Famine, or even bad food, has led to mutinies and revolts. Marie Antoinette’s supposed utterance just before the French Revolution, “Let them eat cake”, is historically incorrect. There is no evidence that she said something of the sort to the starving people of Paris. But we still treat this as a piece of history. The statement, howsoever false, makes the inescapable connection between hunger and the desire to remove what seems to be in the way of getting food — and a fair wage.

 The Naval Mutiny of 1946, which substantially hastened the process of giving India her freedom, stemmed from racial discrimination and bad food. Among other issues, the naval ratings aboard the HMIS Talwar, where the strike began, protested against the rations they were being given with the slogan: “No Food, No Work”. Rice, supposedly, came mixed with mud and stones. This strike soon swept across other ships and shore establishments, with approximately 20,000 men involved.

In a manner of speaking, this event and numerous others give us evidence that we fought for independence against the “bad working conditions” that existed under colonial rule.

Far away from the sea, in the hills of today’s Himachal, the freedom movement merged almost imperceptibly with local issues like land revenue and feudal cesses. One of these was the prevalence of ‘begaar’, which, at its simplest, was unpaid labour. The prevalence of this oppressive institution was substantially responsible for unrest in the hills. ‘Begaar’ was responsible for numerous revolts about which very little is known.

In the second half of the 19th century and in the first quarter of the 20th, some sort of disturbances occurred in almost all the hill states. These were suppressed with troops from British India and with the help of the Punjab Reserve Police.

In the princely state of Dhami, which bordered Shimla, many matters of discontent were similar to other hill states. These, apart from ‘begaar’, were restrictions on forest rights, on civil liberties and agrarian revenue issues. The matter was precipitated after a road had been built in 1938 between Shimla and Dhami; almost all the labour was of ‘begaaris’. Repeated crop failures and the subsequent absence of food security had compelled the common farmers of Dhami to ask for a remission in revenue.

Eighty-six years ago, the month of July would have been quite as wet as this one. Four days after the event, The Tribune, then published from Lahore, reported that on July 13, 1939, despite bad weather, around 600 persons from Dhami and other hill states had gathered for a meeting in Shimla. They raised these and other issues.

The man who came to head the campaign to redress these matters was Bhag Mal Sautha. Trained as an engineer, Sautha made his living by running the Imperial Hotel in Shimla’s Lower Bazaar. He was the secretary of the Himalaya Riasti Praja Mandal, which was spearheading the freedom struggle and anti-feudal order in the hill states.

   As part of a wider nationalist strategy, on July 15, 1939, with a large band of people, Sautha moved towards Dhami from Shimla.

Just short of the border, the state police showed Sautha an order that prohibited his entry. He refused to comply and was arrested. The crowd was estimated by the Dhami Durbar to have numbered between 2,000 and 3,000. As they began to move towards the thana, someone in the crowd began to shout that their leader was being taken away to jail and that this should be prevented.

Subsequently, a melee ensued and two persons were killed and 40 injured. Those killed were a man named Durga, who was a resident of Dhami, and Rup Ram, who had been shot in the legs and abandoned once the crowd dispersed; he succumbed to his injuries at the hospital in Sunni (in the state of Bhajji), where he had been taken.

An upshot of the Dhami incident was that Sautha was evicted from the Imperial Hotel and all his belongings were thrown out. He was sentenced to three months of rigorous imprisonment and a fine. The event came to be known as the ‘Dhami Firing Incident’ or ‘Dhami Goli Kaand’ and its reverberations were felt not only in the hills, but throughout the country. Some went to the extent of drawing parallels with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

For all its seriousness, and the fact that this incident would accelerate and enlarge the freedom movement in the hills, the moment also had a touch of ironical humour. Among the wounded was a man named Tulsi Ram, who claimed to have been shot by the Rana of Dhami. He refused to be treated by anyone except Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. It took considerable persuasion to allow the wound to be bandaged; he was then placed in a palanquin and taken to a hospital in Shimla.