Mathili, August 1942
A thousand tribal cultivators marched on the Mathili police station on 21 August 1942, five were shot, and Lakshman Naik was hanged for a killing the police almost certainly committed.
On 21 August 1942 Lakshman Naik led about a thousand people from thirty three hill villages of Koraput to hoist a flag on the Mathili police station. The police fired, five died, and a forest guard was killed by a bullet while Naik lay unconscious. He was convicted of that killing on the word of nine government witnesses and hanged at Berhampur jail on 29 March 1943, the only man in Odisha executed for 1942.
Nine Thirty in the Morning
It is Friday, 21 August 1942, half past nine in the morning, at a place called Mathili in the Koraput hills of what is now Odisha. The police station is a thatched building with a small compound and a flagstaff. About a thousand people have walked in from thirty three villages, some of them all night, along forest paths and across the Kolab river.
They are carrying Congress flags cut from cheap cotton. They are singing the Ramdhun and shouting Mahatma Gandhi ki jai. Most of them are tribal cultivators from the Bhumiya, Paraja, Gadaba and Koya villages of the hills. Many have never seen a town.
At the head of the crowd walks a man of forty two named Lakshman Naik. He is a Bhumiya cultivator from the village of Tentuligumma, fourteen miles from Jeypore. He had been the village Mustadar, the headman who collects the zamindar's tax, and he lost the post because he would not squeeze his neighbours for it. He has been to jail three times already.
He wants one thing this morning: to put a flag on the roof of that police station. What he will be hanged for, seven months from now, is something else entirely, and it will happen while he is lying unconscious in a ditch.
What a Mustadar Knew
To understand why a thousand people walked to Mathili, you have to understand what they were walking away from.
Koraput in 1942 was hill country inside the Jeypore zamindari, a huge estate whose landlord collected through village headmen. The tribal cultivators there paid tax on settled land, and to escape it many farmed the unsettled jungle slopes by podu, shifting cultivation. On top of the tax sat three unpaid obligations:
- Bethi: free labour for the zamindar's men and the landlord's officials, on demand
- Goti: a man who could not repay a loan worked for the lender for life, for food
- Gudem: when an official toured your village, you fed and supplied his party for nothing