The following is a very special story that deserves wide publicity. A fascinating tale tying together a Gond Adivasi, a British IFS officer, a man-eating tiger & British Empire's highest bravery award. I hope you're intrigued enough to read on, I promise it'll be worth your time.

So, a couple of days ago I was reading a forgotten old book, 'The Book of Man-eaters' by RG Burton (1933), and was fascinated to read the account (attached below) of a Gond Forest Guard saving the life of his DFO from the clutches of a man-eater & awarded the Albert Medal for it!

Amazed, I immediately knew I had to find out more. What was the name of this guard? Where in Central Provinces did this happen? Little digging around & I came across this 1925 news snippet giving the entire story (attached) and the protagonist names, Veladi Sammai & H.S. George.

Albert Medal for Lifesaving, created in 1866, was then British Empire's highest civilian bravery award & later metamorphosed into George Cross (now Britian's second highest award "for acts of the greatest heroism or for most conspicuous courage in circumstance of extreme danger")

Only two Indians had ever been awarded this medal, and Veladi was one of them! Reading up on Albert Medal also led me to a website with a detailed register of all Victoria Cross, George Cross & Albert Medal awardees. Here I found a photo of Veladi's Medal and a short note on him.

Since Veladi couldn't travel to London, he was taken to Nagpur, where the Governor of the Central Provinces conferred the medal on him. It was reported that he arrived for the ceremony just wearing his loincloth! Apart from this, the Forest Dept. awarded 45 acres of land to him.

The website also informed the Veladi died in 1968 and that "his family still proudly holds his medal"! Fascinated, I immediately started making plans in my head of locating the village and visiting Veladi's family! I figured locating the village would not be that hard because +

I had the name of Veladi's village (Murwai) & it's rough location (as the British-era South Chanda Forest Division was a name familiar to me courtesy my readings of old shikar books). I knew it covered the forest area falling under Maharashtra's Chandrapur & Gadchiroli districts.

But as I planned this out and tried researching more in this direction, I found out that someone else had already beat me to this! That someone was @amitbhagat264, a young independent researcher & historian who had lived and researched around Chandrapur for 4 years. He also had +

stumbled across this story in 2019, albeit through a different route than mine, he'd read it while going through archives of the London Gazette. Amit followed leads, put great efforts to track down Veladi's village, & eventually traveled to meet them. There he made amazing finds+

He met up with Veladi's son Joga who not only happily showed him the medal but even took him to the spot of fateful accident. Joga also showed him the Forest Department 'Sanad' (official deed document) awarding the land to Veladi "in perpetuity".

(Both photos by @amitbhagat264)

Amit published this entire account on a platform named livehistory (link: https://www.livehistoryindia.com/snapshort-histories/2019/11/09/in-search-of-a-madia-gond-hero). Two other very interesting finds of Amit from this article were the fact that even HS George had a village named after him, Georgepetha (which got corrupted to Jarjpetha) and +

the fact that Veladi was also given a silver armlet (was it given alongwith the Albert Medal or by Forest Department is not clear). Amit's photograph of the Sanad also revealed that Veladi's full name was Veladi Sammai Maria Gond. While +

(Silver armlet photo by @amitbhagat264

reading the Sanad from Amit's photograph of it, I also noticed a curious thing that the Sanad was granted in 1945, a good twenty years after the Albert Medal award. Was Veladi a forest guard as RG Burton claimed is one question that remains to be answered, the citation makes +

no mention of it, only refering to him as a 'Gond villager'. So that is the incredible story of Veladi Sammai, the Maria Gond Adivasi whose bravery earned him the highest peacetime civilian bravery honour by the British Empire.

I request everyone who has read this thread to read @amitbhagat264 's fascinating article (for Hindi readers, link to article's Hindi version: https://hindi.livehistoryindia.com/amazing-india/2019/09/15/madiya-gond-hero-sama-veladi-ki-khoj ) and share Veladi's story. For those interested in reading Veladi's full citation: http://www.vconline.org.uk/veladi-sammai-am/4594903919