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Chapter 3: The Men Who Came to Study

Sometime in late 1836, a young officer of the Madras Army named Samuel Charters Macpherson arrived in the Kondh hills of Ghumsur — approximately 1,350 square miles of forested mountain terrain in the Eastern Ghats of southern Odisha. He had been sent to survey and investigate a practice that Mr. Russell of the Madras Board of Revenue had reported to official notice on August 12, 1836: the Meriah sacrifice, a ritual offering of human victims to the Earth Goddess Tari Pennu, performed by the Kondh people twice yearly at sowing and harvest. Macpherson was a surveyor, not a soldier — at least not initially. His job was to understand the Kondhs. He would spend the next decade trying to suppress them. He produced a report on the Kondhs of Ganjam and Cuttack in 1842 that remains one of the earliest systematic colonial documents on the community. He rescued 255 intended sacrificial victims by his count. He was humiliated at his camp in Bisipara in 1846 when Kandha revolutionaries forced him to surrender the Meriahs he had taken, threatening assassination. He returned with troops. He was removed by his own government when his aggressive methods made the region ungovernable. He died in 1860, having authored one of the foundational texts on a people he had simultaneously documented and destroyed. The report survived. The society it described did not — at least not in the form Macpherson found it.

Sixty-three years later, on Christmas Eve 1899, approximately seven thousand Munda men and women gathered across six police stations in the Ranchi and Singhbhum districts of the Chotanagpur plateau. They shot arrows and set fire to churches. Their leader was a twenty-four-year-old named Birsa Munda, who had declared himself a prophet and announced that the reign of Queen Victoria was over and the Munda Raj had begun. His slogan — Abua raj ete jana, maharani raj tundu jana (“Let the kingdom of the queen be ended and our kingdom be established”) — was not a desperate cry. It was a political programme. He was arrested on February 3, 1900, in the forests of Chaibasa while sleeping. He died in Ranchi Jail on June 9, 1900, at the age of twenty-five. The official cause was cholera. His followers did not believe it then. Historians do not believe it now.

Between Macpherson’s arrival and Birsa’s death — between 1836 and 1900 — a transformation occurred that did not merely exploit tribal societies. It redefined what “tribal” meant.

This chapter is about that redefinition. The colonial period in the tribal regions of Odisha and the broader Chotanagpur belt was not simply a chapter of conquest and extraction, though it was abundantly both. It was something more structurally interesting and more permanently damaging: a hostile takeover.

In the language of corporate finance, a hostile takeover is not just the acquisition of a company against its management’s wishes. That is the visible drama — the tender offer, the proxy fight, the boardroom confrontation. The deeper operation is what happens after the acquisition succeeds. The acquiring entity redefines the target’s value on its own terms. Assets that the original management considered core to the business are declared non-performing and liquidated. Operations that made sense under the old strategy are “restructured” to serve the acquirer’s priorities. The target’s management is replaced with people who answer to the new owner. And the target’s identity — its brand, its culture, its reason for existing — is absorbed into the acquirer’s narrative. The company that existed before the takeover is not destroyed. It is worse than destroyed. It is redefined.

The British colonial encounter with tribal Odisha followed this logic precisely. Forests that had been community commons were redefined as state property. Cultivation practices that had sustained communities for centuries were redefined as criminal trespass. Religious rituals were redefined as barbarism requiring intervention. Entire communities were redefined as inherently criminal. And the people who had managed these lands, practiced these rituals, and governed these communities for generations were redefined as primitive subjects requiring civilisation. The men who came to study — the surveyors, the ethnographers, the missionaries, the revenue officers — did not come merely to understand. They came to reclassify. And reclassification, in the colonial context, was the precursor to control.

The Humanitarian Pretext: Meriah Suppression and the Annexation of the Kondh Hills

The Meriah suppression campaign of 1835-1861 is the clearest illustration of how humanitarian intervention served as the mechanism for territorial acquisition — the colonial equivalent of an acquirer positioning a hostile bid as being “in the best interests of shareholders.”

The Kondh people inhabited the hills and jungles of the Eastern Ghats in southern and central Odisha — Kandhamal, Koraput, Ganjam, Kalahandi, Rayagada, Boudh. Their society was organized into exogamous clans with totemic names (Hikoka for horse, Kelka for kingfisher), governed through village councils where women participated in decision-making, owned property, chose their husbands, and could seek divorce. All clans owed allegiance to the Kondh Pradhan, the leader of the most powerful clan. It was, by the standards of the time, a remarkably egalitarian society — certainly more so than the caste Hindu plains communities that surrounded it.

The Meriah practice was real. The public sacrifice was offered twice a year to the Earth Goddess Tari Pennu, and the blood was sprinkled in fields to ensure fertility of the soil, good crops, and immunity from disease. The scale, however, is genuinely uncertain. Colonial officers described sacrifices “far larger than could readily be credited,” but these characterizations came from men with vested interests in justifying intervention. Felix Padel’s critical scholarship — The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa (Oxford University Press, 1995) — argues persuasively that the elaborate British reconstructions reveal more about colonial ideological needs than about Kondh society. Campbell wrote best-selling memoirs presenting himself as a heroic savior. The practice was presented in schoolbooks as evidence of “civilizational backwardness,” creating a narrative that justified not just the suppression of one ritual but the entire colonial penetration of the Kondh hills.

