Badridutt Pandey

Badridutt Pandey, the 'Lion of Kumaon', led the movement that abolished coolie-begar, the hated forced labour of the hills. At the Uttarayani fair at Bageshwar in January 1921, thousands followed him to the Saryu to wash away the system for good.

Born in 1882 at Haridwar into a Kumaoni family of Bageshwar district, he became the editor of the Almora Akhbar and then founded Shakti, the newspaper that made him the voice of Kumaon's grievances. None burned hotter than begar: the obligation of villagers to carry the baggage of touring officials without pay.

At the Uttarayani mela in Bageshwar on 14 January 1921, before a crowd of tens of thousands, Pandey had the village headmen carry their begar registers to the Saryu and drown them, taking an oath that the hills would carry no more loads. The administration, faced with total non-cooperation, let the system die. Gandhi called the campaign a bloodless revolution, and Kumaon called Pandey its Kesari.

He was jailed repeatedly in the freedom struggle, wrote the standard history Kumaon ka Itihas, and after independence represented Almora in Parliament. He died in 1965.