Drawing on the historical background of the Birsa movement, this chapter traces the making of Birsa Munda's statue in contemporary Jharkhand. It makes this leap from the previous chapter—anachronistic in nature to distil the reproduction of Birsa's persona through emergent forms of memory politics. The chapter construes history as not merely a scale of time defined by ruptures but rather an unfolding process, each co-constituting the other. In this schema, the Birsa rebellion becomes not only an event of the past. In doing so, it draws on Reinhart Koselleck's idea of history that is characterized by different notions of temporal and spatial existence. These temporal modalities include the process of remembering—the memory of the past as one of the key features. It does not approach the past in an ‘objective and disinterested manner in order to construct a picture of historical reality by which to measure the falsity of various ideological constructions thereof ‘. Rather, it treats history as an image of the past that has not ruptured from one moment to another but is instead unfolding. But it also spills over—making slippages and continuing ‘traces’ through imprints of memory of people, communities and the institutions. Memory becomes an image of the past that resists the emergence of the historical. It flattens the time in which modernity is imagined.

In other words, as Prathama Banerjee in her work has shown, ‘the internal presence of the “primitive”’, the non-modern, inspires the imagination of temporality as chronology—that is, as an abstract numerical series. Consequently, it can be argued that it is the presence of the ‘“primitive” which makes historicality possible in the first instance’.