Jaipal Singh Munda was anything but a simple ‘forest dweller’; he was an exceptional man with an extraordinary career. Born a tribal in what is now Jharkhand, he was an Oxford graduate, he qualified as an ICS officer, he was captain of India’s hockey team that won gold in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, he was a teacher in Ghana, a minister in Bikaner, and a representative of India’s tribal population in the Constituent Assembly. It is he who first established the Adivasi Mahasabha in 1938 to fight for a tribal homeland called ‘Jharkhand’.