Lying on the eastern coast of India, Odisha shares its borders with Andhra Pradesh in the south, Chhattisgarh in the west, Jharkhand in the north and West Bengal in the northeast. Its alluvial coastal plains run from the Subarnarekha River in the north to the Rushikulya River in the south. Three other major riversāMahanadi, Brahmani and Baitaraniāthat originate from the plateaus of Central India run eastward and empty into the Bay of Bengal. The stateās mountainous and forested regionsāfrom Mayurbhanj district in the northeast to Koraput district in the southāform part of the Eastern Ghats and almost run parallel to the coastal belt. This region abounds in mineral wealth, and it is also home to many adivasi communities. Odisha possesses almost 60 per cent of the countryās bauxite reserves, 98.4 per cent chromite, 91.8 per cent nickel, 32.9 per cent iron ore, 24.8 per cent coal and 67.8 per cent manganese. This abundance of mineral wealth, along with its mountains and forests, coastline and rivers, land and cheap labour, makes Odisha the most coveted land. Always, the most ordinary people have risen up leading extraordinary struggles against big dams, mega steel projects and massive mining operations. It is their sacrifice that is called upon whether for building the temples of modern India at the dawn of independence or to keep step today with the march of the global economy. It would be no exaggeration to call the history of post-colonial Odisha the history of forced dispossession, state repression and resistance against it.
Resisting Dispossession: The Odisha Story attempts to demystify the prevailing development paradigm in the state and dwell on peopleās indomitable spirit and unrelenting resistance. In chronicling these long drawn-out struggles, it lifts the veil of anonymity from those ordinary, unknown people who are its protagonists. The book brings to the reader many stories and testimonies; it also attempts to be a witness to their sorrows and sufferings, their triumphs and tribulations. In doing so, it yearns to fill up a significant gap in the resistance history of the state and its people.
We travelled across the coastal plains as well as the hilly and forested areas of south and southwest Odisha. Our familiarity with these areas and resistance movements since the late 1980s and early 1990s made the long winding journey easy and most fulfilling. We were fortunate to meet some great characters who have given shape and in turn been shaped by these struggles and who have been generous in sharing their abiding love for the land and the community, for the mountains, forests and streams. Their stories and ruminations began to slowly unfold a wide canvas. We got a peep into their deep sorrows and festering wounds caused by this affinity to and dependence on the land. All these made us painfully aware of our little knowledge about these struggles. For example, before writing this book, we did not know much about the resistance movement around the Rengali Dam. Even though the Hirakud movement is occasionally discussed in academic seminars and symposia, we were meeting oustees the first time ever. In Gandhamardan, Baliapal, Gopalpur or Chilika, we reconnected with many people, some after twenty or twenty-five years. The interactions in Kashipur, Niyamgiri, Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur had begun after the 2000s. Meeting familiar faces in dharnas and rallies or in solidarity meetings from these places kept us connected.
However, in this journey we were keen to learn how they see their own participation. We were keen to listen in order to connect the past with the present. We thus shared with those we met our own aspiration to collect similar stories and accounts from other parts in Odisha, from others like them who have resisted. Engaging with an open mind meant that peopleās narrations and accounts needed little time to be absorbed by us. In contrast, the sense of responsibility we felt was enormous, if not daunting. This book is not about the movements and the people only; neither is it our own indulgence to reflect through writing. As it began to take shape, there was another character that began to make its presence felt. Yes, the reader too quietly crept in from the beginning. So often we wondered whether the reader will make sense of these multi-layered interactions.
Images, memories, notions and assumptions from the long journey never left us while writing. Now as we aspire to become the conduit to bring this reality to a large audience, we make one active choice. We want to dwell on the characters we met and their worldviews. And let them speak to you. One of the richest experiences of this long exercise is that of accosting and absorbing the varied dialects across districts along with local idioms, metaphors and colloquialisms. What they narrate is so inextricably tied up to the language they speak. So the only misgiving we carry is the translation of these testimonies into English, which, at its best, is a mere faithful rendering of voices and accounts. Perhaps, the Odia version of the book will be a step closer to the accounts.