The timing is the tell. The British did not discover the Meriah practice through disinterested anthropological inquiry. They discovered it in 1835-36, during the military annexation of the Ghumsur hills following the death of the local raja Dhananjay Bhanja. The dissolution of the Bhanja ruling family was the immediate cause for British military intervention. General Stevenson engaged the territory in September 1835. By November, British forces had occupied the Kondh hills. George Edward Russell arrived in January 1836 with a large military force. The Meriah Agency was established by Government of India Act XXI of 1845 — not as an independent humanitarian body, but as an extension of the military-administrative apparatus that had already conquered the territory.

This is the hostile-takeover pattern in its purest form. The acquiring entity identifies a genuine problem at the target company (the Meriah practice was real, and it did involve human sacrifice), uses that problem to justify the takeover (humanitarian intervention), and then uses the acquisition to restructure the entire operation for the acquirer’s benefit (territorial control, revenue extraction, forest appropriation). The problem was real. The solution was not designed to solve the problem. It was designed to acquire the company.

The consequences make the pattern unmistakable. The British did not simply stop the Meriah practice and leave. They restructured Kondh society from the ground up. Administrative reorganization reduced self-governing units from 24 to 18 divisions and from 433 to 80 villages — dismantling the traditional governance architecture. For the first time in Kondh history, land revenue was collected through forceful means. Hundreds of Kondhs were imprisoned as forced laborers. Some were deported to Assam tea gardens. Forty rebels received death sentences, twenty-nine received life sentences. The kingdom of Ghumsur was annexed under the Doctrine of Lapse. By 1855, Kandhamal itself was annexed into British territory. The Meriah Agency was abolished in 1861, its duties transferred to local authorities. By then, the takeover was complete. The target had been fully absorbed.

The Kondhs did not accept this quietly. Dora Bisoi, a Beniah Kandha from Binjigiri village who served as Commander-in-Chief of the Bhanja Royal Army, led the first resistance from 1835 to 1837. His fighters killed thirteen sepoys and two European officers between Udaygiri and Durga Prasad. The British offered a reward of 5,000 rupees for his capture — and used Raja Somnath Singh of Angul to engineer his surrender. Dora Bisoi received life imprisonment and died in Ooty prison in 1846, a thousand miles from the hills he had defended.

His nephew Chakra Bisoi picked up the fight and maintained it for a full decade, from 1846 to 1856 — attacking police stations, disrupting communication lines, and protecting fellow Kondhs from British punitive expeditions. His associate Dandasena was captured and hanged. But Chakra Bisoi himself was never apprehended. He vanished in 1855, his ultimate fate unknown. The British, who had detailed records of every administrative division and every rescued Meriah victim, could not record how this story ended. Some stories resist the archive.

Across the entire suppression campaign, a total of 1,506 Meriah victims were reported rescued — 717 males and 789 females. The practice was gradually replaced with buffalo sacrifice, which continues in modified form to the present day. These are the numbers the British recorded as their achievement. What they did not record is what they took: political autonomy, religious freedom, land, forests, governance, and an entire generation of Kondh leaders killed, imprisoned, or driven into hiding.

The Great Enclosure: How Forests Became State Property

If the Meriah suppression was a targeted acquisition of the Kondh hills, the Forest Acts were a leveraged buyout of the entire tribal landscape. Between 1865 and 1927, three pieces of legislation accomplished what no military campaign could have: they turned every forest-dwelling community in India from steward to encroacher without anyone leaving their home.

Before 1865, there was no concept of “state ownership” of forests in the Indian context. Forests were commons, managed through customary practices by local communities. Different groups — tribal, pastoral, artisanal — had recognized, overlapping use rights that had evolved over generations. Sacred groves were protected by religious custom. Community forests were managed through village institutions. The Mughal state collected some forest revenue but did not assert ownership or attempt systematic management. In Odisha’s princely states, forests fell under the domain of the local raja, but tribal communities had established customary rights that were generally respected. The Jeypore Zamindari in Koraput controlled vast forests, but tribal cultivation and gathering rights were embedded in the feudal arrangement.

Then Dietrich Brandis arrived.

Brandis was a German-trained forest officer who had managed teak forests in the Pegu region of Burma. In 1864, he was appointed the first Inspector General of Forests to the Government of India. He imported the German model of centralized, “scientific” forest management — systematic surveys, growth assessments, management plans designed to calculate how much timber could be extracted annually. The model had no precedent in Indian law or custom. It assumed that forests were a resource to be administered by a centralized state authority. This assumption was, in the Indian context, a legal fiction — but it was a legal fiction backed by the full coercive power of the colonial state.

The Indian Forest Act of 1865, based on Brandis’s recommendations, granted the colonial government sweeping authority to declare any land covered with trees as “government forest.” The definition of “forest” was deliberately vague, enabling authorities to classify virtually any vegetated area as state property. The purpose was revenue. The railway network’s expansion — from 32 kilometres in 1853 to 51,000 by 1910 — created massive timber demand. Each two-kilometre rail section required approximately 900 wooden sleepers. Indian hardwoods, particularly teak, sal, and deodar, were consumed at industrial scale. Shipbuilding, iron smelting, and export markets added further pressure.

The 1878 Act tightened the grip through a three-tier classification system. Reserved Forests came under complete government control, with all activities prohibited unless explicitly permitted. Before designation, legal settlements were supposed to document indigenous rights — but in practice, these rights were converted from inherent community entitlements to “mere privileges that could be revoked at any time.” Protected Forests retained some nominal community access, but with restrictions complex enough to make compliance nearly impossible. Village Forests, the lowest tier, covered the smallest area and offered the least. The system was brilliantly designed: it appeared to preserve some rights while creating a legal architecture that could extinguish them at will.

