When an encyclopaedia carries one man’s name, how many people’s knowledge might live inside it?
There is an extraordinary monument to the Munda world. It is not made of stone. It is made of words. Thousands upon thousands of them. Words for land and agriculture. For plants and animals. For kinship and social organisation. For songs, dances and beliefs. For objects, practices and institutions. For ways of understanding a world.
They eventually became part of the monumental Encyclopaedia Mundarica, associated above all with the German Jesuit Johann Baptist Hoffmann.
The achievement is immense.
But perhaps the most interesting way to encounter the Encyclopaedia Mundarica today is not simply to ask what Hoffmann knew about the Mundas.
It is to ask:
How did Hoffmann come to know it?
An encyclopaedia cannot speak to a village
Hoffmann was born in Germany in 1857 and entered the Jesuit order as a young man. His life eventually took him to Chota Nagpur, where he worked among Munda communities and developed an extensive knowledge of Mundari language and Munda social life.
His Mundari Grammar appeared in 1903. His writings extended into Mundari poetry, music and dance, social organisation and land systems. And eventually came the enormous undertaking for which he remains best known: the Encyclopaedia Mundarica.
Yet an encyclopaedia presents an interesting illusion. Once knowledge has been arranged alphabetically, edited, printed and bound, it can appear to belong naturally to the person whose name appears on its title page.
But encyclopaedias do not interview communities. People do.
Books do not know songs. People sing them.
Dictionaries do not know what words mean. Speakers do.
Descriptions of customary practice do not emerge from paper.
Someone explains how things are done.
Which means that behind the visible architecture of such a work lies another architecture: relationships.
Menas Orea
One of those relationships has a name.
Menas Orea.
Historical scholarship identifies Orea, a Munda and one of the early Jesuit converts, as an important collaborator in Hoffmann’s work.
Jharkhand’s Tribal Welfare Research Institute similarly identifies Menas Orea as assisting Hoffmann in the Encyclopaedia Mundarica. That seemingly modest word — collaborator — changes how we might read the archive. Because now we have at least two intellectual presences.
Hoffmann, who organised, interpreted and published. And Orea, who possessed another kind of relationship with the world being described.
One arrived in Munda country. The other belonged to it.
Their forms of knowledge were not identical.
Their positions were not equal.
And the historical record does not necessarily allow us to reconstruct precisely who contributed what to every entry.
We should therefore resist replacing one heroic biography with another story that the surviving evidence cannot sustain. But we can say something important.
The Encyclopaedia Mundarica was not produced through European observation alone. Munda knowledge entered its making through Munda people. And Menas Orea gives at least one of those people a name.
What happens when we change the citation?
Imagine encountering an entry in the Encyclopaedia Mundarica. The conventional research question might be:
What does Hoffmann say about this Munda practice?
But another question is possible:
From whom might Hoffmann have learned this?
That question does something subtle. It moves the Munda person from the object of knowledge to the possibility of being one of its producers. The distinction matters. There is an enormous difference between:
knowledge about the Munda
and
Munda knowledge.
The first positions a community in front of an observer. The second asks us to consider intellectual lineage.
Another Munda name: Nathanael Tuyu
The German–Munda encounter contains another revealing figure.
Nathanael Tuyu.
Tuyu became the first ordained Munda pastor within the Gossner Mission tradition in 1872. German missionary Alfred Nottrott later wrote a biography of him. But another detail is more interesting for our inquiry.
Historical accounts from the Gossner Mission describe Tuyu as a poet, preacher and major source of the songs used in an early Mundari hymnbook associated with Nottrott.
Here again, the conventional historical structure can easily place the European missionary in the foreground:
Nottrott learned Mundari.
Nottrott produced linguistic work.
Nottrott published.
But shift the lens slightly and another intellectual landscape appears.
Who composed? Who found expressions in Mundari capable of carrying new theological ideas? Who understood rhythm, metaphor and linguistic register? Who made the translated world intelligible within Munda language?
Nathanael Tuyu was not simply standing in the landscape being studied.
He was producing language within it.
Translation is not a neutral bridge
When knowledge moves between languages, something happens. A word rarely arrives alone. It carries relationships — Landscape. Memory. Classification. Sometimes cosmology. Sometimes an entire way of distinguishing one thing from another.
The person translating therefore does more than substitute one word for another. Translation involves judgement.