Our conversations with people always gave us a sense of the past and the uniqueness of each place. The local histories of each site of andolan were revealed through oral testimonies as well as through legends and myths of the habitat. To connect these stories of resistance to the past, we were inspired to look up recorded history in our own small way.
I
The Thirteenth Rock Edict of Ashoka, one of the earliest historical references to Odisha, then known as Kalinga, tells us a story of conquests, massacres, deaths and transportation of lakhs of inhabitants who resisted the invading imperial army of the powerful emperor. It tells us about his remorse for conquering the unconquered and the resultant all-round bloodbath. But who were those people? It is no surprise that resisters find no mention in the history of victors. On the other hand, the vanquished have also not erected āhero-stonesā commemorating the valour and sacrifices of those who fought for the land and its people.
People of Odisha have remained by and large anonymous throughout histories. At best, they are known to the outside world for ālofty temples of stoneā and religiosity. But to the mundane eyes of colonial administrator-ethnographers, people of Odisha ārank the lowest, in the scale of moral and intellectual excellence, of any people on this side of Indiaā (Stirling 1822).1 They are so ordinary to be subject of any scholarly pursuit.
While sketching the history of Odisha, W.W. Hunter is at pains to point out anything redeeming about its people (Hunter 1872).2 Even while launching the non-cooperation movement, an avowed nationalist like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi laments the anonymity of the people:
Most of us perhaps do not even know where Orissa3 isā¦ Orissa is part of one of the poorest regions in India. We do not hear much about the suffering there because the people are backward in every way. For most of us, it is a mere geographical expressionā¦ Nobody knows whether the people of Orissa are happy or unhappy. (Quoted in Sengupta 2015)
And in the post-colonial period, Odisha begins to draw occasional national visibility for all the āwrong reasonsā like starvation deaths and super cyclones; poverty and backwardness; or for the killing of a missionary. It is accused of being āfar too quiet to command scholarly or media attentionā¦. And its political quiescence leads scholars to conclude that its politics isāand has always beenādull and uneventfulā (Sengupta 2015). It is only by taking a view of history from below that we can put to rest any notions of anonymity or of quiescence of the people. Here are some glimpses.
II
With the fall of Barabati Fort at Cuttack on 14 October 1803, the East India Company wrested the mugalbandi 4 area (largely the undivided districts of Balasore, Cuttack and Puri) of Odisha from the Marathas and placed it under the Calcutta Presidency with direct financial and administrative control. Subsequently, the Company subjugated the chiefs of the hill tracts, known as garhjats. These are the land largely inhabited by the adivasis. The Company made these chiefs pay annual tributes and allowed them to enjoy relative autonomy in internal administration. And the colonial military force was ever ready to steady their regimes in case of any exigency. The Sambalpur region was tagged to the Central Province and later amalgamated with Odisha in 1905. Since 1765, the region to the south of Chilika had been under the Madras Presidency. This peculiarity had a bearing on the shape of political development of Odisha in times to come.
Soon after the occupation of the mugalbandi area, the Company brought about far-reaching changes in the revenue policy. The service tenure of erstwhile peasant militias, called paikas, was brought into rent-roll. Monopoly over manufacture and trade of salt was imposed. Cowree as currency was demonetized and silver was introduced in its place. All these developments led to a popular rebellion in the year 1817 known as paika rebellion. Though Khurda was the epicentre of the rebellion, a large part of the mugalbandi area came under its sway. The rebellion was brutally crushed in 1824. After that, the population of mugalbandi, especially peasantry, could not rise up for almost a century and silently suffered both feudal and colonial exploitation.
On the other hand, waves of revolts swept over the garhjats of Odisha from the mid-1830s till the last decade of the nineteenth century centred on issues of cultural practices and access to land and forest (Mishra 1983).5 There was hardly any decade when the colonial and feudal power did not face resistance from adivasis, dalits, peasants and small and marginal farmers. Interestingly, when these parts went into silence, a new kind of political vocabulary developed in the Presidency area spawned by the Odia-language controversy.
