Jayee Rajguru

Jayee Rajguru organised Odisha‘s Paika militia against the British, more than fifty years before the Revolt of 1857. He is remembered today as the first martyr of organised Indian resistance to British rule.

Must Know

• Jayee Rajguru, born Jayakrushna Rajguru Mohapatra, was born on 29 October 1739, in Odisha.
• He served as royal priest and regent, or Dewan, of the Khurda kingdom, under its minor ruler Mukunda Deva II, from 1780.
• The British East India Company took control of Odisha from the Marathas in 1803.
• Rajguru travelled to Cuttack to seek the restoration of four Parganas the Khurda kingdom had earlier lost, and a lower tribute. The British refused both demands.
• He then organised the Paika militia, traditional landed warriors, to resist British encroachment. This became known as the Khurda Uprising, or Paika Rebellion, of 1804-05.
• He built alliances with the rulers of Kanika and Kujanga, and zamindars of Harishpur and other estates, to support the resistance.
• British forces captured him through treachery, near the forests of Ranpur, while he was organising further resistance.
• He was tried at Midnapore, and executed there on 6 December 1806.

Good to Know

• The uprising began over a specific grievance. Khurda had earlier ceded four Parganas to the Marathas in exchange for military help, and the British refused to return them.
• The British also withheld a promised payment to the Raja of Khurda, for facilitating troop movements through his territory in 1803.
• The Raja of Kanika separately seized British storehouses and funds, and raised his own army, in defiance of colonial authority.
• Rajguru’s resistance predates the 1857 Revolt, commonly taught as the start of large-scale armed opposition to British rule, by more than fifty years.
• He is remembered in Odisha as the First Martyr, honoured for organising one of the earliest coordinated regional resistances to the East India Company.

Test Yourself

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1. What position did Jayee Rajguru hold in the Khurda kingdom before leading resistance against the British?

Royal priest and regent (Dewan)

Commander-in-chief of the army only

Court poet

Finance minister only, with no other role

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Great to Know

• Rajguru’s uprising shows that organised resistance to British rule in India did not begin in 1857. Regional revolts against Company rule had already appeared in several parts of the subcontinent decades earlier.
• He relied on the Paika militia, a hereditary warrior class tied to land grants rather than a formal royal army. This same model later shaped the larger Paika Rebellion of 1817 in Odisha.
• As a Brahmin scholar and statesman turned military organiser, Rajguru’s own career crossed roles rarely combined in colonial-era resistance movements.
• His story remains far less known nationally than 1857-era figures, despite predating them by half a century.