A rash of rebellions occurred in the decade after the Burmese war in the strategic frontier zone of Assam, where rajahs and hill tribes - the Khasis, the Singphos, the Khamtis and the Nagas - refused to accept British rule. Rajahs in the valley of the Brahmaputra and chiefs of indigenous tribes in the surrounding hills had traditionally been more in touch with the Burmese, with whom they were linked by ties of race and history, than with the Bengalis. They now made ready to resist the new foreign rulers. The rajahs did not yet know of imperial plans to bring in British settlers and establish extensive tea plantations on their land, but they were well aware that their local power was under serious threat. They sought to regain their lost lands and privileges.
In the wake of their invasion of Burma in 1824-26, the British had pushed north into the former Burmese-controlled territory of Assam, north of their base at Calcutta (and to the north of the present northern frontier of Bangladesh with India). This fertile land, lying on either side of the Brahmaputra, was acquired after the Yandabo Treaty was signed with Burma in February 1826; it became known as the North-East Frontier Territory.
The new governor of Bengal in 1828 was Lord William Bentinck, once a colonel in the Peninsular War, and an ardent reformer. He hoped that a steady flow of entrepreneurial British settlers would reinvigorate this freshly acquired territory, and he reformed the East India Company’s immigration regulations to permit this to happen.1 Hopes were briefly raised that India might rival Australia, Canada and Cape Colony as a land of colonial settlement, although the streams of British settlers never materialised. Eventually, establishing tea plantations appeared more profitable than European settlement, bringing hopes of transforming the economy of the entire region.2
Assam looked the most propitious place to start, and the Company soon had plans to establish commercial tea plantations throughout the Brahmaputra valley. In 1823 Robert Bruce, a Company employee, had already been given samples of the local Assam tea by Bessa Gaum, the ruler of the Singhphos, whose territory lay in the upper valley of the Brahmaputra. In the 1830s, after the death of Bruce, Chinese tea plants were brought in by his brother Charles.
British political agents working along the plains of the Brahmaputra argued that the Company should rule through the existing rajahs, since they formed the traditional ruling class that controlled the hill tribes. David Scott, chief among the agents, hoped that the British authorities would agree to subsidise a local ruler in the lands of Upper Assam, but the continuing resistance of the rajahs and the deteriorating economy made this strategy difficult.
First in the ring was Gomdhar Konwar, the rajah at Jorhat in the Brahmaputra valley, who had been deposed in the aftermath of the Burmese war. In October 1828 he assembled a large gathering of peasants and nobles and announced a plan to throw out the British invaders and re-establish his right to rule. He had received ‘wonderful omens’, he told the crowd, and his audience assured him he would soon again be king. He ordered them to stop paying taxes to the British revenue collectors, and to give them directly to him, their rightful ruler, as well as the ‘rice, milk, and gur he enjoyed according to ancient tradition. The rajah was invested with white shoes and an umbrella, the insignia of royalty, and the bailungs (royal priests) performed other ceremonial rituals.3
The rajah’s rebellion gave the British a taste of what was in store. His initial aim was to seize the nearby British base at Rangpur, after securing the support of other rajahs and chiefs in recruiting soldiers and obtaining financial contributions. Some were reluctant. Pealiar Bar Gohain, known as Dhanjoy, an elderly ally from a nearby territory, sounded a note of caution: ‘If you are able to succeed in the business, well and good, but it is a difficult matter. . . I see no prospect of success. Yet if you are resolved upon the trial, and will take the advice of an old man, let it not be done in a hurry.’ Gomdhar Konwar told him there was no time to lose, and his army of 400 men assembled in November south of Jorhat, armed with nine muskets, ten two-edged Khamti swords, fifty spears and ‘a good number of bows and arrows’.
The British were understandably alarmed. David Scott, the political agent, wrote later that, if the rajah had captured the base at Rangpur, the country would have been cast into anarchy and confusion. But the rajah’s soldiers were caught unprepared, and his hopes of victory frustrated. They were faced by Scott’s deputy, Captain John Bryan Neufville, who advanced with a troop of the Assam Light Infantry and attacked at night.
The rajah and his soldiers escaped into the hills of Nagaland, but he soon surrendered. Put on trial at Jorhat in December, he was charged with ‘assuming the title and dignity of the King of Assam. . . without the consent of. . . the British government’. He was also accused of obstructing officers collecting revenue and of himself amassing arms ‘and preparing to support his pretensions by force and rebellion’. Captain Neufville, as the presiding judge, sentenced him to death, commuted to seven years in exile. Dhanjoy, his reluctant ally, was also imprisoned, although he later escaped into the hills with his two sons to fight another day.
