Rajasthans’s Jalliawalan Tragedy : Mangarh Massacre

Rajasthans’s Jalliawalan Tragedy : Mangarh Massacre

Subject: Modern India

Context:

• On November 17, 1913, six years before the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919, a horrifying tragedy occurred in Mangarh (Banswada, Rajasthan). While 379 lives were lost in Jallianwala, British cannons and machine guns are known to have killed more than 1,500 tribals in Mangarh.
• A noteworthy name in these lost pages of history is that of Govind Guru, a revolutionary leader of the tribals of the region that included present-day Udaipur, Dungarpur and Banswara in Rajasthan, Gujarat’s Idar and Malwa in Madhya Pradesh.
• Guru was a living legend among the Bhil and Garasiya tribal communities, a man who united thousands of tribals with his voice.
• Before Govind Guru became a leader in India’s freedom struggle, he played an important role in India’s renaissance movement. At the age of 25, he impressed Swami Dayanand Saraswati, a central figure of that movement in north India. Those days, Dayanand Saraswati was in Udaipur; a sanyasi, he was raising issues related to swaraj, swabhasha and swadeshi (self-rule, self-language, and self-reliance) in the country and was spearheading social reforms in the Rajputana. These two figures together initiated a wave of social reforms in the tribal areas.
• In 1903, Govind Guru pledged not to drink alcohol, shifting his focus to eradicating social evils, boycotting foreign goods, ending forced labour, educating girls, and resolving mutual disputes among tribes instead of taking them to the courts. This led to the creation of a Sump (Unity) Sabha, whose first meeting was held on the hilltop in Mangarh. This historical event solidified Mangarh’s significance in Indian history as it became central to the tribal movement in this area. Like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, this incident worried the British government and the local princely states. While the British were worried about their participation in the freedom struggle, the princely states were more concerned about social reform that could lead to the tribes demanding an independent Bhil state.
• Consequently, there were many attempts to suppress the movement that started in 1883 but had spread like wildfire by 1903. Called the Bhagat movement, the gathering of tribals around the fire to reaffirm their oath was seen by the British as a threat. By 1913, the movement had turned into a revolution that made British officers even more wary as the tribals pledged to fight against suppression.
• In November 1917, thousands of tribals gathered on the call of Govind Guru to decide on a decisive action against the suppression being faced by them in the form of forced labour, bonded system, and taxes on farmers during the famine.
• In what is today known as the Mangarh massacre, British soldiers fired cannons and machine guns at a large crowd of unarmed tribals who had gathered in an open space on the hilltop of Mangarh. More than 1,500 tribals were killed in the massacre and hundreds were injured.
• The consequence of the Mangarh massacre was cruel. Unlike in the Jallianwala Bagh case, no Dyer was held responsible or punished here. Rather, Govind Guru was given a death sentence, and his wife was arrested. But fearing that the movement of tribal Bhils would turn violent, the British postponed his execution and sentenced him to 20 years of imprisonment on an isolated island. When he was released from jail, all the princely states came together to exile him. He lived his last years in Kamboi, Gujarat, where he died on October 30, 1931.