Shifting cultivation — podu in Odisha, jhum in the northeast — was specifically targeted. The practice involved clearing a section of forest for two to three years, then allowing it to regenerate over a fallow period of seven to fifteen years while moving to a new plot. It was not the mindless destruction the British portrayed. Focus group studies have estimated that about half of tribal food baskets came from the forest, distributed between podu cultivation and non-timber forest product collection. The practice maintained a symbiotic relationship with forest ecology. But to the colonial revenue apparatus, podu was doubly offensive: it was difficult to tax (the plots moved), and it was difficult to reconcile with the idea of fixed state ownership (the forest was being used by people who did not own it, by a definition of ownership they did not recognize).

The Indian Forest Act of 1927 consolidated everything into a single framework. Shifting cultivation was explicitly banned. Criminal penalties were attached. Tribal people engaged in podu cultivation, which they had practiced for centuries, could now be arrested, fined, and imprisoned for doing what their grandparents had done freely.

In southern Odisha, the situation was complicated by a jurisdictional wrinkle that made things worse. Koraput and Ganjam fell under the Madras Presidency and were governed by the Madras Forest Act of 1882, which restricted free movement in forest habitats, grazing, firewood collection, food gathering, and podu. In the Jeypore Zamindari, 1,615 square miles were declared Reserved and Protected Land by 1939 — without detailed settlement of tribal rights. This was the single largest act of forest dispossession in southern Odisha. The tribal people, unable to farm, graze, or collect food, faced starvation and were used as forced labor for road construction.

Here is the hostile-takeover metaphor at its most precise. In a corporate acquisition, the acquirer’s first move is often to redefine the target’s assets on the balance sheet. What the previous management valued as core infrastructure, the acquirer designates as underperforming and marks for disposal. What the previous management treated as community resources (employee benefits, R&D investment, long-term projects), the acquirer restructures for short-term extraction.

The Forest Acts did exactly this. Forests that communities had managed for generations were redesignated as state assets. People who had been stewards were reclassified as trespassers. Practices that had sustained both communities and ecosystems for centuries were criminalized. The entire relationship between people and land was restructured — not to serve the people who lived there, but to serve the timber requirements of a railway network they would never own and an export economy from which they would never benefit.

The numbers in present-day Odisha tell the residual story. Of the state’s 61,204 square kilometres of Recorded Forest Area, 36,049 square kilometres (58.9%) are Reserved Forest and 24,947 square kilometres (40.75%) are Protected Forest. Only 208 square kilometres (0.35%) are Unclassed Forest. Approximately 40% of these government forests have never been properly surveyed. More than 300,000 people live in protected areas. More than 700 villages exist inside wildlife sanctuaries, with inhabitants classified as encroachers on land their ancestors cleared and managed before the concept of “state forest” existed.

The post-independence state did not reverse this. The Orissa Forest Act of 1972 repealed the Madras Forest Act but borrowed most of its fundamental features. Section 10 specifically addressed podu cultivation, explicitly criminalizing the practice in independent India’s legislation. The 2006 Forest Rights Act finally acknowledged the “historical injustice” — 141 years after the first Forest Act. But acknowledgment and remedy are different things. The framework Brandis built in 1864 still structures the relationship between tribal communities and the forests they inhabit.

The Racial Catalogue: How Living Cultures Became Museum Specimens

The Forest Acts restructured the physical landscape. The colonial ethnographic project restructured the conceptual one. If the Forest Acts were the financial restructuring of the hostile takeover — the asset stripping, the balance sheet manipulation — then colonial ethnography was the rebranding. It redefined who these people were.

Herbert Hope Risley, a British ethnographer and member of the Indian Civil Service, saw India as “an ethnological laboratory.” His reasoning was simple and devastating: the continued practice of endogamy ensured strict delineation of communities by caste, and therefore caste could be viewed as identical to race. Using anthropometric measurements — nasal index, cephalic index, skin tone — Risley divided the people of India into seven racial types: Aryo-Dravidian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Mongolo-Dravidian, Mongoloid, Scytho-Dravidian, and Turko-Iranian. His sample sizes ranged from just 30 to 100 individuals. He “carefully chose his specimens,” introducing severe selection bias. His biological interpretation of caste — correlating physical measurements with social hierarchy — has been thoroughly discredited by modern anthropology.

But Risley’s lasting damage was not the racial taxonomy itself. It was the census. As Census Commissioner for the 1901 Census, Risley restructured the enumeration of India’s entire population around caste, attributing its creation to interactions between invading Indo-Aryans and native Dravidians. This institutionalized caste and tribal distinctions, making them more rigid than they had been in pre-colonial practice. Communities that had fluid identities and porous boundaries were assigned fixed labels. The distinction between “tribe” (wild, primitive, forest-dwelling) and “caste” (settled, Hindu, civilised) was hardened into an administrative binary that had not existed in those terms before the British imposed it.

Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891, four volumes) covered the communities of the Bengal Presidency, which included parts of present-day Odisha. His ethnographic glossaries contained detailed information about tribal customs, languages, and social practices in the Chotanagpur-Odisha region. The data is valuable if read with critical awareness of his biases. The framework it was embedded in was poison.

