1. Comment on the changing nature of popular resistance against colonial rule in the period 1857-85.

    Popular resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century in a period when the British were consolidating their rule, is an interesting subject of study and one that highlights the impact of colonial rule in a relatively under-explored area, that of peasant and tribal movements. Conflicts of this nature remained fairly localized and confined to particular grievances. These conflicts were however more easily contained by the state. Improvements in communications, the development of the machine gun at a time when the Indians were being systematically disarmed, and the expansion of the police and military, all these made it easier to crush peasant insurgency before it could spread beyond a fairly localized area. The history of peasant and tribal movements in this period is largely disjointed, but we can find certain commonalities and continuing themes in them as well. In this essay, I will deal with The Santhal Insurrection (1855-56), The Indigo Rebellion (1860), The Pabna Uprising (1873), and the Deccan Riots (1875).

    (1). Santhal Insurrection:

    The Santhal Insurrection of 1855-56 was a tribal uprising as opposed to the other movements which can be categorized as peasant uprisings. While the two terms have been used interchangeably, there is a distinct difference between the two, which has a bearing on its character. Peasants essentially produce surplus on land, which is extracted as revenue by the state or as rent by the landlord. In this context, peasant uprisings are largely concerned with issues of increasing rent or revenue. Tribes, on the other hand live in forests or hills, and this terrain is crucial in defining them for it accounts for their isolation to a large degree. They have often been differentiated on the basis of ‘ethnicity’, a value loaded term, which was used to justify the creation of separate Scheduled Areas by the government in 1925.

    However this isolation has been misinterpreted and there is evidence of these tribes being in regular touch with mainstream life in their neighbouring areas through trade relations and many tribal polities began to play an important role in larger political formations, especially between the 14th and 19th centuries. Andre Wink in his study of tribes in the Maratha Swaraj notes their role as soldiers in the Maratha armies. Another parallel process which occurred in the colonial period was that of Hinduization or Sanskritization of these tribes, a process which was accompanied by subordination of these groups. In the process of assimilation it is argued that the uniqueness of these tribes was lost to an extent. In this context we can also understand the relatively more violent nature of tribal uprisings.

    The British ushered in a qualitatively new kind of property relations by making land a commodity, thereby challenging the peculiar feudal relations in the countryside. The new types of propriety relations were 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 by the British as private property. In ryotwari areas, every peasant within the village was transformed into a proprietor of a specific piece of land, thereby freeing him from all customary and all earlier legal obligations which prevented him from transferring his propriety and possession rights in the market to any bidder. The assessment was now based on the potential productivity of land. Payment was to be made by the individual assessee, and not by the village community as a whole, on the basis of a proportion of share of the total produce. Further, it had to be paid in cash and not in kind as in the pre-British period. The necessity of cash ushered in a process of sale, mortgage, transfer of propriety rights, assets and crops all of which led to increased dependence on the moneylender and trader who could give money in advance to pay the revenue in cash.

    These developments created a chain of fifty to hundred intermediaries between the chief zamindar and the actual cultivators. It also created a chain of contractors, farmers, moneylenders, traders, and others who leased the land from the zamindars to grow particular types of crops like jute, indigo, tea etc. The new tenure system deprived the tribal population of their communal rights over forests and lands, forcing them to give up many vital activities which were customary rights and essential for day-to-day living. British policies encouraged an influx of zamindars, their representatives, forest contractors, traders, moneylenders, administrators, and educationists (primarily missionary) into tribal areas, who exploited the tribals with the political and juridical backing of the government. All of this had a devastating effect on every aspect of tribal life. In course of time the tribals were reduced to such a state that they had no other way of existence, but to resort to activities which the government labeled criminal.

    The Santhals were a tribal community inhabiting the Birbhum district of Bengal. What made them different from other tribes like the Paharias was that they had taken to agriculture in a big way, and used advanced techniques to produce an agricultural surplus. After the introduction of the Permanent Settlement in 1793, they were driven out of their traditional areas and their lands were encroached upon by the zamindars. The Santhals peacefully decided to clear the area and move towards the Rajmahal Hills, where they brought large tracts of land under cultivation. This area was called the daman-i-koh and the Santhals can be seen as a link between the Paharias and the Hindu peasantry.

