Q.How did the Paharias respond to the coming of outsiders?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The Paharias responded to outsiders with a mix of armed resistance, strategic withdrawal into the hills, and a determined preservation of their own way of life — refusing to be absorbed into the settled, revenue-paying society of the plains.
The Paharias were the original inhabitants of the Rajmahal Hills in present-day Jharkhand. For centuries, they lived in a world of their own — a world of forests, shifting cultivation, hunting, and gathering. Their relationship with the plains below was not one of isolation, but of careful, limited contact. They traded forest produce for grain and iron, and in return, the plains people left them alone. This delicate balance was shattered when outsiders — first the Mughals, then the British — began to push into the hills with very different intentions.
When the Mughal emperors tried to bring the Paharia hills under their control, the Paharias did not simply submit. They fought back. The hills were their fortress, and they knew every ridge and ravine. Mughal armies, used to open battlefields, found themselves ambushed in narrow passes, their supply lines cut, their soldiers picked off by arrows from unseen archers. The Paharias did not seek a decisive pitched battle — they fought a guerrilla war, melting into the forest when pressed, then striking again when the enemy grew careless. The Mughals eventually gave up trying to conquer them outright and instead paid them a tribute called dang — a kind of protection money — to keep the passes open and the raids on the plains in check.
The dang was not a tax the Paharias paid to the Mughals. It was the opposite — the Mughals paid the Paharias to stay peaceful. This tells you something important: the Paharias were not a weak, marginal people. They were powerful enough to make even an empire negotiate.
The coming of the British changed the rules entirely. The East India Company was not interested in paying tribute. It wanted revenue, and it wanted the forests cleared for settled agriculture. The British saw the Paharias not as a people with a right to the hills, but as a problem to be solved — "wild tribes" who needed to be "civilised" and brought under the plough.
The Paharia response was immediate and fierce. Between the 1770s and 1780s, they launched a series of raids on the plains, attacking British revenue officials, burning down the new settlements, and destroying the crops of those who had taken land they considered their own. The British called these "outrages" and "disturbances," but from the Paharia perspective, they were acts of self-defence — a people defending their homeland and their way of life against an invasion that came not with armies alone, but with surveyors, tax collectors, and ploughs.
The Paharia resistance was not just about losing land. It was about losing a whole world. The British wanted to turn the Paharias into settled peasants who paid taxes. The Paharias wanted to remain hunters, gatherers, and shifting cultivators. This was a clash of two entirely different visions of life.
The British response was brutal. They sent military expeditions into the hills, burned Paharia villages, destroyed their grain stores, and offered bounties for Paharia heads. But the hills defeated them as they had defeated the Mughals. The Paharias simply withdrew deeper into the forest, where the British soldiers could not follow. They knew the terrain, they knew where to find water and game, and they knew how to survive where a stranger would starve. …
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