Edgar Thurston, Superintendent of the Madras Government Museum, extended the project southward. Appointed to the Ethnographic Survey of India in 1901, Thurston produced seven volumes of Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909), covering over 300 social groups across the Madras Presidency, including the Kondh communities of Ganjam and the Odisha-Andhra border region. His documentation of Kondh customs, including accounts of the Meriah practice derived from the reports of Macpherson and Campbell, remains a key source — but every observation was filtered through the assumption that these were “traditional” practices of “primitive” peoples, specimens to be catalogued rather than strategies to be understood.

Edward Tuite Dalton, a colonel based in Ranchi in the heart of Chotanagpur tribal territory, produced Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872), with 39 hand-coloured lithographed portraits. The work was originally commissioned for an exhibition of “primitive tribes” at the Asiatic Society of Bengal — though the exhibition was abandoned due to the logistical and ethical problems of transporting tribal people to Calcutta. That origin tells you everything about the framework. The subjects were specimens first, people second.

What Risley and Thurston had in common was what might be called the museum effect. The very act of recording customs as “traditional” practices implied that they were relics of the past, out of step with modernity. Living, evolving cultures were frozen into taxonomic categories. The ethnographic volumes treated tribal societies as static and timeless — “living fossils” of an earlier human condition. This denied tribal communities their own histories of change, adaptation, and agency.

The hostile-takeover analogy illuminates the structural function. When an acquirer takes over a company, one of the first moves is to hire consultants to produce a comprehensive assessment of the target. The assessment is not neutral. It is framed in the acquirer’s language, using the acquirer’s metrics, serving the acquirer’s strategy. The target’s strengths become weaknesses (“too dependent on legacy products”), and the target’s culture becomes a liability (“resistant to change”). The assessment creates the intellectual justification for the restructuring that follows.

Risley, Thurston, and Dalton were the consultants. Their ethnographic surveys produced the intellectual justification for colonial policy. Classification determined governance. Communities assigned to the bottom of the civilizational hierarchy received the most interventionist policies. Communities classified as “criminal” received the harshest surveillance. Communities classified as “primitive” received the least investment. The knowledge was not incidental to the control. It was the precursor.

Born Criminal: How the Colonial State Invented Hereditary Guilt

The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was the most extreme expression of the classification-as-control logic. It legislated that entire communities were inherently criminal — not by what individuals did, but by what their community was.

Section 3 permitted local authorities to designate entire communities as “addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences.” Members of designated communities were required to register with police, providing thumb impressions and names. They needed permission to travel. They had to report to police stations weekly, or as directed. Police could arrest any member without warrant for violating these conditions. The government established “reform communities” — effectively internment camps — where “vocational training” was provided. In practice, settled populations became bonded labor for jute mills and railways.

The intellectual framework was explicitly racial. British officials used the concepts of race and caste to depict entire communities as hereditary criminals without substantive legal or incriminating evidence. They termed the groups “tribes” instead of “castes” to evoke qualities of wildness and savagery. George MacMunn, a British military officer, described members of criminal tribes as “absolute slime” and “beasts of the field.” By 1931, the colonial government listed 237 criminal castes and tribes under the Act in the Madras Presidency alone. At independence in 1947, thirteen million people in 127 communities across India were subject to the legislation.

In Odisha, the Lodha people of Mayurbhanj and Balasore were categorized and declared a criminal tribe in 1916 under Government notification No. 7022-23. The Lodha had been traditionally dependent on forests for their livelihood — hunting, gathering wild roots and tubers. Having been deprived of their livelihood by forest restrictions and without alternatives, some reportedly turned to theft and were subsequently branded a criminal tribe. The circular logic is breathtaking: deprive a community of its livelihood, wait for desperation to produce crime, then classify the entire community as criminal.

The label was formally repealed in 1952. The Lodha received Scheduled Tribe status in 1956 and PVTG (Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group) recognition in the 1980s. But stigma is not repealed by legislation. During his tenure as Superintendent of Police in Mayurbhanj in 1991-92 — forty years after denotification — IPS officer M. Nageswara Rao encountered Lodha community members routinely treated as suspects by default. The Kharia Sabara, another community declared criminal during colonial rule, still have no permission to enter village temples in the Purulia-Odisha border region, according to academic studies. Their exploitation and exclusion is, as one study puts it, “discernible from all angles.”

The Criminal Tribes Act was replaced after independence by the Habitual Offenders Act of 1952 — which continued similar logic under a different name. Today, 313 Nomadic Tribes and 198 Denotified Tribes across India continue to face alienation and stereotyping. Many have been denied Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, or Other Backward Classes status, which would have allowed them to access reservation benefits.

This is the rebranding phase of the hostile takeover. The acquirer does not merely acquire the target’s assets. It redefines the target’s identity to serve the acquirer’s narrative. Communities that had lived autonomously for centuries were assigned an identity — “criminal tribe” — that had nothing to do with their history, culture, or self-understanding. It was an identity created entirely by the acquirer, for the acquirer’s administrative convenience, using the acquirer’s pseudo-scientific frameworks. And like many corporate rebrandings, it stuck long after the acquirer departed.

The Double-Edged Arrival: Missionaries in Tribal Odisha

The missionary encounter is the hardest part of the colonial story to hold honestly, because it was genuinely both things at once. Missionaries brought literacy, healthcare, and social dignity to communities that the colonial state and caste Hindu society had abandoned. They also disrupted traditional religious systems, created new divisions within tribal communities, and — whether intentionally or not — served the broader colonial project of cultural transformation.