    With these new lands being cleared by the Santhals, soon the zamindars also began to move to this area as well, claiming proprietorship and demanding rents. A contemporary writer in the Calcutta Review described the situation in these words: ‘Zamindars, the police, the revenue and court alas have exercised a combined system of extortions, oppressive exactions, forcible dispossession of property, abuse and personal violence and a variety of petty tyrannies upon the timid and yielding Santhals.’ The zamindars were soon followed by the moneylenders as well further aggravating tensions. These moneylenders began to give advances at the beginning of the agricultural season on mortgage for the season’s crops. The rates of interests charged ranged between 50% and 500%, leaving generations in debt to the moneylenders. In this way, the Santhals were literally enslaved by the moneylenders, and ultimately had to repay their debts through labour. This had started to cause antagonism among the Santhals and in 1811, 1820 and 1831 uprisings were witnessed but were dismissed as unimportant by the authorities. A new angle to the Santhal condition came in 1854 with the introduction of the railways.

    The construction of railways around the Santhal provided the Santhals with lucrative employment opportunities. WW Hunter writes of the effect of the railways, ‘Every man, woman and child could get work, and boys of ten earned higher wages than grown men had ever earned in the village. It was then that the distinction between the slave and freeman began to make itself felt. Running away became common; and the Hindu masters had recourse, in self-defence, to a much stricter and more vigilant than they had ever before practiced.’ While conditions of the Santhals were ostensibly improving, discontent continued to simmer as an urge to break free from the exploitative system began to spread. The peacefulness of the Santhals was misunderstood for their timidity, and so when the uprising actually began the colonial state was shocked.

    The main targets of the Santhals at least initially were not the British but the Hindu moneylenders, zamindars, the police and the courts. Repeated petitions were sent to the British government, but no replies were received and soon the peasants got fed up. It was only at this stage that the movement turned aggressive and under the leadership of two brothers Sindhu and Kanhu, the insurrection broke out. Like most tribal movements, religion was used in a very skilful and effective manner to further socio-economic and political causes. The Santhals began to rebel and plunder the zamindars and mahajans. The repressive measures instituted by the Darogs Mahesh Lal Datta only added fuel to the fire.

    As a result, a large gathering of over 10,000 Santhals representing 400 villages met at Bhagnadihi on the night of June 30, 1855. It was decided that the time had come for the Santhals to rise as one man and get rid of the control exercised by their oppressors. To the zamindars a clear ultimatum was issued calling for replies within fifteen days. In their letters, which nobody cared to answer, the Santhal leaders declared their solid determination to get rid of the oppressions by the zamindars and the mahajans and to ‘take possession of the country and set up a government of their own’. At this stage, while the government continued to receive petitions, it feigned innocent surprise. At the same time it was making large-scale preparations for its suppression.

    On July 7, 1855 the rebellion started in a big way. The rebels used guerilla warfare and many zamindars were also killed. There was open confrontation with the British forces and the postal and railway communications between Bhagalpur and Rajmahal were severed. Martial law was declared on July 19. The proclamation stated that the insurrection had by now ‘assumed all the characteristics of a rebellion’ and sanctioned ‘the destruction of the rebels found in arms’ and offered large rewards for the apprehension of the leaders. With this began the most brutal suppression of the rebellion. The government was now counter-attacking with full force. The zamindars and the indigo-planters also threw their resources on the side of the government. Despite their unflinching heroism, the Santhals were facing a hopeless task as they were fighting a localized and lonely battle and were under attack from the armed forces of the British Empire. The Santhal uprising was eventually suppressed successfully.

    WW Hunter, a colonial writer points out that the government however did not lose a moment in searching for and trying to remove the causes of discontent and a minute enquiry into the administration of the area was directed. It soon became apparent that the economy of the former administration consisted in taking the taxes without giving anything in return for them, – an economy that had resulted in an insurrection for which the state had paid more in six months than the cost of ten years’ good government. The old police, who had tyrannized over the simple peasantry, were rooted out, and English officers, dispensed justice at all the chief centres of the Santhal population, besides going regularly on circuit through the villages. Justice was made cheap and accessible.

