In 1882 an armed rising of the Khonds of the Kalahandi State occurred
as a result of agrarian trouble. The Feudatory Chief had encouraged
the settlement in the State of members of the Kolta caste who are
excellent cultivators and keenly acquisitive of land. They soon got
the Khonds heavily indebted to them for loans of food and seed-grain,
and began to oust them from their villages. The Khonds, recognising
with some justice that this process was likely to end in their total
expropriation from the soil, concerted a conspiracy, and in May 1882
rose and murdered the Koltas of a number of villages. The signal
for the outbreak was given by passing a knotted string from village
to village; other signals were a bent arrow and a branch of a mahua
tree. When the Khond leaders were assembled an axe was thrown on to
the ground and each of them grasping it in turn swore to join in the
rising and support his fellows. The taint of cruelty in the tribe is
shown by the fact that the Kutia Khonds, on being requested to join
in the rising, replied that if plunder was the only object they would
not do so, but if the Koltas were to be murdered they agreed. Some
of the murdered Koltas were anointed with turmeric and offered at
temples, the Khonds calling them their goats, and in one case a
Kolta is believed to have been made a Meriah sacrifice to the earth
god. The Khonds appeared before the police, who were protecting a
body of refugees at the village of Norla, with the hair and scalps of
their murdered victims tied to their bows. To the Political Officer,
who was sent to suppress the rising, the Khonds complained that the
Koltas had degraded them from the position of lords of the soil to
that of servants, and justified their plundering of the Koltas on the
ground that they were merely taking back the produce of their own land,
which the Koltas had stolen from them. They said that if they were not
to have back their land Government might either drive them out of the
country or exterminate them, and that Koltas and Khonds could no more
live together than tigers and goats. Another grievance was that a new
Raja of Kalahandi had been installed without their consent having been
obtained. The Political Officer, Mr. Berry, hanged seven of the Khond
ringleaders and effected a settlement of their grievances. Peace was
restored and has not since been broken. At a later date in the same
year, 1882, and independently of the rising, a Khond landholder was
convicted and executed for having offered a five-year-old girl as a
Meriah sacrifice.