Chhattisgarh Plains · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
Resistance on this plain is agrarian and industrial rather than constitutional, and it is unusually concentrated on money. The 1857 events here lasted weeks: a zamindar hanged in December and a rising of sepoys in the same town in January. Nothing organised follows for sixty years. When politics resumes in 1920 it does so through two disputes over payment — an irrigation cess refused by a single village in Dhamtari tehsil, and a strike at the Rajnandgaon mill that ran more than five weeks — and the men who led both went on to organise weavers, cultivators and mill hands rather than to argue in assemblies. Social reform ran alongside and sometimes ahead of it: the same organisers were pressing temple entry and caste reform in the plain before the national movement took the question up.
Risings and revolts
Narayan Singh, zamindar of Sonakhan, broke open a merchant's grain store during the famine of 1856 and distributed the grain. Arrested and imprisoned at Raipur, he escaped in 1857 and raised a force of about five hundred men in the forest country east of the plain.
Outcome: A Company force under Captain Smith took him; he was hanged at Raipur on 10 December 1857 and the Sonakhan estate was confiscated.
Soldiers of the regiment stationed at Raipur rose under Hanuman Singh, weeks after the Sonakhan execution.
Outcome: The rising was put down within days. Seventeen of the men tried were hanged at Raipur on 22 January 1858, and the garrison was reorganised.
The village of Kandel in Dhamtari tehsil refused to pay a cess levied for canal irrigation the villagers said they had not used. Sundarlal Sharma organised the refusal and it spread through the surrounding villages; Gandhi came to Raipur in December 1920 in connection with it.
Outcome: The demand was given up before the confrontation came to a head, which is why the episode is remembered in the plain as the first successful non-cooperation action in central India.
Workers at the cotton mill at Rajnandgaon struck for more than thirty-seven days over hours and conditions, in an action organised by Thakur Pyarelal Singh.
Outcome: Working hours were reduced. The strike is among the earliest sustained industrial actions in central India and gave the plain a labour organisation a decade before its Congress organisation.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narayan Singh of SonakhanSonakhan, in the forest country east of Raipur | 1795–1857 | 1857 | Opened a grain store in the famine of 1856 and distributed the grain; escaped from Raipur jail in 1857 and raised a force against the Company.Hanged at Raipur on 10 December 1857. |
| Hanuman SinghRaipur | died 1858 | 1857–58 | Led the rising of sepoys of the regiment stationed at Raipur in January 1858, the only military action of the revolt inside the plain.Seventeen of those tried for the rising were hanged at Raipur on 22 January 1858. |
| Sundarlal SharmaChandrasur, near Raipur | 1881–1940 | Non-cooperation; social reform | Organised the Kandel canal satyagraha of 1920 and arranged Gandhi's visit to Raipur in the same year. He worked on caste reform and temple entry in the plain, and wrote in Chhattisgarhi at a time when it was not being written.Arrested in 1921–22, the first arrest in the region connected with the national movement. |
| Thakur Pyarelal SinghDaihan, Rajnandgaon tehsil | 1891–1954 | Labour organisation; Non-cooperation; Civil disobedience | Led the thirty-seven-day mill strike at Rajnandgaon in 1920 and afterwards built cooperative societies for weavers and cultivators — the weavers' cooperative in 1945 and a farmers' rice mill cooperative in 1944.Sentenced to a year in 1930 and to two more years from 1932; his licence to practise law was cancelled. |
| Ravishankar ShuklaRaipur | born 1877 | Non-cooperation; Civil disobedience | Built the Congress organisation across the Chhattisgarh districts from 1921, toured the Central Provinces for the satyagraha campaign in early 1930, and pressed the case for teaching and administration in Hindi.Imprisoned at Jubbulpore and Seoni, released on 13 March 1931 after the Gandhi–Irwin pact. |
People from Chhattisgarh Plains who resisted colonial rule, and the regional risings and revolts that shaped that resistance. (9)