    The Santhals had the chance of a regular trial, and only those suffered who had taken actual part in the rebellion. Hunter writes that the wrongs of the Santhals proceeded chiefly from the inefficiency of the administration, and they speedily disappeared under the more exact system that was introduced after the revolt. The great Santhal insurrection was thus cruelly suppressed. This was not the end of oppressions against the Santhals, or in fact, against peasants in other parts of India. On the contrary the oppression was intensified. And yet, the Santhal insurrection was highly successful in one aspect. The Santhal area, which had up to them been administratively broken up and merged into neighbouring districts, was now reorganized by the Governor into a separate entity known as the Santhal Parganas. The Santhals had thus succeeded in forcing recognition of their special status as a national minority.

    In the revolt of 1857, a major driving force had been peasant resistance to the system of rule imposed on India by the British. Once British power had been destroyed in northern India by the army revolt, many peasant grievances came to be expressed with a great deal of vigour. The defeat of the revolt left most of these grievances unsolved. The rationality of localized peasant resistance was frequently denied in the reports of British administrators and colonial historians. Little understanding or sympathy was shown for peasant motives, nor analysis undertaken of the way in which they mobilized and fought. From the 1960s onwards an interest began to emerge in the peasantry of nineteenth-century India and historians began to explore the historical roots of a class of dynamic richer peasants, and argued that the British had provided a legal and economic infrastructure which allowed the development of this class.

    Kathleen Gough in her work, ‘Indian Peasant Uprisings’ defines a social movement as ‘the attempt of a group to effect change in the face of resistance’ and peasants as people who engage in agricultural or related production with primitive (palaeotechnic) means and who surrender part of their produce or its equivalent to landlords or to agents of the state.’ Generally the scope and significance of India’s peasant uprisings have been understressed. Barrington Moore Jr. for instance sees the Indian peasant movements in contrast with China. He attributes the alleged weakness of Indian peasant movements to the caste system with its hierarchical divisions among villagers and to the strength of the bourgeoisie leadership against the landlords and the British and the pacifying influence of Gandhi on the peasantry. Gough however argues that links of castes helped the peasants to organize themselves better. Gough saw peasant resistance as being of five types. These are restorative rebellions aimed at driving out the British and restoring earlier rulers and social relations, religious movements for the liberation of a region or an ethnic class so as to establish a new form of government, social banditry, terrorist vengeance, with ideas of meting out collective justice and mass insurrections for the redress of particular grievances. However as David Hardiman points out, such lists cannot explain, except in a tautological manner, why peasant resistance took the form it did. Also, such classifications do not explain how such resistance develops and evolves over time.

    Ranajit Guha also sought to re-examine the history of peasant resistance in eighteenth century India. His first argument was that there were certain underlying structures to peasant uprisings in nineteenth century India, which could be seen under a number of heads like ‘negation’, ‘ambiguity’, ‘solidarity’, ‘transmission’ and ‘territoriality’. Structural similarities could be found in movements that were apparently different. His other argument was that peasant consciousness was revealed most clearly in revolt.

    One element of peasant resistance which was often acknowledged but subsequently marginalized in much analysis of the 1960s and 1970s was the religious and community content of this resistance. Ties of caste or religion could be used by the rich peasants to mobilize the poor peasants in what were essentially class interests of the former. Poorer peasants might also use these ties for greater unity in the struggle for what was essentially their class interest.

    Partha Chatterjee has challenged this conception of peasant struggles in terms of class struggles. He argued that in India, peasants have generally conceptualized relationships of power in terms of the idea of community. He differentiated between community and bourgeoisie consciousness, in terms of collective and individual interests respectively. Chatterjee does not look at community in terms of actual social groups but as a form of consciousness. He saw the community as existing in a relationship of opposition to those who are not of the community, and as such having flexible contours. While community-based solidarities tend to favour interests of the wealthy and powerful, it is not always the case since divisions could also be along lines of caste, religion, age or gender.

    Marxists use the terms ‘political movements’ and ‘pre-political movemnets’ to differentiate between peasant movements that have a well-defined ideology and political program and those which were localized, with limited goals and without any well-defined ideology or program. Subaltern scholars like Gyanendra Pandey, David Hardiman and Shahid Amin have tried to show through regional and local studies that there was what can be called an autonomous domain of peasant politics, as opposed to the mainstream nationalist politics of the late nineteenth century. The two were often in conflict but often powerful movements like the Gandhian movement were able to successfully harness peasant politics. However this did not imply a commonality of interest. Shahid Amin looks at the case of the Chauri Chaura peasants, who in their unique conception of nationalism and the Gandhian message committed an act of violence and were shocked at Gandhi’s condemnation of it. The repeated failure of mainstream politics to understand and assimilate peasant aspirations necessitated an autonomous domain of peasant politics.

