Pacification of the Paharias: British Strategies and Tribal Resistance

The story of the Paharias and the British is one of the most layered episodes in colonial Indian history – a story not just of military conquest, but of an empire trying to reshape an entire people’s way of life. The Paharias, original inhabitants of the Rajmahal Hills in present-day Jharkhand and West Bengal, had maintained near-total independence for centuries. They were hunters, shifting cultivators, and forest-dwellers who answered to no external authority. Then came the British East India Company – and everything changed.

Who were the Paharias? 🔗

The Paharias – known as Malto or Maler – are a Dravidian tribal people whose homeland was the rugged, forested Rajmahal Hills in the northeastern Chota Nagpur Plateau. Their three subgroups – the Mal Paharia, Sauria Paharia, and Kumarbhag Paharia – all share a common identity rooted in the forest. When the British first encountered them, they were nomadic jhum farmers, hunters, and collectors who would frequently descend on the plains of Bihar and Bengal before retreating back into the jungle.

Their lifestyle was deeply ecological. They cleared patches of forest by cutting and burning undergrowth, grew pulses and millets on ash-enriched soil, then left the land fallow to recover its fertility before moving to a new area. From the forests they also collected mahua flowers for food, reared silkworms, produced charcoal, and hunted game. The forest was not just their resource – it was their identity. They considered the entire region to be their land, and they defended that claim fiercely.

Their political economy was also pragmatic. Plains-based zamindars routinely paid the Paharia chiefs tribute in exchange for safe passage through hill routes. Traders similarly paid hill lords a road tax for protection from plundering – an arrangement that gave the Paharias both economic security and political leverage over the lowlands.

The British encounter: from trade to confrontation 🔗

The arrival of the East India Company fundamentally disrupted this balance. The Paharias had maintained their autonomy under the Mughal Empire, but when the British East India Company began asserting control in Bengal and Bihar after 1765, they pushed into tribal regions. The expansion of settled agriculture – encouraged by the Company to increase land revenue – began eroding forests and pastures that the Paharias depended on.

As agricultural frontiers expanded and forest cover shrank, the expansion of established agriculture reduced the area of underwoods and pastures, creating friction between hill inhabitants and settled cultivators, prompting the Paharias to raid established settlements more frequently. These raids were not random acts of violence. They were survival strategies – particularly during famines – and a way of asserting power over communities that were encroaching on Paharia territory.

The earlier negotiated peace, where zamindars paid tributes to hill chiefs, collapsed under the weight of British policy. As established agriculture expanded in eastern India and the British pushed for the destruction of forests, this fragile peace treaty disintegrated in the late eighteenth century. To the British colonial administration, the Paharias were an obstacle – turbulent, ungovernable, and resistant to the kind of settled, taxable agrarian society the Company wanted to build.

The brutal policy of extermination (1770s) 🔗

The British response in the 1770s was not diplomacy – it was violence. In the 1770s, the British embarked on a merciless policy of extermination, hunting down and killing the Paharias. Warren Hastings, then Governor-General of Bengal, dispatched military forces to crush the resistance. Bengal Governor Warren Hastings sent a force of 800 men led by Captain Brook to capture tribal leaders and crush the seeds of rebellion in the region.

Yet the Paharias proved exceptionally difficult to subdue. Despite many British attempts to suppress them, the Mal Paharias fought back by luring British forces into the jungle, where the British rifles were useless and Paharia poisoned arrows were ideal. The terrain itself was their ally – dense forests, rocky upper ranges, and isolated hilltops that the British army simply could not navigate effectively. The Paharias knew every trail and ridge; the British knew none of them.

The uprisings were also politically organised. This tribe resisted the British on numerous occasions – in 1766, 1772, and 1781-1782, with different leaders mobilising their communities across these periods. The rebellion of 1778, led by Raja Jagannath in the Chota Nagpur region, stands out as particularly significant. In the same period, the legendary tribal leader Tilka Manjhi – known in British records as Jabra Paharia – organised armed resistance from the forests of Bhagalpur, looting the Company’s treasury and distributing the wealth among his people before being captured and publicly executed in 1784.

