There are moments in a nation's memory that refuse to fade into the footnotes of history, however far they may lie from its capitals and its chronicles. The Quit India Movement of August 1942 was one such moment — a summons that shook the length and breadth of the subcontinent under the cry of "Do or Die." It did not confine itself to the cities and the university towns; it travelled, unbidden, into the forested hill tracts of Koraput and Malkangiri, into villages that most maps of the time barely acknowledged. It was here, in the obscure settlement of Mathili, that a confrontation unfolded on the twenty-first of August that would come to be remembered as the Mathili firing — not merely an act of colonial brutality, but a testament to the courage of an unarmed tribal people who chose dignity over submission.
At the heart of this uprising stood Lakshman Naik, a name that has since become inseparable from the soil of Malkangiri. Born on 22 November 1899 in the village of Tentuligumma, then part of the Madras Presidency's Koraput tract, Naik grew into a tireless organiser of his people. He worked against the exploitation and humiliation his community endured — against the gothi and bheti systems of forced and unpaid labour imposed by British administrators, and against the punishing forest laws that criminalised the tribal relationship with the very land they had always called their own. He carried the message of khadi from hamlet to hamlet, urged his people away from liquor, and spread the call of non-cooperation with a patience that won him trust rather than mere obedience. In time, the people of Koraput came to speak of him with the reverence usually reserved for the Mahatma himself, calling him, simply, the Gandhi of Malkangiri.
When the call of the Quit India Movement reached these hills in August 1942, Naik did not hesitate. Under his leadership, the tribal community of the region prepared not for violence, but for a disciplined act of defiance — a peaceful assertion of the right to be free.
The morning of August 21 broke over Mathili carrying with it the weight of that resolve. Thousands of men and women, summoned by Naik, left their villages before dawn and gathered at Mathili. They carried the national tricolour, their voices raised in cries of Bande Mataram, and to the rhythm of traditional drums — the singha and the madal — they walked, unarmed and unhurried, toward the police station. Their intention was singular and non-violent: to hoist the flag of a free India over that symbol of colonial authority, and in doing so, to declare, through satyagraha alone, that the Raj's writ no longer held sway over their hearts.
The British police, forewarned, were waiting. As the procession neared the station, officers moved to disperse the crowd, ordering them to turn back. But the marchers, steadied by Naik's presence among them, would not be moved. They held their ground without raising a hand in anger, insisting only on the right to walk forward. What followed was, by every account, a swift and calculated escalation. The police first turned to their lathis, beating the marchers without restraint — and when even this failed to break their resolve, they opened fire on the unarmed crowd.
It is here that the historical record grows less certain, and it would be dishonest to smooth over that uncertainty for the sake of a tidier narrative. The account preserved in Odisha's own government documents holds that five satyagrahis died at the scene, with more than seventeen others left seriously wounded — a figure echoed in later academic scholarship on the Koraput freedom movement. One scholarly account records that the police firing killed five people and injured seventeen others, with Naik himself sustaining a gunshot wound.
Yet a number of more widely circulated popular accounts, including several retrospectives published around Naik's death anniversaries, put the toll dramatically higher — describing indiscriminate police firing that killed forty people and injured more than two hundred others. This essay does not attempt to adjudicate between these figures; readers deserve to know that such a discrepancy exists in the record, rather than be offered false certainty on a matter where sources themselves diverge. What remains beyond dispute is the essential fact: that a peaceful, unarmed assembly was met with gunfire, and that blood was shed on the soil of Mathili that morning.
Naik himself did not escape unhurt. Struck by both baton and bullet, he collapsed at the scene, his consciousness slipping away even as the firing continued around him.
What came after was, in its way, as revealing as the massacre itself — a demonstration of how colonial administration could turn its own violence into a legal instrument against its victims. During the chaos of that day, a forest guard lost his life. The guard, identified as G. Ramayya, had been deployed to Mathili police station specifically to help disperse the demonstrators.
The judge sentenced Naik to death, condemned forty-nine of his companions to rigorous life imprisonment, and acquitted four.
Naik himself maintained, before the court, a very different account of events — he told the judge that Ramayya had in fact died from injuries sustained during the police firing itself, but the court chose to rely instead on the prosecution's version — a divergence that historians and popular memory alike have long treated as evidence of a trial engineered to break the back of tribal resistance rather than to establish truth.
A widely repeated claim holds that Lakshman Naik was independence India's only freedom fighter to be hanged during the Quit India Movement. This deserves a careful correction, since precision matters where a martyr's memory is concerned. What can be verified is a narrower, though still remarkable, distinction: Naik is remembered as the only person from Odisha to be executed by hanging for his participation in the freedom movement.
