A head was laid in the ground on 10th July 2010. No more than a head – a head that has, as of writing, spent 190 years bodyless. It had belonged to a Noongar[1] named Yagan, then to a museum in Liverpool, where it was little more than a curiosity. Yet the actions of Yagan and the location of his remains have brought much attention, and over time he has – superficially or not – emerged a symbol of anti-colonial resistance: subject of a statue in Perth, studied in some Australian schools[2] and tribute of an Aboriginal arts festival,[3] for example.
No outsider heard Yagan declare war; in contemporary newspapers we read a sort of ‘fading in’ – that is, starting in 1831,[4] he was ever more often observed as a leader of indigenous attacks on settlers. These seem to have begun as retaliation against the colonist household of Archibald Butler for shooting dead a member of his residence group who had stolen potatoes. Revenge killings, as Yagan’s and Midgegooroo (his father)’s actions against settlers can be described, were typical of the hunter-gatherer society in which the Noongar lived, as the historian Neville Green writes:
'The Aborigine regarded the homesteader, his wife, children, servants, shepherds and labourers as a family horde. If any member of that horde wronged a Nyungar, the homesteader’s horde was collectively guilty and any one member would be an acceptable target for a reprisal spearing.'[5]
Thus we may come to understand that Yagan was not so much an 'Aboriginal resistance leader', or even a Noongar one. He fought against white settlers simply in defence of his residence group ('horde' in slightly outdated anthropological jargon).[6] It is unlikely he had so much a 'political' motive as an urge to stand against those who had pushed his people off the earth which they had walked for millennia – even a spurious paraphrase of Yagan by colonial diarist George Fletcher Moore does not come across as a position, but a reason ('As we walk in our own country we are fired upon by the white men; why should the white men treat us so?'[7]). It is ignored that he achieved relatively little – dying at the hands of vigilantes after only two months on the run – and had no chance of doing so. But despite this, he has found the glory of a freedom fighter; he has very much become a folk-hero. Even Moore, who wrote contemptuously of the aboriginals, saw 'something in his daring which one is forced to admire.'[8]
***
Brits contemporary to the events surrounding Yagan and Midgegooroo chose not to settle in India to the same degree as they would in Australia – what was worth far more was to force out every last drop of its wealth – but had transformed the subcontinent into a rather effective serf. For all their success here, it must be said that British colonists did not make particularly skilled sahibs when dealing with the Midnapore district (later called 'Jungle Mahals'). Not foreseeing the upset of the Bhumij tribals[9] at the fate of their king, Madhava Singh, who, more relevantly than his being king, had led a minor action against the East India Company, and who had died in a British prison;[10] not drawing their view of Bhumij leaders as 'grossly stupid, debauched, tyrannical and slaves to the most grovelling superstition'[11] to the conclusion that they did in fact oppress their subjects (described by one Walter Hamilton as 'shy, sullen, inhospitable and uncivilised[12]); that the state erected in the area was absent to the point of humour – it was no wonder the British faced a rebellion in the years 1832-3.
Its leader was Ganga Narayan – grandson of a past raja of Barabhum[13] – who had killed his corrupt half-brother Madhava Singh,[14] the unpopular British-appointed Diwan. The following Bhumij attack on Barabazar’s court and bazaar,[15] and what came after this, were on a scale much larger than the Noongar skirmishes with settlers.[16] One British officer commented that these events marked 'the commencement of a new war'[17], and while he may have overestimated the situation’s gravity, it is true that Ganga Narayan (a) commanded thousands of men and (b) that his actions resembled thought-out tactics, such as arson 'with the intent […] to decoy […] troops to the fire, while they might enter the camp',[18] contrasting Yagan’s isolated killings.
But the Bhumij were driven out quickly, and like Yagan, their leader was declared an outlaw, wanted dead or alive. Their fight continued for several months – well into the following year, when, quite suddenly, Ganga Narayan was reported killed, not by British forces or even lone actors, but by soldiers of Chetan Singh, Thakur of Kharsawan. His head, severed, was sent to the British, who rewarded the Thakur with Rs. 5000 and protection.[19]
A comparison can be made between these two men in their posthumous treatment. While the murder and subsequent decapitation of Yagan were so violent that not even the colony’s newspapers could condone their conduct,[20] this was due to their concern that such an unspeakable death may not display the whites’ moral superiority to the Aboriginals. A similar attitude was held by some Brits who worried for the 'poor, superstitious and misguided men, whom we are hunting like wild beasts,'[21] but this was a little offset by the 'great rejoicing in the camps at the death of Ganga Narain'.[22] The eventual truth is that the colonists’ war on the indigenous peoples of western Australia and of the Jungle Mahals was much larger than the deaths of Yagan and of Ganga Narayan; both represented and, to a lesser degree, continue to act as embodiments of their people’s aspirations. Jha writes that Ganga Narayan was considered invincible by many Bhumijs.[23] Further, according to the British newspaper The Bengal Hurkaru and Chronicle:
'[Ganga Narayan convinced] the Chooars [of] the extraordinary idea that he possessed the power of enchanting the sepoys and their muskets.'[24]
The use of the pejorative Chuar indicates this may be a charge of the British imagination, but either way there is a wealth of evidence to suggest a millenarian character to Ganga Narayan’s rebellion. Historical understanding has not persisted – many news articles and web-pages present him in rather shallow terms – yet his status became one of a folk-hero; as Nehru wrote of the more ideologically assured Bhagat Singh, 'the act was forgotten, the symbol remained'.[25] Similarly, Yagan’s failure to enact change did not hinder celebration. It was death, and a subsequent fictionalisation of their lives, that brought both men to the present situation. The story of Yagan’s head perfectly encapsulates this: much of what is written about him concerns its 2010 reburial – while a great achievement for the Noongars, it is ironic that now at home, honoured by statues and literary festivals, whatever he is erroneously said to have believed is contradicted by modern Australia.
