This article tells the story of the Kudumi (Kudmi, Kurmi, Mahato, Mahanta, Mohanta) movement for recognition as a tribe, from the Kurmi Kshatriya campaign of the 1890s to the rail blockades of September 2025. It asks who has organised the movement, what they have asked for, how they have worked, and what their opponents say. The sources show a movement in three broad phases: a caste-rank campaign of about 1894 to 1930, a reversal after the census of 1931 and the tribal list of 1950, and a modern agitation for Scheduled Tribe status, for the Kudmali language and for recognition of the Sarna religion, which has used petitions, mass rallies and repeated rail blockades since 2016. In Odisha the community has held its own blockades at Baripada in 2022 and at Bhanjpur in 2025, the latter by the Adivasi Kudumi Samaj and the Odisha Kudumi Sena. Most of the sources are written by or for the movement, and the main rival voice is that of tribal organisations who oppose the claim; the article reports both and takes no side. It ends with the limits of the record and with the work that is still needed, above all for Odisha.
Keywords: Kudumi; Kudmi; Kurmi; Mahato; Mahanta; Mohanta; Scheduled Tribe; Kudmali; Sarna; rail roko; Odisha
1. Introduction
The earlier article in this series, Kudumi Tribe After Independence, followed the Scheduled Tribe question through the rules, the Government replies and the news. This article looks at the same years from the side of the movement itself: the people and bodies that carry the claim, the stages through which it has passed, and the ways in which it has been pressed. A movement for recognition has a history of its own, and for the Kudumi it begins in a surprising place, in an effort not to be called a tribe but to be called Kshatriya.
That turn, from caste rank to tribal claim, is the main thing the sources help us to see. It is also where the sources are weakest, because most of them are written by supporters of the claim, and the voices of the opposing tribal organisations come mostly through news reports. The article therefore sets out the record with care. Section 2 describes the sources. Section 3 follows the roots and the phases of the movement. Section 4 describes its organisations, leaders and methods. Section 5 sets out the demands and the arguments on both sides. Section 6 turns to Odisha, where the community is known by the titles Mahanta and Mohanta. Section 7 gives the discussion, the limits and the conclusion.
2. Sources and Method
The article rests on seventeen items, listed at the end, all opened on 22 October 2026 and read through a page summary and not in full text. They fall into four groups. Six are papers or studies of modest standing: two by Joheb Islam [1][4], one by Lakshmi Kanta Mahato [2], one by Mrinal Kanti Mahata on the Kudmali language [5], one on the Kudmis of Mayurbhanj by Rajashree Mohanta [14] and a district report of Mayurbhanj [15]. Nine are news or analysis pieces: from Outlook [3], The Mooknayak [6], a Jamshedpur paper [7], a regional report [8], Countercurrents [9], a coaching-site explainer [10], two Odisha television reports [12][13] and The Indian Tribal [17]. One is an official reply of the Government of India [11], and one is a regional report on Odisha [16].
The cautions of the earlier articles apply with more force here. The papers by Islam, Mahato and Mahata [1][2][4][5] are written by supporters of the movement or in sympathy with it, and the Jhargram study [4] could be read only as an abstract and a list of references. The news pieces often quote the leaders of one side, and the figures that leaders give, such as the size of the community or the cost of a blockade, are their own claims and have not been checked. Some statements, for example that the governments of three States have endorsed the demand, or that the Patna High Court accepted the community as a tribe in 1924, 1939 and 1963, come from the words of one speaker in a news article [3] and are reported here as claims. Dates differ between sources, and the article says so where they do. Where no source speaks, the article says so, and where it goes beyond the sources it uses the word may.
