More than a fifth of the people of Odisha belong to the communities officially designated as Scheduled Tribes, and the hills, plateaus and forests of the state’s interior, from the Kandha country of Ganjam and Phulbani to the Bhuyan and Juang hills of Keonjhar and the uplands of Kalahandi and Koraput, have been their homeland for many centuries. For most of that long history these communities lived in a relationship of negotiated autonomy with the kingdoms of the plains and the hill states of the Garhjat. They acknowledged the overlordship of rajas and zamindars, paid tribute in kind, rendered service in war and in ritual, and in return were left largely to manage their own lands, forests, customs and religious life under their own headmen and clan leaders. The boundary between the tribal world and the world of the kingdoms was never fixed or impermeable: it was crossed by trade, by marriage alliances, by the movement of deities and cults, and by the periodic renegotiation of rights and obligations, sometimes through conflict. The colonial period disrupted this relationship in ways that were both gradual and profound. British administration, whether exercised directly through collectors and agents or indirectly through the chiefs of the tributary states, brought new and more rigidly enforced demands for revenue and labour, new controls over land and forests, the settlement of outsiders from the plains, interference with customary practices, and the steady intrusion of officials, police, traders and moneylenders into the hills. The result was a long series of uprisings, extending from the Ghumsur rising of 1835–37 to the Quit India movement of 1942, in which tribal communities defended their lands, their autonomy and their way of life against the colonial state and its local allies, and in doing so wrote one of the most enduring chapters in the history of resistance in Odisha.
This article examines the principal tribal uprisings of colonial Odisha in their full historical setting. It begins with the tribal communities of the region, their economies and social organisation, and their relationship with the pre-colonial states, and then traces the ways in which colonial rule transformed that relationship by introducing new systems of revenue, land settlement, forest control and political authority. It goes on to analyse the common causes of tribal resistance and to survey the major uprisings in chronological sequence: the Ghumsur rising under Dora Bisoi (1835–37), which arose from the British dissolution of the Bhanja ruling house; the long Kandha resistance under Chakra Bisoi (1846–1856), provoked in large part by the campaign of the Meriah Agency against human sacrifice; the Kandha attack on Lieutenant Macneill’s camp in 1855 after the arrest of Rendo Majhi; the Bhuyan risings in Keonjhar under Ratna Naik (1868) and Dharanidhar Naik (1891–93), which grew out of disputed succession and the oppressive rule of a British-backed raja; the Kandha rising in Kalahandi in 1882 against the Kulta settlers who had taken the best Kandha lands; and the participation of tribal communities in the national movement, culminating in the Quit India protest at Mathili in Koraput and the execution of Laxman Nayak in 1943. The article then considers the colonial responses, from military suppression and the burning of villages to the special administrative arrangements of the Meriah Agency, the agency tracts and the excluded areas, and closes with the ways in which Odia historians and scholars of other disciplines have interpreted these movements and the debates that their interpretations have generated.
The article argues that the tribal uprisings of Odisha, though diverse in their immediate causes, leadership and scale, shared a common foundation in the defence of land, forest and autonomy against the encroachment of the colonial state and of the outsiders whose presence it encouraged or tolerated. They were frequently directed not only against British officials but against the chiefs, zamindars, settlers, moneylenders and subordinate functionaries who acted as the agents of colonial power in the hills, and this double target reveals how colonial rule actually reached tribal communities: less through the distant figure of the Collector or the Commissioner than through the raja’s dewan, the settler who acquired the village’s best fields, or the forest guard who forbade the clearing of a hillside. The uprisings were also rational and organised movements, led by men with recognised standing in their communities and pursued with a clear sense of grievance and purpose, rather than the outbursts of “wild tribes” depicted in colonial records. Finally, they formed a continuous tradition of resistance, transmitted through memory, kinship and song, that linked the struggles of the early nineteenth century with the national movement of the twentieth, so that the martyrdom of Laxman Nayak in 1943 can be read as both the culmination of that tradition and its entry into the wider story of Indian independence.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction and background
1.1 The tribal communities of Odisha
Odisha is home to one of the largest and most diverse tribal populations in India. According to the 2011 census, the communities designated as Scheduled Tribes form more than a fifth of the state’s population, and they include some sixty distinct groups, speaking languages of the Austroasiatic (Munda), Dravidian and Indo-Aryan families, each with its own traditions of origin, social organisation and religious practice. Among the largest and most historically significant are the Kandhas (Khonds) of the southern and central hills, in the present districts of Kandhamal, Rayagada, Kalahandi and Ganjam, whose resistance to the British in the 1830s to 1850s is the best documented of all the tribal movements of the region; the Santals, Mundas, Hos and Kolhas of the northern borderlands, in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh, whose kin across the border in Chota Nagpur were at the centre of some of the greatest tribal movements in Indian history; the Bhuyans and Juangs of the Keonjhar hills, who held a special place in the ritual life of the Keonjhar kingdom; the Gonds, Binjhals and others of the western uplands around Sambalpur, who took a major part in the resistance led by Surendra Sai; and the Savaras, Parajas, Gadabas, Bondas and Bhumias of the southern highlands of Koraput and Gajapati. This diversity is important for understanding the uprisings, which were shaped by the particular history, economy and political circumstances of each community, and which cannot be reduced to a single “tribal” pattern.
These communities lived, for the most part, in the hills, plateaus and forests that cover much of the interior of Odisha, regions that the states of the coastal plain had never fully controlled and that colonial officials long regarded as remote, unhealthy and difficult of access. Their economies combined shifting cultivation (podu) on the hill slopes, settled agriculture in the valleys where the land allowed, the gathering of forest produce such as mahua flowers, sal seeds, honey, resin and tubers, and hunting, which together provided a resilient if modest subsistence. Land and forest were held according to customary rules, often communally by the village or the clan, without written titles, and these rules were bound up with the religious life of the community: the earth, the forest and the hills were sacred, inhabited by deities and spirits whose favour was necessary for the fertility of the land and the welfare of the people, so that any interference with land or forest was also, in tribal eyes, an interference with the sacred order. Social and political organisation centred on the village, the clan and the territory, under headmen and chiefs whose authority rested on descent, custom and the consent of the community, and whose office often combined secular leadership with ritual responsibility. It was precisely this integration of land, religion and authority that made colonial intervention so disruptive, since a change in any one of these spheres reverberated through the others.
1.2 The tribes and the pre-colonial states
The relationship between the tribal communities and the kingdoms of Odisha was long and complex, and it cannot be described simply as one of domination and subjection. The rulers of the hill states of the interior, the Garhjat, were in many cases themselves of tribal origin or ruled through tribal chiefs, and the legitimacy of their kingship often depended on rituals that acknowledged the prior rights of the tribal communities to the land. In Keonjhar, for example, the Bhuyans traditionally played a central part in the installation of the raja, and a ruler who lacked their acceptance could not easily claim to rule by right; similar arrangements, in which tribal headmen or priests took a recognised part in coronation and state ritual, are found in other hill states. The tribal communities acknowledged the overlordship of the rajas, paid tribute in kind or labour, and provided military service when called upon, but they were left largely to manage their own internal affairs, to settle their own disputes and to worship their own deities. The relationship was one of negotiated autonomy, sustained by custom and mutual obligation, and periodically renegotiated through conflict when rulers overstepped the limits that custom allowed. Tribal revolt against an oppressive raja was therefore not a novelty of the colonial period; what changed under colonial rule was that the raja could now call on the military power of the British, and the balance that had restrained him was lost.
The Jagannatha cult itself bears witness to this long interaction between the tribal and the Brahmanical worlds of Odisha. The tradition, preserved in the temple chronicles and in popular legend, that the deity was first worshipped in the forest by the Savara chief Viswavasu before being brought to Puri by king Indradyumna, and the continuing role of the daitapati servants, regarded as descendants of the original tribal worshippers, in the most intimate rituals of the temple, including the renewal of the images during Nabakalebara, the rites of the Anasara period and the Ratha Yatra, reflect the deep tribal roots of the religious culture of Odisha. Historians have often seen in this tradition the memory of a process by which tribal deities and tribal communities were absorbed into the regional Hindu order while retaining a recognised and honoured place within it. That memory makes the later conflicts between tribal communities and the state all the more significant, for it reminds us that the tribal peoples of Odisha were not outsiders to its history but among its oldest participants.
1.3 Colonial penetration of the hills
The colonial period transformed this relationship. The British first encountered the hill communities as obstacles to the pacification of their newly acquired territories, as in the Ganjam hills after the occupation of the Northern Circars and in the hills bordering Khurda and the Mughalbandi after 1803, and then as subjects to be brought under control, surveyed, taxed and civilised. In the regulation districts and agency tracts under direct British rule, and in the tributary states ruled by chiefs under British supervision, tribal communities faced a series of new and interlocking pressures. Demands for revenue and labour rose and were enforced more rigorously than before. The survey and settlement of land often ignored customary and communal rights, recognising only individual holdings backed by written titles that tribal cultivators rarely possessed. The reservation of forests by the state, especially from the later nineteenth century, restricted shifting cultivation, grazing and the collection of forest produce on which tribal subsistence depended. The settlement of outsiders, including cultivators, traders and moneylenders from the plains, led to the steady transfer of tribal land through debt, purchase and fraud. Customary practices, most notably the meriah sacrifice among the Kandhas, were suppressed by force; police and officials became a permanent presence; and in the tributary states, chiefs who were secure in British protection no longer needed to observe the customary limits on their power, since the threat of revolt that had once restrained them could now be met with British troops.