    David Hardiman approaches peasant resistance in terms of different areas of resistance which relate to specific instances of domination and subordination. The chief areas of resistance to be looked at here are (1) Peasants against European planters; (2) Peasants against indigenous landlords; (3) Peasants against professional moneylenders (sahukars); (4) Peasants against the land-tax bureaucracy; (5) Peasants against forest officials. These are of course only broad headings all do not cover all kinds of peasant resistance.

    (2). The Indigo Rebellion:

    The period 1859-62 witnessed serious clashes between the planters and peasants in Bengal over the question of indigo. With the growth of the modern textile industry in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was a great expansion in the demand for this dye. The plantation system, which had come into being under British rule and against which the peasants protested was confined largely to Bengal, Bihar and Assam. Here, European capital financed the establishment of warehouses and processing factories at strategic points and the raw or semi-processed produce was acquired from small peasant cultivators. These cultivators were normally tenants of indigenous landlords or zamindars.

    Local factories were operated by European entrepreneurs or managers for larger companies, known as ‘planters’. They advanced money to the peasants in order to pay rent to the zamindar and provide for their subsistence needs, on the understanding that they would cultivate indigo on a certain proportion of their land and hand over the harvested crop to the factory. The peasants were often bound by contracts which ranged in time between ten and five years. Under these contracts the ryots were forced to grow indigo and were often treated as slaves. Peasants who tried to assert any independence were beaten up or illegally imprisoned in factories. The zamindars favoured the system because it ensured for them a regular payment of their rents in cash. Over time many zamindars allowed planters to become managers of their estates.

    The planters were hated because of their racial arrogance and contempt for law. They also maintained small private armies of strongmen, whom they would use to coerce the peasantry, forcing them to grow indigo. Planters, some of whom were former slave-driers in America were repeating their brutal performance in India. Over time, as the planters became more rapacious, the zamindars and leading peasants began to turn against them. The Indigo rebellion had a great impact all over Bengal. Another unique feature of this rebellion was the racial element, in which the British planters were singled out for attack by the ryots.

    In Bengal there was already a history of peasant resistance to the planter system associated with the Fara’idi sect of East Bengal. This group of people had been active in the struggle against oppression by planters in the 1830s and 1840s. Their role is significant in the sense that while they were addressing religious concerns they also took up the economic aspect of the problem. Many of the peasants who took part in the anti-planter movement in 1859-62 were Fara’idis.

    The opposition from the cultivators to this serfdom was so great that the Governor-General in Council was forced to issue a circular on July 13, 1810, which charged the planters with a number of offences. These included acts of violence, illegal detention, and illicit infliction of punishment on the cultivators. However, nothing more was done to prevent the oppression. As a result, during the course of the next forty years, local monopolies and acquisition of zamindaris by European planters were extended a great deal and the oppression of the cultivators intensified. Between 1850 and 1859 indigo ceased to be extremely important and accounted for only 10% of the total exports from Bengal. In this period the government was not too concerned with the plight of the indigo cultivators.

    The actual revolt came in 1859, when the Bengal government began to refuse to support the planters. The coercive methods of the planters violated the principles of laissez faire and freedom of contract between entrepreneur and labourer, and liberals in both Britain and India were demanding that the peasants be free to sell their produce to the highest bidder. In 1859 John Grant, who supported this liberal position, became Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. He demanded the planters conform to the law. By the Rent Act passed in 1859, the British government went out of its way to protect the peasants and the power of the zamindars was curtailed. Tenure was further strengthened and zamindars could no longer evict ryots at will. Even though the attitude of the Bengal government had changed, the attitude of most Europeans in Bengal, including the judiciary remained firmly pro-planter. In April 1859, the Punjab System of Administration was introduced in Bengal whereby administrative and magisterial powers became concentrated in the hands of the District Collector, who became an extremely powerful figure.

