Khandesh's freedom-movement record has one national moment and one local one, and they are unlike each other. The national moment is Faizpur: in December 1936 the Congress held its annual session in a village in Yawal taluka rather than in a city, a decision about the party's rural direction that a cotton-and-banana district could physically support because it had the grain, the carts and the space. The local one is Nandurbar on 9 September 1942, where police fired on a schoolchildren's flag procession and killed five, and it is by a long way the best-documented thing that happened in this region during the whole movement. The Satpura slope has a third and much older record of resistance to forest and revenue regulation, but it survives mostly in administrative reports rather than in named biography, and this file does not supply names it cannot confirm.
Bhil and Pawra resistance on the Satpura slopec. 1818–1840s
For more than a decade after the British annexation of 1818 the hill tracts north of the Tapi were not administered in the ordinary way. Resistance was to forest and revenue regulation and to the extension of a settlement system into country that had been held by clan naiks, and it was met with a combination of amnesty, grain allowance and a police corps recruited from the Bhil communities themselves.
Outcome: The hill tracts were brought under administration by the middle of the century. Several of the communities involved were later listed under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, a designation that was not repealed until after Independence.
The Faizpur Congress session27–28 December 1936
The fiftieth annual session of the Indian National Congress was held at Faizpur, a village in Yawal taluka of Jalgaon district, presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru. It was the first session held outside a city, and it was organised around agrarian questions and a largely rural attendance.
Outcome: The session's agrarian programme shaped the Congress ministries formed after the 1937 elections.
The Nandurbar firing9 September 1942
During the Quit India movement a procession carrying the national flag was stopped by police at Mangal Bazar in Nandurbar. A lathi charge failed to disperse it and the police then opened fire.
Outcome: Five were killed: Shirishkumar Mehta, a schoolboy of fifteen, along with Dhansukhlal Wani, Ghanshyam Das, Shashidhar Ketkar and Laldas.