These pressures did not affect all communities equally or at the same time, and they were felt differently in different regions. The Kandhas of Ghumsur experienced the colonial state first as the destroyer of a ruling house and then as the enemy of their religion; the Bhuyans of Keonjhar experienced it as the protector of a raja they rejected; the Kandhas of Kalahandi experienced it as the guarantor of settlers who had taken their land; and the Bhumias and others of Koraput experienced it through the forest department, the police and the agents of the Jeypore zamindari. But together these pressures produced a long series of uprisings in which tribal communities resisted the transformation of their world, and the cumulative history of those uprisings reveals a coherent pattern beneath the variety of local circumstance. These uprisings form one of the most important strands in the history of resistance to colonial rule in Odisha, alongside the Khurda rebellion of 1804, the Paika rebellion of 1817 and the Sambalpur rising of 1857–64, in which tribal communities also took a major part (see Revolt of 1857 and the Role of Surendra Sai). Any account of resistance in colonial Odisha that leaves them out is therefore incomplete, and much of what follows is an attempt to restore them to their proper place in that history.
2. Sources and historiography
The history of tribal uprisings in Odisha faces a particularly acute version of the problem common to all histories of resistance under colonial rule: the problem of recovering the perspective of the rebels from sources produced by those who suppressed them. The communities concerned were, for the most part, non-literate in the colonial period, and they left few written records of their own. Almost everything we know of the uprisings from contemporary documents was written by British officers, missionaries and the officials of the tributary states, who saw the tribal communities through the lens of colonial ethnography, as “wild tribes” or “savages” to be pacified and civilised, and who had every reason to present their own actions in a favourable light. The voices of the rebels themselves survive in their statements to their captors and judges, in occasional petitions, and above all in oral traditions, songs and legends preserved within the communities and recorded, in many cases, only in the twentieth century, when memory had already been shaped by later experience. The historian must therefore read the colonial record critically, against its own grain, recognising its assumptions and silences and asking what its descriptions of “outrages” and “disturbances” reveal about the grievances that lay behind them; and must draw on oral traditions and anthropological evidence with equal care, neither dismissing them as unreliable nor treating them as transparent windows onto the past.
2.1 Colonial reports and the Meriah literature
The most extensive body of contemporary documentation concerns the Kandhas and the campaign against meriah sacrifice, which attracted intense official and public interest in Britain and India in the 1840s and 1850s. The reports of S. C. Macpherson, who served as Meriah Agent in the 1840s, and the memoir of John Campbell, A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years’ Service amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan (1864), describe the Kandha country, its villages and chiefs, the meriah practice and the operations of the Meriah Agency in great and often vivid detail. They are invaluable sources, recording names, places, events and customs that would otherwise be lost. But they are also documents of colonial self-justification, written by men whose careers depended on the success of the Agency, in which the suppression of human sacrifice serves as the moral warrant for the extension of British authority over the hills, and in which Kandha resistance appears as the obstinacy of a barbarous people rather than as the defence of a religious and political order. Macpherson and Campbell also disagreed sharply with each other about methods and results, and their rival accounts must be read in the light of that controversy. The reports of the military officers who fought in the Ghumsur rising, and of the officials who administered the agency tracts in Ganjam and the Khondmals, add further detail from the same perspective and with the same limitations.
2.2 Records of the tributary states
For the uprisings in Keonjhar and Kalahandi, the main sources are the records of the tributary states and of the British officers who supervised them: the Superintendent of the Tributary Mahals, the Commissioner of Orissa and the political agents appointed after major disturbances. The reports of officers such as Colonel E. T. Dalton, Commissioner of Chota Nagpur, who intervened in Keonjhar in 1868, and of the officials who dealt with the Bhuyan rising of 1891–93 and the Kalahandi rising of 1882, document the causes and course of these risings from the standpoint of the paramount power, and they are frank at times about the misrule of the chiefs whom the British were nevertheless obliged to support. Dalton’s Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872) also contains ethnographic accounts of the Bhuyans, Juangs, Kandhas and other communities, written by an officer who had personal experience of the region and its conflicts. The autobiography of Fakir Mohan Senapati, the founder of modern Odia prose fiction, who served as Dewan in several tributary states, including Keonjhar during the troubles of the early 1890s, gives a rare Odia perspective on the administration of these states in the late nineteenth century, though it is written from the standpoint of an official whose appointment was itself one of the grievances of the Bhuyans, and must be read with that in mind.
2.3 Judicial records
The records of the trials of rebel leaders, from Dora Bisoi in the 1830s to Laxman Nayak in 1942–43, contain the charges against them, the evidence presented by the prosecution, the testimony of witnesses and, in some cases, the statements of the accused themselves. They are among the few sources in which the rebels’ own words, however mediated by interpreters, clerks and the conventions of colonial legal procedure, can be heard. They must be read with an awareness that the accused were speaking under duress and often in a language not their own, and that the record was shaped by the purposes of the court; but they nevertheless reveal much about how the rebels understood their own actions, what grievances they named and whom they held responsible. For the twentieth century, the trial of Laxman Nayak has also been examined critically by later writers who have questioned the fairness of the proceedings and the strength of the evidence on which he was condemned.
2.4 Oral traditions and literature
The oral traditions of the tribal communities preserve the memory of the uprisings and their leaders in songs, stories and legends, many of which have been collected and published by folklorists, anthropologists and local historians, especially since independence. These traditions often record what the colonial archive omits: the reasons the rebels gave for their actions, the places where they hid and fought, the names of lesser leaders and the suffering of the villages that were burned. They also show how the memory of the uprisings has been kept alive and reinterpreted across generations, so that figures such as Chakra Bisoi or Dharanidhar Naik have acquired a legendary as well as a historical existence. Odia literature has also engaged with the experience of the tribal communities under colonial and post-colonial rule, most notably in the novels of Gopinath Mohanty, such as Paraja and Amrutara Santana, which, though works of fiction set in a later period, offer a profound portrait of the pressures of debt, land loss, forest regulation and official oppression that drove tribal resistance, and which have shaped the way in which educated Odia readers have understood the tribal world.
2.5 Key documents examined
| Document | Date | What it tells us | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reports of S. C. Macpherson | 1840s | Kandha society, the meriah practice, the Meriah Agency | Colonial ethnography; justifies intervention |
| Campbell, Personal Narrative … Khondistan | 1864 | The campaign against meriah sacrifice; resistance of Chakra Bisoi | Memoir of a participant; strongly colonial perspective |
| Military reports on the Ghumsur rising | 1835–1837 | Operations against the Kandhas and the Bhanja family | Written by the suppressing force |
| Reports on the Keonjhar risings (Dalton and others) | 1868; 1891–1893 | Causes and course of the Bhuyan risings | Perspective of the paramount power and the raja |
| Reports on the Kalahandi rising | 1882 | The conflict between Kandhas and Kulta settlers | Official perspective; emphasises violence against settlers |
| Trial records of Laxman Nayak | 1942–1943 | The Mathili incident and the charges | Prosecution’s framing of a political protest |
| Oral traditions and songs | 19th–20th century | Community memory of the uprisings and their leaders | Recorded later; details unverifiable |
2.6 How the historiography developed
In the colonial accounts, the tribal uprisings appear as outbreaks of savagery or lawlessness among primitive peoples, provoked, at most, by the misrule of individual chiefs or the excesses of subordinate officials, and justly suppressed in the interest of order and civilisation. The communities themselves were described in a vocabulary of wildness, ignorance and superstition that denied them political reason, so that their resistance could be explained as the product of excitability, intoxication or the influence of a few designing leaders rather than as a response to real grievances. The campaign against meriah sacrifice, in particular, was presented as a humanitarian mission of the highest moral character, and resistance to it as evidence of barbarism, an interpretation that allowed the extension of British authority over the Kandha hills to appear as an act of benevolence. This framework dominated official and much scholarly writing until well into the twentieth century and continues to colour the language of the sources on which every historian must rely.
Odia and Indian historians of the twentieth century, writing in the context of the national movement and independence, recovered the history of the uprisings as part of the story of resistance to colonial rule, and presented their leaders, Dora Bisoi, Chakra Bisoi, Ratna Naik, Dharanidhar Naik and Laxman Nayak, as heroes of the freedom struggle who had fought against foreign domination long before the rise of organised nationalism. General histories by K. M. Patra, J. K. Samal, P. K. Mishra and others gave the uprisings a place in the history of modern Odisha, drawing on the colonial records but reversing their moral judgments, so that what the British had called outrages became acts of patriotic resistance. This work was of lasting importance in establishing the uprisings as a legitimate subject of historical study and in restoring the names of their leaders to public memory, though it tended at times to assimilate tribal grievances to the concerns of the national movement and to pass lightly over the conflicts between tribal communities and the Odia-speaking chiefs, landlords and settlers of the plains.
