Revive Your Darlings

The Prophecy of Rani Gaidinliu

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This article is the first in a series, “Revive Your Darlings,” where writers were encouraged to bring back ideas that were cut or abandoned in the writing process of a previous project. 

1996 Rani Gaidinliu stamp, issued by the Government of India (Wikimedia Commons)

When I first heard of Rani Gaidinliu, I was researching my biography on V.P. Menon, India’s last Political Reforms Commissioner and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s Secretary in the Ministry of States.1 Her story found no place in my original manuscript, primarily because, between 1932 and 1945, she was behind bars, effectively sidelined for much of India’s freedom struggle. But there was a story there – of local rebellion and an Empire straining at the seams. The inner workings of the British Raj in northeast India can best be summed up by a stern Home Department memo of the time: “Reliance cannot be placed on one particular course of policy, but there must be a ready adaptation of expedients to suit ever changing circumstances.”2 This makeshift policy meant that there would always be gray areas in the northeast that were impossible to quell or keep, despite the Raj’s best attempts to create “buffer states” in the region. As time passed, geopolitics grew more complex and the world went to war in 1914, the Empire’s problems in the area began to mushroom.

It was against this backdrop that Rani Gaidinliu was born on January 26, 1915, in Lungkao, a Rongmei  (an ethnic group in the area) village in the Tamenglong district of Manipur.3 Legend has it that an angel visited Gaidinliu’s mother in a dream, warning her that the baby would be a girl, but that her birth would be accompanied by death. If the baby lived, the angel added, she would be extraordinary. The last part of this prophecy, at least, turned out to be true.4

When she was a teenager, Gaidinliu joined the movement of Haipou Jadonang, a family member and young man at least ten years her senior, who claimed to have miraculous powers and divine ordination from Tingkao Ragwang, the Kabui supreme being. Based on the holy sanction given to him and fuelled by rising ethnic tensions in the region, Jadonang began a religious, economic and ultimately political movement in the Naga Hills.5 Though their narrative has often been co-opted as a nationalist one, particularly by India’s currently ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, it is difficult to discern whether either Jadonang or Gaidinliu thought of their fight against the British as such. It is more likely, as the scholar Arkotong Longkumer has explained, that theirs was a fight against local issues: against the payment of house taxes in their region of Manipur, the use of labor for the war effort; the abuse of power by local leaders in exploiting the pothang system of labor and internal animosities against neighboring tribes.6 Between 1929 and 1931, the Jadonang movement created difficulties for the Raj, until it was brought to an abrupt halt with the arrest of Jadonang by the Deputy Commissioner of Cachar.7 In the ensuing melee, Gaidinliu managed to escape. The Empire launched a massive manhunt to capture her, for in their eyes, the succession of the Jadonang Movement rested on her wiry shoulders.

Dzukou valley in the Nagaland-Manipur border, SeethaG, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

But under Gaidinliu’s aegis, the movement evolved, now combining emotive appeal – a young girl standing up to an empire – with practical social and economic reforms, based on a reworking of indigenous religious rituals.8 Much of the movement’s allure bloomed from its promise of prosperity and freedom to a people weighed down by famine and loss of land, due to continuing ethnic tensions. Echoes of these dreams were reflected in the region’s folk songs and prayers. But in 1932, Gaidinliu, thus far sheltered by her supporters, was betrayed and captured.9 ​​She was imprisoned for the next 14 years, her life a succession of transfers from one jail to the other – from Kohima to Imphal; from Guwahati to Shillong; and from Aizawl to Tura.

But that was not the end of her story.10

Jawaharlal Nehru at the opening of the 1937 Indian National Congress (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru, returned to India from Switzerland after the 1936 death of his wife Kamala, happened upon Gaidinliu’s story for the first time. Then campaigning for a crucial and historic provincial election, under clouds of communal tension and the rise of global fascism, Nehru became fascinated by the northeast.11 In 1938, he republished an essay, originally contributed to the All-India Congress Committee Newsletter, titled “Gaidallo Ranee.”12 ​​In it, Nehru spoke of his visit to Sylhet, a district in the then-province (now state) of Assam, where he heard Gaidinliu’s story for the first time. His reproduction of that story in prose is panegyric.13 Despite its obvious romanticism, his essay deserves quotation, simply because of Nehru’s skill in projecting an unknown (to the rest of India) young woman onto a national stage, and establishing Gaidinliu as an icon who embodied unity, a clarion call against colonial oppression.

What torment and suppression of spirit they have brought to her who in the pride of her youth dared to challenge an empire? She can roam no more in the hill country through the forest glades, or sing in the fresh air of the mountains. This wild young thing sits cabined in darkness, with a few yards, maybe, of space in the daytime, eating her fiery heart in desolation and confinement. . . A day will come when India also will remember her and cherish her and bring her out of her prison cell.14

That day wasn’t to come for some years.