3. Roots and Phases
The first phase is a movement for rank and not for a tribal list. A study of the Kudmi-Mahato of Jhargram dates the social movement of the community from 1890, and says that it gained recognition as Kshatriya Kurmi after 1931, a change the author reads as an example of sanskritisation [4]. A second paper gives the dates of the Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha: it was formed in 1894, it supported Kshatriya rank at its session of 1915, it allowed Kshatriya rites in 1922, and in November 1930 its general secretary asked that Kurmis be counted as Kurmi Kshatriya at the census of 1931 [1]. A news article on the dispute says the Mahasabha was active until 1930 and relates the change to a Hinduisation of the community, linked with the Kshatriya claim and with the figure of Shivaji [3]. The same paper says that many Kudmis opposed the change, and that the protest of 15 January 1931 under the name Janew Todo, the breaking of the sacred thread, ended with four protesters killed in police firing [1]; this account comes from one paper whose passages are garbled in places, it is not repeated in the news article of 2023 [3], and it should be taken as a claim until it is checked in other records.
The second phase begins with the lists of 1931 and 1950, which are described in the earlier article. What the sources add is the movement’s reaction. After the order of 6 September 1950 limited the tribal list to the primitive tribes of the census of 1931, fifteen Members of Parliament wrote to the Prime Minister on 7 December 1950 and were answered on 15 February 1951 [5], and memoranda followed in 1955 and 1956 [1]. A resolution at Patna in 1971 asked for the community to be put back in the list, and the organisation was renamed Adivasi Kudmi Samaj in 1978 [1]. A news article says that a Shivaji Samaj was formed in 1969 under Vinod Bihari Mahato and merged into the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in 1973, and that the demand for tribal status began in the mid-1970s according to one researcher and in 1972 according to a former Member of Parliament [3]. A conference at Junjhka in Purulia on 27 December 1987 is said to have drawn about 100,000 people [1][5], and in 1983 the Mulki Kudmali Bhakhi Baisi was founded as a body for the language [5].
The third phase is the modern campaign. It has a clear official marker in the proposals sent by the Jharkhand Government on 8 December 2004 and 6 January 2005, which the Union Government has not approved [11], and a speaker at a convention in 2022 dated the recommendation to 23 November 2004 under the then Chief Minister, Arjun Munda [7]. It has an organisational marker in the Adivasi Kudmi Samaj of Ajit Prasad Mahato, founded in 2015 [5], and a tactical one in the rail blockade, first held in 2016 [5]. A news article adds that the decision of the Centre in September 2022 to include groups from five States in the Scheduled Tribe list sharpened the agitation [3]. In short, the sources show the movement moving, over about a century, from a claim to be counted among the Kshatriyas to a claim to be counted as Adivasi, and the reasons for that move are the part that the campaigners and their critics argue about most.
4. Organisations, Leaders and Methods
The movement is carried by a small number of named bodies. The Mulki Kudmali Bhakhi Baisi (1983) and the Kudmali Bhakhi Chari Akhada (begun in 2006 and registered in 2019) work for the language and the folk heritage, the Adivasi Kudmi Samaj of Ajit Prasad Mahato (2015) leads the political demand, and the Kudmi Sena (2018, at Purulia) has branches in Odisha and Jharkhand [5]. In Jharkhand the Kudmi Vikas Morcha, reported in another news piece as the Totemic Kurmi Vikas Morcha, and its president Sheetal Ohdar, who is quoted in the press, have also pressed the claim, and the Opposition party AJSU supported the blockade of 2025 [6][8]. Ajit Prasad Mahato is described at a convention in 2022 as the leader of the Rail Roko Andolan and as Mulkhunti Mulmanta of the tribal Kudmi Samaj [7]. Among the leaders who speak in the press are a former Member of Parliament, Shailendra Mahato, who says that the agitation has run for seventy-two years, and the researcher Kunal Shahdeo, who gives the historical case [3][7]. Beyond the political bodies, the language side has its own work: Jayanta Mahata’s Chisoi script and more than a hundred primary schools in Junglemahal that teach in Kudmali [5].
