Q1.
You may explore further and find out more about the freedom struggle in the North-East and known and lesser-known freedom fighters from this area.
Answer
Start from the six names the chapter itself gives you, then widen out. The point of the exercise is to see that the freedom struggle in the North-East was not a smaller copy of the movement elsewhere — much of it began earlier, and much of it was fought over land, forests and tax.
| Name / event | When and where | What they did |
|---|---|---|
| Tirot Sing | Khasi Revolt, 1829–1833, present-day Meghalaya | Led Khasi resistance when the British pushed a road through the hills — one of the earliest organised revolts in the region, decades before 1857 |
| The Singpho Rebellion | 1830s–1840s, eastern Assam | A tribal revolt against British rule as the Company extended its hold over Assam after the Anglo-Burmese war |
| Maniram Dewan and Piyali Baruah | 1857, Assam | Publicly hanged by the British for their part in the rebellion of 1857 in Assam |
| Kanaklata Barua | 1942, Gohpur, Assam | Shot dead at 17 while leading a procession to hoist the national flag at the local police station during Quit India; honoured as ‘Birangana’ (heroic woman) |
| Kushal Konwar | 1942–43, Assam | A Quit India martyr — one of the movement’s best-known figures from Assam |
| Rani Gaidinliu | From the late 1920s, Manipur and the Naga hills | Began fighting the British at the age of 13; urged people not to pay taxes and not to work for the colonial masters — non-cooperation carried out in the hills |
How to explore further, properly:
- Fix the place first — Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram — and then look for what happened there, rather than searching for ‘famous freedom fighters’ in general.
- Use the state government’s or the state archive’s pages, district gazetteers, and the ICHR Dictionary of Martyrs, which the chapter mentions — it lists some 14,000 names, and many North-Eastern martyrs are in it.
- Ask what the local grievance was. In the North-East it was very often land, forest rights, house tax or forced labour — not the same issues that drove protest in Bombay or Calcutta.
- Look for women and very young people. Kanaklata Barua was 17 and Rani Gaidinliu was 13 when they began. Also look for Bhogesvari Phukanani and Gopinath Bordoloi, both in the chapter’s long list on p. 80.
- Record your sources. If two accounts differ on a date, say so instead of choosing one silently.
Sample answer (opening paragraph): “The freedom struggle in the North-East began earlier than in most of India. Tirot Sing’s Khasi revolt (1829–1833) and the Singpho rebellion of the 1830s–40s were fought before the Great Uprising of 1857, and in 1857 itself Maniram Dewan and Piyali Baruah were publicly hanged in Assam. The region then joined the national movements: in 1942, Kanaklata Barua, aged 17, was shot dead while carrying the national flag to a police station at Gohpur, and Kushal Konwar was executed. In Manipur, Rani Gaidinliu began resisting the British at 13, telling people to stop paying taxes and stop working for the colonial government — a strategy very close to non-cooperation, worked out in the hills.”
Small point worth noticing: the chapter spells the same name two ways — ‘Kanak Lata Baruah’ in the box on p. 55 and ‘Kanaklata Barua’ on p. 76. Spellings of Indian names in colonial-era records are often unstable; when you write, pick one form and say which you are using.