- Lived:
- Sidhu c. 1815, Kanhu c. 1820, both in Bhognadih village below the Rajmahal hills (today's Sahebganj district, Jharkhand); both dead by 1856 — Sidhu hanged in 1855, Kanhu captured and executed as the rising ended. Their whole world was the Damin-i-koh, the "skirts of the hills."
- Field:
- Adivasi resistance — leaders, with their brothers Chand and Bhairav, of the Santal hūl (rebellion) of 1855–56, the largest armed rising against the East India Company before 1857
- The Big Idea:
- Two farming brothers summoned ten thousand villagers, declared the Company's rule over, and led bows against muskets. They lost everything — and the defeat forced the British to write a separate law for Santal land that is still in force today.
- In their words:
- "The Thacoor has descended in the house of Seedoo Manjee, Kanoo Manjee, Bhyrub and Chand, at Bhugnudihee… he has descended from Heaven, he is conversing with Kanoo and Seedoo." (from "The Thacoor's Perwannah," a rebel proclamation preserved in the Company's judicial files, 1855 — the spelling is the clerk's)
- If you remember one thing:
- The hūl was crushed in six months and its leaders hanged, yet it won its central demand anyway: the British had to admit their own courts and police had caused the rising, wall off the Santal country from both, and bar the taking of Santal land — a concession that hardened, law by law, into an Act of 1949 that still stands in Jharkhand.