Duggar was the ruling half of a princely state, not a colonised district, and that shapes everything about its resistance record. There was no British collector to defy, no Quit India arrests on this side of the ridges, and in 1857 the state's soldiers marched for the Company. What the region has instead is two older strands and one late one. The older strands are agrarian: the Jhiri tradition of a cultivator who refused a landlord's grain demand, still commemorated at a large autumn fair, and the documented refusal of Mian Dido to accept Sikh tax collection after 1808. The late strand is the politics of the 1920s and 1930s, which took the form of associations pressing for state service and subjecthood, then of parties after 1931 pressing for responsible government from the Maharaja. The Jammu leaders below belong to that movement, and the account stops in 1947.
Baba Jitto and the Jhiri traditionby tradition, 16th century
A cultivator who is said to have brought waste land at Jhiri, near Jammu, into cultivation and then refused the landlord's demand for a larger share of the harvest, dying rather than yielding it. The story is oral tradition rather than record, and its dating is uncertain.
Outcome: The Jhiri fair each autumn is among the largest gatherings in the region, and the story is the region's own account of an agrarian grievance rather than a borrowed one.
Mian Dido's resistancec. 1808–1821
After Ranjit Singh annexed Jammu in 1808, Mian Dido Jamwal refused to submit and conducted a long irregular resistance from the Shivalik hills, obstructing revenue collection and raiding the garrison's posts with the support of cultivators.
Outcome: He was surrounded and killed by Sikh troops in the Trikuta hills; the resistance is remembered chiefly through Dogri ballads.
The State Subject agitation1920s
An organised campaign, pressed through Dogra and Kashmiri associations, against the employment of outsiders in state service and against the purchase of land by non-residents.
Outcome: The hereditary State Subject definition of 1927 restricted state service and landholding to state subjects, and became the basis of residence rights in the state.
The Jammu delegation and the agitation of 19311931
The Young Men's Muslim Association at Jammu chose delegates to lay grievances over employment, education and religious usage before the Maharaja, in parallel with the meetings in Srinagar that preceded the firing of 13 July 1931.
Outcome: The Glancy Commission reported in 1932, the state's first political parties were formed in the same year, and a partly elected Praja Sabha followed in 1934.