Since the 1980s, social, environmental and anthropological historians have deepened the analysis considerably. Biswamoy Pati’s studies of Kalahandi and of tribal and peasant movements in Odisha emphasised land alienation, ecological change and the role of the colonial state in encouraging the settlement of outsiders, and argued that tribal resistance represented a rational response to systematic exploitation rather than a primitive reaction to change. Anthropological and historical studies of the Kandhas, such as those of Barbara Boal and Felix Padel, have re-examined the meriah campaign and its consequences for Kandha society, asking what the sacrifice meant within Kandha religion and how the campaign against it reshaped Kandha relations with the state, with Hindu society and with Christian missions. Environmental historians, working on the history of forests and shifting cultivation across eastern India, have shown how the reservation of forests and the attack on podu transformed the economic foundations of tribal life. This body of work has moved the history of the uprisings beyond the categories of both colonial and nationalist writing, situating them within the long history of the relationship between the tribal communities, the state and the land, and it has opened up questions about agency, identity and memory that earlier historiography had scarcely posed.
3. Common causes of tribal resistance
The tribal uprisings of colonial Odisha took place in different regions, among different communities and under different leaders, over a period of more than a century, and each had its own immediate occasion: a disputed succession, the arrest of a headman, an attempt to rescue meriah victims, a new demand for forced labour, or a quarrel between cultivators and settlers. It would be easy, focusing on these occasions, to see the uprisings as a series of unconnected local disturbances. But beneath this diversity lay a set of common causes, rooted in the transformation of the relationship between the tribal communities and the state that colonial rule brought about, and these causes recur with striking consistency from Ghumsur in the 1830s to Koraput in the 1940s. They can be grouped under five headings: land, forest, labour and revenue, culture and religion, and political autonomy. In practice they were closely interwoven, since for tribal communities the land, the forest, the gods and the authority of their own chiefs formed a single order, and an attack on any one of them was felt as an attack on the whole.
3.1 Land alienation
The most fundamental cause of tribal resistance was the loss of land. Tribal communities held their land under customary rules, often communally, without written titles, and rights of use were defined by membership of the village and the clan rather than by documents recorded in a government office. Colonial survey and settlement recognised individual rights and written titles, and in doing so frequently ignored or extinguished customary and communal rights, so that land which a community had cultivated for generations could be recorded as waste, as state property or as the holding of an outsider. At the same time, the colonial state and the chiefs of the tributary states encouraged the settlement of cultivators from the plains, whom they regarded as more productive and more reliable taxpayers than the tribal communities with their shifting cultivation and their reluctance to pay cash revenue. These settlers, together with traders and moneylenders, acquired tribal land through purchase, debt, fraud and the support of officials, pushing the original inhabitants into the hills and forests or reducing them to the status of tenants and labourers on land that had once been theirs. The process was slow and often invisible in the official record, but its cumulative effect was devastating. The Kalahandi rising of 1882, directed against the Kulta settlers who had acquired the best Kandha lands, is the clearest example of resistance rooted in land alienation, but the same process underlay many other uprisings and remained a source of conflict long after independence.
3.2 Restrictions on forests
For tribal communities the forest was a source of food, fuel, building materials, medicine and income, the site of shifting cultivation and grazing, and a sacred space inhabited by deities and ancestral spirits. It was not a separate resource to be managed but the very environment of tribal life. From the later nineteenth century, the colonial state increasingly asserted its control over forests, under the forest legislation of 1865 and 1878 and the rules that followed in the provinces and the tributary states, reserving them for the production of timber and revenue and restricting the rights of local communities to use them. Shifting cultivation was discouraged or prohibited as wasteful and destructive; the collection of forest produce was regulated, licensed and taxed; grazing was confined to designated areas; and forest guards, with wide powers to fine and harass, became a constant and resented presence in tribal life. What had been customary use now became trespass or theft. The conflict over forests was particularly important in the later uprisings and in the tribal participation in the national movement, and it is significant that the death of a forest guard was at the centre of the case against Laxman Nayak in 1942, for the forest guard was, for many tribal communities, the most immediate embodiment of the colonial state.
3.3 Forced labour and revenue
Tribal communities were subjected to increasing demands for revenue and for labour. In the tributary states, chiefs secure in British protection imposed new taxes and exacted forced labour (bethi) for the construction of roads, palaces, dams and other public and private works, for carrying the baggage of officials on tour, and for the personal service of the raja and his household. Such obligations had existed before, but they had been limited by custom and by the need of rulers to retain the goodwill of their subjects; under colonial protection those limits weakened, and bethi became more frequent, more onerous and more arbitrary. Revenue demands were raised and collected more strictly, often in cash rather than kind, which forced cultivators into the hands of moneylenders, and new forms of taxation on liquor, forest produce and markets were introduced. In Keonjhar, the forced labour demanded by the raja and his officials, including the construction of a dam across the Machha Kandana stream, was a central grievance of the Bhuyan rising of 1891–93, and similar complaints about bethi run through the petitions and protests of tribal communities across the Garhjat states down to the prajamandal movements of the 1930s and 1940s.
3.4 Interference with culture and religion
Colonial rule brought interference with tribal customs and religious practices on a scale and with a persistence that pre-colonial states had rarely attempted. The most dramatic example was the campaign against meriah sacrifice among the Kandhas, in which victims, usually purchased or captured from outside the community, were offered to the earth goddess to secure the fertility of the soil. Whatever its humanitarian justification, and the practice was undoubtedly cruel to its victims, the campaign struck at the heart of Kandha religious life and was experienced by many Kandhas as an assault on their relationship with the earth goddess and therefore on the fertility of their land and the survival of their communities. Its methods, which included the forcible removal of meriahs, the punishment of those who kept them and the use of troops, made it inseparable from the extension of British political control. Missionary activity, which followed the establishment of colonial authority in the hills, the regulation of liquor brewing, which affected both ritual and subsistence, and the intrusion of outsiders with different values and a frequently contemptuous attitude towards tribal customs also disrupted tribal culture and social life, and added a sense of cultural humiliation to material grievances.
3.5 Loss of political autonomy
Finally, colonial rule eroded the political autonomy that tribal communities had enjoyed under the pre-colonial states. Tribal chiefs and headmen were subordinated to British officials or to rajas whose power was now backed by the paramount power, and the customary limits on the authority of rulers, including the tacit right of subjects to withdraw their allegiance or to rise against a ruler who violated custom, were weakened or extinguished. The British, for their part, recognised the chiefs whom they found convenient and set aside those who resisted, without regard to the customary rules by which tribal communities conferred or withheld legitimacy. In Ghumsur, the British overthrow of the Bhanja ruling family, with which the Kandhas had long-standing ties, provoked the rising of 1835–37 and the long resistance that followed. In Keonjhar, British support for a raja whose succession and rule the Bhuyans rejected produced the risings of 1868 and 1891–93. In both cases, and in others, the uprisings were in part a defence of the traditional political order, in which tribal communities had a recognised and respected place, against its transformation under colonial rule into a hierarchy in which they had none.
| Cause | Example |
|---|---|
| Land alienation and outside settlers | Kalahandi, 1882 (Kulta settlers) |
| Forest restrictions | Koraput, 1942 (forest guard incident) |
| Forced labour and revenue | Keonjhar, 1891–1893 (bethi; Machha Kandana dam) |
| Interference with religion | Kandha resistance to the Meriah Agency, 1846–1856 |
| Loss of political autonomy | Ghumsur, 1835–1837 (fall of the Bhanjas); Keonjhar, 1868 (disputed succession) |
4. The uprisings
This section surveys the principal tribal uprisings of colonial Odisha in chronological order, from the Ghumsur rising of the 1830s to the Quit India protest at Mathili in 1942. They are not the only instances of tribal resistance in the period, which saw many smaller and less documented conflicts in the hill tracts of Ganjam and Vizagapatam, the tributary states of the Garhjat and the borderlands of Chota Nagpur, many of which survive only as brief references in official correspondence. But the uprisings discussed here are the best known, the best documented and the most significant for the history of the region, and together they illustrate the full range of causes, forms of leadership and colonial responses that characterised tribal resistance in Odisha. The drawing below sets out their chronology.
The uprisings cluster in two broad periods, which correspond to two phases in the extension of colonial power into the hills. The first is the Kandha resistance of the 1830s to the 1850s in the hill tracts of Ganjam and the adjoining regions, provoked by the British intervention in Ghumsur and then by the campaign against meriah sacrifice, which together marked the first sustained British penetration of the Kandha country. The second is the series of risings in the tributary states of Keonjhar and Kalahandi in the later nineteenth century, provoked by the misrule of chiefs backed by the paramount power, by forced labour and by the settlement of outsiders, which reflected the consolidation of colonial authority through indirect rule. The Koraput protest of 1942 links this tradition to the national movement and shows how, by the twentieth century, long-standing tribal grievances over land, forests and exploitation had found expression within the wider struggle for independence.
