The Forest Became Government Property
How the Forest Acts, the podu ban, the Political Agent and the 1917 labour draft set the board for four risings
In March 1879 the hill people of Rampa came down armed to the Sub-Collector's camp at Chodavaram, stated their grievances, and then fought the Madras government for twenty months over a tax on toddy. This lesson explains the board they and everyone after them were playing on: the Forest Acts of 1878 and 1882, the ban on podu cultivation, the Manipur hills placed under the Political Agent after 1891, and the 1917 draft of 2,000 men for the Labour Corps in France. The four fights that follow in this chapter all start here.
Chodavaram, 13 March 1879
The Sub-Collector of the Godavari Agency was camped at Chodavaram when the hill men came down to him. It was 13 March 1879. They were armed, and they were not hiding it. Bows, axes, a few matchlocks taken from police posts in the days before. Before anything else happened, they stated their grievances out loud to the officer in his tent.
That detail is worth holding on to. These were not bandits. They came with a list.
The list was about toddy. For as long as anyone in those hills could remember, a family tapped the palm behind its own hut and drank what it drew. The new excise rules of the Madras government made that illegal. Toddy was now a taxed article. The right to sell it was leased to renters from the plains, who came up the ghats and demanded a fee called chigurupannu from every tapper. Then the mansabdar of Rampa, Sri Madhuvati Rambhupati Devu, announced a further levy of his own on top of it.
The Godavari District Gazetteer, written by the Raj's own officers, calls that second levy the last straw.
Within days the hills were in arms. A man named Chandrayya burned the police station at Addatigela. Others followed: Jangam Pulicanti Sambayya, Tamman Dora, Ambul Reddi of Boduluru. The Madras government eventually put about 2,400 troops into those forests, and malaria killed more of them than the hill men did. Chandrayya was shot dead in February 1880. The Gazetteer records that quiet was "finally and everywhere restored" only in November 1880.
Twenty months. Over a tax on the sap of a tree.
The question this lesson answers is why that fight kept happening, in different hills, in different languages, for the next forty-five years. The answer is not that hill people were warlike. The answer is a set of laws.