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Peasant Struggles in India

A large number of peasants, tribesmen, disinherited landlords and


disbanded soldiers turned to part time or full time banditry in 18 century
and 19 the century when they were deprived of their livelihood, evicted
from their homelands or squeezed in their tribal territories.

The thugee were the most colorful and numerous of Indian bandits, the
best of them combining a rather distant millenarian prospect with
gallantry and a genius for swift assassination. They arose about 1650 in
the area between Delhi and Agra and multiplied in late Mughal times as
revenue exactions became harsher. During British rule they spread
throughout Bihar and into Oudh, Bengal, Orissa, Rajputana, Punjab,
Mysore and Karnataka.Thugee were recruited from outlaws of the state,
peasants and disbanded soldiers chiefly from the most oppressed classes
of their regions. They confined their assaults chiefly to merchants,
soldiers,

money

carriers

and

servants

of

the

company.

The militant religious movements strove for the liberation of an ethnic


region both from the British and from foreign Indian predators and
invaders and for the establishment of a divinely ordained kingdom
righteousness and justice. They arose among severely exploited
minorities most of whom remained in there home territories and were
numerically preponderant within a region. Many bandit movements

resembled the ethnic religious movements in possessing special religious


cults charismatic leaders and a belief that their struggles would
eventually release the world from pain. Bandits apparently differed from
local religious movements for liberation, however being recruited from
displaced

or

outcaste

groups

and

individuals.

14 of the revolts were mass insurrections in which peasants provided the


leadership and were the sole or dominant force. These revolts were
sudden and dramatic. They lacked a religious movement ideology and a
single charismatic leader. They aimed initially at the redress of particular
grievances

and

thus

were

at

first

reformative.

All the uprisings involved tenants and small owner-cultivators. All were
against economic deprivations resulting from British policies and in
most cases also from landlords. The revolt in Rangpur and Dinajpur of
1783 and the Deccan peasant uprising of 1875 provide earlier and later
example of features characteristic of all these uprising. Water carriers,
barbers and even the house servants of moneylenders in addition to
cultivators joined the Deccan revolt of 1875. It covered Poona and
Ahmed nagar districts and spread into Gujarat. Excessive revenue
exactions, low prices of grain and cotton crops and eviction and land
mortgages to moneylenders drove the peasants to three-week
insurrections. Tens of 1000s met in public gatherings in market places

and vowed to boycott the claims of moneylenders and to seize their


documents. Some moneylenders fled the area. Those who resisted the
armed bands had their fodder stacks burned down although the peasants
carried on very little personal violence. The revolt produced some
respite

in

the

Deccan

Agriculturists

Relief

Act

of

1879.

The famous Bengal Indigo Strike of 1860 was the first large strike in
India and one of the most successful. It illustrates the initiative and
discipline of what peasants are capable of .The tenants were forced to
grow indigo at very low prices for the British textile industry to the
exclusion of other crops. When they refused slave drivers some
trained on US southern plantations kidnapped or flogged them, exposed
them in stocks or murdered them. The strike spread rapidly. Tenants
assembled with swords, bows and arrows and matchlocks to defend their
settlements. In Pabna an army of 2000 peasants appeared and wounded a
magistrate's horse otherwise there was little violence. The strike stopped
indigo planting in Bengal and forced the planters to move west to Bihar.

Santhal Uprising against British as well as Zamindars who were invested


with unjustified and undreamt of powers of ownership of land that
peasants had customarily considered and cultivated for millennium as
their own and also against money lenders who were given powers to get
peasants imprisoned for failure to repay their debts and against the

authority of officials. The Santhals never thought that they could be


evicted from their ancestral homesteads; holdings and forests to failure
to pay taxes and debts but that had come to happen. The peasants
bonded themselves to resist short measures, illegal cesses and forced
deliveries of agreement to pay enhanced rents and also there had been
combination of raiyats in east Bengal refused to payments except what
they considered just. The Santhals found their leaders in two brothers
who claimed to have received some occult blessings from the Gods to
put an end to oppression of officers and to the deceit of merchants.

With equal fury and fervor rose the Maratha peasants in the same
generation against the oppression of money lenders.They could not
brook the idea of obedience to the new laws which gave such coercive
powers to money lenders that any money lender could with impunity
move court to imprison anyone of his peasant debtors so they revolted
burnt the houses,killed many oppressors and attacked government
officials

who

were

supporting

their

oppressors.

Indian peasants have a long tradition of armed uprisings reaching back at


least to the initial British conquest and the last decades of Moghul
government. For more than 200 years peasants in all the major regions
have repeatedly risen against landlords, revenue agents and other
bureaucrats, moneylenders, police and military forces. The uprisings

were in response to relative deprivation of unusually severe character


always economic and often also involving physical brutality or ethnic
persecution.

Although revolts have been widespread, certain areas have an especially


strong tradition of rebellion. Bengal has been a hotbed of revolt both
rural and urban from the earliest days of British rule. Some districts in
particular Mymensingh, Dinajpur, Rangpur and Pabna in West Bengal
and Santhal regions of Bihar and West Bengal figured repeatedly in
peasant struggles and continued to do so.The tribal areas of Andhra
Pradesh and the state of Kerala also have long traditions in revolt. Hill
regions were tribal or other minorities retain a certain independence,
ethnic unity and tactical maneuverability and where the terrain is suited
to guerilla welfare are of course especially favorable for peasant struggle
but these have also occurred in densely populated, plain regions such as
Thanjavur where land hunger, landless labor and unemployment caused
great

suffering.

The British ushered in a qualitatively new set of property relations by


making land a commodity thereby giving a mortal blow to the peculiar
feudal relations prevailing in the countryside. These new types of
proprietary relations are called the Zamindari and ryotwari systems.

Under the former vast tracts of land comprising of districts, talukas,


villages and even large tribal areas were made over to zamindars.

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