Govind Guru and the Mangarh Massacre

A movement that began by teaching temperance and literacy ended with over a thousand tribal men, women, and children shot dead on a hillside. Few outside Rajasthan and Gujarat have heard of it.

Must Know

• Govind Guru (1858 – 30 October 1931) was born in Bansiya village, Dungarpur State, in present-day Rajasthan, to a Banjara family.
• Around 1909, he founded the Samp Sabha, a reform movement among Bhil and Banjara communities. It taught monotheism, temperance, and agriculture, and rejected superstition.
• His movement later turned political. He taught that Bhils and Banjaras were the rightful owners of their land, with a right to self-rule.
• On 17 November 1913, British and princely-state troops attacked a large Bhil gathering at Mangarh Hill, on the Banswara-Sunth border.
• The exact death toll is disputed. Contemporary accounts and oral tradition put it at over 1,500, earning the event the name “Adivasi Jallianwala Bagh.”
• Govind Guru was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1919, under restrictive conditions, and died in Gujarat in 1931.

Good to Know

• By 1910, his followers had placed a charter of 33 demands before the British. These mainly concerned forced labour, high taxes, and harassment of his followers.
• The gathering at Mangarh was itself defensive. Bhil families had assembled there after repeated harassment from local rulers and colonial authorities.
• The massacre took place two decades before the far better-known Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, though it remains far less widely taught.
• His legacy today includes the Govind Guru Samadhi Mandir, and two universities named in his honour.
• His Bhagat movement’s tribal-rights tradition continued into the next decade. See ModHist0186 — Motilal Tejawat, whose 1920s Eki Movement organised Bhils across the same Rajasthan-Gujarat tribal belt.

Test Yourself

Please wait…

1. Around 1909, Govind Guru founded the Samp Sabha. What did this reform movement mainly teach?

Armed resistance and guerrilla tactics

Monotheism, temperance, and agriculture

Formal schooling only

Trade and commerce skills

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Great to Know

• The disputed death toll itself says something about how this event was recorded. Unlike Jallianwala Bagh, no comparable official inquiry or count followed Mangarh, leaving oral tradition to fill the gap.
• Govind Guru’s movement shows how social reform and political resistance were often intertwined in tribal areas. A push against superstition and toward literacy became, over a few years, a demand for land and self-rule.
• Mangarh’s relative obscurity, compared to Jallianwala Bagh, reflects a broader pattern in how India’s freedom-struggle history has been taught. Tribal and regional resistance movements often received far less attention than urban, mainstream ones.