Peasant Movements in India, 1920-1950 0195613902, 0195629035, 9780195629033

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A

. . . _VE . I I ~ IA 1920-1950

E

D. N. DHANAGARE

DELHI

OXFORD UNIVERSITI-PRESS BOMBAY CALCUITA MADRAS

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Unlv. Ubrarv, Univ. Cal1f., Sartta ~ Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP LONDON GLASGOW NEW YORIC TORONlO . DELHI BOMBAY CALCUTrA MADRAS KARACHI KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE HONG ICONG TOKYO NAIROBI DAR ES SALAAM CAPE lOWN MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

and associates in BEIRUT BERLIN IBADAN MEXICO

cm

© Oxford University Press 1983

Typeset by Aurophotosctters, Pondiche1ry·605001 : .Printed by Rajb~dhu Industrial Co., New Delhi 1tOOM and published by R. Dayal, Oxford Unive1·sjty Press 2/11 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New ~lhi 110002

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To

SOU.MAI my mother who did not live to see

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this work in print, and to

Tirthroop BABA my father, who through his untold sacrifices,

taught me what I must uphold in life.

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Contents •

Preface Acknowledgements Glossary

lX X •

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• I Framework of the Study

1

II Agrarian Structure and Peasant Revolts in India before 1920 III Agrarian Conflict, Religion and Politics: The Moplah rebellions in Malabar in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth centuries IV The Bardoli Satyagraha: Myth and Reality V Agrarian Agitation and Congress Politics in Oudh, 1920-2 and t 930--2 VI Peasant Organizations and the Left Wing in India, 1925-47 v-··-v1I The Tebhaga Move111ent in Bengal, 1946-7 '-· VIII Social Origins of the Peasant Insurrection in T elangana, t 946-51 IX Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Tables '

1.1 Gainfully en1ployed population of India engaged in agriculture in J931 3 .1 Distribution of Hindu-Muslim population in different taluks of Malabar, 1921

3 .2 Occupational distribution of the Moplah working population in 1921 5.1 .Classification of landholders and tenants by extent of revenue/rents paid in Oudh, 1920 5.2 Agrarian classes in Oudh 5.3 Prices, rental and revenue demands, and wages in the U.P., 1900-34 6.1 Men1bership of the All India Kisan Sabha, 1941-4 7. 1 Agricultural prices and wages in Bengal, 1939--45 7.2 Extent of Bargadari cultivation in some districts of Bengal, 1940--50

17 71 73 114 115116 147 161 163

8~-1 Pattern of employment in agriculture in the Hyderabad state, 1891-1951

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Maps ''

1. The Malabar district: Important towns and taluka boundaries 2. The Moplah rebellion, 1921: Centres of the uprising and rebel strongholds 3. The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh: Location of the agrarian disturbances, 1921 and the 'No-Rent' campaign, 1930--2 . 4~· Map of undivided Bengal, 1946: Major areas of the Tebhaga movement · 5. Location map of the Hyderabad State before its merger with India 6. Map of Andhra Pradesh showing the Telangana and the Andhra Delta districts and also the areas of the T elangana insurrection, 1946-51

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Preface .

This book has grown out of my D. Phil. thesis submitted to the University of Sussex in 1973. I would like to record my gratitude to the Government of India, Ministry of Education, and to the Commonwealth Scholarship_ Commission in the United Kingdom for awarding me a Commonwealth Scholarship for a period of three years to carry out my research at the University of Sussex. The Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, was kind enough to give me the leave which made my stay at Sussex possible. To my supervisor Professor Zevedei Barbu I owe a special debt. 1'he idea of undertaking an extensive and comparative study of some important peasant struggles in India was first conceived in a Graduate Seminar on 'Comparative Study of Revolutions' which he conducted. He not only took a keen interest in this project but also painstakingly scrutinised many versions and drafts of my thesis. But for his constant encouragement and constructive criticism it would not have been possible for me to bring this work to fruition. While preparing this study I have benefited from discussions and consultations with Professors Hamza Alavi, Tom Bonomore, E. Kathleen Gough, Bruce D. Graham, Ranajit Guha, Robin Jeffrey, Adrian C. Mayer, Peter D. Reeves, Gyanendra Pandey, Sunil K. Sen, B. D. Soni and Theodore P. Wright, Jr. However, the errors which remain are entirely mine. My special thanks are due to the librarians and staff of the India Office Library and India Office Records, London; the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics; and the University of Sussex Library, for providing me with all the facilities and most of the source material I needed for this study. B. D. Soni and Dr Ghanshyam Shah helped me in obtaining very useful source material. K. T. Jacob Panicker translated the rare Malayalam sources used in Chapter III on the Moplah rebellion of 1921. I gratefully acknowledge their help. Pune 22 August 1982

