The Unconquered King: U Tirot Sing and the First True War for India's Freedom

By Chronicles Of Spirit

Long before the famous Revolt of 1857, a king in India's misty hills ignited one of the first, most brilliant, and most forgotten wars against the British Empire. This is his incredible true story.

They called him a "rebel." His people called him a king.

In the early 19th century, U Tirot Sing, the charismatic king of the Khasi people, ruled a sovereign kingdom in the mountains of Northeast India. A brilliant diplomat and a master of guerrilla warfare, he was faced with an impossible choice when the British East India Company demanded to build a road through his ancestral lands.

What began as a cautious alliance born from a promise of prosperity quickly spiraled into a shocking betrayal. Realizing the road was not a path to trade but a chain of colonization, Tirot Sing did the unthinkable: he declared war on an empire.

"The Unconquered King" is the gripping, fact-based account of the four-year Anglo-Khasi War, a conflict that predates the Sepoy Mutiny by decades. This inspirational historical biography uncovers the story of:

• A MASTER STRATEGIST: How Tirot Sing forged a confederacy of hill chiefs and waged a sophisticated guerrilla campaign that baffled the world's most powerful army.
• A FORGOTTEN HEROINE: The tale of Ka Phan Nonglait, the woman warrior who single-handedly disarmed a British platoon with nothing but her wits and a jug of rice beer.
• A SHOCKING BETRAYAL: The heartbreaking story of how the king was captured only after being sold out for a bag of gold coins.
• THE TRUTH OF HIS FINAL DAYS: Uncover the recently discovered, true story of his exile—a reality more complex and poignant than the myths of a dark prison cell.

This is not just a biography; it is the restoration of a lost chapter in the history of the fight for freedom. It is a story of a leader who stood unbowed against impossible odds and left behind a legacy of courage that continues to inspire generations.

If you love riveting stories of forgotten heroes, epic struggles against empires, and the indomitable power of the human spirit, you will not be able to put down "The Unconquered King."

Discover the story of the first true war for India's freedom. Get your copy today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicles Of Spirit
• Release date: Sep 6, 2025
• ISBN: 9798232881030

Book preview

Prologue

The King in the Palanquin

Dhaka, 1834. The air in the city was thick and heavy, a humid mix of river silt, woodsmoke, and the sweet, cloying scent of jasmine sold in the teeming bazaars. It was a city of noise and motion, a colonial hub where the steady, rhythmic tramp of East India Company sepoys on patrol mingled with the cacophony of merchants hawking their wares and the singsong calls of boatmen on the Buriganga River. Grand stucco buildings, the administrative heart of the British presence, stood in stark contrast to the labyrinthine lanes of the old city, where life spilled out from homes and workshops in a vibrant, chaotic torrent.

Through this clamor, a palanquin made its steady way. It was a simple but well-maintained conveyance, borne on the shoulders of four sturdy bearers who moved with a practiced, unhurried gait. To the casual observer, it was just another part of the city’s daily tableau—perhaps a mid-level Company official or a local merchant being carried to his affairs. But the man who sat inside was neither. He was a prisoner. He was a king.

His name was U Tirot Sing Syiem, and he was a thousand miles and a world away from the cool, misty hills he called home. Here, the land was flat and unforgiving, the sun a relentless hammer. It could not have been more different from his kingdom of Nongkhlaw, a realm of rolling green mountains, sacred groves, and deep, shadowed valleys where the clouds themselves seemed to rest. The sounds were different, too. He was used to the whisper of wind through pine forests, the roar of a waterfall after the monsoon rains, the crisp silence of a mountain night. Here, the world was a constant, suffocating hum.

He was thirty-two years old, but the last five years had etched a lifetime of struggle onto his face. He was a man of medium height, with the strong, compact build of a hill warrior. But it was his eyes that held the true measure of the man. They were sharp and intelligent, accustomed to scanning distant horizons and reading the subtle shifts of both weather and men. Now, they looked out from the palanquin at a world that was not his own, taking in the sights of his gilded cage with a quiet, unreadable dignity.

He was the most important political prisoner in the city, a man who had, for four years, waged a brilliant and bloody war against the formidable military machine of the British Empire. He had united a confederacy of chiefs, armed his people with swords and arrows, and held the Company’s forces at bay using nothing more than his wits and his profound knowledge of the land. He had become a legend in the Khasi Hills and a source of immense frustration in the colonial corridors of Calcutta. They had never faced an enemy quite like him.

