BharatSangraha

South Odisha & Ganjam · Eastern Coastal Plains

Freedom fighters

Two quite different things happened here and only one of them was national. The first was the Kondh resistance of the hills, which ran from the 1830s to the 1850s and was about the administration reaching a tract that had never been administered — its leaders were hereditary hill officers, not politicians, and its demands were about the hills, not about India. The second was the campaign to move this plain out of the Madras Presidency, which occupied the region's public life from about 1903 to 1936 and was carried by newspapers, memorials and a maharaja rather than by mass action. Congress organisation arrived late, and when it did, in 1930, its salt camp at Huma was staffed largely by the same people who had been arguing about the boundary. Anyone looking here for an 1857 will not find one.

Risings and revolts

The Ghumsur risings1835–1837

The death of Raja Dhananjaya Bhanja on 31 December 1835, during an unresolved revenue dispute with the Madras government, brought the Kondh villages of the upper Rushikulya into open resistance alongside members of the Bhanja family. A Company force under George Edward Russell entered the tract on 11 January 1836 and fought a hill campaign in which the Kondhs used the forest and the ghats rather than meeting the column.

Outcome: Ghumsur was taken under direct administration. Dora Bisoi was surrendered to the British in 1837 by the Raja of Angul; sentences on those tried ran from terms of years to transportation and death.

The Kondh risings and the meriah agency1837–1861

From 1845 a special agency operated in the Kondh hills to end the meriah rite and the taking of children for it. Its officers were the first outsiders to move regularly through these villages, and their presence, together with new demands for labour and tribute, kept the tract in intermittent revolt. From 1846 the resistance was led by Chakra Bisoi across the Ghumsur, Kandhamal and Kalahandi borders.

Outcome: The rite was suppressed and the hills were brought under a permanent agency administration. Chakra Bisoi was never captured and disappears from the record about 1855.

The campaign to transfer Ganjamc. 1903–1936

A press and petition campaign, argued from Berhampur and Paralakhemundi, that the Odia-speaking tracts of the northern Madras Presidency should be joined to the other Odia districts. It was conducted through the Utkal Sammilani sessions, evidence to boundary commissions, and the Odia newspapers founded at Berhampur from 1913.

Outcome: Ganjam and the Paralakhemundi tract were transferred to the new province of Orissa on 1 April 1936. The southern Telugu-majority mandals remained with Madras.

The salt satyagraha at HumaApril 1930

Volunteers made salt on the Ganjam coast at Huma, near Rambha, as the district's contribution to the civil disobedience movement. Biswanath Das, Niranjan Patnaik and Sarala Devi organised the camp.

Outcome: Arrests across the district and the first sustained Congress organisation in Ganjam, which carried through to the Quit India arrests of 1942.

People

NameYearsMovementKnown for
Dora BisoiThe Ghumsur hills died 1846 The Ghumsur risings of 1835–37 Hereditary bisoi who led the Kondh villages of the upper Rushikulya against the Company column from 1836, fighting in the ghats rather than on the plain.Surrendered in 1837 and died in prison at Ootacamund in 1846.
Chakra BisoiThe Kondh hills of Ghumsur, Kandhamal and Kalahandi active 1846 – c. 1855 The Kondh risings Led hill resistance to the agency administration for nearly a decade across three borders, keeping a force in being without a fort or a treasury.Never captured; he disappears from the record about 1855.
Sashibhusan RathSorada, Ganjam 1885–1943 The Odia language movement; civil disobedience Founded the weekly Asha at Berhampur in 1913 and the first Odia daily from the same press in 1928. His paper carried the case for transferring Ganjam, and his press printed nationalist literature, some of it later proscribed.Arrested in 1930 and released in 1931.
Biswanath DasBelgan, Ganjam 1889–1984 Civil disobedience; the campaign for a province Sat in the Madras legislative council from 1921 to 1930 and used it to press the Odia districts' case, then helped organise the Ganjam salt camp at Huma in April 1930. He became Prime Minister of Orissa in 1937.
Sarala DeviGanjam and coastal Odisha 1904–1986 Civil disobedience; Quit India One of the organisers of the Ganjam salt satyagraha at Huma in 1930 and among the first Odia women to take a public political role, later working on women's education and widow remarriage.Imprisoned during the movements of the 1930s and 1940s.
Niranjan PatnaikGanjam — Civil disobedience Among the organisers of the Ganjam salt campaign at Huma in April 1930 and of Congress work in the Berhampur and Rushikulya towns through the following decade.
Krushna Chandra Gajapati Narayan DeoParalakhemundi 1892–1974 The Odia language and province movement Put the Paralakhemundi estate's weight and money behind the demand for a single Odia-speaking province, and argued the case before the commissions and conferences that produced it in 1936. His seat was in the hills, not on the coast, which is why this region's politics were made at the scarp.

People from South Odisha & Ganjam who resisted colonial rule, and the regional risings and revolts that shaped that resistance. (11)