D. N. Dhanagare •

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Acknowledgements

For perrnission to reproduce copyright material that the author has published elsewhere, he is grateful to the ,ollowing: Contributions to Indian Sociology (New Series), No. V 1 .I, December 1974, for 'Social origins of the peasant insurrection in 1 ·elangana, 1946-51 '; Sociological Bulletin Journal of the Indian Sociological Society) Vol. 24, No. 1, March 1975, for 'The politics of survival: Peasant organizations and the Left-wing in India, 1925-46'; The South Asian Studies Association (Nedlands, W. Australia) for 'Congress and agrarian agitation in Oudh, 192~22 and 193~32', from South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies, No. 5, December 1975; Agra University-Institute of Social Sciences for Agrarian Movements and Gandhian Politics (a monograph under the Extension Lecture Series: 1, Agra: 1975); Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., London, for 'Peasant protest and politicsthe Tebhaga movement in Bengal (India) 1946-47' from The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, April 1976; the Past and Present Society, Oxford (U.K.) for 'Agrarian conflict, religion and politics: The Moplah rebellions in Malabar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries', from Past and Present-a Journal of Historical Studies, No. 74, February 1977; and the University of Queensland Press (Australia) for 'Myth and reality in the Bardoli satyagraha-1928: A study in Gandhian politics'. from the Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 26, No L, 1980.

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Glossary

abwabs ahimsa amsams anna •

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asamzwan ashram baithak bania barga

bazarlbazaar begar bhagela charkha chothai dalam/dallam deshmukh dharamgola Dhed dub/a durra!dora fatwa

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Illegal taxes (cesses) collected by landlords from their tenants, panicularly in Bengal, Bihar and U .P. Non-violence Village/arishes in Malabar (Kerala) An ol coin, equivalent to the sixteenth pan of a rupee in Indian currency Systelil under which lands were leased out by middlemen like thikadars; this was prevalent in Bihar panicularly for cultivation of indigo Centre where a community dedicated to a common cause lives and works together Here, meeting of workers of an organization or political pany One belonging to the Vaishya (trading) caste; engaged primarily in business and money-lending, particularly in central and northern India . Share of crop; hence bargadar---a sharecropper. More commonly used in Bengal market Compulsory free labour of peasants for landlords or the state Debt-bond labourer in Telangana area Hand-operated spinning wheel with four spindles One-fourth of the land revenues ass~sn1ent imposed as a fine on defaulters (particularly in Gujarat) Squad or batch; a Communist cell or fighting unit Literally, 'head of the country', but here some kind of hereditary official, a revenue collector turned landlord Grain co-operative store run for charity purposes An untouchable caste in South India, also in Maharashtra and Gujarat debt-bond (serf) labourer, mainly in Gujarat villages. Also a caste name master, 'sir'-title of affectionate respect for officials, landlords and educated men in T elangana and Andhra Written instructions issued by Islamic religious heads to their followers

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Glossary

goonda gram grihastha Harijan hat znam 1ag1r •

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kabuliyat kanamdar kanungo karnam khadi/.khaddar khamar khedut kisan lathi malik

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munszf nazrana panchayat pannaiyal pate/ patta •

patwan

prajalproja raj/rajyam ra1a rupee razakar •

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razyat

Hooligan or notorious trouble-maker Village; gram-rajyam, village government Settled peasant and husbandman Untouchable or one who belongs to any of the Scheduled Castes as defined by the Indian Constitution. Literally, 'people of God'; a teran introduced by Mahatma Gandhi. Martket; hence hat-to/a, a tax paid for marketing goods Gift or a grant of land in perpetuity (generally tax-free) Land-grant, usually for services rendered to a king/ en1peror;j1girdar, holder of such a grant System of patron-client relationship Landlord or 'lord of the soil' as a matter of binh-right (panicularly in Malabar) Written agreement or contract for til Mongagee-tenant in Malabar (Kerala) Revenue accounts official or record-keeper Village-level revenue official in Andhra and Telangana countryside Hand-spun, hand-woven cloth Threshing floor used for harvesting crops Blanket te,111 for villager or anyone connected with cultivation of land Peasant, mainly cultivating peasant Stick Master; used also to denote landlords, rich landowners in villages Lower rank judge, dealing mainly with revenue cases Gift (either cash or kind) made out by tenants to their landlords to retain or secure leases Village council Agricultural serf caste inTanjore district (south India) Hereditary village headman, also entrusted with revenue administrative work Registration of landholding; pattadar, registered landholder Village revenue accountant; keeper of the records of land revenue, crop assessments and returns, etc. People; subjects Kingdom, regime, government King or chieftain Major denomination of Indian currency Para-military volunteer who fights for religious cause (mainly Islamic) Peasant; sometimes used for landholders (revenuepayers) in peasant-proprietry areas and sometimes refers to tenants holding leases under landlords in zamindari areas; raiyatwari, system of peasant proprietorship