What is equivalent?
What is not?
What must be explained?
What cannot be translated?
Which European category corresponds poorly with a Munda one?
Which Munda idea disappears when forced into somebody else’s conceptual vocabulary?
These are not merely linguistic problems.
They are questions of knowledge.
And that means the translator, interpreter and informant can also be an intellectual participant in the production of the archive.
Knowledge and land
Hoffmann’s encounter with the Munda world extended beyond language. He studied Munda land systems and customary rights during a period of profound agrarian conflict in Chota Nagpur. His work became connected with the documentation of customary land tenure surrounding the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908.
The history here requires care.
The Act cannot be reduced to the achievement of a single missionary, administrator or scholar. It emerged from a much larger history of Adivasi resistance, agrarian conflict, colonial administration, surveys, legal processes and attempts to codify customary rights.
Munda resistance itself — including the upheavals associated with Birsa Munda at the end of the nineteenth century — forms part of that historical landscape.
But Hoffmann’s documentation of Munda land systems demonstrates something important for our inquiry. Knowledge recorded through ethnographic and linguistic encounters did not necessarily remain confined to dictionaries and books. It could move into administration.
Law. Categories of tenure. Definitions of customary practice.
The archive could acquire consequences. And that makes another question unavoidable: Who has authority to translate a community’s understanding of land into the language of the state?
The Danger of Gratitude
There is a tempting way to tell this story.
One might say:
German scholars preserved Munda culture.
It sounds generous.
It is also insufficient.
Munda culture did not exist because Europeans recorded it. Mundari did not survive because somebody wrote a grammar. Munda knowledge belonged first to people who spoke, practised, transmitted and transformed it across generations.
Documentation can be enormously valuable. Without historical grammars, manuscripts, correspondence and ethnographic records, things might indeed have disappeared from the documentary record.
But documentation is not creation.
And preservation should not erase provenance. Perhaps the more interesting question therefore isn’t whether Europeans preserved Munda knowledge. It is:
What relationship existed between the people who held the knowledge and the people whose names eventually appeared on the documents?
Reading the Silences
Menas Orea is visible.
Nathanael Tuyu is visible.
That is valuable.
But their visibility creates another problem.
Who else was there?
Who explained agricultural practices?
Who identified plants?
Who narrated stories?
Who sang songs?
Who explained clan relationships?
Who described ceremonies?
Who corrected vocabulary?
Who said:
No. That isn’t quite what this word means.
Some names may still be recoverable.
They may exist in correspondence.
Mission records.
Prefaces.
Marginal notes.
Diaries.
Unpublished manuscripts.
Oral histories.
Institutional archives in India and Germany.
Others may have disappeared completely from the written record. We shouldn’t invent them. But neither should archival anonymity make us imagine that nobody was there.
Sometimes: Unknown does not mean that nobody knew.
It means the archive did not preserve the name.
What if we read the Encyclopaedia backwards?
This suggests an experiment. Instead of beginning with the printed Encyclopaedia Mundarica and asking what it tells us about Munda society, what if we attempt to travel in the opposite direction?
Book → manuscript → correspondence → field notes → collaborator → speaker → community → knowledge.
Can individual entries be traced backwards?
Can particular stories be connected with particular places?
Can contributors be identified?
Can old terminology be compared with contemporary Mundari?
Can Munda scholars and knowledge holders annotate what was written?
Can communities identify things the historical researcher misunderstood?
Can they identify things that remain accurate?
Can they recover a name?
That would transform an encyclopaedia from a finished authority into something else:
a starting point for a new conversation.
When the archive comes home
Imagine opening a digitised page of the Encyclopaedia Mundarica in a Munda village today. Not presenting it as:
Here is what a German scholar discovered about you.
But asking:
What do you see here?
Perhaps someone recognises a word. Someone else says nobody uses it anymore. An elder remembers the practice. A younger speaker knows another term. A researcher notices that the catalogue has described something incorrectly. Someone recognises a village name. Perhaps someone even recognises a family name.
The archive suddenly changes.
It is no longer merely evidence from the past. Contemporary knowledge begins accumulating around it. The community becomes capable of annotating its own historical representation. And perhaps that annotation should itself become part of the archive.
From Encyclopaedia Mundarica to a living Munda archive
This may be where the next India–Germany encounter could begin. Not with another European attempt to comprehensively describe the Munda world. The Encyclopaedia Mundarica already belongs to that historical moment. The opportunity now is different.