The shift to pacification: Augustus Cleveland’s strategy 🔗

By the 1780s, it was clear that military extermination alone was not working. A new approach was needed – and it came in the form of Augustus Cleveland, the Collector of Bhagalpur. By the 1780s, Augustus Cleveland proposed a pacification approach: Paharia chiefs were granted an annual allowance and held responsible for their men’s conduct.

Cleveland was barely twenty-five years old when he assumed charge as Collector, yet his approach was notably more calculated than brute force. He developed a pension policy that brought tribal leaders into the orbit of Company “welfarism,” with pensioners receiving anywhere between Rs 10 to Rs 2 a month and reporting on criminal activities while maintaining peace and order. The chiefs who accepted these allowances were expected to keep discipline within their communities and ensure safe movement through the hills – effectively becoming local agents of British authority.

Cleveland went further. As collector, Cleveland intensified pacification efforts, including providing lifelong pensions and rent-free land to Paharia chiefs, establishing Hill Assemblies and bazaars for bartering goods, raising a corps of hill archers, and even building a school for children. This was a multi-pronged approach: economic co-optation, administrative integration, and cultural transformation – all packaged as benevolent governance.

The Bhagalpur Hill Rangers 🔗

One of the most strategically significant moves Cleveland made was the formation of an indigenous armed corps from among the Paharias themselves. Many Mal Paharias were recruited into a new British force which proved extremely effective: first using traditional bows and arrows, and eventually using British weaponry. This Paharia regiment, the Bhagalpur Hill Rangers, continued until the 1857 revolt and the reorganisation of British forces there.

The logic was elegant from a colonial standpoint. Rather than deploying expensive British armies into terrain where they were at a tactical disadvantage, the Company used the Paharias’ own martial skills and hill knowledge to police their own people and their territory. The Bhagalpur Hill Rangers served as an auxiliary force maintaining order across the Santhal Pargana region. By turning some Paharias into instruments of colonial control, the British minimised costs while maximising reach – a strategy of internal pacification that appears repeatedly in the history of empire.

The chieftain allowance system and its contradictions 🔗

The allowance system Cleveland introduced carried deep internal contradictions. Many Paharia chiefs refused the allowances. Those who accepted most often lost authority within the community. Being in the pay of the colonial government, they came to be perceived as subordinate employees or stipendiary chiefs. A chief’s authority among the Paharias had traditionally rested on his independence, his ability to lead his people in battle, and his role as an arbiter of community disputes. Once he became a salaried functionary of the colonial state, that authority evaporated.

The pacification campaign thus created a fracture within Paharia society – between those who accommodated British power and those who rejected it outright. As the pacification campaigns continued, the Paharias withdrew deep into the mountains, insulating themselves from hostile forces, and carrying on a war with outsiders. When the surveyor Francis Buchanan travelled through the region in the winter of 1810-11, the Paharias viewed him with suspicion and distrust – a reflection of how deeply the experience of pacification had shaped their relationship with all outsiders.

Forcing the transition: from hoe to plough 🔗

Alongside the military and administrative measures, the British pursued a third front: transforming the Paharias from shifting cultivators into settled farmers. The colonial state associated the Paharias’ khallu (shifting/slash-and-burn) agriculture with wildness and disorder. British colonial officials pressurised the swidden-farming Paharias of the Rajmahal Hills to give up their traditional shifting agriculture, even as later research would show that these techniques were ecologically sophisticated and suited to their terrain.

The British goal was straightforward: settled cultivation meant taxable land, predictable revenue, and a population that could be administered. Having failed to subdue the Paharias and transform them into settled agriculturists, the British turned to the Santhals – a different tribal group from the southeastern Chota Nagpur Plateau who were far more willing to clear forests and plough land. From the 1780s onwards, Santhals began migrating into the Rajmahal Hills, hired by zamindars and invited by British officials to settle in the Jangal Mahals.