4.1 The Ghumsur rising under Dora Bisoi, 1835–1837
Ghumsur, in the Madras district of Ganjam, was a zamindari ruled by the Bhanja family, whose authority extended from the coastal plain over the Kandha hill country to the west. The Kandhas of the hills had long-standing ties with the Bhanjas, based on mutual obligation rather than simple subjection, and the Bhanja rulers depended on Kandha chiefs, among them Dora Bisoi (also called Dara Bisoi or Kamal Lochan Bisoi), for the defence and administration of the hill tracts and for the supply of fighting men in time of war. The bisoi was a hereditary intermediary between the zamindar and the Kandha communities, and the office gave its holder considerable influence among the Kandhas. In the early 1830s the Madras government came into conflict with the zamindar, Dhananjaya Bhanja, over arrears of revenue and over his conduct, which the British regarded as defiant and disorderly, and moved to take over the estate by force. Dhananjaya Bhanja withdrew into the hills and died there on 31 December 1835, and the British proceeded to dissolve the authority of the Bhanja family over Ghumsur. Members of the family, including Brundaban and Jagannath Bhanja, sought refuge and support among the Kandhas, who regarded them as their rightful rulers, and Dora Bisoi led the Kandhas in resistance on their behalf.
According to Mahanta’s account, the rising was fed by several grievances that together turned a dynastic dispute into a popular rebellion: the British suppression of meriah practices among the Kandhas, which had begun to make itself felt even before the formal establishment of the Meriah Agency; the coercive collection of land revenue, said to have amounted to as much as half of the produce; and the dissolution of the Bhanja ruling family with which the Kandhas were bound by ties of loyalty. George Edward Russell, appointed as special commissioner to deal with the situation, arrived on 11 January 1836. On 14 February 1836 Captain Butler led British troops towards the ghats to arrest members of the royal family and recover the treasury. Between Udaygiri and Durgaprasad the Kandhas ambushed a British detachment, killing thirteen sepoys and two European officers, Lieutenant Bromley and Ensign Gibbon, an episode that shocked the Madras authorities and demonstrated the military capacity of the Kandhas in their own terrain. British attempts to capture the rebels at Ambhajhara and Jiripada failed, and the campaign became a prolonged and costly pursuit through the hills. Dora Bisoi eventually fled to Angul, where in 1837 he was handed over to the British by the raja of Angul, Somnath Singh. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life and, according to Mahanta, died in prison at Ootacamund (Ooty) in 1846; another account places his death around 1840. The repression that followed was severe: forty rebels were executed and twenty-nine sentenced to life imprisonment, and the memory of these punishments long remained alive among the Kandhas of Ghumsur.
4.2 The Kandha resistance under Chakra Bisoi, 1846–1856
The Ghumsur rising led the British to discover the meriah sacrifice, which officers on campaign in the hills encountered for the first time, and its suppression soon became a major object of policy, debated in Madras, Calcutta and London. In 1845 the government established the Meriah Agency, with S. C. Macpherson as its first agent, to rescue intended victims and end the practice throughout the Kandha country. Macpherson’s interference with Kandha religious practice, and the political authority that the Agency claimed over the Kandha chiefs, provoked renewed resistance, led by Chakra Bisoi, the nephew of Dora Bisoi, who inherited both his uncle’s standing and his cause. In 1846 the Kandhas forced Macpherson to surrender the rescued meriahs at his camp at Bisipara, a serious humiliation for the Agency that revealed how little real control it exercised in the hills. Chakra Bisoi installed Pitambar, a minor son of Dhananjaya Bhanja, as the rightful raja of Ghumsur, giving the resistance a political as well as a religious character and linking it explicitly to the cause for which his uncle had fought. He also coordinated with Savara rebels under Radhakrishna Dandasena in Parlakhemundi, so that the resistance spread across the hill tracts of Ganjam and drew in communities beyond the Kandhas, presenting the British with a widespread and elusive opposition.
Macpherson was replaced by Lieutenant-Colonel John Campbell, who combined military pressure with persuasion, negotiation with Kandha chiefs and the steady extension of roads and posts into the hills. The British also acted against those who sheltered the rebels: the raja of Angul, Somnath Singh, accused of aiding Chakra Bisoi, was arrested in 1848 and his state annexed, a striking reversal for a ruler who had handed Dora Bisoi over to the British only eleven years earlier. G. F. Cockburn, Superintendent of the Tributary Mahals, pursued Chakra Bisoi vigorously through the hills of Ghumsur, Boudh and the neighbouring regions. But Chakra Bisoi was never captured, protected by the loyalty of the Kandha villages and by his knowledge of the terrain. In 1855 the British annexed the Kandhamal (Khondmals) country, bringing it under direct administration, and Chakra Bisoi disappeared into the forests; he is said to have died around 1856, though the circumstances are unknown and his fate has become the subject of legend. For a decade he had posed a serious threat to British authority in the hills, and his resistance demonstrated both the depth of Kandha attachment to their religion and autonomy and the limits of colonial power in the hill tracts, where the British could defeat the rebels in the field but could not easily win the allegiance of the communities that sheltered them.
4.3 Rendo Majhi and the attack at Orladhoni, 1855
The resistance to the Meriah Agency extended beyond Ghumsur into the Kalahandi region and the adjoining hill estates, where Kandha communities were equally affected by the Agency’s attempts to rescue meriahs and to impose its authority. On 10 December 1855, Kandhas attacked the camp of Lieutenant Macneill, the Meriah Agent, at Orladhoni in the Madanpur estate, in protest against the arrest of their leader, Rendo Majhi. The attack shows that Kandha resistance to the Agency was not confined to Ghumsur or dependent on a single leader, and that the arrest of community leaders, who combined political and ritual authority, could provoke immediate and violent collective responses. It also shows that by the mid-1850s, as the Agency extended its operations westwards, the conflict between the Kandhas and the colonial state had become a regional rather than a local phenomenon, foreshadowing the later conflicts in Kalahandi itself.
4.4 The Bhuyan rising under Ratna Naik, 1868
Keonjhar, a tributary state in the north of Odisha, was the home of the Bhuyans and Juangs, whose traditional role in the installation of the raja gave them a special place in the state and a recognised voice in questions of succession and legitimacy. On the death of Maharaja Gadadhar Bhanja in 1861, his minor son Dhanurjay Bhanja succeeded with British approval. The late raja’s queen, Bishnupriya, contested the succession, claiming that her husband had designated Brundaban Bhanja as his heir, but her petitions were rejected at every level, up to the Privy Council, so that the dispute was settled in the colonial courts rather than through the customary processes in which the Bhuyans had a part. Many Bhuyans sided with the queen and regarded the new raja as illegitimate. Dhanurjay’s rule, as described in Mahanta’s account, was autocratic, and he revoked rights and privileges that the Bhuyans had enjoyed under earlier rulers, adding material grievance to the dispute over legitimacy and preparing the ground for open revolt.
Ratna Naik, born in 1820 at Tarpur, emerged as the leader of the Bhuyans and organised the Bhuyans, Juangs and Kolhas in resistance, drawing together communities that shared both the grievances of Dhanurjay’s rule and a traditional stake in the legitimacy of the Keonjhar kingship. On 28 April 1868 his followers stormed the palace and carried off the Dewan and other officers, a direct blow at the machinery of the raja’s government. Among his allies were Nanda Naik, Nanda Pradhan, Babu Naik, Dasarathi Kuanr and Padu Naik, whose names, preserved in Mahanta’s account, show that the rising had a broad leadership drawn from several villages and lineages. The British responded with force. Dr W. Hayes, the Deputy Superintendent, arrived in May 1868, and Colonel E. T. Dalton marched on Keonjhargarh, burning Bhuyan villages and calling on neighbouring chiefs for help, so that the suppression drew on the resources of the wider system of tributary states. Deprived of food and shelter, the rebels could not hold out for long. Ratna Naik and Nanda Naik surrendered; Ratna Naik and six others were sentenced to death, according to Mahanta’s account. Queen Bishnupriya, whose cause had been bound up with the rising, spent her remaining years at Cuttack, and Dhanurjay Bhanja’s rule over Keonjhar was confirmed, leaving unresolved the grievances that would erupt again a generation later.
4.5 The Kandha rising in Kalahandi, 1882
In the tributary state of Kalahandi, an earlier ruler, Udit Pratap Deo, had brought cultivators of the Kulta caste from Sambalpur to develop agriculture, in the expectation that skilled plough cultivators would expand the area under settled cultivation and increase the revenue of the state. The Kultas, well connected with the court and familiar with the workings of revenue administration, gradually acquired the best Kandha lands, and the Kandhas, as one account puts it, were “deprived of the best of their lands” and pushed into the hills or reduced to dependence on the settlers. Disputes over land, debt and labour accumulated over decades. In May 1882, during the regency that followed the raja’s death, when the authority of the court was weakened, the Kandhas of the Asurgarh-Narla region rose against the Kultas. According to Biswamoy Pati’s study, Kandhas, Gonds, Gowdas and Dombs acted in concert, “attaching” the property of their rivals in some 142 villages, which suggests a coordinated movement rather than a spontaneous riot and an alliance that crossed the boundaries of tribe and caste. Many Kultas were killed. The rising was suppressed with the help of British troops; some thirteen Kandha villages, with the grain they had stored, were burned, and seven Kandha leaders were tried and executed. The British took the state under direct management until 1894, but the underlying question of Kandha land rights was not resolved, and it remained a source of tension in Kalahandi long afterwards.