Meanwhile, the international publication of Nehru’s essay caught the eye of Lady Nancy Astor, who took up Gaidinliu’s cause in 1939.15 Writing to Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Muirhead, then Parliamentary Undersecretary for India and Burma in Neville Chamberlain’s doomed government, Lady Astor argued that the time to release Gaidinliu had arrived. Given Jadonang’s execution in 1931, surely the Government of India could consider some method of “reformative treatment” for Gaidinliu, rather than permanent imprisonment. Given the volatility of global politics at the time, the last thing the Empire wanted was to provoke any further tensions in the northeast. Muirhead flatly refused.16 When Nehru heard of this, he was wryly amused. Peace in Manipur and Assam, he wrote, “had a very insecure foundation if it rested on a girl in her twenties being kept in prison indefinitely.”17

In 1947, Gaidinliu was released from prison.

But her freedom did not mean that her story would have a happy ending. Her movements, for one, were under strict supervision. She was not allowed to enter “Manipur State, the North Cachar Hills Subdivision or the Sadr Subdivisions of the Naga Hills” and she had to “refrain” from any and all political activities.18 In the aftermath of India’s 1947 partition – not to mention a war with Pakistan and raging violence in Hyderabad – India’s geopolitical and political stability was crucial. Documents from the Ministry of States, in the National Archives of India (NAI) support the decision of state officials, with correspondence between bureaucrats, officials in Assam and Manipur and the Prime Minister’s Secretariat in Delhi, debating the wisdom of setting Rani Gaidinliu free. Even in April 1949, Gopinath Bordoloi – then Premier of Assam – was a worried man. Nehru was still pushing for Gaidinliu’s unconditional freedom, but Bordoloi begged to differ. “The real difficulty about this case is that, even though Gaidinliu herself may wish to do no mischief,” he wrote diplomatically to the Prime Minister, “…her very name acts almost as a spell amongst a section of the Nagas who, under her guidance, practiced a sort of semi-fanatical cult during the days of her freedom.”19

The file on Gaidinliu at the NAI suggests that Nehru continued to actively push for her unrestricted movement, in possible continuance of his incredulity that so much ferment could emanate from one woman. But Bordoloi remained firm. He could allow Gaidinliu to go home to Lungkao, if that would make Nehru happy, but “the local officers do not think that, at this stage of ferment in the Naga Hills, she could be allowed to move as she likes.”20 Only by July 1949, after months of incessant letters from Nehru, were the restrictions on Gaidinliu’s movements lifted, though haggling over her allowance would continue, until the frustrated Prime Minister was told gently that it was perhaps best if he stopped writing at all. “Nothing has been done nor will be done,” Sri Prakasa, then the Governor of Assam wrote to Nehru, “The matter rests there and I should not advise you to write to the Premier again. He is not his own master in such matters……”21

The story of Rani Gaidinliu did not end there. It continued well into modern Indian political history. From Nehru to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, from Indira to her son Rajiv, from the Congress Party and more recently, to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Gaidinliu’s legacy is, in the 21st century, a complex and deeply political one, layered with religion, iconoclasm and gender.22There are many who still venerate her, and many who feel the opposite way. Sadly, this story became a snippet on the cutting-room floor of edits that shears any first draft down to a readable length, but Gaidinliu’s life was exactly what the angel in her mother’s dream had prophesied: extraordinary.

Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

  1. Gaidinliu’s actual name is Gaidinliu Pamei. Rani is an honorific title, meaning Queen.
  2. Memo, July 10, 1866, Nos. 15-16, Home Department, Public Branch, Section A, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
  3. Manipur, it must be noted, was an important political and military base for the British Raj at this time, buffering it against the hill tribes and Burma.
  4. Arkotong Longkumer, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast (Stanford University: 2021), 193.
  5. The primary actors in this region were – and are – the Kukis, the Kabui and the Kacha Nagas (Zeme). The Kukis are a nomadic people, belonging to the same ethnic group as the Chins of Myanmar and the Lushai of Mizoram. Specifically, then, the word “Kuki” can also apply to those who were driven from the Lushai and the Chin Hills to the north and to the west. The Zeme (also spelt Nzemi, Zemei) were known as Kacha Nagas in colonial times. They were one of the first “Naga” tribes the British encountered in the North Cachar Hills. Today, the word “Naga” is used, for nationalistic reasons, in order to signify a supposedly unified culture with common characteristics. The Kabui, today, are known as the Rongmei. The enmity between the Kuki, the Kabui and the Kacha Nagas can be traced back to the Kuki Rebellion (1917-1919). The rebellion had broken out against the British policy of recruiting Kukis for the Labour Corps during the First World War. Later, under the pretext of the Rebellion, some Kuki villages allegedly attacked Kabui and Kacha villages in order to settle “old scores.” Along with ethnic tensions, the Jadonang movement encompassed political and religious measures. His supporters argued that rather than being paid to the Raj, house tax etc should be paid to Jadonang himself. Jadonang also devised a set of new religious rituals, based on Kabui practice, but closer to the Vaishnavite traditions of the dominant Meitei community of Manipur. For more on the movements that have changed the equilibrium in Manipur, see N. Joykumar Singh, Social Movements in Manipur (1917–1951) (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1992); and John Parratt, Wounded Land: Politics and Identity in Modern Manipur (New Delhi: Mittal Publication, 2005).
  6. Pothang literally means pot (baggage) and thang (to carry). Under Manipuri law, every village had to cater for the visiting king, members of his family, and state officials when they toured the village or the region. This was abolished in 1913 with the help of the British, but the practice continued illegally in some regions. For more on this, see Longkumer, The Greater India Experiment.
  7. Jadonang was executed on charges of murdering two Manipuri traders – who had allegedly been sacrificed in the name of the God he swore by. In the wake of his death, there were murmurs around the accuracy and veracity of the charges. Questions still abound as to whether Jadonang’s execution was, in fact, politically motivated in order to break the back of a movement that held very real danger to the Empire’s security in the northeast. For more, see Gangumei Kamei, A History of the Zeilangrong Nagas: From Makhel to Rani Gaidinliu (Spectrum Publications: 2004), 155-158.
  8. For more, see Arkotong Longkumer, “Religious and Economic Reform: The Gaidinliu Movement and the Heraka in the North Cachar Hills,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 30, no. 3 (2007): 499.
  9. Dr. Haralu was accused by Gaidinliu’s followers of leaking her location to Hari Blah, then the Assistant Commissioner of the Naga Hills, and Captain MacDonald of the Assam Rifles. Gaidinliu was finally cornered in the village of Pulomi and brought to Manipur to be interrogated. In MacDonald’s report of her capture, he described Gaidinliu as fatigued and bedraggled, but undaunted.
  10. See the tour diaries, correspondence and dispatches of J.H. Hutton and those of Ursula Graham Bower, the well-known anthropologist and guerrilla fighter against the Japanese between 1939-1945. Both can be found online at the Naga Database, built by the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge: https://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/naga/coll/93/children/detail/all/index.html.
  11. He had written previously – albeit academically – of the northeast in Discovery of India. Yet in Unity of India, Nehru is almost childlike in his revelations, “Here were entirely new people, new to me and so different from all others I had seen in India. How little we know of our country and her children!” See Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India: Selected Writings, 1937-1940 (Lindsay Drummond, 1941), 188.
  12. The essay appeared in an American periodical called The Living Age (and later included in The Unity of India, a select collection of his writing on various subjects).
  13. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India: Selected Writings, 1937-1940 (Lindsay Drummond, 1941), 187-188.
  14. Nehru, The Unity of India, 187-188.
  15. Formerly Nancy Shaw, Lady Astor was one of the leading hostesses of her day and the first woman to sit in the  House of Commons in 1919. As the wife of Waldorf Astor and the mistress of Cliveden House, a sumptuous mansion on the Thames in Buckinghamshire, Lady Astor was the center of a clique known as the Cliveden set. In the late 1930s, the set was widely charged with being pro-Nazi in its tendencies, not to mention subverting British foreign policy when it could.
  16. Muirhead shot himself a few months later, in October 1939, in fear that a leg injury, sustained during action in the First World War, would prevent him from seeing active service in World War II.
  17. See Folios 412, 414-417, British Library, London. The case for Rani Gaidinliu’s release continued to be taken up at various intervals throughout the freedom struggle, with representations being made to the beleaguered Viceroy of India at the time, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell.
  18. Gopinath Bordoloi to Jawaharlal Nehru, April 7, 1949, D.No. 3568-NEF/49, F. No. 15(9)/P-49, Ministry of States, F Branch, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
  19. Gopinath Bordoloi to Jawaharlal Nehru, April 7, 1949, D.No. 3568-NEF/49, F. No. 15(9)/P-49, Ministry of States, F Branch, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
  20. Gopinath Bordoloi to Jawaharlal Nehru, June 22, 1949, D.O. PS-130/49, F. No. 15(9)/P-49, Ministry of States, F Branch, National Archives of India, New Delhi. This particular file also contains protracted correspondence on the need to increase an allowance that the government was handing out to Gaidinliu. The Ministry of States was in charge of releasing monies to her – hiked from Rs. 15 a month in 1946 to the princely sum of Rs. 75 a month in 1949.
  21. Sri Prakasa to Jawaharlal Nehru, September 29, 1949, No. 7(173)-49/PM, F. No. 15(9)/P-49, Ministry of States, F Branch, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
  22. Arkotong Longkumer has done excellent work in studying Gaidinliu, the Heraka movement, her legacy, her modern political relevance and her complicated spiritual appeal. See Arkotong Longkumer, “Religious and Economic Reform: The Gaidinliu Movement and the Heraka in the North Cachar Hills,” South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies 30, no. 3 (2007): 499; The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast, Stanford University Press (2021) and “Lines that Speak: The Gaidinliu’s Notebooks as Language, Prophecy and Textuality,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 2 (2016): 123-147.
Narayani Basu on Twitter
Narayani Basu is a historian and foreign policy analyst. Her second book, "V.P. Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India," was released in 2020 by Simon & Schuster India.

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