The Grain of Sonakhan

He opened a hoarder's grain store in the famine of 1856, wrote to tell the Deputy Commissioner, and Raipur executed him for it on 10 December 1857

Narayan Singh, zamindar of Sonakhan in the Chhattisgarh forests, had a grain merchant's godown opened in the famine of 1856 and then informed the Deputy Commissioner at Raipur himself. He was arrested for theft, escaped the Raipur jail in August 1857, raised about five hundred men, and was taken in December when four neighbouring zamindars guided the British column through his forest. He was executed in public at Raipur on 10 December 1857; accounts differ on whether he was hanged or blown from a gun, and this lesson states the method as disputed.

The Godown at Kasdol

It is the autumn of 1856, in the Chhattisgarh plain east of Raipur. The rains have failed. In the village markets the price of rice has climbed past what a labourer earns in a week, and the grain that exists is locked up. A merchant named Makhan holds a full godown at Kasdol, a day's walk from the forest zamindari of Sonakhan. He will not lend. He is waiting for the price to climb further.

A man of about sixty rides in from Sonakhan to ask him one more time. His name is Narayan Singh, and he is the zamindar of Sonakhan, a small forest estate of some sixty villages. He belongs to the Binjhwar, a tribal community of the Chhattisgarh forests. His people are eating mahua flowers and boiled leaves.

Narayan Singh asks for the grain as a loan, the customary barhi, to be repaid after the next harvest. Makhan refuses. So Narayan Singh does something a zamindar is not supposed to do. He has the godown opened, the grain carted out, and distributed to the hungry. Then he writes to Charles Elliott, the Deputy Commissioner at Raipur, and tells him exactly what he has done and why.

He must have thought that telling the truth to the government would protect him. It did the opposite.

What a Government Files It Under

Elliott's office had a category for this, and the category was theft. On 24 October 1856 Narayan Singh was arrested at Sambalpur, on Makhan's complaint, and taken to the jail at Raipur.

Read the two versions of the same act side by side, because the whole lesson sits in the gap between them.