    In 1859 trouble began in Barasat where peasants complained that they were being forced to grow indigo, and in protest refused to sow any indigo. Indigo cultivators in the large districts of Pabna and Nadia and in the Barasat subdivision had declared the first general strike which soon spread to Jessore, Khulna, Rajshahi, Dacca, Maldah and Dinajpur, encompassing most of Bengal. By 1860 the movement had gathered force in the delta region of Bengal. While the zamindars were also not pro-planters they did not as a rule actively support the peasants. Leadership to the rebellion was provided by the substantial peasantry – the class which had earlier acted as intermediaries between the planters and the small peasants. Many planters also retaliated to the offensive by the peasants by sending hired toughs to attack the peasants and loot and destroy their houses.

    In March 1860 the Bengal government passed a temporary law which made it a punishable offence to breach contracts to cultivate indigo. The planters immediately filed hundreds of cases of contract violation against the peasants in court. The magistrates took the side of the planters, and as a result many peasants were forced to cultivate indigo in the 1860 season. When the temporary law expired in October Grant refused to renew it and courts were sent orders forbidding them from forcing peasants to grow indigo. The peasants now found that they could use the courts to their advantage and once again the planters were forced on the defensive.

    After this the movement took a more radical turn, developing into a no-rent campaign, directed against both European and Bengali landlords. The planters who were landlords began to evict their tenants on a large scale and demanding higher rents. The peasants fought back in early 1861, refusing in huge numbers to pay their rents. Threats of eviction were challenged by the better-off peasants in the courts. They claimed that they were occupancy tenants who could not, under the terms of the Tenancy Act of 1859, be evicted under the law.

    The broad social base of the Indigo movement should not be ignored. A number of Bengali zamindars, petty landholders, some moneylenders and rich peasants and some village headmen as important leaders were also a part of the movement in addition to the peasants. In his essay on Neel Darapn Ranajit Guha however shows how the grievances of the peasants were used by various superordinate classes to press their own demands. The richer peasants wanted to free themselves from the oppression of the planters so that they could operate their own mahajani i.e. money-lending and usury, freely. The zamindars were pleased to see the power of the planters undermined. The intelligentsia sought to establish themselves as the true friends of the peasants and thus their legitimate political representatives. In all of this the peasants’ own voices were largely ignored, and in the end they gained very little from the struggle.

    By mid-1863 the struggle was largely over. The planters had to raise the rates paid to the peasants for their indigo. Many planters gave up the work entirely, as they knew that without government support for their extra-legal methods, the business could not be sustained. The Revolt of 1859-62 effectively destroyed the indigo plantation system in rural Bengal, but not in Bihar. In fact a lot of the capital which had been invested in Bengal began to be invested in Bihar after the 1860s. After 1860 the Bihar planters increasingly acquired landlord rights usually by leasing holdings from the indigenous landlords. They were then able to force the peasants either to grow indigo or face eviction.

    Thus we see that the indigo cultivators’ strike was a powerful mass movement which generated a wide popular support from the intellectuals and some of the missionaries. The support for the planters, however, was to come from somewhat unexpected quarters – two well-known Indians, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore. The sharp contrast between the testimony of the indigo cultivators who revealed in the investigations of the Indigo Commission their complete hatred for indigo cultivation on the one hand and the support to the planters by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore indicates vividly the gulf that divided these so-called reformers and masses of the people at that time.

    (3). Pubna Uprising:

    A third important centre of public agitation was Pabna district, which became in 1873 the scene of a powerful agrarian movement. This movement, conducted by a well-organized agrarian league created the conditions for the launching of similar agrarian movements in other parts of Eastern and Central Bengal in the decade which preceded the enactment of the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885.

    These agrarian disturbances demonstrated the great power of unionism which was fast developing in this period among certain sections of the peasantry, underlined the basically unstable nature of the landlord-tenant relationship and sharply pointed to the inadequacy of the existing law which regulated these relationships.

    The new landlords belonged to a section of the noveaux riches, who bought estates as speculative investments and expected to make the most of the bargain. They tried to rack-rent maximum profits out of the landed property. The rapacity of the new landlords however did not lead the tenantry to combine prior to 1873, though occasionally the landlords’ demands were individually resisted. The basic cause of this agrarian unrest was the persistent attempts of the local landlords to do away with the right of occupancy of a new class of ryots, the occupancy ryots who had been browbeaten into existence by the Bengal Rent Act X of 1859.

