The Empire's Uneasy Edges

Two thirds of India was ruled from Delhi. The other third was ruled through somebody else, and that is why its fighters went uncounted.

The Raj did not hold every part of India with its own hands. It held the princely states through their rulers and the north eastern hills through an Inner Line and an Excluded Area order. This scene-setter opens at a river ghat in Dhenkanal in 1938, explains how rule by proxy worked, and introduces the three people this chapter follows: Gaidinliu, Accamma Cherian and Baji Rout.

The Ghat at Nilakanthapur

It is the night of 11 October 1938, on the bank of the Brahmani river in Dhenkanal, in what is now Odisha. A boat is tied at the Nilakanthapur ghat. The water is high after the rains. A boy of twelve named Baji Rout is sitting with the boat, keeping watch, because the older men of his village have asked him to.

Armed police come down to the water in the dark. They want to cross. They tell the boy to take them over.

He says no.

He is twelve. He is a boatman's son who ferries people for a few coins a day. The men in front of him have rifles. He still says no, and he keeps saying it, and one of them shoots him. Others at the crossing are shot with him. Baji Rout dies of his wounds before morning.

Here is the part that gets left out of the telling. Those police were not British. They were the police of the Raja of Dhenkanal, an Indian ruler, in an Indian state, wearing an Indian state's uniform. And that single fact is why a twelve-year-old who died for his country took more than half a century to be counted properly as one of its fighters.

Two Maps of One Country

Most of us learn the freedom struggle from one map: British India, ruled from Delhi and Calcutta, with a Viceroy at the top and a Collector in every district. That map is about two thirds of the land.

The other third was not ruled that way at all. It was made up of the princely states, well over five hundred of them, from Hyderabad, bigger than many European countries, down to states of a few villages. Each had its own ruler, its own courts, its own police, and in the larger ones its own army, currency and postage stamps.