4.6 The Bhuyan rising under Dharanidhar Naik, 1891–1893
In Keonjhar, the rule of Dhanurjay Bhanja continued to provoke discontent in the decades after 1868, as the raja and his officials pressed harder on the Bhuyans and Juangs. Forced labour (bethi) was exacted for the raja’s works, including a dam across the Machha Kandana stream built under the supervision of his adviser Bichitrananda Das, which required heavy and unpaid labour from the hill villages; grain-sale rules forced farmers to sell at low prices, to the benefit of the court and its agents; and the appointment of Fakir Mohan Senapati, the celebrated Odia writer, as Dewan was resented by the Bhuyans, who saw in it a further strengthening of an administration from which they were excluded. Dharanidhar Naik, born on 5 May 1864 at Kusumita, who had been dismissed from service after completing a boundary survey and who thus combined personal grievance with knowledge of the state’s administration, emerged as the leader of the Bhuyans, Juangs and Kolhas. In 1891 the rebels rose. They killed Nanda Dhal, a former Dewan, at Champakpur, freed prisoners from the raja’s jail, plundered grain stores and the armoury, ransacked the houses of officials and seized the Dewan, targets that show a clear understanding of the structures of power against which they were fighting. The rising continued for about three years, with the rebels using the hills and forests as a refuge. H. Dowson, Deputy Commissioner of Chaibasa, brought troops to suppress it. Dharanidhar Naik was captured and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in Cuttack jail, from which he was released in 1897. He spent the rest of his life in religious retirement; Mahanta gives the year of his death as 1944, while Wikipedia gives 1914. After the rising the British appointed an agent, H. P. Wylly, to administer Keonjhar, and later a Political Agent, Rai Bahadur Nanda Kishore Das, to supervise the raja, an implicit acknowledgment that the misrule of the state had been the root of the trouble.
4.7 The northern borderlands
The northern tributary states of Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar and the Chota Nagpur borderlands of Gangpur and Bonai were home to Santal, Munda, Ho and other communities whose kin in neighbouring Chota Nagpur and the Santal Parganas took part in the great tribal movements of the nineteenth century, the Santal hul of 1855–56 and the ulgulan of Birsa Munda in 1899–1900. These movements arose from grievances closely similar to those of the tribal communities of Odisha: the loss of land to outsiders, the oppression of moneylenders and landlords, forced labour, and the indifference or hostility of colonial officials and courts. Though centred outside the present boundaries of Odisha, they influenced the tribal communities of its northern borderlands through ties of kinship, language and migration, and the fear of their spread shaped the policies of officials and chiefs in the neighbouring states. They form part of the wider context of tribal resistance in eastern India within which the Odisha uprisings must be understood. The history of tribal resistance in the northern Garhjat states in the later colonial period deserves fuller study than it has so far received.
4.8 Laxman Nayak and the Quit India movement, 1942–1943
In the twentieth century, tribal resistance increasingly merged with the national movement, as Congress workers and local leaders carried the message of non-cooperation and civil disobedience into the hill regions and tribal grievances found a new political language. Laxman Nayak, born on 22 November 1899 at Tentuligumma in Koraput, a member of the Bhumia community, was inspired by Gandhi and worked among the tribal communities of Koraput, encouraging khadi, education and temperance and opposing exploitation by officials, moneylenders and the agents of the Jeypore zamindari, whose demands for rent and labour weighed heavily on the hill villages. His work gave him a large and devoted following and made him a figure of concern to the authorities. During the Quit India movement, on 21 August 1942, he led a large march of tribal people to the police station at Mathili, intending to assert the authority of the people in place of that of the colonial state. The police opened fire, and several protesters were killed. In the disturbances a forest guard was killed. Laxman Nayak was arrested, tried for the death of the forest guard, and sentenced to death, though his supporters maintained that he was not responsible for the killing. He was hanged in Berhampur jail on 29 March 1943. He has since been honoured as one of the foremost tribal martyrs of the freedom struggle in Odisha, and his life and death embody the convergence of tribal resistance with the national movement.
5. Colonial responses
The colonial state responded to tribal resistance with a combination of force, special administrative arrangements and, increasingly in the later period, protective legislation. These responses were not part of a single coherent policy but evolved over more than a century, in response to particular crises and in the light of the experience gained in suppressing them. They reflected both the state’s determination to establish its authority in the hills, which it never abandoned, and its growing recognition that the tribal regions could not be governed in the same way as the plains, that their peoples had distinctive customs and rights, and that unchecked exploitation by chiefs, settlers and moneylenders was itself a cause of disorder that the state had an interest in restraining.
5.1 Military suppression
The first response to every major uprising was military. Troops were sent into the hills, often after considerable delay and with great difficulty; villages suspected of supporting the rebels were burned; leaders were hunted down, sometimes with the help of rewards and informers; and captured rebels were tried and, in many cases, executed or imprisoned for life, often after summary proceedings. In Ghumsur, forty rebels were executed after the rising of 1835–37; in Keonjhar in 1868, Dalton’s troops burned Bhuyan villages and enlisted the help of neighbouring chiefs; in Kalahandi in 1882, Kandha villages and their grain stores were burned and seven leaders executed. The burning of villages and grain, a form of collective punishment directed at whole communities rather than at individual rebels, was a recurrent feature of these campaigns. It inflicted severe hardship on communities whose subsistence depended on stored grain, exposing them to hunger and disease in the months that followed, and it was intended as much to deter future resistance as to defeat the rising in hand. The memory of such reprisals became part of the oral history of the communities concerned.
Military suppression was effective in the short term, in the sense that it broke up rebel bands and restored the authority of officials and chiefs, but it was costly and difficult in the hills and forests, where the rebels could withdraw into terrain the troops could not easily penetrate, where disease took a heavy toll on soldiers from the plains, and where supplies had to be carried over long distances. Chakra Bisoi was never captured despite a decade of pursuit, and Dharanidhar Naik’s rising continued for about three years before it was finally suppressed. Moreover, force alone did nothing to remove the grievances that had caused the uprisings, which therefore tended to recur. The limits of military force encouraged the colonial state to seek other methods of control, combining coercion with administrative arrangements designed to bring the hill regions more securely under its authority and, eventually, with measures intended to restrain the worst forms of exploitation.
5.2 The Meriah Agency
The Meriah Agency, established in 1845, combined a humanitarian purpose, the suppression of human sacrifice, with the extension of British authority over the Kandha hills, and the two purposes were never easily separable. Its agents, Macpherson and later Campbell, rescued intended victims, many of whom were settled in the plains or placed in mission institutions; negotiated with Kandha chiefs, who were pressed to give written undertakings to abandon the practice; built roads and posts that opened the hills to troops and officials; and punished those who resisted, sometimes with great severity. Over time, the Agency’s work brought the Kandha country under British administration, culminating in the annexation of the Khondmals in 1855 and the establishment of a regular administration there. The Agency thus illustrates the way in which colonial intervention in tribal regions was often justified in humanitarian terms while serving the purposes of territorial control, and the way in which a moral campaign could become the vehicle for the political subordination of a people. Historians continue to debate how far the suppression of the meriah reflected genuine humanitarian concern and how far it served as a pretext, but there is little doubt that, from the Kandha point of view, the two were experienced as one.
5.3 Agency tracts and non-regulation administration
The colonial state recognised early that the tribal regions could not easily be governed under the ordinary laws and courts of the plains, whose procedures were slow, expensive and unintelligible to tribal communities, and whose officials could not reach the hills. In the Madras districts of Ganjam and Vizagapatam, the hill tracts were removed from the ordinary regulations by legislation of 1839 and placed under the direct authority of the Collector acting as Agent to the Governor, with simplified procedures and wide discretionary powers in civil, criminal and revenue matters. These “agency tracts” became a distinctive feature of the administration of the southern hills of Odisha until the twentieth century. In the Orissa Division, the Khondmals and Angul were administered as non-regulation areas under similar principles, with executive and judicial authority concentrated in the hands of a single officer. These arrangements gave officials greater flexibility in dealing with tribal communities and could, in the hands of a sympathetic officer, offer some protection against the worst abuses of moneylenders and settlers. But they also concentrated power in the hands of officials who were answerable to no local check, and they limited the communities’ access to legal protection, so that the quality of administration depended heavily on the character of individual officers.
