AI Generated Summary
- Shouts rang through the crowd, and in the melee that followed, two men were killed—Durga, a local resident, and Rup Ram, who succumbed to gunshot wounds at a hospital in Sunni.
- From the modest premises of the Imperial Hotel in Shimla’s Lower Bazaar, he helped steer a movement that sought not only an end to colonial dominance, but to centuries of local feudal oppression.
- The parallels drawn at the time between Dhami and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre—though differing in scale—reflected how deeply the event resonated with a population long resigned to silence.
History has a way of repeating itself—not always in grand revolutions or sweeping political changes, but often in hunger, hardship, and quiet but persistent defiance. It’s in those moments, when people rise to demand food, dignity, and freedom, that real change begins. One such moment—largely forgotten in mainstream narratives—played out 86 years ago this week, in the rainy hills near Shimla.
On July 13, 1939, as monsoon showers lashed the hills, around 600 villagers braved the weather to gather in Shimla. Their cause: the deeply rooted injustices of feudal rule in the princely state of Dhami and surrounding hill regions. At the heart of their discontent were issues familiar across colonial India—unpaid forced labour (begaar), restrictions on forest access, high land revenue demands, and no guarantee of food in times of crop failure.
The man leading this resistance was not a career politician, but an engineer-turned-hotelier named Bhag Mal Sautha. As the secretary of the Himalaya Riasti Praja Mandal, Sautha had become a key figure in organising peaceful resistance across the hill states. From the modest premises of the Imperial Hotel in Shimla’s Lower Bazaar, he helped steer a movement that sought not only an end to colonial dominance, but to centuries of local feudal oppression.
On July 15, Sautha and a crowd of nearly 3,000 protestors marched toward Dhami. Just before reaching the state border, Sautha was stopped by police and shown an order barring his entry. When he refused to turn back, he was arrested. As the police attempted to take him away, chaos erupted. Shouts rang through the crowd, and in the melee that followed, two men were killed—Durga, a local resident, and Rup Ram, who succumbed to gunshot wounds at a hospital in Sunni.
The incident shocked the hills. Known now as the Dhami Goli Kaand or Dhami Firing Incident, it became a flashpoint in the hill states’ struggle for justice and self-rule. The British authorities cracked down hard. Sautha was evicted from his hotel, his possessions thrown into the street. He was sentenced to three months of rigorous imprisonment and fined. Yet, rather than crushing the movement, the crackdown only intensified it.
The parallels drawn at the time between Dhami and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre—though differing in scale—reflected how deeply the event resonated with a population long resigned to silence. What made this moment even more poignant was its connection to the broader national movement. While Indian freedom fighters in Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi battled colonial policies, people in Dhami were resisting something equally brutal: systemic hunger, unpaid labour, and exclusion from their own forests and farms.
Indeed, food—or the lack of it—has often been the unseen spark of rebellion. The 1946 Naval Mutiny, which shook the British hold on India’s armed forces, was triggered by racial abuse and terrible food served aboard the HMIS Talwar. With slogans like “No Food, No Work”, naval ratings demanded better rations—protesting rice mixed with stones and mud. That strike soon involved 20,000 sailors and is now credited with hastening India’s independence.
Even earlier, long before 1947, hunger had fuelled resistance in the hills. The construction of the Shimla-Dhami road in 1938 relied almost entirely on forced labour. And when repeated crop failures struck, farmers found no relief from crushing taxes. Food insecurity turned into political defiance.
In the aftermath of the Dhami uprising, stories emerged that combined tragedy with irony. One protestor, Tulsi Ram, claimed he had been shot by none other than the Rana of Dhami. He reportedly refused treatment by any doctor other than Jawaharlal Nehru. Eventually, after much persuasion, his wounds were bandaged and he was carried in a palanquin to a hospital in Shimla.
Though now largely absent from schoolbooks and public memory, the Dhami Firing Incident was a crucial chapter in India’s long road to freedom. It reminds us that independence was not only won in legislative halls or by charismatic leaders, but also through the courage of farmers, labourers, and ordinary citizens who marched through the rain for the simple right to live with dignity.
As monsoon clouds once again drape the hills of Himachal, it is worth remembering that freedom often begins not with grand speeches, but with a hunger that refuses to be silenced.