    The formation and the rapid spread of the league throughout the district were facilitated by certain objective factors. A ruling by the District judge in favour of the ryots in 1782 helped in encouraging the ryots. The turbulent and lawless character of the Pabna landlords also contributed to the growth of a spirit of combination among the tenantry. Besides, the Indian Revenue law which allowed as a legitimate cause of enhancement the fact that a higher rate than the one in question was paid by neighbouring ryots of the same class for similar lands led to extensive union among the former as it became the interest of every ryot to prevent enhancement in any land near his own. All these factors contributed to the growth of a general spirit of unionism among the Pabna tenantry and directly led to the formation of the agrarian league.

    The primary aim of this movement was to defend and consolidate the occupancy status gained by the Act X of 1859. Other sections of the peasantry – the non-occupancy ryots, the under tenants of the occupancy ryots, the share-croppers and the agricultural labourers – participated in the movement willingly since they all perceived the zamindar as the common enemy.

    The methods devised by the league to rally the ryots to its cause were very effective. These included sounding of drums and other instruments to assemble the villagers and exhort them to resist the landlords’ demands. Messengers were also sent by the League to those villages which kept aloof to hold out threats of armed bands being sent. The League however never instructed the ryots to defy the authority of the British government. The agrarian movement in the district of Pabna, however rarely degenerated into extreme violence. The tenantry on the contrary displaying a remarkable sense of discipline fought the principal landlords of Pabna, the Tagores, the Pakrasis, the Sanyals, the Banerjees and the Bhaduris in the civil courts. Scholars like Binay Chaudhry and Suprokash Roy however have underlined the violent character of the movement and thereby uncritically accepted the contemporary landlord press bias regarding the Pabna tenantry.

    As the movement of the occupancy ryots of Pabna gradually spread throughout the district, the Bengal landlords apprehended that a further extension of the movement would adversely affect the position of the landlord class as a whole. Consequently the pro-landlord enthusiasts in Calcutta made a conscious attempt to confuse the issues. A deliberate attempt was made to create an impression that the Pabna movement was not an agrarian movement at all but a movement organized by men who wanted to use the peasants to further their selfish interests. Thus, Dwijendranath Tagore, poet and musician, one of the famous cultural figures of 19th century Bengal, drew the attention of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal to the acts of wanton violence committed by the Pabna peasantry upon the ‘inoffensive people’.

    It was also made to appear that the movement organized by the Pabna League was not an agrarian movement but really a communal movement of the Mohammedan tenantry against their Hindu landlords. However we cannot take this simplistic understanding of the character of the movement for granted, especially when we look at the fact that two top leaders of the League, Ishan Chandra Roy and Shambhunath Pal were caste Hindus and would not have associated with a movement which had any such communal leanings. Also, if we look at the Muslim tenantry, we find that a majority were Hindu converts, who had not even been accepted completely into the Islamic fold. Such men could not consciously use religion in their struggle.

    Basically, the Pabna movement was a non-violent agrarian uprising. Instances of violence were rare since the peasant leaders did not take the law into their own hands and actually advised the ryots to keep themselves within the bounds of law. In fact in many instances, the rioting and plundering had been proved to have been instigated by some zamindars against neighbouring landlords, against whom they had a grudge; and then the movement was unfairly saddled with the whole responsibility of disturbances for which it was only partially responsible. Other cases of violence were also due to the criminal class who took advantage of the excitement.

    It should be noted that the grievances of the ryots were not narrowly concerned only with enhancement of rent; they felt that the high landlordism struck at the very roots of their occupancy status and Kalyan Kumar Sengupta believes that the uprising had a more general character than is usually ascribed to it. The communal character which was attributed to the movement by the mouthpieces of the property owners and imputation of widespread violence, reflect the growth of communalism among the propertied class but are not an accurate description of the complex factors which shaped the general character of the disturbances.

