Bastar Rebellion 1910: Gunda Dhur, the Bhumkal and Colonial Forest Policy

Bastar Rebellion 1910 in the News: Veer Gundadhur Seva Dera

Veer Gundadhur Seva Dera at Netanar, May 2026

On 18 May 2026 Union Home Minister Amit Shah opened the Shaheed Veer Gundadhur Seva Dera Jan Suvidha Kendra at Netanar in Bastar district, Chhattisgarh. Netanar is the village of Gunda Dhur, who led the Bastar rebellion of 1910, and the centre stands on a site that had been a security camp since 2013. It is the first of the region's security camps to become a public service centre.

• What the centre does: It gives villagers banking, Aadhaar and ration cards, and the benefits of 371 Central and State schemes through a Common Service Centre, and it is also to serve as a livelihood centre.
• What comes next: About 70 of the roughly 200 security camps in Bastar are to become such centres within a year and a half, all named after Veer Gundadhur.
• Why now: The government says armed Naxalism in Chhattisgarh has ended, and it wants to turn the camps of that campaign into centres of welfare; the Minister called Gunda Dhur a leader of the freedom struggle in Bastar.

Background and Causes of the Bastar Rebellion: Forest Reservation and Colonial Rule

Princely State of Bastar Before 1910

Bastar lies in the southernmost part of Chhattisgarh, bordering Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Maharashtra. Its centre is a plateau, with the Chhattisgarh plain to the north and the Godavari plain to the south, and the Indravati river winds across it from east to west. In 1910 it was a princely state of about 33,830 sq km, with its capital at Jagdalpur and a population of 3,06,501 in 1901.

Its people included the Maria (also written Madia) and Muria Gonds, Dhurwas (also written Duruwa), Bhatras, Halbas and Dorlas. They spoke different languages but shared customs and beliefs. Each village held that the Earth had given it its land, and it looked after the forest, rivers and hills within its boundary. A village taking wood from another village's forest paid a small fee called devsari, dand or man.

The rulers were Rajputs who claimed descent from a brother of the last Kakatiya king. The state became a tributary of the East India Company after the Third Anglo-Maratha War and was later attached to the Central Provinces. The raja was also high priest of the goddess Danteshwari, so the people's bond with the throne was unusually close.

That bond was strained in the decades before 1910. When the raja died in 1891, his son Rudra Pratap Deo was six, and the colonial government began to run the state directly. Even after the young raja came of age in 1908, real power lay with the diwan, a former Extra Commissioner who had run the state as its superintendent and who made the raja follow his advice.

Forest Reservation, Forest Villages and the 1905 Plan

Forest reservation was the main cause. A reserved forest is forest land declared under the forest law, where the state decides who may enter and what may be taken; the Indian Forest Act of 1878 consolidated this power and the 1927 Act carried it on. In Bastar the colonial government began reserving forests rich in timber and other produce from 1871, granted companies the right to exploit them, and charged people fees for collecting produce or grazing.

In 1905 it proposed to reserve two-thirds of the forest and to stop shifting cultivation, hunting and the collection of forest produce. The policy was widened in 1908. Some villages could stay inside the reserves only if they worked free for the forest department, cutting and carrying timber and fighting fires; these became known as forest villages. People of other villages were moved out without notice or compensation.

• Before reservation: Shifting cultivation, hunting and the collection of produce such as tendu leaves, under the village's own rules.
• After reservation: Entry, grazing and collection by permission and fee, free labour in forest villages, and eviction elsewhere.

The famines of 1899‑1900 and 1907‑08 deepened the distress, and the reservations proved to be the last straw. The move to resist began among the Dhurwas of the Kanger forest, where reservation had begun.

Thekadari Leases, Begar and the Diwan's Administration

Forest law was not the only grievance. Under the thekadari system whole villages were leased to contractors, so cultivators became tenants on their own land and paid rising rents. Officials demanded begar, forced unpaid labour, as well as free goods.

• Moneylenders and traders: Telugu and Chhattisgarhi moneylenders and traders came into tribal areas on harsh terms.
• Ghotul and worship: The ghotul, the youth dormitory of Gond villages, was suppressed through the school system, and a ban on home-brewing of alcohol struck at traditional religion.
• The diwan: The British had begun replacing the state's officials, especially the diwan, and power had passed from the raja, who was close to his people, to the diwan; as early as 1876 people had gathered to stop the raja leaving the state and demanded that an oppressive diwan be removed.

Bhumkal Rebellion: Gunda Dhur, Lal Karendra Singh and the 1910 Rising

Leaders of the Bhumkal and the Signals of 1910

Anger grew after troops attacked a Dhurwa community near Jagdalpur in 1908. For about nine months weapons were gathered and meetings held in the ghotuls, unnoticed by the administration. The rising had two kinds of leadership.