The optimistic Captain Neufville imagined that rebellions in Assam might now come to an end, but Scott had a firmer grip on reality. The territory’s inhabitants ‘are far from reconciled to our rule’, he wrote; ‘it may be expected that the higher classes in that country will long continue to cherish hopes and engage in schemes for the re-establishment of the ancient form of government under a Native Prince’4 The hills of Nagaland long remained a centre of dissent.
Pealiar Bar Gohain, known as Dhanjoy, returned to the struggle in March 1830, planning to revive the claims of another rajah, Kumar Rupchand Konwar, to be the true ruler in the valley of the Upper Brahmaputra. His plan was similar to that of Gomdhar Konmar two years earlier. He would assemble a troop of 400 men and destroy the British base at Rangpur. Together with other members of the region’s surviving elite, he sent letters to the tribal chiefs of the Khamtis, the Nagas and the Khasis, and urged them to provide armed support. Some were willing, but Sadiya Khowa Gohain, chief of the Khamtis, was already in league with the British; he gave notice of Dhanjoy’s plans to Captain Neufville.5
The treachery of the Khamti chief enabled Neufville to send reinforcements to bolster the sepoy defences at Rangpur. Dhanjoy’s rebel force were confronted with a larger force than they had expected, and retreated in disarray to Galeki, where they surrendered. Most of the leaders were seized, along with their wives and families, their followers, and their weapons, but Dhanjoy again escaped into the jungle. British vengeance was swift. Two rebels were hanged in August, and five others, including Rajah Rupchand, were imprisoned. Their property was confiscated and they remained in a Bengali gaol for fourteen years. The son of the Khamti turncoat, Sadiya Khowa Gohain, was to rebel against the British a few years later, in 1839.
In the Khasi hills, in 1829, it was the turn of the tribal chiefs to rebel. Tirat Singh, the syiem, or chief, in the region of Nankhlao, joined by a substantial number of Khasi chiefs and armed tribesmen, surrounded the British military base there in April 1829. Two British lieutenants in charge were killed: Lieutenant Richard Bedingfield was lured out to a meeting with the Khasi leaders and summarily despatched; Lieutenant Philip Burlton escaped from the base, but was overtaken by Tirat Singh’s forces as he headed north towards Gauhati on the Brahmaputra, and he too was killed.
Tirat Singh’s rebellion was partly the result of the plans of Scott, the political agent, to construct a road through the Khasi and Jaintia Hills, from the Brahmaputra to Sylhet. A military guard had been provided to accompany the road-builders into the hills, and a troop of British-officered sepoys was established at Nangkhao to supervise the road’s construction. A sanatorium was built there to provide rest and relaxation for the Europeans.
Tirat Singh had agreed to accept British ‘protection’ after the Burmese war, and he had given permission for the road to be built. But his advisers disapproved: the sole result of such a scheme, they argued, would be the eventual loss of their lands, as well as heavy taxation. With the support of the local population, which suffered from the presence of British forces, the advisers recommended resistance.6 Tirat Singh accepted their advice.
After the base at Nankhlao had been destroyed, British punitive expeditions were sent out from Sylhet and Kamrup. Several Khasi villages were torched as a reprisal for the death of the officers, but Tirat Singh escaped. He remained free for several years, sustaining a guerrilla campaign in the hills and raiding British settlements in the Brahmaputra valley.
Yet as the British showed no signs of retreating, his support slowly ebbed away. He surrendered in January 1833, receiving a promise that he would not be executed. The British kept their promise, and he was held in prison in Dacca. Some years later, during a subsequent Khasi rebellion in 1836, they felt the need to reinstate him, and they offered him limited sovereignty under Company control. Tirat Singh refused the offer, saying that he chose to die in prison like a king rather than to ‘sit on the throne of Nongkhlaw like a slave. The blood of my forefathers is still running hot in my withered veins, and here I must stay till the end.’ He died in 1841.
In May 1830, soon after Tirat Singh’s rebellion, the Singphos at Sadiya engaged in an act of similar resistance. The Singphos were a cross-border tribe, and sixteen of their chiefs had signed an agreement in 1826 with David Scott, the agent. Others had refused to sign, and these now joined a rebellion organised by Luttera Gaum, the principal chief. One of them, Wackum Kunjem, came with 2,000 warriors. Luttera Gaum, with 600 men of his own, prepared an attack on the British base at Sadiya, on the furthest north-eastern frontier of the NorthEast Frontier territory.
