Journey
Adivasi histories — rebellion, polity, village
Four risings, two kingdoms and a village that negotiated its own terms. The point of the set is that it is not only risings: Adivasi communities in central India ran states, held land as corporate bodies and served in other people's armies, and the rebellions are what happened when that stopped.
Stops (12)
- Durgavati · 1550–1564
A Chandel princess married into the Gond ruling house of Garha-Katanga, who governed for fifteen years after her husband's death and fought Akbar's governor Asaf Khan when he invaded in 1564. Wounded and about to be taken at Narrai, she killed herself. Abu'l-Fazl records the tribute Asaf Khan carried away from her kingdom.
- Garha-Katanga / Jabalpur · c. 1300–1789
The Gond kingdom in the Narmada valley, with a chain of hill forts, a cash revenue system and, by Mughal account, a famous elephant stable. It was defeated in 1564, survived as a tributary for two centuries and was absorbed by the Marathas. Its history is the strongest single argument against reading Adivasi polities as pre-state.
- Banswara–Dungarpur · c. 1400 onward
The southern Rajasthan and western Madhya Pradesh borderlands, where Bhil communities held the forested hills, supplied the Rajput houses with infantry, contested their revenue, and were eventually administered as Bhil Agency. Mewar's rulers took a Bhil thumbprint in their coronation rite, which records an older arrangement than the one the colonial state found.
- Sidhu Murmu · June 1855
A Santhal of Bhognadih who, with his brother Kanhu, declared that the Thakur had told them to end the rule of the moneylenders, the police and the revenue officers. Ten thousand assembled. He was hanged, and the result was the first legislation in India that made Adivasi land unsellable to outsiders.
- Kanhu Murmu · 1855–56
Sidhu's younger brother and the field commander of the Hul, who kept it going after the first defeats and was captured and hanged. Their brothers Chand and Bhairav were killed in the fighting, and Santhal accounts name their sisters Phulo and Jhano in it as well. The official estimate of Santhal dead runs to several thousand, most of them killed by artillery.
- Bhognadih · 1855
The village in the Santhal Parganas where the Hul was declared, now its central memorial landscape. The grievance was specific and documented: debt at compound interest against unrecorded land, enforced by a police and revenue system that the Santhals had moved into these hills to escape in the first place.
- Birsa Munda · 1895–1900
A young Munda from Ulihatu who preached a reformed religion, declared himself Dharti Aba, father of the earth, and led the Ulgulan against landlords installed over Munda khuntkatti land. He died in Ranchi jail at twenty-five, and the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 came out of it. His portrait hangs in the Bihar Assembly, and Jharkhand's foundation day is his birthday.
- Ulihatu / Khunti · 1895–1900
The Chotanagpur landscape around Ulihatu and Khunti that carries Birsa's memory. The khuntkatti system — land held by the descendants of the families who cleared it, not by individuals — is what the Ulgulan was fought over, and what the 1908 Act eventually wrote into law. Ulihatu is his birthplace and Khunti the administrative centre he was tried from.
- Alluri Sītārāma Rāju · 1922–1924
A young man from the Godavari plains who organised the Koya and Konda Reddi of the Eastern Ghats against the forest laws and the ban on podu cultivation, raided police stations for their rifles, and fought until he was captured and shot. The Madras government had to bring in the Assam Rifles to end it.
- Paderu · the agency tracts
Paderu, in the hill country of the Eastern Ghats, is the administrative centre of the agency tracts where the Rampa risings of 1879 and 1922 happened. The Scheduled Areas and the agency system are still a distinct legal regime here, which is the long institutional residue of those rebellions. The same hills rose again in the Srikakulam movement of the late 1960s.
- Rani Gaidinliu · 1931–1947
A thirteen-year-old Zeliangrong girl who took over Haipou Jadonang's Heraka movement after he was hanged in 1931, fought the administration in the Naga and Manipur hills, and was imprisoned for fourteen years. The movement was religious reform and political refusal at once, which is why it is hard to file.
- Khonoma · 1850–1879
An Angami village on a defensible spur that fought British expansion through four decades and held a siege of its stockade in 1879 before negotiating terms rather than surrendering. Khonoma is now also known for its own community hunting ban and conserved forest, which is the more recent half of its reputation.