Resistance in this belt was to a frontier administration rather than to an empire, and the people involved were not fighting for a nation — there was no Congress organisation here, no newspaper, no electorate and no representation of any kind before 1947. What there was, in under forty years, was three armed episodes with specific and documented causes. The Singpho case is the best recorded: a Company enquiry after 1843 listed encroachment on land, the punishment of members of the community and instruction from the Tipam raja across the Patkai, and concluded that the principal cause was the abolition of slaveholding, on which the Singpho agrarian economy had depended. The Khamti case of 1839 turned on the Company's reduction of the position the Khamti chiefs held at Sadiya. The Ninu case of 1875 began with the treatment of a dead chief's body by a survey escort. The belt's other twentieth-century experience of a wider war was not political at all: an American military road and the Burma campaign came through the Pangsau pass between 1942 and 1945 and left again.
The Khamti rising at Sadiya28 January 1839 – 1843
About six hundred Tai Khamti fighters attacked the British military station at Sadiya before dawn in four simultaneous parties, taking the barracks and burning the arms store and the hospital. Adam White, the Political Agent, was killed, along with some seventy others. The attacking force then split, one part withdrawing towards the Abor hills and the other towards the Mishmi hills and Singpho country, and conducted a dispersed campaign from the hills for four more years.
Outcome: Suppressed by successive expeditions with the destruction of villages and standing crops; surrenders were taken between 1839 and 1843. The office of Sadiya Khowa Gohain was abolished and the frontier station was eventually moved.
The Singpho rising of 184310 January 1843
A Singpho force from beyond the Patkai attacked the British outpost at Ningroo, killing seven soldiers, and the Singpho of the Noa Dihing and Buri Dihing joined the action. It followed earlier attempts in 1830, when a joint Khampti and Singpho move against the Sadiya post was dispersed before it began, and in 1835.
Outcome: Suppressed within the year. Bisa Gam was found guilty of rebellion and imprisoned for life at Dibrugarh; the chief Ningroola submitted, was pardoned and released, and afterwards took up tea cultivation near his village. A school was opened at Saikhowa in the aftermath.
The Ninu affair1 February 1875
A survey party under Lieutenant Holcombe and Captain Badgley reached Ninu, one of the larger Wancho villages. Sepoys of the escort disturbed the body of the village's recently dead chief, and the village attacked the party the following morning; about eighty men were killed, Holcombe among them, and Badgley withdrew with roughly fifty survivors.
Outcome: Expeditions under Brigadier Nuthall destroyed Senua and burnt Ninu, Nisa and Longkai in the same year, and Ninu was attacked again after being rebuilt. Except around Banfera, Wancho villages were kept out of the plains until independence.