Kalu Singh Mahara

Kalu Singh Mahara is remembered as the first freedom fighter of Uttarakhand: the Champawat man who raised a rebel band in the uprising of 1857 and carried the revolt into the Kali Kumaon hills.

He was born in 1831 at Thuwa Mahar near Lohaghat in Champawat, in the borderland where Kumaon meets Nepal. When the great uprising of 1857 spread from the plains, Mahara organised a force of hill men, in touch with the rebel leadership at Bareilly, and struck at the British in the Kali Kumaon region.

The rising in the hills was contained and Mahara was hunted and imprisoned, but he survived, and local memory kept his name alive long after the official record moved on. In recent years the state has formally honoured him as its first freedom fighter, with his memory centred on Champawat and Lohaghat.