The numbers tell the structural story. Christians among Scheduled Tribes in Odisha numbered 816,981 in the 2011 Census — 70.33% of all Christians in the state. Among the Oraon, approximately 41.8% identify as Christian — the highest conversion rate among Odisha’s tribal groups. The geographic concentration maps directly onto the areas of deepest colonial penetration: Kandhamal at 20.31% Christian, Sundargarh at 18.39%, Koraput at 4.97%. The coastal plains — Ganjam, Puri — are below 1%.

The Baptist missionaries arrived first, establishing a station in Cuttack on February 12, 1822. William Bampton and James Peggs came from the Serampore Mission. Amos Sutton followed in 1825, producing the first Odia grammar in 1831, translating the Bible into Odia, establishing an Odia-language printing press, and training the first Odia evangelists. The missionaries created the first primary school in Odisha. The infrastructure of Odia literacy — the grammar, the printed books, the educational institutions — has missionary fingerprints on its foundations.

The Great Orissa Famine of 1866 (Na-Anka Durbhiksha) was the inflection point. At least one million people died — roughly one-third of the population. The Protestant mission network, having already established orphanages, became one of the few options for famine orphans. Mrs. Buckley’s orphanage in Cuttack contained 321 orphans, of which 231 were famine victims. An estimated 1,553 famine orphans were placed under guardians receiving three rupees per month. The conversion dynamic was structural: since famine victims ate in relief centres set up by missionaries, they were regarded as outcastes by Hindu society — unlike those who ate in centres run by temples or zamindars. The caste system’s own exclusionary logic pushed famine survivors toward Christianity.

German missionaries of the Schleswig-Holstein Evangelical Lutheran Mission reached Koraput in 1882. Rev. Ernest Pohl and Rev. Herman Bothmann established stations at Koraput, Kotpad (1885), Jeypore (1886), and Nowrangpur (1889). The Jeypore Evangelical Lutheran Church now has more than 250,000 members. The Canadian Baptist Mission worked among the Sora people in the Ganjam hills from 1905 — a community considered even lower than “untouchables” in the social hierarchy. The first two decades of mission work produced almost nothing. As Rev. Glendinning noted with honest exhaustion, “The Souras had not a shadow of interest in our message.” But the medical mission — the Serango Christian Hospital established in 1924 — changed the relationship.

The hospitals matter. Christian Hospital Bissamcuttack serves 53 tribal villages with 12,700 residents. Christian Hospital Berhampur has been operating since 1900. These institutions worked in areas where the state had negligible healthcare presence — and still does. Current vacancy rates for medical specialists in tribal areas of Odisha exceed 75%.

But here is what missionaries disrupted. Conversion did not simply add a new religious option to an existing menu. It fractured communities. When some members of a Kondh village converted and others did not, the social bonds that had held the community together — the shared rituals, the collective relationship with ancestral deities, the communal governance around sacred groves — were severed. New forms of religion, administration, and community organization replaced self-administered Adivasi institutions. The missionaries acquired land that became Christian spaces, fostering clergy dominance in formerly egalitarian tribal cultures.

The Baptist missionaries of the Ghumsur campaign collaborated with British forces, providing intelligence on Kondh locations and grain storage sites. This is a fact that cannot be explained away. The men who came to heal were, in this instance, also the men who came to help conquer.

And the deepest consequence is visible not in the nineteenth century but in the twenty-first. The Kondh community in Kandhamal — already fractured by 170 years of colonial and post-colonial pressures — was further divided along religious lines. The 2007-08 Kandhamal communal violence, in which over 100 people died, 56,000 were displaced, and 395 churches were destroyed, cannot be understood without this colonial-era foundation. The missionary encounter did not cause the violence. But it created the fault line along which the violence ran. That fault line was laid in the nineteenth century. It is a later chapter’s subject. Here, the point is that the colonial period’s disruptions are not historical curiosities. They are active geological forces.

The Century of Fire: Tribal Rebellions as Hostile-Takeover Defence

Every hostile takeover provokes a defence. The target’s management fights. Shareholders resist. Employees protest. Sometimes the defence succeeds and the acquisition fails. Sometimes it forces concessions that limit the acquirer’s control. Sometimes it fails entirely, and the target is absorbed. But the defence always happens, because people do not submit to the redefinition of their world without a fight.

Across the Odisha-Chotanagpur belt, tribal communities fought the colonial takeover for an unbroken century — from the Paik Rebellion of 1817 to Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan of 1899-1900, and beyond to Laxman Naik’s martyrdom in 1942. The rebellions are sometimes taught as isolated events. They were not. They were a continuous defence against a continuous acquisition.

The structural pattern was so consistent that it operates almost as a law. Step one: external assertion of sovereignty over territory that tribal communities considered their own by custom, by clearing, by habitation for generations. Step two: introduction of intermediaries — zamindars, thikadars, moneylenders, missionaries — who were not subject to tribal social norms and who extracted value from tribal land and labor. Step three: destruction of traditional governance — the manki-munda system of the Mundas, the bisoi system of the Kondhs, the bhuyan kingmaker tradition in Keonjhar — replacing it with colonial administrative structures that excluded tribal authority. Step four: armed resistance organized along traditional kinship and clan networks, using guerrilla tactics adapted to forested terrain that tribal fighters knew and colonial armies did not. Step five: military suppression followed by partial acknowledgment of grievances. Step six: resumption of encroachment under modified forms, triggering the next cycle.