    (4). Deccan Riots:

    The Deccan Riots of 1875 in Maharashtra are an instance of peasant resistance aimed at moneylenders or sahukars and this movement has been analyzed in great detail since the 1960s. The basis of rural society was the village community with the head or the patel, the moneylender belonging to the vani caste and the agricultural groups belonging to the kunbi caste. The discussion of the Deccan riots is mainly concerned with the argument of credit relations in rural India in this period. In this debate three themes are broadly explored. The first is the degree of continuity and change with regard to the role and importance of the moneylender since the pre-colonial period. While some see a continuation of earlier social relations, for others, control of moneylending capital on small peasant production only emerges in the colonial period and links with colonial capitalism. The second is the debate over whether it was peasant poverty or peasant prosperity that was responsible for the expansion of credit. SS Thornburn in his study of credit in Punjab saw increasing revenue demands as being the causative factor behind increasing rents. Some scholars also believe that peasants borrowed in order to invest further in land. The third theme is about the peasant-debtor relationship and whether it was one of reverence and reciprocity or was it one of resistance. It has been argued that the use of terms like mahajan or sahukar which literally mean great or honourable person, reflect respect for the moneylenders. Sugata Bose has tried to explore another theme in which creditor-debtor relations have been viewed in a culturally defined context of power and not just in terms of political economy.

    British administration in the Deccan in the 1830s came under the influence of utilitarian thinkers like Robert Keith Pringle, who laid the foundations of the land-revenue policy in western India. Pringle had an atomistic approach to social phenomenon and was concerned with the behaviour of conceptually isolated individuals. The ryotwari system of land revenue introduced by Goldsmid and Wingate reflected social atomism in the creation of a contract between the individual peasant and the state and in the exclusion of intermediaries. What Ravinder Kumar calls the ‘realignment of power’ in rural society stemmed from the Utilitarian measures of reform and led to a growth of social tensions within the Deccan villages that erupted in the disturbances of 1875.

    The ryotwari system of land revenue weakened the cohesion of the village by abolishing the collective responsibility which the kunbis had formerly borne for the village rental. It was also responsible for organizing rural credit along novel lines. Although grain dealers-cum-moneylenders (sahukars) has long been a feature of the Indian countryside, their position had been considerably enhanced under British rule. This was in part because the British had worked towards creating a largely uniform system of landed property, in which an area of land was held to belong to an individual and to be freely saleable on the market. Since the new system emphasized individual responsibility for the payment of land-tax, credit was now required by the individual and not the village community. It now became possible for moneylenders to take individual peasants to court and force them to sell their land to pay off debts. The increase in civil suits instituted against ryots in this period proves that the moneylenders recognized the new judicial institutions as instruments for self-aggrandizement. The position of the moneylenders was also strengthened by the growth in population in rural areas, as this created a demand for land and, made land a valuable security for debt. It was this growing exploitation by the moneylenders which caused extreme resentment among the peasant communities which in the past had prided themselves on their independence.

    The land tax rates had been raised by the government in the tax settlements in the 1860s and 1870s. This increase was justified that prices had risen and that cash crops were being grown over a greater area than before. Unfortunately, these enhancements came into effect just at a time when produce prices had crashed, making it harder for the deeply indebted peasants to pay their taxes. This situation led to the agitation on 1873-4 described by Ravinder Kumar in his article on the Deccan riots.

    The revolt began at Supe in eastern Pune district on May 12, 1875. Peasants gathered from the surrounding villages and attacked the shops of the sahukars. The sahukars themselves were not attacked. The object of the rioters in every case was to obtain and destroy the bonds, decrees etc. in the possession of their creditors, and could be done peacefully and violence only ensued when the moneylenders resisted. The British sent in troops and began arresting those they suspected of having attacked the moneylenders and police posts were established in the most militant villages to overawe the peasants. By early June the attacks had stopped, though the peasants continued to show hostility to the moneylenders and boycott them.

    Ravinder Kumar is mainly concerned with the socio-economic background of the movement. He argues that till the coming of the British the moneylenders were not very powerful in villages, and had to deal with the village community as a corporate body. Under the Ryotwari system, the government began to collect the taxes individually rather than from the village community as a whole, which meant that peasants now had to borrow as individuals to pay their tax demands. Thus their position weakened while that of the sahukars was strengthened. From the 1840s the moneylenders began to acquire the land of the peasants in settlement of their debts and what Kumar sees as the ‘harmonious relationship’ between Sahukar was transformed into one of acute antagonism. The situation subsequently only worsened with the fall in agricultural prices and the rise in land taxes.