Hearing news of the Singpho plan, Captain Neufville advanced with a small troop from Sadiya to the village of Luttera. The party reached the village before sunset and fell upon the Singphos, according to Hemeswar Dihingia’s account. The Singphos were unprepared and confused by the sudden attack, unable to withstand the British firing. Muskets against bows and arrows represented an unequal match. The Singphos fled, and Luttera Gaum disappeared into the hills.7
Captain Neufville was affected by his exertions, and collapsed suddenly in June 1830; David Scott died the following year, forever pessimistic about curbing these perennial rebellions: ‘It would be futile to suppose that members of the ruling classes, whose ancestors had ruled in the valley for more than 500 years, would at once give up all their hopes of future greatness upon the appearance among them of a handful of strangers.’8
The resistance of the Singphos continued sporadically, reappearing in 1836 and 1843. Duffa Gaum, another Singpho chief who had taken refuge across the border in Burma, returned in 1835 with an army of 400 men to recover his lands. His camp was attacked by a force from the Assam Light Infantry led by Major Adam White, but after an hour’s mortar attack ‘the artillery could hardly break the enemy’s defence. When White ordered his troops to advance, they were ‘strongly repulsed’, and a British officer was seriously wounded. Eventually the superior weapons of the British obliged the Singphos to retreat, and Duffa Gaum retired across the Burmese frontier. ‘Stern action’ was taken against the local chiefs who had helped him, according to Hemeswar Dihingia. ‘The troops burnt Singpho villages, destroyed crops, seized cattle, and released their slaves’, and their actions caused ‘much resentment and bitterness.9
Curbing the resistance in the territory of the Upper Brahmaputra took its toll. ‘Many of the finest parts of the country are now a dreary waste’, wrote a Company official in 1833. ‘Villages once the most flourishing are now deserted and in ruins; the inhabitants instead of finding the British government a power which would protect them with enjoyment of their hearths and homes have fled by hundreds in all directions’.
Purandar Singh, a senior rajah, was eventually installed as the local, British-backed ruler of Upper Assam, embodying Scott’s original aims. He agreed to pay tribute to the East India Company, and to recognise its right to intervene in his affairs should he ‘misrule. Yet he soon found himself unable to pay the heavy tribute demanded, and developed a form of passive resistance. The experiment was abandoned after five years; with plans to establish commercial tea plantations throughout the Brahmaputra valley, the Company felt that it was useless to depend on unreliable rajahs. Formal annexation was now the plan.
The rajah was deposed and his territory annexed to the Empire; proudly, he refused the proffered compensatory pension. Smaller territories in the area suffered the same fate. Cachar was seized by the British in 1832 after its rajah had been murdered, and Jaintia was annexed in 1835 after the rajah had refused to pay tribute. Yet the resistance continued well into the 1840s as new tea plantations began to encroach on the land of others.
Far from Assam and the Brahmaputra valley, an unexpected insurrection broke out in December 1831 among the indigenous tribal peoples of Chota-Nagpur, an area of Bihar, south of Patna. This isolated and inaccessible region of hills and forests south of the Ganges had been under notional British control since the armies of the Mughal Empire had been defeated in 1764. The local people, notably the Mundas and the Oraons (described collectively by the British as the Kols), resented the gradual infiltration of their tribal lands by Hindu and Muslim zamindaris. These landlords had been encouraged by British policy to settle there and engage in agriculture and local commerce. Much tribal hostility was directed at the Maharaja of Chota-Nagpur, a British-backed ruler whose friends and relations were markedly hostile to the indigenous people.
The Kols began operations by seizing the cattle of the settlers in December 1831, and a large force of 700 tribesmen followed this up with a more serious attack on four settler villages. With widespread discontent at the loss of land and influence to outsiders, the attack aroused considerable popular support. Tribal peoples joined the insurrection in great numbers, and violent outbreaks occurred throughout the region. The insurgents attacked the outsiders indiscriminately, according to the Bengal and Agra Annual Guide.10 They drove them ‘from their homes and property, which were burnt or plundered; and sacri-flced numbers of those who fell into their hands, to their excited passions, or revenge and hatred’. According to official flgures, 219 Hindus and seventy-six Muslims were killed by the tribesmen; 4,086 houses were burned and 17,058 cattle seized.11 A punitive expedition led by Captain Thomas Wilkinson took some time to crush the rebellion.
Later writers claimed that the Kol insurrection was little more than an explosion of tribal rage, but Charles Metcalfe, vice-president of the Calcutta Council at the time, was seriously alarmed. He believed that the insurrection had originated ‘in the spirit of independence. . . and [in] the belief that the opportunity of throwing off our yoke had arrived’.
Subsequently, to avert such problems and to meet the special needs of the tribal peoples, the government set up a South East Frontier Agency, with a political agent responsible to the governor-general in Calcutta. Later still, in 1845, Lutheran missionaries were despatched to the region, and Christianity spread rapidly among the tribal peoples. They perceived this new faith as a way of resisting the influence of their Hindu and Muslim oppressors.
World History