• Behind the scenes: Lal Karendra Singh, a former diwan and cousin of the royal family, popular with the tribals, backed by the senior rani, Kumari Devi.
• In the villages: Gunda Dhur, a Dhurwa of Netanar, named by most accounts as the main figure, though the movement had no single leader. A council formed on 22 October 1909, when Lal Karendra Singh met the village headmen (majhis), chose Gunda Dhur to head an independent government once the colonial administration was overthrown.

The plan was so secret that ordinary villagers knew only that they should prepare for a bhumkal, an earthquake, which gave the movement its name. In January 1910 mango boughs, a lump of earth, red chillies, and bows and arrows began to pass from village to village. These were messages inviting people to rebel, and every village contributed something to the costs.

Course and Suppression of the Bastar Rebellion, 1910

The rising began on 6 February 1910. A band set out to seize the diwan and break the state's administration, but he escaped and fled to Chanda. Across the state, rebels looted bazaars, burnt the houses of officials and traders, schools and police stations, and redistributed grain; most of those attacked were tied to the colonial state and its forest laws. The state's police, about 250 men, were overwhelmed. In the north-west a Madia Gond leader, Aytu Para, who compared himself with Lingo, the ancestral hero of the Gonds, took over the Antagarh area.

• 7 February: The raja asked the British for help. The same day Madia Gond leaders and Gunda Dhur met at Geedam near Dantewada and took it; the rebels went on to capture Barsur and lay a week-long siege to Kutru.
• 13 February: Troops entered Jagdalpur and captured Lal Karendra Singh; until then the rebels practically ruled Bastar.
• 9 March: The Abujh Madias, the Madias of the Abujhmarh hills, attacked a force under a commander named Drury near Chhote Dongar and drove it to Narayanpur. Drury answered with a scorched-earth campaign against them.

The British suppressed the Bastar rebellion with troops from neighbouring Jeypore and from Bengal. When the tribal leaders tried to negotiate, the troops surrounded their camps and fired on them, then marched through the villages flogging those who had joined. Many villages emptied as people fled into the jungle. It took the British three months, February to May, to regain control.

Outcome and Significance of the Bastar Rebellion

Forest Reservation Halved and the Later History of Bastar

The rising was put down, but it won a real concession. Work on reservation was suspended for a time, and the area to be reserved was cut to roughly half of what had been planned before 1910.

The underlying conflict did not end. After independence the practice of keeping people out of forests and reserving them for industry continued. In the 1970s a World Bank proposal to replace 4,600 hectares of natural sal forest in Bastar with tropical pine for paper pulp was stopped only after local protests. The continued reservation of forests is one of the reasons the Naxalite insurgency later found support in the Bastar division.

Bastar Rebellion and Other Tribal Uprisings Against Colonial Rule

Tribal communities across India faced the same pressures as the British pushed into forests and hills: Restricted access to forests and forest produce, the loss of land, cash taxes, debt, outside courts in place of tribal councils, and missionary activity. Many of them rose in rebellion through the nineteenth century, and the Bastar rising of 1910 belongs to that line.

Each rising drew a response. After the Santhal rebellion the colonial government created the Santhal Parganas district under an Act of 1855, and the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act of 1876 later stopped tribal land passing to non-tribals. In Bastar the response was to scale back the reserves.

From Colonial Forest Law to PESA and the Forest Rights Act

The grievances of 1910, the loss of forest rights and control by outsiders, are what later laws try to undo. The Constitution's Fifth Schedule governs the Scheduled Areas named under Article 244(1), found in ten States; the Governor of each such State reports to the President on their administration.

• PESA, 1996: The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act extends the panchayat system to the Scheduled Areas and gives Gram Sabhas a say over customary resources, minor forest produce, minor minerals and local projects.
• Forest Rights Act, 2006: It recognises the rights of forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers, including ownership of minor forest produce, which it defines to include bamboo, tendu leaves, honey, lac and medicinal plants.
• Indian Forest (Amendment) Act, 2017: It removed the word "bamboos" from section 2(7) of the 1927 Act. That was its only change; rights to bamboo as forest produce come from the Forest Rights Act.

These laws have worked unevenly. Many States were slow to frame PESA rules (Chhattisgarh is among those that have published theirs), and the Gram Sabha's control over forests has hardly been put into practice. The Union Government's approach to Naxal violence in the Scheduled Areas calls for PESA to be implemented in letter and spirit, with stress on Gram Sabha rights over minor forest produce.

Bastar Rebellion UPSC Relevance: Modern History and Tribal Policy

Bastar Rebellion in the UPSC Syllabus: GS Papers I, II and III

The Bastar rebellion belongs to General Studies Paper I, under modern Indian history and the tribal response to colonial rule, and its present-day side belongs to Paper II (Scheduled Areas, PESA) and Paper III (Left Wing Extremism).