The fates of the two figures described in this essay bring to mind the novelist Hans Fallada’s comments on the German anti-fascists Otto and Elise Hampel, who were beheaded in 1943:
'[They] sacrificed their lives in a purposeless battle, apparently in vain. But perhaps not entirely purposeless, after all? Perhaps not entirely in vain, after all?'[26]
Fallada soon finished writing Every Man Dies Alone,[27] a novel about the couple; perhaps this was his folk-tale, the Hampels (or the Quangels, as he calls them) his folk-heroes. Two-hundred years’ folk-chatter of Ganga Narayan and of Yagan are equivalent – they are what have prevented these stories from, as Fallada put it, 'dying away unheard'.[28]
1. A group of Aboriginal Australians who mostly live in Western Australia. Yagan hailed specifically from the Beeliar camp of the Whadjuk.
2. Curriculum Council, Aboriginal and Intercultural Studies (2007), 11.
3. Cressida Fforde, “Yagan”, in The Dead and their Possessions: The repatriation in principle, policy and practice, ed. Cressida Fforde, Jane Hubert and Paul Turnbull (London: Routledge, 2002), 234 (under 'Yagan’s Significance Today').
4. Perth Gazette, May 25, 1833, reproduced in Neville Green, Broken Spears: Aboriginals and Europeans in the southwest of Australia (Perth: Focus Education Services, 1984), 80.
5. Neville Green, Broken Spears, 77.
6. This view is common among modern 'Yagan-ologists'. For example, historian R.H.W. Reece describes the situation: 'Yagan cannot properly be described as a 'resistance leader' when the Noongars offered no organised and sustained opposition to the settlers. He was more of a maverick, a bold and courageous warrior whose actions on behalf of his people and their rights made him notorious.' See: R.H.W. Reece, “Yagan (1795-1833),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography.
7. George F. Moore, Diary of Ten Years Eventful [sic] Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia and also a Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language of the Aborigines (London: M. Walbrook), 191.
8. Ibid., 192.
9. Considered a Scheduled Tribe in Odisha, West Bengal, Jharkhand; a Scheduled Caste in Bihar; an Other Backward Class in Tripura and Assam. The rebellion mostly took place in parts of India where Bhumij are today considered a Scheduled Tribe.
10. Samira Dasgupta, Rabiranjan Biswas and Gautam K. Mallik, Heritage Tourism: An Anthropological Journey to Bishnupur (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2009), 29. According to this text, Madhava Singh had had the dream to 'drive the Britishers from India'.
11. Walter Hamilton, East India Gazetteer (London, 1828), II, 346. Reproduced in Jagdish C. Jha, The Bhumij Revolt (1832-1833) (Ganga Narain’s Hangama or Turmoil) (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967), 107.
12. Ibid.
13. Jha, 36.
14. Not to be confused with the other Madhava Singh described above.
15. Ibid., 66.
16. This was doubtlessly due to the Midnapore area’s well-established feudal society, in place of the nomadic residence groups of western Australia.
17. In India Gazette (19 May 1832), reproduced in Jha, 70.
18. Jha, 70.
19. Ibid., 102.
20. “The Natives”, in The Perth and Western Australian Journal (20 July 1833), 114-115. Available to view online at https://trove.nla.gov.au/.
21. “Report from Camp Amjor” in India Gazette (6 February 1833), reproduced in Jha, 101.
22. Jha, 103.
23. Ibid., 71.
24. Report from Camp Barabazar, in The Bengal Hurkaru and Chronicle (22 May 1832), reproduced in Jha, 146-147.
25. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, reproduced in S.K. Mittal and Irfan Habib, The Congress and the Revolutionaries in the 1920s, in Social Scientist (June 1982), 24.
26. Hans Fallada, original source unknown, reproduced in Geoff Wilkes’ afterword to Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin (Penguin, 2009), 582.
27. My personal preference lies with the original title – Jeder stirbt für sich allein – of which this is a translation. In the UK it was published as Alone in Berlin.
28. Fallada, reproduced in Wilkes, 580.