The Mal Paharias fiercely resisted the entry of the Santals into their lands, but the demographic tide was overwhelming. As the Santhals poured into the Rajmahal hills, destroying forests and ploughing land, the Paharias were forced to retreat deeper into the hills. If Paharia life was symbolised by the hoe – the tool of shifting cultivation, forest management, and mobility – the Santhal settlers came to represent the plough: permanence, revenue, and colonial order. This became known as the long battle between the hoe and the plough.

The creation of Damin-i-Koh and the consolidation of displacement 🔗

The British formalised this demographic transformation in 1832 when they demarcated a large stretch of land in the Rajmahal foothills and designated it for Santhal settlement. This administrative division, known as Damin-i-Koh – a Persian term meaning “skirts of the hills” – was demarcated in 1832-33 for the settlement of migrating Santhal tribesmen, while reserving the upper hill tracts for the indigenous Paharia peoples. In practice, this meant the Paharias were pushed upward into the barren, rocky upper hills, cut off from the fertile lower slopes where cultivation was viable.

By the time the lower hills were taken over by Santhal settlers, the Paharias receded deeper into the Rajmahal hills, losing access to their most productive forest land and agricultural zones. Today, the Paharias have become an insignificant minority in their own lands – a community that once controlled trade routes, demanded tribute from plains zamindars, and resisted every empire that tried to govern them is now among the most economically marginalised groups in Jharkhand.

What pacification really meant 🔗

The British called it pacification. In practice, it was a systematic dismantling of Paharia autonomy through several interlocking strategies: military suppression when force worked, financial co-optation of chiefs when it did not, the formation of an indigenous auxiliary force to police the tribe from within, the promotion of settled agriculture to break the mobile, forest-based economy, and finally the demographic displacement enabled by Santhal settlement. Each strategy reinforced the others.

What the pacification of the Paharias reveals, philosophically, is the colonial assumption that certain ways of life – mobile, forest-dependent, non-agrarian – were inherently inferior and needed to be “civilised” into conformity with a settled, revenue-generating model. The Proceedings of the Indian History Congress notes that the Paharias “always tried to defend their freedom and identity, fiercely resisting Hindu, Afghan and Mughal rulers.” But the British approach was different – it combined force with restructuring, making resistance harder with each passing decade not by defeating the Paharias in battle, but by dismantling the very conditions that had made their resistance possible.

What do you think? If a community’s entire way of life – their farming, their mobility, their forest-based economy – is considered “disorder” by an external power, can any policy toward them genuinely be called pacification rather than subjugation? And what does it say about colonial governance that the most “successful” approach was not military victory, but economic co-optation and demographic displacement?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal_Paharia_people
2. https://www.studyiq.com/articles/pahariyas-rebellion/
3. https://prepp.in/news/e-492-paharias-rebellion-1778-tribal-revolts-modern-indian-history-notes
4. https://cuet.iitk.ac.in/sathee-cuet/student-corner/ncert-books/class-12/themes-in-indian-history/chapter-09-colonialism-and-the-countryside-exploring-official-archives/
5. https://www.jharkhanddmc.com/history-and-revolutions/
6. https://unacademy.com/content/upsc/study-material/ncert-notes/administration-of-the-company/
7. https://thebetterindia.com/270899/history-tilka-manjhi-fearless-adivasi-led-indias-first-peoples-revolt-british/
8. https://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/bhaugulpoor-tales-1503202678.html/amp
9. https://theprint-in.translate.goog/pageturner/excerpt/how-santhal-chief-tilka-manjhi-gave-british-chilmil-saheb-a-run-for-his-money/1068403/
10. http://thanksupsc.blogspot.com/2017/02/t11-ncert-xii-history-iii.html
11. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/shifting-greening-options-27424
12. https://grokipedia.com/page/Damin-i-koh
13. https://www.gaonconnection.com/read/paharia-tribe-in-jharkhand-struggling-poverty-malnutrition-and-human-trafficking-46712/