5.4 Indirect rule in the tributary states
In the tributary states, the colonial state ruled through the chiefs, and its response to tribal uprisings reflected its relationship with them. In general, the British supported the chiefs against their rebellious subjects, since the stability of indirect rule depended on the authority of the rulers through whom it was exercised, and they sent troops to suppress risings, as in Keonjhar in 1868 and 1891–93 and in Kalahandi in 1882. But they also recognised that misrule by chiefs could provoke disorder, embarrass the paramount power and threaten the peace of neighbouring territories, and after major risings they sometimes took the administration of states into their own hands or imposed agents and political officers to supervise the chiefs, as in Kalahandi after 1882 and Keonjhar after the rising of 1891–93. Such intervention rarely amounted to a fundamental reform of the relationship between the chiefs and their tribal subjects; it aimed rather at restoring order and preventing further outbreaks. This combination of support and supervision characterised British policy towards the tributary states until 1947, and it left many of the grievances of the tribal communities to be addressed, or left unaddressed, after the merger of the states with Odisha in 1948–49.
5.5 Protective legislation and the “excluded areas”
In the twentieth century, the colonial state increasingly recognised the need to protect tribal land and communities, partly in response to the lessons of the earlier uprisings and partly under the influence of anthropologists and administrators who argued that tribal societies required special safeguards. Laws restricting the transfer of tribal land to outsiders were introduced in several regions, though their enforcement was often weak and the transfer of land continued through debt and evasion. Under the Government of India Act of 1935 the principal tribal regions were designated as “excluded” or “partially excluded” areas, in which ordinary legislation applied only with the approval of the Governor, who had special responsibility for their administration. Critics, including many nationalists, saw in these arrangements an attempt to isolate the tribal regions from the national movement and to preserve them as preserves of official paternalism; their defenders saw them as necessary protection for vulnerable communities. These arrangements, though limited in their effectiveness, laid the foundations of the protective provisions for Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes in the Fifth Schedule and other provisions of the Constitution of independent India, and the debate they provoked about protection and integration has continued ever since.
| Response | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Military suppression | Crush rebellion; punish rebels | Ghumsur 1836–37; Keonjhar 1868; Kalahandi 1882 |
| Meriah Agency | Suppress human sacrifice; extend control | Kandha hills, 1845 onward |
| Agency and non-regulation areas | Flexible administration of hill tracts | Ganjam and Vizagapatam agencies (1839); Khondmals |
| Supervision of tributary chiefs | Restore order; check misrule | Kalahandi after 1882; Keonjhar after 1893 |
| Protective laws; excluded areas | Protect tribal land and communities | Government of India Act 1935 |
6. Case studies
The five case studies below examine particular episodes of tribal resistance in closer detail, drawing on the narrative of the preceding section but focusing on what each episode reveals. Each illuminates a broader feature of the relationship between the tribal communities and the colonial state: the defence of a traditional political order in Ghumsur; the conflict over religion at Bisipara; the dilemmas of indirect rule in Keonjhar; land alienation and the settlement of outsiders in Kalahandi; and the convergence of tribal resistance with the national movement at Mathili. Taken together, they provide a cross-section of tribal resistance across more than a century.
Case study 1: Ghumsur and the fall of the Bhanjas
The Ghumsur rising of 1835–37 began not as a tribal revolt against British rule as such, but as a defence of the Bhanja ruling family, with which the Kandhas of the hills had long-standing ties of loyalty and mutual obligation. The Bhanja zamindars had relied on the Kandha chiefs, and the Kandhas had looked to the Bhanjas as the guarantors of an order in which their autonomy was respected. When the British moved to dissolve the family’s authority after the death of Dhananjaya Bhanja, the Kandhas under Dora Bisoi took up arms on behalf of its members, sheltering them in the hills, refusing to surrender them to the British, and ambushing the troops sent against them, most notably in the action between Udaygiri and Durgaprasad in February 1836 in which two British officers and thirteen sepoys were killed.
Significance. The Ghumsur rising shows that tribal resistance was often bound up with the defence of a traditional political order in which tribal communities had a recognised place. The Kandhas fought not only for themselves but for the Bhanjas, because the Bhanja kingdom embodied a relationship that respected their autonomy and their customary role; its destruction by the British threatened that relationship and put in its place an alien authority with no stake in the Kandha world. The episode thus complicates any simple opposition between “tribal” and “Hindu” or between hill and plain, for the Kandhas here appear as the defenders of a Hindu ruling house against a foreign power. The rising also shows how a political conflict could lead to wider and unforeseen consequences: it was in the course of the Ghumsur operations that the British discovered the meriah sacrifice, and its suppression became the next and longer stage of the confrontation between the Kandhas and the colonial state, transforming a dynastic dispute into a decades-long struggle over religion, authority and the control of the hills.
Case study 2: Bisipara, 1846
In 1846 the Kandhas under Chakra Bisoi forced the Meriah Agent, S. C. Macpherson, to surrender the meriahs he had rescued at his camp at Bisipara. The Kandhas gathered in large numbers around the camp, and the Agent, lacking the force to resist them and fearing a wider conflagration, gave up the victims whom the Agency had taken from their keepers. The episode was a serious humiliation for the Agency, exposing the gap between its claims to authority over the Kandha country and its real power on the ground, and it led to Macpherson’s replacement and to a reassessment of the methods by which the campaign against the meriah was to be pursued.
Significance. The Bisipara episode illustrates both the depth of Kandha attachment to the meriah practice and the limits of colonial power in the hills. For the Kandhas, the meriahs were not merely victims but part of a religious relationship with the earth goddess on which the fertility of their land depended; their removal by an outside power was a sacrilege and a threat to the survival of the community, and the collective action at Bisipara shows how widely that view was shared. For the British, the episode showed that the suppression of the practice could not be achieved by force or command alone, and the subsequent policy of Campbell combined military pressure with negotiation, persuasion, the cultivation of cooperative chiefs and the gradual extension of roads and posts. The episode is also central to later debates about the meriah campaign, in which historians and anthropologists have asked how far the humanitarian justification of colonial intervention can be separated from its political purposes, how reliable the colonial accounts of the scale of the practice were, and what the campaign meant for the subsequent history of Kandha society and its relations with the state and with outsiders.
Case study 3: Keonjhar, 28 April 1868
On 28 April 1868 the followers of Ratna Naik stormed the palace of Keonjhar and carried off the Dewan and other officers, striking at the centre of the raja’s government. The rising was a protest against the rule of Dhanurjay Bhanja, whose succession the Bhuyans did not accept, since it had been decided without regard to their customary role and against the wishes of the late raja’s queen, and whose government had revoked their traditional rights and privileges. The Bhuyans were joined by the Juangs and Kolhas, and the rising quickly spread through the hill tracts of the state before British troops under Dalton intervened.
Significance. The Keonjhar rising of 1868 shows how British support for a ruler could provoke tribal resistance in a tributary state. The Bhuyans had a traditional role in the legitimation of the Keonjhar kings, and their rejection of Dhanurjay Bhanja was a rejection of a ruler they regarded as illegitimate in origin and oppressive in practice. In the pre-colonial order, such a rejection might have forced a compromise or even a change of ruler. The British, by upholding his succession through the courts and then suppressing the rising by force, became parties to the conflict and removed the customary check on the raja’s power. The episode illustrates the central dilemma of indirect rule: by supporting the chiefs in order to rule through them, the British made themselves responsible for their misrule, and the resentment that misrule provoked was directed against the paramount power as well as against the raja. The recurrence of the rising under Dharanidhar Naik a generation later shows that the dilemma was not resolved.
Case study 4: Kalahandi, 1882
In May 1882 the Kandhas of Kalahandi rose against the Kulta settlers who had acquired their best lands with the encouragement of the ruling family, taking advantage of the weakening of the state’s authority during the regency that followed the raja’s death. The rising was widespread and coordinated, affecting many villages in the Asurgarh-Narla region. Many Kultas were killed; the rising was suppressed with British troops, Kandha villages were burned along with their grain, and seven leaders were tried and executed. The state was then taken under British management.
Significance. The Kalahandi rising is the clearest example of tribal resistance rooted in land alienation and the settlement of outsiders. As Biswamoy Pati has shown, the settlement of the Kultas was part of a deliberate policy, supported by the state, of replacing tribal cultivators considered unproductive with settlers from the plains, whose methods of cultivation and readiness to pay revenue made them more valuable to the rulers. The rising was directed not primarily against British officials but against the settlers who had taken the land, which illustrates the way in which tribal resistance was often aimed at the local agents of change rather than at the distant colonial state, and the participation of Gonds, Gowdas and Dombs alongside the Kandhas shows that the grievance was shared across communities affected by the same process. The British suppression of the rising, and their subsequent direct management of the state, show how the colonial state became involved in the defence of a social order it had helped to create, and how it treated the symptoms of agrarian conflict rather than its causes, leaving the question of tribal land in Kalahandi unresolved.
Case study 5: Mathili, 21 August 1942
On 21 August 1942, during the Quit India movement, Laxman Nayak led a march of tribal people to the police station at Mathili in Koraput, part of a wave of protests across the district in which tribal communities sought to assert popular authority against the colonial state. The police fired on the crowd, killing several people; a forest guard died in the disturbances; and Laxman Nayak was arrested, tried for the death of the forest guard, sentenced to death and hanged at Berhampur on 29 March 1943. Many others were imprisoned, and the movement in Koraput was suppressed with considerable severity.