The methods have grown from petition to blockade. The earliest were letters and memoranda, then conventions: at Seraikela on 30 November 2022 the community planned block-level conferences on 10 January 2023 and district-level conferences on 12 March, a gherao of the Assembly and, failing that, a blockade of the rail and the economy in Jharkhand and Odisha from 20 September 2023 [7]. Deputations went to the Registrar General of India on 6 August 2020 and to the Chief Minister of Jharkhand on 19 August 2020 [5]. The rail roko is the best known method. The sources record a first blockade in 2016 at Sordiha and Kustaur, road blockades in 2018, blockades from 20 to 24 September 2022, a second on 5 April 2023 and a third on 20 September 2023 [5][6]. For the stir of April 2023 a news article gives the community’s own figures of a five-day blockade, 435 trains cancelled and losses of over 1,700 crore rupees [3], and for September 2023 another reports ten trains cancelled and eight diverted, with the railway police planning extra men, and says that the 2023 protest ended after high-level talks [6][8]. On 20 September 2025 the agitation was held at about 100 railway stations, forty of them in Jharkhand, after a protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi the week before, and the report records no settlement [8]. The same news piece quotes Sheetal Ohdar as saying that the Government had not moved on the matters agreed in the talks [8]. The tribal organisations have answered with their own meetings: a sit-in at Chandil and a memorandum to the President in October 2025 [10], and, according to one report of June 2026, an Adivasi Akrosh Maharally at Morabadi ground in Ranchi on 12 October 2025 which drew thousands of members of Jharkhand’s recognised tribes [9].
5. Demands and Arguments
The movement has three long-standing demands: Scheduled Tribe status for the Kudmi, recognition of the Sarna religion, and the inclusion of Kudmali in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution [5][7]. A fourth has come with the census of 2026, when Kudmi groups want Adivasi or Animist and not Hindu to be recorded in the religion column [9]. The Kudmi leaders say that without the status they lack representation and the benefits of reservation in education and jobs [8], and an analysis of June 2026 adds that the claim is also, in part, a claim to land protections, to the governance of Scheduled Areas and to reserved seats in the Assembly [9]. At present the community is listed among the Other Backward Classes in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha [9], where in Jharkhand the OBC share of reservation is 27 per cent and the Scheduled Tribe share is 7.5 per cent, divided among 32 communities [9].
The arguments of the movement rest on four points. The first is the colonial record: a news analysis says that a Gazette notification of 3 May 1913 listed the Kurmi of Chotanagpur as a primitive tribe, and that the community was then left out of the post-independence list in 1950 with no official reason on record [9]; a former Member of Parliament adds that the Patna High Court accepted the community as a tribe in judgments of 1924, 1939 and 1963 [3], a claim that this study has not checked. The second is custom: the community has eighty-one totemic clans, a language of its own, and festivals such as Karam and Tusu [5][15]. The third is the loss of identity through Hinduisation, said by the researcher Kunal Shahdeo to be the cause of the change after 1894 [3]. The fourth is the claim that the demand has been backed by governments, with the community reporting that the Governments of Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal have endorsed it [3]; of these the Jharkhand proposals of 2004 and 2005 are on the official record [11], but the sources reviewed do not confirm the others.
The opponents are chiefly the tribal organisations, and their arguments are set out in the press. They say that the community fails the criteria of the Lokur Committee of 1965, which speak of primitive traits, a distinct culture, isolation, shyness of contact and backwardness, and that the Kudmis are mainly landowning cultivators integrated into the mainstream; the same analysis notes that a government task force of 2014 called the Lokur language obsolete [9]. They say that a thirty-third community would not enlarge the quota of 7.5 per cent but only increase the competition for jobs, seats and political places [9]. They ask why the Kudmi use of Sarna identity and Pahan-led rites became prominent only lately [9]. A leader of the Tribal Coordination Committee has said that there is no historical link between the tribes and the Kudmis, and a former Member of Parliament, Salkhan Murmu, has warned that Kudmis would come to dominate elections, jobs, education and land and that Jharkhand could face a situation like Manipur [3][6]. The tribal case, in turn, is read by the campaigners as an effort to keep the benefits of the Schedule within a small circle. These are the words of two sides in a heated dispute, and the article repeats them to show what is argued and does not decide between them.
