ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Raghu-Dibakar and the Prajamandal Movement in Ranpur

The Prajamandal Movement of the Garjat (Feudatory) States of Orissa constitutes an important episode of the Indian struggle against colonial rule, emerging out of the agrarian grievances and political marginality in the context of indirect British rule. From among the twenty-six Garjat states, it was Ranpur that experienced one of the most violent incidents in the course of the movement, the assassination of the Political Agent, Major R. L. Bazalgette on 5 January 1939, followed by the trial and hanging of two of its prominent youths, Raghunath Mohanty and Dibakar Parida — known collectively as “Raghu-Dibakar.” Utilizing sources from published extracts from archives, newspaper accounts of the period, and the historiography on popular movements within princely states, this essay attempts to show that the level of violence witnessed in Ranpur was not a direct result of the severity of feudal rule — Dhenkanal was worse ruled by contemporary criteria — but rather a function of a specific set of local circumstances. In contrast to the experiences of Nilgiri, Dhenkanal, and Talcher, as well as the theory of peasant revolt and crowd action, the paper provides a perspective to overcome a reductionist approach of anti-colonial violence that only considers structural oppression, providing a reinterpretation of the sacrifice of Raghu-Dibakar in the context of the human consequences of the politicization process in princely India. The paper is not an account of any archival research, but a synthesis of secondary literature, as stated in Section 2.