Significance. The Mathili episode shows the convergence of tribal resistance and the national movement in the twentieth century. Laxman Nayak was a Gandhian who worked within the framework of the Congress movement and who preached non-violence, khadi and temperance, but his following was drawn from tribal communities with long-standing grievances over land, forests and exploitation by officials, moneylenders and the agents of the Jeypore zamindari, and the march to Mathili gave expression to those grievances as much as to the national demand for independence. The death of a forest guard, the symbol of the state’s control over the forests, was at the centre of the case against him, and the circumstance captures the way in which forest conflict had become the sharpest point of tribal resentment. His execution made him a martyr of both the national movement and the tribal communities of Koraput, and his memory links the tribal uprisings of the nineteenth century with the struggle for independence, giving the tribal communities of Odisha a recognised place in the national narrative of freedom.
7. Odia historians, memory and the main debates
The tribal uprisings of Odisha have been interpreted in different ways by different generations of historians, and their place in the history of Odisha remains a subject of debate, which bears not only on the past but on contemporary questions of tribal rights, land and identity. Three broad approaches can be distinguished, though in practice they overlap and many historians draw on more than one. The first is the nationalist, which presents the uprisings as part of the struggle for freedom and their leaders as freedom fighters. The second is the social and economic, which emphasises land, forests, labour and exploitation, and situates the uprisings within the agrarian history of colonial Odisha. The third is the anthropological and environmental, which situates the uprisings within the long history of tribal societies and their relationship with the land, the forest and the state. Alongside these scholarly approaches, the public memory of the uprisings, shaped by commemoration, local tradition and political need, has its own history.
7.1 The nationalist interpretation
Nationalist historians of Odisha, including Harekrushna Mahtab and the volumes on the history of the freedom movement produced under his direction, and general historians such as J. K. Samal and P. K. Mishra, placed the tribal uprisings within the history of resistance to British rule, alongside the Khurda rebellion, the Paika rebellion and the Sambalpur rising. Leaders such as Dora Bisoi, Chakra Bisoi, Ratna Naik, Dharanidhar Naik and Laxman Nayak were presented as freedom fighters, and their uprisings as early chapters in the struggle for independence, in which the people of Odisha, including its tribal communities, had resisted foreign domination from the beginning. This interpretation brought the uprisings into the mainstream of Odia history, gave their leaders a place in public memory and in school textbooks, and corrected the colonial picture of lawless savagery. Prasanna Kumar Mishra’s Political Unrest in Orissa in the Nineteenth Century (1983) examined many of these risings as part of a broader pattern of resistance and remains a valuable source for their political history. The limitations of the nationalist approach lie in its tendency to read the uprisings in the light of later national aims, and to underplay the conflicts between tribal communities and the Odia chiefs, landlords and settlers who were also the objects of tribal resentment.
7.2 Social and economic history
Social and economic historians, notably Biswamoy Pati, have emphasised the material roots of tribal resistance: land alienation, the settlement of outsiders, the restriction of forest rights, forced labour and the exploitation of tribal communities by chiefs, zamindars, moneylenders and officials. Pati’s studies of Kalahandi and of peasant and tribal movements in Odisha, grounded in close work on the colonial archive, showed that tribal resistance was directed as much against local agents of exploitation as against the colonial state, and that the colonial state actively encouraged the processes that dispossessed tribal communities, both through its own land and forest policies and through its support for the chiefs and settlers who benefited from them. His work also showed that tribal grievances did not always coincide with those of the nationalist elite, who were often drawn from the same landholding and professional classes that tribal communities had reason to distrust, a point of importance for understanding the complex and sometimes uneasy relationship between tribal movements and the national movement in the twentieth century. This approach has made it possible to see the uprisings as part of the social history of colonial Odisha rather than as isolated episodes of resistance.
7.3 Anthropological and environmental approaches
Anthropologists and environmental historians have situated the uprisings within the long history of tribal societies and their environments. Studies of the Kandhas by scholars such as Barbara Boal and Felix Padel have re-examined the meriah campaign, its religious significance for the Kandhas and its long-term consequences for Kandha society, raising critical questions about the humanitarian claims of the colonial state, the reliability of colonial reports on the scale of the practice, and the way in which the image of the sacrificing Kandha was used to justify intervention. Padel in particular has argued that the campaign must be understood as part of a broader process of conquest and that its legacy shaped later relations between the Kandhas and the state. Environmental historians have emphasised the transformation of forests and land use under colonial rule, the attack on shifting cultivation and the commercialisation of forest produce, and their consequences for tribal livelihoods and for the ecology of the hills. These approaches have helped to move the history of the uprisings beyond the categories of colonial and nationalist writing alike, and they have connected the history of resistance with contemporary debates about development, displacement and the rights of tribal communities over land and forests.
7.4 Public memory
In Odisha, tribal leaders of the colonial period are increasingly honoured in public memory, reflecting both a growing recognition of the tribal contribution to the history of the state and the political importance of tribal communities in contemporary Odisha. Laxman Nayak’s birth anniversary is commemorated, and a postage stamp was issued in his honour; Dharanidhar Naik, Ratna Naik, Dora Bisoi and Chakra Bisoi are remembered in their regions as heroes, in statues, local festivals and the names of institutions, and in the oral traditions of their communities. Such commemoration has helped to restore these figures to the history of Odisha, though it sometimes simplifies their complex histories into stories of patriotic heroism. Brajabandhu Mahanta’s articles on historyofodisha.in, “Ghumsar Rising under Dara Bisoi”, “Kandha Rising under Chakra Bisoi”, “Bhuyan Rising under Ratna Naik” and “Bhuyan Rising under Dharani Dhar Naik”, present the history of these uprisings for students and general readers, combining narrative detail with an account of causes and consequences, and they are the source of many of the dates and details used in this article.
7.5 Main debates
| Debate | One view | The other view | Where the evidence stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Savagery or rational resistance? | Outbreaks of lawlessness among primitive peoples (colonial view) | Rational, organised responses to dispossession and exploitation (Pati and others) | The organisation, leadership and specific grievances of the uprisings support the latter |
| Against whom? | Uprisings against British rule | Uprisings against local chiefs, settlers and moneylenders | Both: many were directed primarily against local agents, backed by the colonial state |
| The meriah campaign: humanitarian or political? | A humane suppression of human sacrifice | A justification for extending control over the Kandha hills | Both purposes were real; the campaign served humanitarian and territorial ends |
| Part of the national movement? | Early chapters of the freedom struggle | Movements with their own aims, sometimes at odds with the nationalist elite | Earlier uprisings had local aims; later ones, such as Mathili, merged with the national movement |
| Defence of tradition or of rights? | Defence of a traditional order (e.g. the Bhanjas, Keonjhar custom) | Defence of land, forests and livelihood | Inseparable: the traditional order guaranteed the rights the communities defended |
| Disputed details | — | — | Sources differ on Dora Bisoi’s death (c. 1840 or 1846) and Dharanidhar Naik’s death (1914 or 1944) |
8. Assessment
The tribal uprisings of colonial Odisha form one of the most persistent traditions of resistance in the history of the region. Over more than a century, from the Ghumsur rising of 1835 to the Mathili protest of 1942, tribal communities in the hills and forests of Odisha repeatedly rose against the transformation of their world under colonial rule, often at great cost to themselves in lives, villages and grain. These uprisings differed in their immediate causes, their leaders, their scale and their targets: some were defences of a ruling house, some were struggles over religion, some were conflicts with settlers over land, and some were protests against the oppression of chiefs or the demands of the forest department. But they shared a common foundation in the defence of land, forest and autonomy against the encroachment of the colonial state and of the outsiders whose presence it encouraged, and seen together they reveal a sustained and coherent pattern of resistance rather than a sequence of isolated disturbances.
The uprisings were not the outbursts of lawlessness or savagery depicted in colonial records. They were organised movements, led by men of standing in their communities, such as the Kandha chiefs Dora Bisoi and Chakra Bisoi and the Bhuyan leaders Ratna Naik and Dharanidhar Naik, who were able to mobilise large numbers of people, to coordinate action across villages and communities, and to sustain resistance over months or years. They were directed against specific and identifiable grievances: the destruction of a traditional political order, interference with religion, the loss of land to settlers, forced labour and the oppression of chiefs backed by the paramount power. Their choice of targets, the raja’s palace and jail, the Dewan, the settlers’ property, the police station, shows a clear understanding of the structures of power that oppressed them. Many were directed as much against local agents of exploitation, chiefs, settlers, moneylenders and officials, as against the British, and they reveal the ways in which colonial rule operated in the hills through these intermediaries, so that resistance to them was, in effect, resistance to the colonial order itself.
