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Chapter 7: The Hills Answer Back
By the 1840s, the centre of resistance had moved further into the hill world.
Khondmals and Angul show another side of early Odisha resistance. Here the issue was not only revenue or succession. It was also cultural intrusion, religious practice, forest autonomy, and British suspicion of hill leaders.
The British described their intervention partly as reform, especially through the suppression of Meriah sacrifice. But reform came with soldiers, agents, surveillance, arrests, annexation, and political control.
The hills answered back.
The Khond Question
The Khonds were not outside history. They were part of Odisha’s political world, especially through Ghumsar, Baud, Daspalla, Angul, and the hill tracts.
British officials became concerned with the Meriah practice, involving human sacrifice among some Khond groups. Different officers debated method. Some favoured gradual persuasion. Others preferred more forceful intervention.
This is where moral reform and colonial expansion became entangled.
A government that comes to suppress a practice may also come to map, police, tax, discipline, and control. The Khonds did not experience intervention as a clean humanitarian project. They experienced it as an intrusion into their religion, leadership, and autonomy.
That fear made rebellion more likely.
Dora Bisoi And Chakra Bisoi
Dora Bisoi had already appeared in the Ghumsar resistance. After the suppression of Ghumsar, he remained difficult to capture. His survival kept a line of continuity between the earlier southern risings and later Khond unrest.
Chakra Bisoi became another major name in the hill resistance.
These figures belonged to a network of hill leadership, not to a world of isolated banditry. British authorities suspected them of inspiring unrest, sheltering rebels, promising restoration of old practices, and linking different hill groups.
Whether every accusation was true is less important than what the suspicion reveals. The British saw mobile hill leaders as dangerous because they could move where police and courts could not easily reach.
The hills protected memory.
Angul And Somanath Singh
Angul is one of the clearest examples of political necessity being dressed as administrative action.
Somanath Singh, the Raja of Angul, was proud, difficult, and often in conflict with British authority. There were disputes involving Daspalla, compensation, alleged violence, suspected shelter to rebels, and seizure of territory.
British officers investigated allegations. Some officials were not fully convinced that the case against Angul justified conquest. But the higher political logic was different.
Angul sat in a strategic position among Odisha’s tributary states. Control over Angul helped the British manage Dhenkanal, Baud, Daspalla, Keonjhar, and the wider interior. Sambalpur was already moving into British control. Angul was too important to leave uncertain.
Angul was conquered because political expediency required it, not simply because the Raja’s guilt had been proved.
Somanath Singh was removed and sent as a state prisoner.
Khondmal And British Intervention
In Khondmal, intervention around Meriah suppression and political control created repeated disturbances.
British agents tried to stop sacrifice, control chiefs, secure hostages or leaders, and establish authority in difficult terrain. The Khonds resisted when they feared their practices and independence were being destroyed.
The British response mixed military action with diplomacy. Some chiefs were punished. Others were won over. Some former opponents were used to suppress new risings.
This pattern had already appeared in Parlakimedi and Ghumsar. In the hills it became even more important because direct rule was difficult.
Where soldiers could not easily dominate, alliances and betrayal mattered more.
The Use Of Former Rebels
One of the saddest patterns in this period is the repeated use of former rebels against new rebels.
After Parlakimedi, some Bisois and Doras helped British operations.
After Ghumsar, appointed chiefs helped stabilize British control.
After the Khond and Angul disturbances, local intermediaries, former enemies, and rewarded men helped pursue people like Chakra Bisoi.
This does not mean these collaborators were simple cowards. Many were acting under pressure, calculation, rivalry, survival, or hope of retaining local power. But the effect was clear. The British did not need to understand every hill path if they could make one hill leader guide them against another.
Divide-and-rule was not only a slogan. It was an administrative method.
Smaller Risings Before 1857
After 1848, several smaller disturbances continued before 1857.
Chakra Bisoi remained at large. Khond unrest appeared in Ghumsar and Baud. Khondmals was annexed to British territory in 1856. The Savaras of Parlakimedi rose in 1856-1857 under Radhakrushna Dandasena, who was later hanged. Chakra Bisoi was suspected of connection.
These incidents were smaller than the earlier waves, but they show that the hill frontier had not become fully quiet.
British power had become stronger, but not beloved.
What The Hills Were Defending
The hill risings were not only about one custom, one chief, or one arrear.
They were defending a way of life in which authority was local, sacred practice was internal, forests and hills gave shelter, and outside officers had limited reach.
British rule threatened all of that. It came with abolition, survey, police, road, court, tribute, agent, military post, and political suspicion. Even when a specific reform had moral justification, the larger package was colonial control.
That is why the hills resisted longer than the plains.
The plains had already been entered by revenue and law. The hills still had space. As long as there was space, rebels could disappear, regroup, and survive.
That leaves the final question: after all this resistance, why did Odisha not become a major centre of the 1857 rebellion?