An Adivasi between two worlds

In India’s political and cultural history, Jaipal Singh is, paradoxically, a prominent and obscure figure.

- VEENU SANDHU

He was the first Adivasi to study at Oxford; the first to join the Indian Civil Service (and to resign from it); and the first to captain an Indian hockey team to an Olympic gold in Amsterdam in 1928. A powerful voice of the Adivasis in the Constituent Assembly, he remained a parliamentarian till his death in 1970, and was the most consequential Adivasi leader after Birsa Munda. Known to his people as “Marang Gomke” — the Big Chief — Jaipal Singh lived a life that traversed continents and contradictions. Lo Bir Sendra: A Hunter in the Burning Forest, his memoir, written in 1969 during a sea voyage to England, captures the essence of that journey — at once personal, political, and profoundly reflective.

The title, Lo Bir Sendra, invokes an Adivasi ritual hunt, a communal act of renewal amid destruction. It is an apt metaphor for Jaipal Singh’s life and mission: To reclaim dignity and identity for India’s Adivasis in a rapidly modernising nation.

Singh’s life reads like an improbable epic. Born in 1903 to priestly Mundas in Takra village, 11 miles south of Ranchi, he was rechristened “Jaipal Singh” when he entered St Paul’s School, Ranchi. Canon W E Cosgrave, the school’s British principal, saw in the bright young boy an exceptional spark and took him to England in 1918 after baptising him.