This is adivasi-majority country and its resistance history reflects that rather than the national timetable. The nineteenth-century risings here were about administration arriving in hills that had never been administered, and they were led by hereditary hill officers, not by politicians. National politics reached the plateau extremely late: there was effectively no Congress organisation in Koraput before about 1929, and it was built in the following decade among Bhumia, Paraja, Gadaba and Kondh cultivators rather than in the market towns. That base is why the events of August 1942 here were village flag-hoistings and the firings that answered them, and why the region's best-known figure was a village Congress president rather than a lawyer. Below the ghat, in the feudatory states, the demand was directed at the ruler as much as at the British and took the form of praja mandal agitation.
The Kondh risings and the agency in the Kalahandi hills1840s–1850s
The special agency established to end the meriah rite pushed into the Kondh tracts of Kalahandi from Ghumsur. Its officers were the first administration many of these villages had encountered, and the demands for labour, tribute and access that came with them met sustained resistance led from 1846 by Chakra Bisoi, moving across the Ghumsur, Kandhamal and Kalahandi borders.
Outcome: The hills were brought under permanent agency supervision. Chakra Bisoi was never captured and disappears from the record about 1855.
Civil disobedience on the plateau1930–1934
The first organised national political action in Koraput. Volunteers recruited after the enrolment drive of 1929, under Radhakrushna Biswasray, joined the civil disobedience movement and courted arrest.
Outcome: Arrests and short sentences, and a district Congress organisation that grew from almost nothing to more than fifty thousand enrolled members by October 1938.
Quit India in KoraputAugust 1942
On 21 August 1942 Laxman Nayak led villagers to hoist the Congress flag at the police station at Mathili; police fired on the crowd and many were killed and injured. Later the same month a firing at Papadahandi in the Nabarangpur country killed a large number of demonstrators. Similar actions were recorded at Umerkote, Raighar, Padwa, Nandapur, Jeypore and Malkangiri.
Outcome: Mass arrests across the district. Laxman Nayak was charged with murder, sentenced on 13 November 1942 and hanged at Berhampur jail on 29 March 1943.
The praja mandal movement in the feudatory states1937–1947
In the states below the ghat the demand was for an end to forced labour and irregular levies and for rights of association and publication. Praja mandals were formed in most of the garjat states after the second All Orissa States People's Conference in 1937, and an All Orissa Garjat Day was observed on 29 October 1938.
Outcome: The states' administrations were opened to scrutiny and, by the end of 1947, almost all of them had agreed to merge with the province.