In 1870, Kantichandra Bhattacharya, a Bengali school teacher of Balasore, wrote a pamphlet, Udiya Swatantra Bhasa Nahe (Odia is not an independent language), suggesting that it is a dialect of Bengali. The educated middle class vehemently protested against this perceived Bengali conspiracy to erase the language from the face of the earth and so the Odia people. Not only did it lead to the efflorescence of modern Odia literature, the identity of Odias as a people was projected so as to invoke its glorious historical and cultural past. Thus, the movement to protect the language prepared the ground to imagine an Odia nationality on the basis of linguistic and cultural affinity and to demand political unification of all Odia-speaking tracts under one separate province. In 1903, the āOdia national aspirationā took an organized shape with the formation of Utkal Sammilani (Utkal Union Conference). Intellectuals, middle-class babus and some feudal chiefs took the lead. Like moderates in National Congress, the Sammilani remained shy from mass agitation politics and kept itself limited to passing resolutions, writing petitions and submitting memoranda. In fact, it believed in the goodwill of the British administration and prohibited ācriticisms of the actions of Government and Government Officialsā in its forum (Dash 2005).
Gradually, the futility of the politics of petition-writing crept in. A section of the Sammilani leadership began to realize that unification of Odisha could be achieved through national independence. The novelist Gopabandhu Das articulated it thus: āThe sole objective of the Utkal Sammilani so far had been to unify Orissa. For the last seventeen years all the resolutions had been passed for achieving this goal. As a result, the Sammilani had little relevance to the common man. Orissa could aspire to achieve unification only through national independenceā (Quoted in Pati 1993). With the launch of the non-cooperation movement by the Indian National Congress (INC), the era of mass politics began in Odisha and Utkal Sammilani got relegated to the background. In the mid-1930s, radical peasant politics under the banner of Kishan Sangha backed by the Congress Socialists developed in the mugalbandi areas on the immediate issues of rent, bethi (corvee) and Magana (extra illegal cesses levied by rulers on ceremonial occasions). And the peasantry arose from their century-long slumber, shedding their quiescence and submissiveness. Fakir Mohan Senapati in his classic novel Six Acres and a Fourth, while depicting the silent suffering of the mugalbandi peasantry, had almost anticipated its arising.6 His novel ends with the protagonist zamindar meeting his fate:
He drifted back to sleep and saw looming on the horizon the horrifying skeleton of a human with its jaws wide open, watching him intently, waiting silently to devour himā¦. He also saw thousands of lunatics like Bhagia ā¦ come rushing out of black clouds in the sky, holding swords and iron clubs. He felt as if all these clubs were raining down on his head. Mangaraj wanted to scream and run away; but he could not utter a word, and he felt too weak to move. (Senapati 2006)
The Congress Socialists and the Communists also took the initiative to mobilize masses in garhjat regions under the banner of Prajamandal against the feudal and colonial oppression. As the politics of Kisan Sangha and Prajamandal grew, the adivasis, dalits, peasants and small and marginal farmers occupied the centre stage of politics. The air of Odisha was rent with cries of the end of exploitation and the beginning of a new society:
Dispelling dark night,
We will bring about a red morning.
Let the earth, the sky and the exploiters tremble.
Let the strength of equality be established on earth. (Mishra 1936)
Soon, Odisha became a separate province on 1 April 1936 with the merger of the Odia-speaking tract of Madras Presidency; the garhjat areas were merged after independence. As per provisions of the 1935 India Act, election for provincial legislatures was held in 1937 and the INC formed the ministry. But it resigned with the outbreak of the Second World War and plunged into mass agitation that culminated in the Quit India Movement. With the massive participation of the adivasis, dalits, peasants and small and marginal farmers, the anti-colonial and anti-feudal struggles reached a new height; the end of the British Raj seemed imminent. In the undivided Koraput district, people felt that their sl...