Rani Gaidinliu Took Over the Heraka Movement After Jadonang's Hanging in 1931, Was Captured on 17 October 1932 and Received the Padma Bhushan in 1982

Rani Gaidinliu (26 January 1915 to 17 February 1993) was a Rongmei Naga woman who led the Zeliangrong Heraka movement against British rule after its founder, Haipou Jadonang, was hanged in 1931, and she received the Padma Bhushan in 1982. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs says she joined Jadonang at 13, took over his movement and spent 14 years in jail before her release in 1947.

Three kinds of record describe her and they do not always agree: the Assam Government’s 1942 frontier history, which gives the colonial view; Jawaharlal Nehru’s writing and letters; and later accounts by Zeliangrong writers and scholars. Where they differ, the source is named.

A faith reform that turned political

Rituparna Goswami, in a 2026 essay for the Bṛhat learning platform, describes the Zeliangrong as three linked Naga tribes, the Zeme, Liangmai and Rongmei, living across what are now Assam, Manipur and Nagaland. Goswami dates Jadonang’s reform to about 1925 and says he called it Heraka, meaning pure. One supreme being, Tingkao Ragwang, stood at its centre, and prayer in village prayer houses called Kelumki, which he began building around 1927, replaced costly animal sacrifice.

Jadonang’s house and two temples stood at Kambiron in Manipur, on the bridle path between Cachar and Imphal, the Assam Government’s history says. In February 1931 the Assam administration told the Government of India that he “has proclaimed a Kabui Naga Raj”, using Kabui, the name officials gave the Rongmei. Outlook quotes Gaidinliu as saying his aim was reform of old religious practice “in order to strengthen the political movement aimed at ousting the British”.

Jadonang was arrested in Cachar on 19 February 1931, tried at Manipur for the murder of four Manipuri traders killed at Kambiron in March 1930, and sentenced to death on 13 June 1931, the same history records, adding that the traders died at his instigation and with his participation. Zeliangrong accounts, which IANS summarises from Anu Kumar’s book on women freedom fighters, say he was falsely accused. He was hanged at Imphal on 29 August 1931, according to Outlook and Goswami.

The manhunt of 1932 and the capture at Pulomi

Gaidinliu took over the movement at 16, Outlook and IANS say, and repeated Jadonang’s call not to pay taxes. IANS, summarising Anu Kumar, adds that she used Gandhi’s name in messages to her followers and spread a song Jadonang had written in his praise. The Assam Government’s history says she was wanted on a murder charge and calls her Jadonang’s “spiritual successor, if not incarnation”.

Her party clashed with the Assam Rifles in the North Cachar Hills on 16 February 1932, now a Sixth Schedule district of Assam, and again at Hangrum in March, the official history records. On 2 March 1932 the Governor-in-Council sanctioned organised operations to capture her, drawing on the 3rd and 4th battalions of the Assam Rifles. Rewards followed: Rs 500, plus a ten-year house-tax exemption for any village that gave her up, IANS reports. On 9 June 1932 Mills, the Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills, wrote that “The real danger of the movement is the spirit of defiance now abroad”, and that her capture would not end it.

By October she was at Pulomi, a Naga Hills village whose people were building a palisade round it on her orders. Mills recorded that when Captain N. Macdonald of the Assam Rifles attacked at dawn on 17 October 1932 her supporters melted away and no blow was struck. A Zeliangrong Heraka Association officer writing in the Morung Express in 2012 gives the date as 12 October. Outlook, IANS and the official history all say 17 October.

The trial and what the record charged

Tried at Manipur on a charge of murder, she was sentenced to transportation for life, the Assam history says, after a trial that Outlook says ran for over ten months. Lady Astor, writing to Nehru in 1939 from what the India Office had told her, said there was “ample evidence” of Gaidinliu’s part in the murders and that her youth was the reason the court commuted a death sentence. Assam’s own history records only the life sentence, and Goswami writes that she got life rather than death because she was a minor.

Accounts give her age at capture as 16 (Outlook, IANS) or 17 (by the birth date in the Tribal Affairs release, 26 January 1915).

A second charge appears in the colonial record. In December 1932, after her capture, a party of Nagas killed a Kuki watchman’s wife and four or five children, and two Kuki travellers, at the Lakema bungalow. The Assam Government believed she had urged followers to keep the movement alive through visits arranged by bribing the Manipur State jail staff, the same record adds. Neither allegation is answered in her own words in the sources opened for this article.

Nehru, the title Rani and Lady Astor

In December 1937, during a visit to Sylhet, Nehru wrote about her. Longkumer says the article ran in the All India Congress Committee Newsletter as “Gaidallo Ranee” and was republished in 1938. A Valley of Words review of Som Kamei’s biography quotes Nehru as writing that she lay “in some prison in Assam, wasting her bright young womanhood in dark cells and solitude”.

Several accounts say he also met her at Shillong Jail in 1937 and gave her the title Rani, among them IANS and that review. In his remarks at the 2015 centenary launch the Prime Minister said Nehru went to the jail to meet her. Longkumer’s account says Nehru heard her story and wrote about it, with no meeting, and the passage above speaks of a prison somewhere in Assam. Nehru’s own description of a visit is not among the sources opened here. At the 2015 launch the Union Home Minister said that someone born in a humble family earns the title Ranima through the love of the people.

