. It was a public, collective reordering of Uraon identity. Around 26,000 Oraon followers were eventually mobilised under Jatra, with the movement spreading rapidly across Ranchi, Palamau, and Hazaribagh. By 1916, it had even reached migrant Oraon labourers in the tea gardens of Jalpaiguri, far from Chotanagpur. Members of the Munda and Kharia tribes also joined. The movement crossed village boundaries precisely because it offered something more than local grievance: it offered a shared spiritual identity and a common cause.

From religious reform to political resistance 🔗

The Tana Bhagat movement did not remain confined to religion. The movement was religious in its initial stage, but gradually targeted political objectives and is considered an extended part of the Birsa movement. As the movement grew, agrarian demands came to the forefront. The tribal religious movement gave way to a “no-rent payment” campaign as Jatra questioned the ritual subordination of the Uraons to the zamindars, and instructed his followers to stop ploughing the fields of landlords and to refuse to work as coolies or labourers for non-Oraons or the government. The basic rationale was theological as much as economic: land was a gift of God, and no one had the right to interfere with the tribals’ claim to it.

Jatra and his leading disciples were arrested on 23 April 1914, less than a month after the movement began. The British were alarmed by the scale of mobilisation and the outright refusal to cooperate with colonial authority. After his release in June 1915, Jatra stepped back from leadership – but the movement did not stop. A succession of leaders followed, including Litho Oraon, who declared herself a goddess and preached on the same lines, and Mangor Oraon, who took up leadership in November 1915. Both were also imprisoned. The state’s response – arrests, suppression, intimidation – revealed how seriously authorities took the movement’s challenge to colonial order.

Non-violence and the Gandhian turn 🔗

One of the most philosophically distinctive aspects of the Tana Bhagat movement was its commitment to non-violence, or ahimsa. The Tana Bhagats staged a Satyagraha – a civil disobedience movement – even before Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement. This makes the movement not just historically important for tribal history, but for the broader history of non-violent resistance in India. Thousands of tribal community members who followed this new creed became part of an organised non-violent army against feudal lords, moneylenders, and British rule.

From 1921, the Tana Bhagat movement entered a new phase as followers were required to carry the Congress flag, wear khaddar (homespun cloth), and take vows in Gandhi’s name. Gandhi came to be perceived almost as a divine figure – one who would drive out the British without guns and establish a dharma raj, a kingdom of righteousness. The Congress propagated the idea that Gandhi Raj would usher in the tribal millennium. The movement became integrated into the mainstream nationalist struggle, and its followers participated in Congress sessions at Calcutta, Gaya, and Lahore. In this way, a movement born in a forested plateau of eastern India eventually fed into India’s national liberation movement.

Legacy and lasting impact 🔗

The Tana Bhagat movement permanently altered the religious and social landscape of the Uraon community. The movement is recognised as a revival movement in Oraon religion in the Chotanagpur plateau, and even today many followers continue the Tana path of idealism. Tana Bhagat families maintain distinct rituals: they do not perform animal sacrifices, married women use white sandalwood paste rather than vermilion as a marital symbol, and communal worship remains central to their practice. The movement’s insistence on direct worship – bypassing traditional priestly intermediaries – permanently redistributed religious authority within the community.

The Tana Bhagat movement also demonstrated something that scholars of religion and social movements have long noted: that religious reform and political resistance are not separate channels. As theorists like Ernst Bloch and Paul Ricoeur have argued, religion can function not only to legitimise domination but also as a force of social change and liberation from oppression. The Tana Bhagats understood this instinctively. They used spiritual purification as a vocabulary for political demand, and they used collective faith as the structure for collective action. In doing so, they mounted one of the most creative challenges to both colonial rule and internal social hierarchy that tribal India has ever seen.

What do you think? Is it possible to separate religious reform from social and political resistance, or do movements like the Tana Bhagat movement suggest they are always intertwined? And when a community reclaims its religious identity as an act of dignity, is that fundamentally different from political rebellion – or is it the same thing by another name?

References

1. https://jharkhand.pscnotes.com/jharkhand-history/tana-bhagat-movement/
2. https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Oraon_Tana_Vagat_Movement
3. https://grokipedia.com/page/Tana_Bhagat_Movement
4. https://jndmeerut.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/CSS-10.pdf
5. https://agrarianstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/colloqpapers/12dasgupta.pdf
6. https://www.insightsonindia.com/modern-indian-history/other-dimensions/tribal-movements/tana-bhagat-movement/
7. https://indianculture.gov.in/digital-district-repository/district-repository/bhagat-movement
8. https://www.etribaltribune.com/index.php/volume-3/mv3i1/the-tana-bhagat-an-observation-in-contemporary-situation-in-jharkhand