Could German and Indian archives, Munda scholars, community knowledge holders, linguists, historians and cultural institutions work together to reconstruct the journeys through which this knowledge was produced?
Could we identify more of the people behind the pages?
Could historical material become accessible in forms useful to contemporary Munda communities?
Could old descriptions be accompanied by contemporary Munda interpretation?
Could we distinguish:
what the archive says
from
what the community says today?
That would not destroy the historical archive. It would make it richer. Because the Munda world would no longer appear only through the eyes of those who once documented it.
The archive could finally look back.
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THE JOURNEY OF KNOWLEDGE
Tribal Design Forum is undertaking preliminary research towards a possible India–Germany research and curatorial initiative exploring the historical journeys of Adivasi knowledge, languages and cultural documentation between India and German-speaking Europe.
One strand of this emerging inquiry will explore the documentary history of the Munda world.
The research will attempt, wherever surviving evidence permits, to move beyond bibliographic authorship and identify the wider networks of people through whom knowledge entered publications and archives.
This may include researchers and missionaries, but also Adivasi collaborators, translators, writers, storytellers, singers, teachers and other knowledge holders.
TDF is currently mapping relevant publications, archival repositories and contemporary community perspectives and beginning to identify possible academic, archival and cultural partners in India and Germany.
Possible future outcomes may include a research publication, digital knowledge resource and/or curated exhibition.
No institutional partnership has yet been established or should be inferred
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THE EMERGING QUESTION
If an archive knows the name of the person who recorded knowledge, can we also recover the names of the people who made that knowledge possible?
And when those names cannot be recovered: How should an archive acknowledge the people it has forgotten?
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READINGS & BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary and historical works
Hoffmann, Johann Baptist.
Mundari Grammar. Calcutta, 1903.
Hoffmann, Johann Baptist.
Mundari Poetry, Music and Dances. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1907.
Hoffmann, Johann Baptist, with subsequent editorial assistance including Arthur van Emelen.
Encyclopaedia Mundarica. Patna: Government Printing, publication beginning after Hoffmann’s death.
Nottrott, Alfred.
Grammatik der Kolh-Sprache. Gütersloh, 1882.
Nottrott, Alfred.
Ein Träger des Lichts: Nathanael Tuyu, der erste Munda-Pastor. Later edition, Berlin, 1911.
Research and reference starting points
Ponette, P., ed.
The Munda World: Hoffmann Commemoration Volume. Ranchi: Catholic Press, 1978.
Deutsche Biographie.
Biographical entry on Johann Baptist Hoffmann.
Klaus Karttunen / Persons of Indian Studies.
Biographical and bibliographical entries for Johann Baptist Hoffmann and Alfred Nottrott.
Tribal Welfare Research Institute, Government of Jharkhand.
Munda community reference material, including discussion of Hoffmann and Menas Orea.
Gossner Mission.
Historical material concerning Alfred Nottrott, Nathanael Tuyu and the development of the Gossner church in Chota Nagpur.
Further archival research will be required before drawing conclusions about the full network of contributors to the Encyclopaedia Mundarica.
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RESEARCH NOTE & DISCLAIMER
This article forms part of an exploratory research series rather than a completed historical account.
The historical relationship between missionaries and Adivasi communities cannot be reduced either to preservation or exploitation. Missionary work pursued religious objectives and operated within wider colonial structures, while particular individuals and institutions also developed linguistic scholarship, social relationships and forms of advocacy whose histories require examination on their own evidence.
Similarly, the role of Johann Baptist Hoffmann in the history surrounding the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act should not be interpreted as sole authorship of the Act or of the customary knowledge reflected within it. The legislation emerged from a much larger history involving Adivasi resistance and political agency, colonial administration, surveys, legal processes and multiple intermediaries.
Where historical sources identify Munda collaborators, this series will name them. Where the evidence does not establish an individual’s contribution, TDF will not infer it.
Historical terminology appearing in publication titles is retained for bibliographic accuracy and does not necessarily reflect contemporary terminology or TDF’s usage.
Corrections, archival leads and information concerning named or currently unidentified Munda contributors are particularly welcome.
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India × Germany: Encounters with Tribal Knowledge
A Tribal Design Forum research and writing series.
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