Nehru then took up her case. Lady Astor’s letter of 10 May 1939 recalls that he had raised it with her the previous summer. Writing from the India Office’s information, she said the movement “has not yet died down” and that the Secretary of State thought her “a potent source of danger to the peace of Manipur state and the Province of Assam”. She added that the sentence was a matter for the Crown Representative because it concerned Manipur’s internal affairs. Chopra, drawing on Kamei’s book, writes that she belonged to an Excluded Area outside the provincial Congress government’s reach, so Nehru wrote to Astor and the Manipur Mahasabha petitioned the Maharaja, neither with result.

Release, Vimrap and the years underground

According to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, she was released from Tura jail in 1947, after independence, having been imprisoned for 14 years. Longkumer gives 1945, and Live History India says Nehru ordered her release after the interim government was formed in 1946. Manipur would not take her back for five years, Chopra writes, so she settled in Mokokchung, then part of the Naga Hills district, with a monthly pension of Rs 15 and security from Nagaland Police. Until 1952 she lived at Vimrap village with her younger brother Marang, IANS says, and then moved back to Longkao.

The Zeliangrong Council was formed on 15 February 1947 at Keishamthong, Imphal, to bring the Kabui and Kacha Naga tribes together, the Zeliangrong United Committee Manipur Valley says. On 14 December 1947 the Kabui Naga Association became the Manipur Zeliangrong Union, and in 1960 the Zeliangrong Naga Union. None of the accounts opened here names Gaidinliu as a founder of the Council.

Her own aim, IANS says, was a separate Zeliangrong territory within the Indian Union, and she opposed the Naga National Council, which sought secession. NNC leaders saw her as an obstacle and Baptist leaders called the Heraka revival anti-Christian, so she went underground in 1960. The Heraka association’s organising secretary writes that she raised a force of about 1,000 men to defend the faith. After Nagaland became a state in 1963, Chopra writes, its chief minister, Shilu Ao, sought to bring her out. By 1966, after an agreement with the Government of India, she had emerged to work by peaceful means, according to IANS.

She told the young administrator sent to meet her, Subodh Chandra Dev, that she wanted “no state, no country, but only a Zeliangrong district within any state of the Indian Union”, Chopra’s review records. Our Fifth and Sixth Schedules guide explains how the Constitution sets up councils for hill districts. The Zeliangrong demand for a homeland or council has not been met, Chopra writes. She returned to Longkao in 1991 and died there on 17 February 1993, aged 78.

The Heraka today and who claims her

Goswami writes that the Heraka is now organised under the Zeliangrong Heraka Association, with a Kelumki in every village, a written hymn text called the Tingwang Hinge and trained preachers who travel between villages. Its organising secretary wrote in 2012 that the community marks 17 February as her death anniversary.

Her memory is claimed in more than one direction. Longkumer, a scholar at the University of Edinburgh, writes that from the late 1960s the RSS and the VHP, Hindu nationalist organisations, invited her to events, and that in 1979 she was invited to a World Hindu Conference at Allahabad. He adds that some Zeliangrong are uncomfortable with how her story has been taken over, while others accept it because those groups run schools and welfare projects. Goswami writes that the Heraka have kept a distinct identity and do not adopt Puranic idol worship.

In Nagaland, civil society bodies objected when a museum in her name was planned at Kohima in 2015, and the Nagaland Baptist Church Council’s general secretary told Scroll: “We don’t see Gaidinliu as a religious figure but more of a political freedom fighter.”

Honours, the stamp, the coin and two museums

The Tribal Affairs release lists the Tamrapatra freedom fighter award in 1972, the Padma Bhushan in 1982, the Vivekananda Seva award in 1983 (the release spells it Sewa Summan), the Stree Shakti Puraskar in 1991 and, after her death, the Bhagwan Birsa Munda Puraskar in 1996. Outlook and one philatelic catalogue give 1981 for the Padma Bhushan, while PIB and Longkumer give 1982.

India’s commemorative stamp for her was issued on 12 September 1996, two catalogues record: 100 paise, 0.4 million printed at the India Security Press, Nasik, with the design supplied by the Rani Gaidinliu Foundation. Outlook’s 2005 text says 1994, while PIB says 1996.

On 24 August 2015 the Prime Minister opened her birth centenary celebrations at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, and released a Rs 100 commemorative coin and a Rs 5 circulation coin, the Ministry of Culture’s release says. Rules from the Finance Ministry, notified as G.S.R. 33(E) on 15 January 2015, set the Rs 100 coin at 35 grams and 44 millimetres, 50 per cent silver, and the Rs 5 coin at 6 grams and 23 millimetres in nickel brass. Both carry her portrait, an English inscription marking her birth centenary and the years 1915-2015. At the launch the Prime Minister called her Rani-maa and credited her with spreading Gandhi’s message in the North-East. That release adds that the Ministry for the Development of the North Eastern Region allocated Rs 983.08 lakh (about Rs 9.8 crore) for a library-cum-museum at Kohima.

Scroll reported on 1 October 2018 that building work at the Kohima site had stopped in August 2015 after the objections. A second museum, the Rani Gaidinliu Tribal Freedom Fighters Museum at Luangkao village in Tamenglong district of Manipur, was sanctioned by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs at about Rs 15 crore, and the Union Home Minister laid its foundation stone on 22 November 2021, the Sangai Express records. In a memorandum reported on 3 April 2026, two Rongmei organisations asked the Manipur chief minister to start its construction that month.