The colonial response combined military force, which was effective in suppressing individual risings but costly, incomplete and incapable of removing the causes of discontent, with administrative arrangements that recognised, however imperfectly, the distinctiveness of the tribal regions: the Meriah Agency, the agency tracts, the non-regulation administration of the Khondmals and Angul, the supervision of tributary chiefs and, eventually, the protective provisions of the excluded and partially excluded areas. These arrangements were shaped by the uprisings themselves, which repeatedly demonstrated the limits of ordinary administration in the hills. They laid the foundations of the special constitutional status of tribal areas in independent India, and in that sense the uprisings had a lasting influence on the governance of the tribal regions of Odisha.
The uprisings also formed a bridge between the earliest resistance to colonial rule and the national movement of the twentieth century. The traditions of resistance established in the nineteenth century were remembered within the tribal communities and provided a foundation for their participation in the Congress campaigns of the 1920s to the 1940s. The execution of Laxman Nayak in 1943 linked the tribal communities of Koraput with the Quit India movement, and the memory of the earlier uprisings has been incorporated into the history of the freedom struggle in Odisha, so that Dora Bisoi and Chakra Bisoi now stand alongside Jayi Rajguru, Buxi Jagabandhu and Surendra Sai in the public memory of resistance to British rule.
The fairest verdict is that the tribal uprisings of Odisha were a sustained and rational defence of the land, livelihoods and autonomy of the tribal communities against a colonial order that threatened all three. They did not prevent the transformation of the hills: the Kandha country was annexed, the tributary chiefs retained their thrones with British support, settlers continued to acquire tribal land and the forests passed under state control. But the uprisings shaped the colonial state’s approach to the tribal regions, forcing it to recognise their distinctiveness and to devise special arrangements for their administration; they produced leaders who are honoured in Odisha today; and they left a tradition of resistance that later generations have drawn upon. They remain a reminder that the questions they raised, of land, forests and the rights of tribal communities to govern their own affairs, continue to be central to the life of the state, and that the history of Odisha cannot be written without the history of its tribal peoples.
9. Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Agency tracts | Hill areas removed from the ordinary regulations and governed by the Collector as Agent |
| Bethi | Forced, unpaid labour exacted by chiefs or officials |
| Bhuyan | Tribal community of the Keonjhar hills, with a traditional role in the installation of the raja |
| Daitapati | Servants of the Jagannatha temple regarded as descendants of its original tribal worshippers |
| Excluded areas | Tribal regions under special administration by the Government of India Act 1935 |
| Kandha (Khond) | Tribal people of the southern and central hills of Odisha |
| Kulta | Agricultural caste brought from Sambalpur to Kalahandi |
| Meriah | Victim of the Kandha human sacrifice to the earth goddess |
| Meriah Agency | British agency established in 1845 to suppress meriah sacrifice |
| Podu | Shifting cultivation |
| Savara | Tribal people of the southern hills, especially Parlakhemundi |
| Tributary states | The Garhjat states ruled by their own chiefs under British supervision |
10. Frequently asked questions
1. What were the main tribal uprisings in colonial Odisha? The principal uprisings were the Ghumsur rising under Dora Bisoi (1835–37), fought in defence of the Bhanja ruling family; the Kandha resistance under Chakra Bisoi (1846–1856) against the Meriah Agency; the attack at Orladhoni after the arrest of Rendo Majhi (1855); the Bhuyan risings in Keonjhar under Ratna Naik (1868) and Dharanidhar Naik (1891–93) against the rule of Dhanurjay Bhanja; the Kandha rising in Kalahandi (1882) against the Kulta settlers; and the Mathili protest led by Laxman Nayak (1942) during the Quit India movement. Many smaller and less documented conflicts also took place in the hill tracts and tributary states throughout the period.
2. What caused the tribal uprisings? Each uprising had its own immediate occasion, but the underlying causes were broadly shared: land alienation and the settlement of outsiders from the plains; restrictions on the use of forests and on shifting cultivation; forced labour (bethi) and rising revenue demands; interference with religion and custom, above all the suppression of meriah sacrifice among the Kandhas; and the loss of political autonomy under the colonial state and the chiefs it supported, who no longer needed to respect the customary limits on their power.
3. Who was Chakra Bisoi? He was the nephew of Dora Bisoi and the leader of the Kandha resistance against the Meriah Agency from 1846 to about 1856. He forced the Meriah Agent, S. C. Macpherson, to surrender the rescued meriahs at Bisipara in 1846, installed Pitambar, a son of Dhananjaya Bhanja, as raja of Ghumsur, and coordinated with Savara rebels in Parlakhemundi. Despite years of pursuit he was never captured, and he is said to have died around 1856 in circumstances that remain unknown.
4. Why did the Bhuyans of Keonjhar rise? In 1868, under Ratna Naik, they rose against the rule of Dhanurjay Bhanja, whose succession they did not accept and who had revoked their traditional rights; the rising was suppressed by British troops under Colonel Dalton. In 1891–93, under Dharanidhar Naik, they rose again against forced labour on the raja’s works, oppressive grain-sale rules and the misrule of the raja’s officials. In both cases the British intervened to support the raja and afterwards placed the state under closer supervision.
5. What happened in Kalahandi in 1882? The Kandhas, joined by Gonds, Gowdas and Dombs, rose against the Kulta settlers who had acquired their best lands with the encouragement of an earlier ruler, attaching their property in some 142 villages. Many Kultas were killed. The rising was suppressed with British troops, about thirteen Kandha villages and their grain stores were burned, seven leaders were executed, and the state was placed under British management until 1894.
6. Who was Laxman Nayak? He was a Bhumia leader of Koraput (1899–1943) and a follower of Gandhi who worked among the tribal communities of the district against exploitation by officials, moneylenders and the agents of the Jeypore zamindari. During the Quit India movement, on 21 August 1942, he led a march to Mathili police station, where the police opened fire. Convicted in connection with the death of a forest guard in the disturbances, he was hanged at Berhampur on 29 March 1943, and he is honoured as one of the foremost tribal martyrs of the freedom struggle in Odisha.
7. How did the British respond to tribal uprisings? The British relied first on military suppression, including the burning of villages and grain, executions and long sentences of imprisonment. They also created special institutions for the tribal regions: the Meriah Agency (1845), the agency tracts of Ganjam and Vizagapatam with simplified administration, the non-regulation administration of the Khondmals and Angul, and the supervision of tributary chiefs through agents and political officers. In the twentieth century they added protective legislation on land transfer and the designation of excluded and partially excluded areas under the Government of India Act of 1935.
11. How to cite this article
Mahanta, Brajabandhu (ed.). “Tribal Uprisings in Odisha.” History of Odisha, 2026. https://historyofodisha.com/tribal-uprisings-in-odisha/ (accessed [date]).
12. References
12.1 Primary sources
- Macpherson, S. C. Reports on the Khonds of Ganjam and Cuttack, 1840s.
- Campbell, John. A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years’ Service amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan. London, 1864.
- Military and political reports on the Ghumsur rising, 1835–1837 (Madras records).
- Reports on the Keonjhar risings of 1868 and 1891–1893 and on the Kalahandi rising of 1882 (records of the Superintendent of the Tributary Mahals and the Commissioner of Orissa).
- Dalton, E. T. Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal. Calcutta, 1872.
- Senapati, Fakir Mohan. Atmajivana Charita (autobiography, Odia).
- Trial records of Laxman Nayak, 1942–1943.
12.2 Secondary sources
- Boal, Barbara M. The Konds: Human Sacrifice and Religious Change. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1982.
- Padel, Felix. The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995 (later published as Sacrificing People).
- Elwin, Verrier. The Religion of an Indian Tribe. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1955.
12.3 Works by Odia historians
- Pati, Biswamoy. Resisting Domination: Peasants, Tribals and the National Movement in Orissa, 1920–50. New Delhi: Manohar, 1993.
- Pati, Biswamoy. Studies of land, ecology and tribal resistance in Kalahandi (see online resources).
- Mishra, Prasanna Kumar. Political Unrest in Orissa in the Nineteenth Century. 1983.
- Patra, K. M. Orissa under the East India Company. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1971.
- Samal, J. K. History of Modern Orissa. Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1989.
- Mahtab, Harekrushna, ed. History of the Freedom Movement in Orissa. Cuttack, 1957 onward.
- Mohanty, Gopinath. Paraja and Amrutara Santana (novels, Odia).
- Mahanta, Brajabandhu. “Ghumsar Rising under Dara Bisoi”. historyofodisha.in.
- Mahanta, Brajabandhu. “Kandha Rising under Chakra Bisoi”. historyofodisha.in.
- Mahanta, Brajabandhu. “Bhuyan Rising under Ratna Naik”. historyofodisha.in.
- Mahanta, Brajabandhu. “Bhuyan Rising under Dharani Dhar Naik”. historyofodisha.in.
12.4 Online resources
- Dharanidhar Naik, Wikipedia.
- Laxman Nayak, Wikipedia.
- Khond Revolts in Odisha, GKToday.
- Kandha Rebellion in Kalahandi, Orissa Review, August 2007.
- Biswamoy Pati on Kalahandi, Environment and Society Portal.
- “Hanging of Laxman Naik: A Tribal Gandhite”, eTribal Tribune.