By Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI/BHUBANESWAR: The Union PNG-Steel Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Wednesday met his Cabinet Colleague Union Culture & Tourism Minister, Prahlad Singh in New Delhi and discussed about Paika Memorial at the Barunei Foothills in Odisha’s Khordha district, to commemorate the martyrs of Paika rebellion.
President Ram Nath Kovind had early in September this year laid the foundation stone of a memorial dedicated to the 1817 Paika Rebellion against the British. In 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had released a stamp and a coin to commemorate the Paika rebellion of 1817 in Odisha.
Bakshi (Commander) Jagabandhu Bidyadhar Mahapatra Bhramaraber Ray was the military chief of the then Khordha Raja, who roused and led Paikas (peasant militia) and Kandhs (tribals) in a military attack on the British in 1817.
He had lost his Rorang Garh estate due to procedural errors in revenue payment to the British. After seven years of evading arrest, in May 1825, he surrendered in Cuttack and was granted a pension till he died in 1829.
Historians since the nineteenth century have presented the Rebellion and its leader Jagabandhu through different lenses. Assigning Paika Rebellion the status of a “freedom movement”, historian B C Ray wrote in 1959 that “nowhere in India on the regional level, in the pre-nationalist age, a freedom movement was so carefully planned and so vigorously launched”.