Whether he stands entirely alone among the many thousands who were imprisoned, injured, or killed by police firing across India during the 1942 movement is a claim repeated often in popular retellings, but one this essay cannot confirm with the same confidence, since credible sources speak specifically to his standing within Odisha rather than the whole of India. It is a distinction that loses none of its gravity for being stated with this care — Odisha's soil gave the movement a martyr whose death sentence was carried out to its bitter end, when so many others convicted alongside him were sent instead into long years of imprisonment.
One detail from popular memory that this essay was unable to independently verify concerns the judge who passed the sentence. It has been said in some retellings that V. Ramanathan was himself an Indian who, after independence, rose to become Chief Secretary of Odisha. No historical record encountered in preparing this essay could confirm or deny this claim, and it is offered here only as something that circulates in oral memory, not as an established fact. Readers should treat it with appropriate caution until a more reliable source can be found.
The trial's conclusion did not end Naik's resistance. From his cell, he petitioned the Patna High Court against the verdict, engaging Radha Charan Das, a lawyer from Berhampur, to carry his appeal forward — reportedly signing on only with reluctance, having already made his peace with the sacrifice ahead of him. The appeal failed, and the death sentence was confirmed. He was moved to the condemned cell at Berhampur Central Jail, where he remained from mid-November 1942 until his execution. Even behind bars he continued to hearten his fellow prisoners, urging them toward the freedom struggle and filling the jail's silence with the strains of the national anthem. In his final days, he asked to share the ordinary meals given to his fellow inmates and to see them once more; on the night before his execution, it is recorded that the inmates of Berhampur jail kept a vigil of prayer, and that his fellow prisoners wept through the night.
Among those who shared his final imprisonment was said to be a fellow prisoner named Banchanidhi Das, remembered in family and community memory as the author of a mourning verse composed after Naik's execution — an elegy addressed to the "southern wind," asking whether it still remembered the brother who had swung from the gallows, while fate itself seemed to wait, watching the eastern sky for a dawn that would not come easily. I was not able to independently verify the details of Banchanidhi Das's identity or the exact provenance of this verse through available records, and in keeping with the care due to any individually authored poem, I have chosen to describe its spirit here in prose rather than reproduce its lines, even in transliteration. What can be said of it, based on what has been shared, is that it belongs to a small, aching body of prison poetry from that era — verses composed by men who had watched a comrade go to his death with a kind of settled grace, and who found in that grief a language of natural imagery: wind, dawn, a homeland still waiting to wake.
The dawn of March 29, 1943, brought Naik's own sentence to its conclusion. At around half past five in the morning, he walked to the gallows at Berhampur Jail. Before he was led to the noose, he is remembered to have said that though he might die, his motherland would surely one day be free. It is said that he walked to his death smiling, embracing it not as defeat but as a final, willing act of devotion to the land he loved.
That smile, more than almost anything else in his story, is what generations of Odia schoolchildren have carried forward — not through textbooks alone, but through song. A short, anonymous verse, sung for decades in schools across the state and passed down without a single named author, keeps his memory alive in the most immediate way a folk memory can: through the voices of children reciting it together. Rendered here as it has long been sung — "Lakshmana Nayaka he, Lakshmana Nayaka, hasi hasi phasi khunte jhalaila beka" ("O Lakshman Naik, Lakshman Naik, smiling, smiling, he offered his neck to the gallows-post") — with, in some regions, the closing line "Rakhigala Koraput teka" or, elsewhere, "Rakhigala Odisha ra teka" ("he upheld the honour of Koraput" / "he upheld the honour of Odisha"). Sung by children too young to fully grasp the weight of what they recited, this small couplet did more than any monument to keep a forgotten hero's memory alive in ordinary Odia households, one classroom at a time.
Today, the Mathili firing and the martyrdom of Lakshman Naik occupy a hallowed place in the history of Odisha's contribution to the freedom movement — a chapter written not in the language of the metropolis, but in the idiom of the forest and the hill, by people whose names rarely found their way into the grander narratives of the independence struggle. Odisha's official records, and journals such as Odisha Review, have long honoured the significance of that day. The tree of freedom that grew from the blood spilt on Mathili's soil went on to stir the wider country. Even now, the name of Lakshman Naik, and the memory of that ground where unarmed tribal men and women stood their ground against colonial rifles, continue to awaken in Indian hearts a quiet, enduring tremor of patriotism, courage, and selfless service — a reminder that the freedom so often celebrated in the language of great cities was, in places like Mathili, purchased at a cost no less profound for being so little known, and kept alive, long after, in the unschooled memory of a children's song.
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