The Paik Rebellion of 1817 — Odisha’s first major armed uprising against the East India Company, predating 1857 by four decades — was not primarily a tribal rebellion. But it had a critical tribal component: a 400-strong party of Kandhas crossed into Khurda from Ghumsur, openly declaring rebellion against Company rule. They joined forces with the Paikas under Bakshi Jagabandhu’s leadership, using Lord Jagannath as the symbol of unity. The pattern was already established: tribal communities joining broader anti-colonial coalitions when their autonomy was threatened.

The Kol Insurrection of 1831-32 brought the pattern into full definition. The Mundas, Oraons, Hos, and Bhumijs of the Chotanagpur plateau rose against the thikadar system — non-tribal contractors who had been imposed as rent-farmers over tribal lands, who imposed forced labor, levied arbitrary fines, and confiscated tribal cattle. The houses of many diku (outsider) landlords were burnt. The rebellion spread across Ranchi, Singhbhum, Hazaribagh, Palamau, and into the Singhbhum border region adjoining Odisha’s Sundargarh and Keonjhar districts. It was suppressed “with a good deal of trouble” by several hundred British troops. The British partially acknowledged the legitimacy of tribal grievances by creating the South-West Frontier Agency — a concession that did not prevent the next rebellion.

The Santhal Rebellion of 1855-56 was the largest in scale. On June 30, 1855, two brothers, Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu, gathered approximately 10,000 Santhals, claiming they had been visited by Thakur Bonga (the great spirit), who had instructed them to drive out outsiders. From an initial gathering of 10,000, the movement grew rapidly. It was suppressed with extreme violence: an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Santhals were killed. Sidhu was hanged. Kanhu was executed on February 23, 1856. The rebellion’s geographic scope extended into Mayurbhanj, where the Santhal population remains significant. The British response included the creation of the Santhal Parganas — a separate administrative unit with special regulations intended to protect tribal land from alienation. The pattern repeats: suppress the rebellion, partially acknowledge the grievance, resume the encroachment.

In Sambalpur, Veer Surendra Sai maintained a guerrilla resistance from 1827 to 1864 — thirty-seven years. Though a descendant of the Chauhan royal family and therefore not himself tribal, his rebellion was fundamentally a tribal uprising. The Gond zamindars of Kolabira, Paharsirgira, Bheren, Kharsal, Kodabaga, and a dozen other garjats provided the fighting force. The Gond, Binjhal, and Kisan communities used their knowledge of the forested terrain for guerrilla warfare that the British could not break for years. Surendra Sai spent seventeen years in Hazaribagh Jail (1840-1857), was freed by rebellious sepoys during the 1857 Revolt, fought again until 1864, then spent twenty more years in Asirgarh Fort, where he lost his eyesight and died in 1884. His brother Ujjal Sai was hanged at Bolangir without trial. The freedom movement of 1857 in Sambalpur was, as colonial records acknowledge, “essentially a tribal uprising.”

The Keonjhar Irony: When the Novelist Became the Oppressor

The Bhuyan rebellions in Keonjhar deserve separate attention not only for their content but for a paradox that captures the colonial era’s moral complexity more precisely than any abstract analysis could.

The Bhuyans of Keonjhar held a traditional prerogative that was the core of their political identity: they were the kingmakers. The Bhuyan chiefs had the customary right to crown or reject the king. When the British interfered in the succession following Maharaja Gadadhar Bhanja’s death in 1861, they struck at this foundational principle.

The first rebellion in 1867, led by Ratna Naik, was an explicit defence of this traditional authority. Ratna Naik organized the Bhuyans, Juangs, and Kols into a fighting force. On April 28, 1868, they stormed the palace, abducted the Dewan and court officers. The Dewan was assassinated. The punishment was severe: ten leaders, including Ratna Naik, were sentenced to death.

The second rebellion in 1891, led by Dharanidhar Naik, was driven by the Machhakandana dam project — specifically, the brutal treatment of Bhuyans forced to dig a hill stream under the bethi (forced labor) system with minimal or no salary. Royal officers forced tribal laborers to work under conditions that produced revolt.

And here is the paradox. The Dewan of Keonjhar state at the time of the 1891 uprising was Fakirmohan Senapati — the father of modern Odia literature, the author of Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third), the pioneering novel that dissects zamindari exploitation with devastating precision. Senapati, the man who most powerfully documented agrarian injustice in Odia literature, was simultaneously an administrator in a system the tribals found oppressive enough to rebel against. Dharanidhar Naik was “not pleased with Fakir Mohan Senapati’s appointment as Diwan.” The Bhuyans considered him “a hindrance to their progress.” During the uprising, the rebels captured Senapati himself while he was traveling to meet Commissioner Toynbee.

The writer who understood exploitation in the abstract was participating in it in the concrete. This is not a contradiction that can be resolved by declaring Senapati a hypocrite. It is a structural truth: the colonial and feudal system was so pervasive that even its most incisive critics operated within it. The man who saw the machine clearly still turned its gears. If there is a margin-of-safety caveat to apply here, it is this: I am not confident (perhaps 60%) that Senapati was personally responsible for the bethi abuses rather than the system he administered. But his position as Dewan placed him within the chain of authority that produced the conditions for revolt. The irony is structural, not merely personal.

(Cross-reference: The Churning Fire, Ch. 3 — on consciousness-shifters and the gap between seeing a system and changing it. Senapati saw the system. He documented it with genius. But he did not exit it.)

