. Great Rebellion, Introduction has been a subject of much debate among historians, both British and Indian. British imperialist historians dismissed it a mutiny, an outbreak among soldiers. Indian historians who explored the role of the people in converting a military outbreak into a rebellion raised two questions to which the imperial historians have had no answer.
If it was only a military outbreak how to explain the revolt of the people even before the sepoys at those stations mutinied? Why was it necessary to punish the people with fine and hanging for complicity in acts of rebellion? Col. Mallesan, the Adjutant General of the Bengal army in a pamphlet titled The Making of the Bengal Army remarked, ‘a military mutiny...speedily changed its character and became a national insurrection’.
situation as tribal lands were leased out to non-Santhal zamindars and moneylenders. To this was added the oppression of the local police and the European officials engaged in railroad construction. This penetration of dikus (outsiders) completely destroyed their familiar world, and forced them into action to take possession of their lost territory. In July , when their ultimatum to the zamindars and the government went unheeded, several thousand Santhals, armed with bows and arrows, started an open insurrection “against the unholy trinity of their oppressors-the zamindars, the mahajans and the government.” At the battle of Maheshpur, many of the Manjis were dressed in red clothes.
Later this garment became an assertion of authority. In the first week of the rising a party of ten men attacked and burnt down the village of Monkaparrah. The rebels included a number of women. Initially their leader was Sido.
After his arrest the revolt was led by Kanoo. At the later stage of the revolt, the peasants also joined. Several thousand peasants raided on Charles Maseyk’s indigo factory and pillaged. This invited brutal counter-insurgency measures; the army was mobilized and Santhal villages were burnt one after another with vengeance.
According to one calculation, out of thirty to fifty thousand rebels, fifteen to twenty thousand were killed before the insurrection was finally suppressed. Munda