Two quite different things happened here and only one of them was national. The first was the Kondh resistance of the hills, which ran from the 1830s to the 1850s and was about the administration reaching a tract that had never been administered — its leaders were hereditary hill officers, not politicians, and its demands were about the hills, not about India. The second was the campaign to move this plain out of the Madras Presidency, which occupied the region's public life from about 1903 to 1936 and was carried by newspapers, memorials and a maharaja rather than by mass action. Congress organisation arrived late, and when it did, in 1930, its salt camp at Huma was staffed largely by the same people who had been arguing about the boundary. Anyone looking here for an 1857 will not find one.
The Ghumsur risings1835–1837
The death of Raja Dhananjaya Bhanja on 31 December 1835, during an unresolved revenue dispute with the Madras government, brought the Kondh villages of the upper Rushikulya into open resistance alongside members of the Bhanja family. A Company force under George Edward Russell entered the tract on 11 January 1836 and fought a hill campaign in which the Kondhs used the forest and the ghats rather than meeting the column.
परिणाम: Ghumsur was taken under direct administration. Dora Bisoi was surrendered to the British in 1837 by the Raja of Angul; sentences on those tried ran from terms of years to transportation and death.
The Kondh risings and the meriah agency1837–1861
From 1845 a special agency operated in the Kondh hills to end the meriah rite and the taking of children for it. Its officers were the first outsiders to move regularly through these villages, and their presence, together with new demands for labour and tribute, kept the tract in intermittent revolt. From 1846 the resistance was led by Chakra Bisoi across the Ghumsur, Kandhamal and Kalahandi borders.
परिणाम: The rite was suppressed and the hills were brought under a permanent agency administration. Chakra Bisoi was never captured and disappears from the record about 1855.
The campaign to transfer Ganjamc. 1903–1936
A press and petition campaign, argued from Berhampur and Paralakhemundi, that the Odia-speaking tracts of the northern Madras Presidency should be joined to the other Odia districts. It was conducted through the Utkal Sammilani sessions, evidence to boundary commissions, and the Odia newspapers founded at Berhampur from 1913.
परिणाम: Ganjam and the Paralakhemundi tract were transferred to the new province of Orissa on 1 April 1936. The southern Telugu-majority mandals remained with Madras.
The salt satyagraha at HumaApril 1930
Volunteers made salt on the Ganjam coast at Huma, near Rambha, as the district's contribution to the civil disobedience movement. Biswanath Das, Niranjan Patnaik and Sarala Devi organised the camp.
परिणाम: Arrests across the district and the first sustained Congress organisation in Ganjam, which carried through to the Quit India arrests of 1942.