6. The Odisha View: Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Mahanta and Mohanta
The movement in Odisha has two documented faces: the blockades of Mayurbhanj and the work of two organisations. On 20 September 2022 members of the Kudumi community sat on the tracks at several railway stations of Baripada in Mayurbhanj, in a protest that a television report says disrupted train services severely; the report names no organisation or leader and is mostly a video [13]. On 20 September 2025 the Adivasi Kudumi Samaj and the Odisha Kudumi Sena held a blockade at Bhanjpur station near Baripada, where several hundred people sat on the tracks, the Bangriposhi to Bhubaneswar Superfast Express was held for several hours, and the protesters withdrew after talks with local officials [12]. The Kudmali paper adds that the blockades of 2022 included Aunlajori as well as Bhanjpur, with protests at Bhubaneswar, and that the Kudmi Sena has a branch in Odisha [5]; a news article of 2023 names Harichandanpur, Jaraikela and Dhanpur as the Odisha stations of that year’s plan [6]. The leaders at Bhanjpur say that the Kudumi were once listed as a Scheduled Tribe and removed in 1950, and the report says the community lives in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh in Odisha, and also in Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam [12]. The report does not name a single leader, and none of the Odisha sources names the founders or the date of the Odisha organisations.
The naming is a point of interest for this website. The television reports use only the word Kudumi [12][13], the Mayurbhanj paper writes Mohanta or Mahanta [14], and the district report of Mayurbhanj writes Kudumi Mahato and Kudumi (Mahanta) [15]. This is a good reason to record the titles with care: the community of the movement is called Kudmi in the East and Kudumi in Odisha, and the family titles Mahanta, Mohanta and Mahato appear to belong to one people. The size of the community in Odisha is known only from claims. The community is reported to give a figure of about 25 lakh for Odisha, against 72 lakh in Jharkhand and 30 lakh in West Bengal [3], a figure that no census or independent count supports in the sources reviewed, although the census of 1931 recorded the Kudumi Mahato at 6.77 per cent of the people of Mayurbhanj [15]. Status in Odisha is that of an Other Backward Class [9], with the central and State memoranda of 1996 and 2011 named among the references of the Jhargram study [4], and on 3 January 2026 a regional news site reported that the Chief Minister had asked the research institute of the State to study the inclusion of the Kudumi and three other communities, for the next meeting of the Tribal Advisory Council [16]. What is missing is the movement’s own history in Odisha: who first took the claim to Baripada, Keonjhar and Sundargarh, what petitions were made to the State, and how the Mahanta families of Keonjhar and Sundargarh stand in relation to the Mohanta families of Mayurbhanj. The book of 2015 by Nanda, Prasad and Kulke on Odisha’s Kurmi identity politics, which appears in the references of the Jhargram study [4], may be the best place to begin, but it was not read.
7. Discussion and Conclusion
The record shows a movement that has changed its aim more than once and has kept its method of mass pressure. In the first phase the community sought a place in the caste order, and in the second and third it sought a place in the Schedule, which is a different kind of recognition with different rights. The campaigners explain the change by the loss of an earlier tribal status through Hinduisation and through the omission of 1950 [3][9]; the critics explain it by the benefits that the Schedule offers [3][6][9]. A third reading is possible, and is offered here only as an inference: that the caste claim of the 1890s and the tribal claim of today are two ways of seeking respect and security for the same community at two moments when the state offered different rewards. This needs the papers of the Mahasabha and of the modern bodies to test. What is clear from the news and the official reply is that the question now sits with the Registrar General and the National Commission and, in each State, with the State Government [11], so that the movement’s future depends on ethnographic reports as much as on rallies.