Yet, his captivity was a study in contradictions. He was not confined to the grim confines of the Dhaka Central Jail, where common criminals and rebels were left to waste away. By special order of the British government, he had been declared a State Prisoner. He lived in a rented bungalow in a part of the old city known as Girdkillah. He was granted a monthly allowance of sixty-three rupees—a considerable sum at the time—and was permitted to retain two servants. This palanquin, which carried him through the city, was a symbol of his strange, liminal existence: a captive who was still afforded the trappings of his royal status.

His captors understood what some historians would later forget: Tirot Sing was not a bandit chieftain. He was the constitutional head of a sovereign state. He had negotiated with them as an equal and had gone to war only after his Durbar, his parliament, had sanctioned it. To treat him as a common felon would be to deny the legitimacy of his rule, a legitimacy they had once sought to leverage for their own ends. And so, they held him in this state of honored confinement, a king on a leash, his influence contained but his status quietly acknowledged.

As the palanquin moved past the imposing walls of the Company’s administrative buildings, he might have allowed his mind to drift back. Back to the great Durbar, where he and his ministers had debated David Scott’s proposal for two full days. Back to the sting of betrayal, when he realized the road he had approved was not a path to shared prosperity but a chain being laid upon his land. He might have remembered the chill of the mountain caves where his warriors forged their arrowheads, or the fierce pride in their eyes as they prepared for another night raid. He might have heard the echo of his own words, spoken to a British officer during a failed attempt at negotiation: Better to die an independent king than reign as a vassal.

He had chosen his path. He had fought for the sovereignty of his people, for the sanctity of their traditions, for the freedom of his hills. He had lost the war, but in his heart, he had not been conquered. He was a prisoner, but he was still the Syiem of Nongkhlaw.

The palanquin turned into a quieter lane and slowed to a halt before a modest but well-kept bungalow. The journey was over for the day. As he stepped out, his gaze might have lifted, for a moment, to the vast, pale sky above Dhaka. It was a sky empty of the mountains he knew. He was alone, defeated, and far from home. But the story of how he came to be here, the story of his incredible defiance, was the story of a spirit that could be captured but never truly broken. It was the story of the unconquered king.

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Part I

The World of the Seven Huts

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Chapter 1

A Land Between Two Valleys

To understand the story of a king, one must first understand the story of his kingdom. The kingdom of U Tirot Sing was not a land of sprawling plains or gentle, rolling countryside. It was a realm sculpted by the monsoon and shrouded in mist, a fortress of hills set apart from the world below. This was the Khasi Hills, a rugged spine of mountains that rose dramatically from the floodplains of Bengal, a land that existed both as a bridge and a barrier between two of the most strategic territories in nineteenth-century British India. It was a land whose very geography would shape the destiny of its people and their unyielding king.

The world of the early 1800s was being redrawn by the inexorable march of the British East India Company. From their grand headquarters in Calcutta, the Company’s administrators, generals, and surveyors looked at maps not just as representations of land, but as canvases of opportunity and ambition. In the northeast of the subcontinent, their ambition was focused on two great river valleys. The first was the Brahmaputra Valley, the heart of Assam, a vast and fertile expanse that the British had recently wrestled from the control of the Burmese Empire following the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826. It was a prize of immense value, rich in resources and strategic potential. The second was the Surma Valley, encompassing the region of Sylhet, which had been under Company control for decades. It was a vital source of revenue, particularly from its vast limestone quarries, a material essential for the construction of the grand colonial edifices rising in Calcutta.

Between these two coveted valleys lay a formidable obstacle: the Khasi Hills. On a map, it was a block of green, an interruption in the neat lines of imperial control. To travel from the administrative centers in Assam, like Guwahati, to the commercial hubs of Sylhet, a British official or a Company army regiment had to undertake a long and punishing journey. They had to travel west down the Brahmaputra, navigate the treacherous, malaria-infested swamps of the Sundarbans, and then sail east again. The journey could take weeks, sometimes months, and was fraught with peril, from deadly diseases to the sheer unpredictability of the river systems. The Khasi Hills stood as a direct, yet seemingly impenetrable, alternative. A road cut through this highland territory would reduce the journey to a matter of days, creating a vital artery for the movement of troops, administrators, and commerce. For the British, the question was not if such a road should be built, but how.

The land they coveted was unlike any other. The