Birsa Munda and the Counter-Offer

Every hostile takeover has a moment when the target’s management presents a counter-offer — an alternative vision of what the company could become if left to develop on its own terms. The counter-offer rarely succeeds. But it defines what was lost.

Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan was the counter-offer.

The Mundas of the Chotanagpur plateau — Ranchi, Singhbhum, and extending into Odisha’s Sundargarh and Sambalpur districts — practiced a communal land tenure system called khuntkatti. Land belonged collectively to the khuntkattidar, the descendants of the founding families who had originally cleared it. Individual families held hereditary cultivation rights but could not alienate or sell land outside the clan. The concept of individual ownership and sale of land was alien to Munda custom.

This system was systematically destroyed during the nineteenth century. Jagirdars and thikadars arrived as merchants and moneylenders. British administrative frameworks enabled non-tribal dikus to penetrate tribal regions. Khuntkatti lands were appropriated through debt bondage, fraudulent contracts, and administrative manipulation. The Kol Insurrection of 1831-32 was the first armed response. It did not reverse the dispossession.

By the 1890s, Birsa Munda — born November 15, 1875, in Ulihatu village near Khunti — had developed a syncretic religious-political vision that was not merely a rebellion but an alternative programme. His concept of “Birsa Raj” or “Munda Raj” was the establishment of an ideal agrarian order free from European officials, missionaries, and diku landlords. He rejected both Christianity (though he had been educated at a German Mission school) and certain traditional practices he considered weaknesses. He declared the reign of Queen Victoria ended and the Munda Raj begun.

This was a counter-offer in the hostile-takeover sense: not merely a rejection of the acquirer’s terms, but a statement that the target company had a viable independent strategy. Birsa’s vision incorporated reformed religious practice, agricultural self-sufficiency, and political sovereignty. It was a programme for a tribal future that was neither the colonial present nor a nostalgic return to a pre-colonial past.

Around Christmas 1899, approximately 7,000 Munda men and women assembled. Birsa united diverse tribal groups from Chotanagpur, Bengal, and Odisha — including Oraons and Kharias — against the British and their local allies. His organizational skills bridged traditional inter-tribal divisions. The movement covered six police stations in Ranchi and Singhbhum.

He was arrested on February 3, 1900. He died in Ranchi Jail on June 9, at the age of twenty-five.

The counter-offer was rejected. The takeover was completed. But the counter-offer left a legislative trace: the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, enacted eight years after Birsa’s death, prohibited the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals, recognized the khuntkatti tenure system, and recorded customary community rights on forest produce and grazing. It was placed in the Ninth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, beyond judicial review. Birsa died in custody. His demands became law.

India’s largest hockey stadium — in Rourkela, Sundargarh district, Odisha, in the heart of Munda territory within the state — is named after him. November 15 is celebrated as Janjatiya Gaurav Divas. His image appears on Indian currency. The man who declared the queen’s kingdom ended and the people’s kingdom begun is now memorialised by the very state apparatus whose predecessor killed him.

(Cross-reference: The Churning Fire, Ch. 3 — Birsa Munda as consciousness-shifter. Delhi’s Odisha, Ch. 6 — PESA as the unimplemented continuation of what Birsa fought for. The Long Arc, Ch. 1 — the zamindari system imposed simultaneously on tribal regions.)

The Takeover’s Balance Sheet

What did the colonial period actually do to tribal Odisha? Not in the language of moral judgment — that verdict is clear enough — but in the language of structural transformation?

It is possible, though the evidence permits uncertainty, to construct a balance sheet.

What was acquired (taken from tribal control):

Forests: From community commons to state property. In present-day Odisha: 36,049 sq km of Reserved Forest, 24,947 sq km of Protected Forest, 700+ villages classified as encroachments in wildlife sanctuaries, 300,000+ people living in protected areas as de facto trespassers.
Land: From customary tenure (khuntkatti, podu rotation) to individual/state ownership. More than 50% of tribal land in Odisha has been lost to non-tribals over 25-30 years through indebtedness, mortgage, and forcible possession. From 1951 to 1995, approximately 1.5 million people were displaced by developmental projects, with 42% from tribal communities.
Governance: From the bisoi system, the manki-munda system, the bhuyan kingmaker tradition, to colonial administrative structures and their post-colonial successors.
Identity: From self-defined communities with fluid boundaries and evolving practices to fixed categories in census schedules, ethnographic surveys, and administrative classifications.

What was introduced (imposed on tribal society):

Literacy and print: The first Odia grammar (1831), the first schools, the first printed books. The infrastructure of modern Odia language has missionary origins.
Healthcare: Medical facilities in areas where neither the colonial state nor the post-colonial state provided adequate care. Many of these institutions still operate.
Legal protections: The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908), the Santhal Parganas regulations, the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution — all products of rebellion, all incomplete.
New identities: Christianity provided an alternative identity with inherent human dignity for communities classified as subhuman by caste Hindu society. Among the Sora, who were considered below “untouchables,” conversion was a structural escape from the bottom of a hierarchy they had not chosen.

What was created (new categories that did not exist before):

The category “tribal” itself: The boundaries between “tribal” and “non-tribal” communities were far more permeable and context-dependent before the colonial census imposed a hard binary. The very concept of “tribe” as distinct from “caste” was partly a colonial construction. It has become one of the most consequential categories in Indian public life.
The “encroacher”: A person who lives where they have always lived but who the state has declared has no right to be there.
The “criminal tribe”: A community whose identity is defined not by its own culture but by the state’s suspicion.

