Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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.
or
outcaste
groups
and
individuals.
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
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.
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.
suffering.