The limits are plain. Every source was read through a page summary, most of the papers are by supporters of the movement, the Jhargram study was read only as an abstract and a list of references, and the numbers of blockades, trains, losses and population are the figures of one side or of a news article, not of the railways, the census or the State. The sources also differ on whether the community was still listed as a tribe in 1931 [9][10], and the account of Janew Todo rests on one paper [1]. For Odisha the record is the thinnest of all: two television reports, one paper on Mayurbhanj, a district report and a regional news item. Future work should include the Gazette notices of 1913 and 1931, the census of 1931, the order of 1950 and its correspondence, the ethnography report of Jharkhand and the opinion of the Registrar General, the judgments of the Patna High Court that are cited, the papers of the Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha, the records of the Odisha Kudumi organisations and the Odisha study of 2026, and above all the oral histories of Mahanta and Mohanta families of Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh. Until that work is done, the history of the movement in Odisha cannot be written in full, and this article is a record of what is known and a call for the rest to be recorded.
References
- Joheb Islam. Cultural revivalism: A way to revive ethnic identity – A sociological understanding. International Journal of Applied Research 6(7), 2020, pp. 570–574. (sympathetic to the Kudmi claim; some passages garbled; summary)
- Lakshmi Kanta Mahato. Socio-Political Mobilization of Kudmis in Junglemahal Region of West Bengal. International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research 4(6), 2022. (advocacy-oriented; summary)
- Md Asghar Khan. Kudmi-Mahatos Vs Adivasis: Can Jharkhand Turn Into Another Manipur Over ST Status?. Outlook India, 22 May 2023, updated 18 January 2024. (news analysis quoting both sides; figures are the speakers’ claims; summary)
- Joheb Islam. Social Mobility Movement of Kudmi-Mahato in Jhargram District of West Bengal: A Sociological Case Study. 2020 (venue not confirmed). (abstract and references only; summary)
- Mrinal Kanti Mahata. Revival of Kudmali language: identity politics of Kudmi community. IJCRT 14(2), 2026. (supports the Kudmi movement; some dates differ within the paper; summary)
- Rumbling Rails: Kudmi-Mahatos to Hit the Brakes for ST Inclusion. The Mooknayak, 19 September 2023. (news report quoting both sides; summary)
- Grand convocation of Kudmi Samaj for inclusion in ST list. The Avenue Mail, Jamshedpur, 30 November 2022. (local news report; summary)
- Kurmi caste organisations begin Rail Roko agitation in Jharkhand, Bengal, Odisha. Jharkhand State News, 20 September 2025. (news report; summary)
- Utkarsh Mishra. Who Counts as Adivasi? The Kurmi Agitation and the Battle Over Tribal Identity in Jharkhand. Countercurrents, 16 June 2026. (analysis presenting both positions; summary)
- Tribal Protest Against Inclusion of Kurmi Community in ST List. Drishti IAS, 8 October 2025. (coaching-site explainer; summary)
- Inclusion of the Kurmi community in the Scheduled Tribes list. Ministry of Tribal Affairs, reply in the Lok Sabha, Press Information Bureau, 11 December 2025. (official source; summary)
- Kudumis demand restoration of ST status after 75 years, stage rail roko. OTV (OdishaTV), 20 September 2025. (news report; no leaders named; summary)
- Kudumi community stage rail roko in Mayurbhanj. OTV (OdishaTV), 20 September 2022. (video report with a few lines of text; summary)
- Rajashree Mohanta. Social Life of the Kudmis of Mayurbhanj. International Journal of Humanities Social Science and Management 5(3), 2025, pp. 423–428. (few citations in the text; summary)
- Report on District Governance in Mayurbhanj. Indian Institute of Public Administration. (institutional report; summary)
- Rabindra Sahu. Four Communities Including Kudumi Likely to Be Included in Scheduled Tribe List. Hello Kotpad, 3 January 2026. (regional news site; does not name the other three communities; summary)
- Kurmis: History, Demand And The Tribal Pushback. The Indian Tribal, 2 April 2024. (news article; sympathetic to the Kurmi claim; summary)
