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She was working in the fields along with the other Adivasi women when a youngster from their village Saliha came racing to them, yelling: “They’re attacking the village, they have assaulted your father. They are torching our homes.”
“They” were armed British police who had cracked down on a village seen as defiant of the Raj. Many other villages were razed, burned down, their grain looted. The rebels were being shown their place.
Demathi Dei Sabar, an Adivasi of the Sabar tribe, raced back to Saliha with 40 other young women. “My father was lying on the ground bleeding,” says the aging freedom fighter. “He had a bullet in his leg.”
That memory brings alive a mind otherwise fading. “I lost my temper and attacked that officer with the gun. In those days, we all took lathis as we went to work in the fields or forest. You had to have something with you in case wild animals showed up.”
As she attacked the officer, the 40 other women with her turned their lathis on the rest of the raiding force. “I chased the scoundrel down the street,” she says, angry but also
— source ruralindiaonline.org | P. Sainath | Aug. 14, 2015