    David Hardiman however points out a few flaws in Ravinder Kumar’s conception. He points out that it appears that even before the coming of the British the power of the moneylenders had started to increase. Also, Kumar’s equation of ‘moneylender’ with ‘vani’ i.e. a member of the Vaniya caste (such as the Marwari and Gujarati Vaniyas), obscures the fact that the sahukars in the Deccan were of three main classes: the alien Marwari and Gujarati Vaniyas, indigenous Vaniyas and Maharashtrian Vaniyas.

    Ian Catanach, in his study of the Deccan Riots argues that the revolt failed to spread beyond Pune and Ahmednagar districts because of the repression by the police and the army. Catanach also picks up the question of popular beliefs during the revolt, for instances the peasants believed that the government officials were on their side against the Marwaris. He even tries to trace a connection between the revolt and the cholera epidemic on at the same time in the same area. However while Catanach does try to explore some different angles, in most cases he is unable to establish a satisfactory link between these factors and the revolt, and his treatment of the issues is tentative and suggestive, requiring more systematic research and writing.

    Neil Charlesworth in ‘The Myth of the Deccan Riots’ attempts a controversial reinterpretation of the subject. Charlesworth disputes Kumar’s argument that British rule had transformed Deccan society by the 1870s. In his view the only important changes were that the ryotwari system had greatly reduced the power of the village headman and that the relationship between the peasants and moneylenders was now mediated through the courts of law, which were used as instruments of harassment by the moneylenders. According to Charlesworth, this legal system went to make the Deccan riots a more coherent and effective movement, but it had not created an agrarian revolution to cause the disturbances.

    He says that a social revolution would have occurred of the peasants had lost a majority of their lands to the moneylenders and if there had been a commercial revolution in agriculture. According to his study only five percent of the land had passed on to the moneylenders and the sahukars were not interested in the acquisition of land, but were merely using dispossession as a threat to recover debts from peasants. Charlesworth thus advances what he calls, ‘a strictly functionalist view of credit and debt in India’. In fact he also points out that in some cases when the moneylenders were in a state of crisis they were forced to withdraw credit to remain solvent. This would cause discontent and possible grain riots against moneylenders. He also sees 1875 in this context as a ‘safety-valve’ allowing peasants to work off their anger and therefore as a ‘source of stability for the system’. 

    However there are some problems with Charlesworth’s argument. Statistically it would seem that the Marwari and Gujrati sahukars took a small percentage of the land, it was among the most fertile and valuable land. The revolt made the Sahukars afraid of the consequences of grabbing land in the future, and the Deccan Agriculturists Relief Act of 1879, under which a partial interdict was imposed on the sale of land, made it legally harder for them to do so. Charlesworth’s depiction of the riots as no more than ‘minor grain riots’ is also problematic. It cannot be described as minor as it occurred in villages, the figures for which range between 33 in official accounts to 90 in files in the Bombay Archives. It is likely that if the British had not acted promptly in suppressing the revolt, it would have spread all over Maharashtra.

    In conclusion we can see that popular resistance in the late nineteenth century can be linked up to larger questions of colonial policy, while at the same time being firmly localized and confined to specific complaints. At the same time inadequate work in this area has led first of all to confusion with regard to the character of peasant and tribal movements, the two of which are often used interchangeably. Also there has been a tendency till recent years to view these uprisings as violent, chaotic, communal and sectarian, without a proper understanding of the specific circumstances and grievances. These movements need to be viewed in the context of resistance to exploitation from a variety of channels, including the colonial state, landlords, planters and moneylenders.

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

    • R. Desai (ed.) – Peasant Struggles in India
      • Kathleen Gough – Indian Peasant Uprisings
      • Natrajan – The Santhal Insurrection: 1855-56
      • Natrajan – Indigo Cultivators’ Strike: 1860
      • Kalyan Kumar Sengupta – Peasant Struggle in Pabna, 1873: Its Legalistic Character
    • David Hardiman (ed.) – Peasant Resistance in India, 1858 – 1914
      • Introduction
      • Ranajit Guha – Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror
      • Kalyan Kumar Sengupta – The Agrarian League of Pabna, 1873
      • Ravinder Kumar – the Deccan riots of 1875
      • J. Catanach – Agrarian Disturbance in Nineteenth-Century India
      • Neil Charlesworth – The Myth of the Deccan Riots