Mangarh, 17 November 1913
The Bhagat movement, the Samp Sabha, and the firing on Mangarh hill
On 17 November 1913 troops of the Mewar Bhil Corps and the princely states of Banswara, Dungarpur and Santrampur fired on thousands of Bhil families gathered around Govind Guru's sacred fire on Mangarh hill. The community remembers about 1,500 dead; the official record produced no matching count. This lesson follows the Banjara teacher who built the Bhagat movement and the Samp Sabha, the charter of demands that ended in gunfire, and the twelve years he spent barred from the country of the people who believed him.
The Fire on the Hill
It is the morning of Monday, 17 November 1913. Mangarh is a low, flat-topped hill on the border between Banswara state and the Gujarat country, scrub and loose stone on every slope. On the top, a dhuni, a sacred fire, has been burning for days. Around it sit thousands of Bhil families who have walked in from Dungarpur, Banswara, Kushalgarh, Sunth and the villages between. Women and children are among them. Many have brought nothing but grain for the road.
They came for a fair. They stayed for a demand.
Two days ago the deadline ran out. The soldiers ringing the hill had told them to go home by 15 November. Nobody went. Now, below the slope, there are riflemen of the Mewar Bhil Corps and contingents sent by the princely states of Banswara, Dungarpur and Santrampur. There is at least one machine gun, carried up on pack animals.
The man they came for is a Banjara from a village called Bansia, in Dungarpur. His followers call him Govind Guru. He has spent about fifteen years telling these families to stop drinking, to keep clean, to school their girls, and to refuse to work for nothing. The last of those four is why there are guns at the bottom of the hill.
Before the day ends, this hill will hold the largest killing in this book. It is also the one you were least likely to be taught.
What the Forest Acts Had Already Done
The lesson before this one set out the law. The Forest Acts of 1878 and after made forest government property by default, and turned a villager's oldest uses of it into offences to be permitted or refused. That is the ground under everything here, and it does not need repeating.
The Bhil country on the Rajasthan and Gujarat border had a second layer on top of it. This was princely territory. Banswara, Dungarpur, Sunth and their neighbours were ruled by their own darbars under British oversight, and they raised their own levies. A Bhil family paid for the wood it cut and the liquor it distilled from its own mahua trees. It paid a cess on a goat. And it gave begar: unpaid labour, on demand, for the state, the jagirdar and the touring official.