The deepest structural consequence — the one that persists most completely — is not any individual policy or law. It is the framework itself. The colonial period did not just exploit tribal Odisha. It created the conceptual vocabulary through which tribal Odisha is still understood, governed, and debated. “Scheduled Tribe” is a colonial category, refined and constitutionalised but not reinvented. “Reserved Forest” is a colonial legal fiction, continued into post-colonial law. “Shifting cultivation” remains a practice that the state seeks to eliminate rather than understand. The hostile takeover succeeded in its deepest objective: it redefined the target on its own terms, and the redefinition outlasted the acquirer.

The men who came to study did not leave when the British departed in 1947. Their categories stayed. Their frameworks stayed. Their legal fictions stayed. The next chapters of this series — on post-independence policy, on Niyamgiri and Kalinganagar and Kandhamal — will document how independent India continued operating within structures the colonial state built, using categories the colonial ethnographers invented, enforcing laws the colonial forest department drafted.

Macpherson’s report survived. The society it described did not survive in the form he found it. But it survived — adapted, fractured, diminished, persistent. The Kondh still sacrifice buffaloes where their ancestors offered Meriahs. The Bhuyans still claim their kingmaker heritage. The Mundas still invoke Birsa’s name. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 finally acknowledged the “historical injustice” — using, it should be noted, the coloniser’s language of legal remedy to address the coloniser’s legal crime.

The churning continues.

Sources

Primary Scholarly Works

Felix Padel, The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa (Oxford University Press, 1995); republished as Sacrificing People: Invasions of a Tribal Landscape (Orient BlackSwan, 2009)
Herbert Hope Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, 4 volumes (Bengal Secretariat Press, 1891)
Edgar Thurston and K. Rangachari, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 7 volumes (Government Press, Madras, 1909)
Edward Tuite Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1872)
S.C. Macpherson, Report upon the Khonds of the Districts of Ganjam and Cuttack (1842)
Verrier Elwin, A Philosophy for NEFA (Adviser’s Secretariat, Shillong, 1957)
Ramachandra Guha, “An early environmental debate: The making of the 1878 forest act,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 27:1 (1990)
Dasarathi Swaro, The Christian Missionaries in Orissa: Their Impact on Nineteenth Century Society (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1990)
Bidyut Mohanty, A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste and Class in the 1866 Famine of Orissa (Routledge, 2022)

Colonial and Institutional Records

The Indian Forest Act, 1865; The Indian Forest Act, 1878; The Indian Forest Act, 1927
The Madras Forest Act, 1882
The Orissa Forest Act, 1972 (India Code)
The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871
The Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act, 1908 (Bengal Act 6 of 1908)
The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006
Government of India Act XXI of 1845 (Meriah Agency)
1881 Census data (Ghumsur region); 1901 Census (Risley restructuring); 2011 Census (Christian population data)
Forest Survey of India, ISFR 2019 Vol. II, Odisha

Journal Articles and Academic Papers

“Suppression of Meriah Sacrifice Among Khond Tribe” (Social Research Foundation)
“Human Sacrifice Among the Khonds of Orissa c.1836-1861” (MZUHSS Journal)
“Christianity and Liberation: A Study of the Canadian Baptist Mission among the Savaras in Ganjam,” Religions 13:10 (2022)
“Spirituality and Conflict in Healthcare: The History of the Canadian Baptists and Medical Mission in Orissa,” Histories 1:2 (2021)
C.J. Fuller, “Herbert Risley, William Crooke, and the Study of Tribes and Castes” (LSE, 2017)
“Keonjhar Uprisings, 1867 & 1891” (Academia.edu)
“Bhuyan and Juang Rebellion during British Rule” (EU Academic)
“Birsa Munda’s Fight Against Feudal and Colonial Systems” (IJCRT)
“Decolonizing Ethnography and Tribes in India” (Frontiers in Political Science, 2023)
“Orphans of the Orissa Famine: Capital, Charity, and Coercion” (SMU Scholar)

Historical Reference Sources

History of Odisha: “Ghumsar Rising under Dara Bisoi”; “Kandha Rising under Chakra Bisoi”; “Paika Rebellion 1817 CE”; “Revolt of 1857 and the Role of Surendra Sai”; “Bhuyan Rising Under Ratna Naik”; “Bhuyan Rising Under Dharani Dhar Naik”; “The Famine of 1866”
Odisha Review: “Chakra Bisoi: A Rebel Leader of Ghumusar” (January 2020); “Shifting Cultivation Among the Tribes of Orissa” (July 2006); “Laxman Naik: The Immortal Martyr” (February-March 2007)
eTribaltribune.com: “English Barbarism and the Kondhs of Ghumsur”; “History of Marginalization: Relationship between Tribes and Forests in Odisha”; “Podu Cultivation”; “Bhuiyan Uprising”; “Birsa Munda: A Hero of Tribal Movement”
Encyclopedia.com, “Konds”; Wikipedia entries for Paika Rebellion, Veer Surendra Sai, Birsa Munda, Kol Uprising, Santhal Rebellion, Lodha people, Verrier Elwin, Herbert Hope Risley, Edgar Thurston
Down to Earth, “Roles have reversed” (review of Padel)
The Wire, “Once Branded ‘Thieves’, Mayurbhanj’s Lodha Tribe Eager to Begin Life Anew”

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.