Phulo and Jhano Murmu
History remembers empires. Memory remembers courage.
Welcome to The Her Archive!
Archive No.: 001 | Her: Phulo & Jhano Murmu
Period: 1855 | Region: Santhal Pargana (present-day Jharkhand)
Collection: Forgotten Women of India | Classification: Freedom Fighter · Indigenous Leader · Women of Resistance
We begin right here in Jharkhand, with a story that shatters the comfortable fiction of the passive colonized woman. Two Santhal sisters picked up battle-axes against the British Empire in 1855, yet today, most of us cannot even recall their names. Some women inherit history; others have to fight simply to be remembered.
July 1855: The Axes in the dark
The monsoon of 1855 turned the Rajmahal Hills into a thick, suffocating curtain of green. Beneath it, a British military camp slept, anchored by the arrogant certainty of their musket fire and artillery. But the East India Company’s troops fundamentally misunderstood the terrain they claimed to own.
Moving through the dense, wet underbrush that July night were not the famed rebel brothers Sidhu, Kanhu, Chand, and Bhairav, but two women armed with traditional battle-axes. Phulo and Jhano Murmu did not make a sound until they were already inside the perimeter.
As the Santhal Hul- a massive, coordinated uprising against the suffocating debt-bondage of moneylenders and the zamindari system roared across the plateau, the Murmu sisters refused the safety of the rear guard. They understood that the systemic exploitation of their people was enforced by the very soldiers sleeping before them. This infiltration was not a desperate scramble; it was a calculated, lethal guerrilla strike.
By the time dawn broke over the bloodied camp, 21 British soldiers lay dead. The sisters had weaponized their intimate knowledge of the forest to bypass one of the most sophisticated military forces in the world.
The Green Curtain: Damin-i-Koh and the Revenue trap
To understand the sheer magnitude of the Murmu sisters’ rage that night, one must look past the immediate bloodshed and examine the quiet, structural violence that birthed it. The Santhal Hul was not an unprovoked riot; it was the inevitable boiling point of a people being methodically choked on their own land.
Decades earlier, in 1832, the British administration demarcated the Damin-i-Koh, a Persian word meaning the “skirts of the hills”- across the Rajmahal terrain in Sahebganj, Pakur and Godda. It was initially pitched as a designated territory for the Santhals. Seeking refuge from oppressive land taxes elsewhere (exacerbated by the Permanent Settlement of 1793), they migrated by the thousands. Relying on deep kinship ties, they cleared dense forests and transformed the unforgiving plateau into highly profitable agricultural tracts.
But the British had engineered a revenue trap. Once the land proved fertile, the colonial machinery outsourced its exploitation. They permitted a flood of dikus- non-tribal outsiders, primarily ruthless moneylenders (mahajans) and absentee landlords (zamindars) to infiltrate the Damin-i-Koh. A devastating economic strangulation began. Through the kamioti and harwahi systems of bonded labor, a loan of a few rupees or a few seers of grain could enslave a Santhal family across generations. If the Santhals sought legal recourse, they quickly learned that the colonial courts and the revenue collectors operated as a unified syndicate of extortion.
For years, the Santhals petitioned the colonial administrators and undertook grueling marches to Calcutta to plead their case, only to be met with deaf ears. The tipping point arrived with a collective, terrifying realization: when the law is engineered solely to consume you, peaceful submission is a death sentence.
Daughters of the Forest: The Egalitarian spirit of the Santhals
On June 30, 1855, the heavy, rhythmic thud of the nagara and tumdak drums drew an astonishing 60,000 Santhals from the surrounding forests. The Murmu brothers declared the Hul, severing all ties with the East India Company. (Karl Marx commented on this rebellion as India’s first organised ‘Mass revolution’ in his book Notes on Indian History)
As the masses mobilized, conventional colonial history assumes the women faded into the domestic background- cooking rations or weeping for the dead. Phulo and Jhano obliterated this assumption. Unlike the rigid, patriarchal structures of the zamindars who oppressed them, the Santhal tribe possessed a deeply egalitarian spirit where women were fundamental to the economic and social survival of the community.
When the land they cultivated was threatened, that innate agency naturally extended to the battlefield. The sisters armed themselves with tangis (axes) and bows, stepping directly into the vanguard. They transformed from cultivators into military commanders.
The Echo of the Hul: The Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act
The Santhal Hul was ultimately met with the full, merciless weight of the British military apparatus. Martial law was declared, villages were burned to ash, and tens of thousands of Santhals were slaughtered. Phulo and Jhano Murmu did not survive the rebellion they helped orchestrate; they attained martyrdom on the very field they refused to surrender.
Get Muskan Priya’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Yet, the British won the battle only to realize they had lost the policy war. The sheer ferocity of the Santhal resistance shook the East India Company to its bureaucratic core. The administration recognized that this landscape could not be governed through standard colonial extortion. They were forced to concede, carving out a separate, non-regulation district.
This administrative surrender laid the groundwork for the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act (SPTA) of 1876. This landmark legislation recognized customary laws and legally barred the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals. It cemented in law the very protection Phulo and Jhano had fought for with their axes. The SPTA remains a defining pillar of tribal land rights in Jharkhand today- a legal shield forged directly from their spilled blood.
Footnotes and Erasure: How history edits Women
While the legal legacy endured, the names of the women who fought for it were quietly sanded down. Colonial records preferred to paint indigenous women as collateral damage, while modern retellings often reduce Phulo and Jhano to footnotes, overshadowed entirely by the towering legacy of their brothers.
History is not merely a ledger of the men who signed treaties; it is the living, breathing memory of the women who broke the systems that tried to bind them. Phulo and Jhano Murmu were not supporting characters. They were the architects of a sovereign defiance.
Indian women have never just survived history. They have shaped it.
The Her Archive Matrix: Legacy & Impact
- Courage: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Leadership: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Strategic thinking: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Community impact: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Historical recognition: ⭐
- Enduring legacy: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Upshots:
- Tactical brilliance: Demonstrated mastery of guerrilla warfare and forest topography, successfully bypassing modern British artillery.
- Structural impact: Catalysts for the administrative surrender that led to the SPTA (1876), permanently altering tribal land rights.
- Cultural resonance: Their legacy survives in Santhal oral traditions, Baha and Sohrai folklore, and modern Ol Chiki literature, standing as eternal symbols of indigenous identity and dignity. They are remembered with respect in Santhali folk songs and stories which said- “Aam Do Lattu Bodhya Khoalhare Bahaduri Udukeda”, meaning you grew up to be braver than your older brothers.
If your family, village, or community preserves stories about Phulo and Jhano that deserve to be remembered, I’d love to hear them!
History is never complete until every forgotten woman has her page.
Collecting memory. Preserving courage. Restoring history.
One woman. One story. One step closer to remembering.
-Muskan Priya, Founder, The Her Archive, A growing archive of women whose lives shaped history, heritage, science, art, resistance, communities, and memory.
If this story moved you, consider leaving a 👏 and sharing it with someone who believes forgotten histories deserve another chance to be remembered🌻