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Glossary sabha • • sam,t, sanghlsangham • sanyas,

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Party, organization Usually, local committee of an association Association or collective body One who renounces worldly pleasures, leading a . 1!.C he11111t s me Crown lands of Nizam of Hyderabad before t 949 Non-violent civil disobedience or passive resistance,,,_technique of fighting peacefully for political and other rights; introduced into India by Gandhi Money-lenders, creditors Illegal rent enhancen1ent (particularly used in Bihar) Occupancy (registered) tenants in Telangana region; asami-shikmi, tenant-at-will. Purification ritual Independence, freedom; also self-government. Village-level revenue official in Gujarat A revenue sub-division of a district lord or owner of a ta/,,/u, i.e. a group of several villages; mosdy in Oudh (U.P.) and Bengal. The tea111 originated in the Mughal systen1 of land administration System of produce-rent whereby a tenant was required to pay a fixed quantity of crop to a landlord/landholder (mainly in Bengal). a lump-sum payment imposed on tenants by landlords -Systen1 under which a tenant was obliged to set aside a 3/20 portion of his holding for indigo cultivation in Bihar and Bengal A corruption of Hindi tariltadi, fomented sap of tar or palmyra tree ·· Annuity paid to revenue-collecting intt:11nediaries Bond-serf labour system in Telangana Grant, usually of land, for maintenance of Muslim religious endowments such as mosques Lord of the land, proprietor-owner of a landed estate Home-farm land of thileadars in Bihar J

sarf-e-khas satyagraha sawcars/sahukars sharahbeshi shikmidar shuddi swara1 tauzti taluka talukdar •

tanka tawan tinkathia toddy

vatan • vett, waqf zamindar ziraat/zirrait

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CHAPTER I

Framework of the Study

The Problem Since the 1960s interest in the comparative sociology of social and political moven1ents has grown steadily. More recently social scientists of diverse intellectual persuasions have increasingly turned their attention towards the study of peasant movements. In the sociology of social movements there is a well-entrenched tradition of analysing socio-political movements including peasant movem~ts-in a 'class' framework that is rooted in Marxism. A general question that is often raised concerns the · role different agrarian cla-sses play in peasant resistance and revolts. The question has become somewhat polemical owing mainly to the sharp increase in diverse sets of empirical data being produced by researchers dealing with a great variety of historical cross-cultur~~ settings. Since this study is concerned with the peasant movements that occurred in India between 1920 and 1950, it would be worth our while to set out with an examination of the main ways in which the question ht\s been approached, conceptualized and fo1.111ulated from time to time. An important starting point is provided by Marx's well-known thesis on peasantry ~ It is originally complex, frequently applied differently in different contexts, and hence full of ambiguities, if not contradictions. There is first of all Marx's overwhelming, if not exclusive, concern with modern industrial societie~ and his analysis of various social upheavals in France partict.larly the revolution of 1848-that led him to treat the peasantry as a secondary social class essentially outside the class system of capitalist society. Yet he thought that the peasantry could be a possible ally of the industrial proletariat in the latter's struggle against the bourgeoisie. Contrary to Marx's expectations the French peasantry did not support the working class at the time of the 1848 revolution. 1 Marx therefore unsparingly criticised the peasantry and chara-:terized it as a 'petit-bourgeois'

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Peasant Movements in India, 1920-50

class struggling to restore the old property relations within the framework of the new social order. 2 Caricaturing the peasants as a 'sack of potatoes that lack interconnections, common political identity and organization', Marx even despised them as 'representing barbarism in the midst of civilization'. 3 Despite such scathing criticism, Marx's views on the peasantry were basically ambivalent. For him the possible sources of mobilization, resistance and revolutionary action were complex, multiple and comprehensive. Therefore they included all those who symbolize alienation and exploitation in a given society. In this sense the peasants were important, for with growing-capitalist penetration of the French countryside, the peasant proprietors were being steadily expropriated and pushed into the ranks of the rural proletariat. Hence they could very well be a useful ally of the industrial working class." Marx's critique was always tinged with this hope which he expressed cogently while writing on the Paris Commune of 1871. 5 . Marx has been attacked enough for treating the peasantry as a homogeneous social category although it is only fair to say that his 'agrofugal' sketch, in which the peasantry is depicted as a 'sack of potatoes' or 'epitome of backwardness', was not a characterization of the peasantry in general but specifically of the French peasantry. Moreover, Marx did draw a distinction between the small peasant and the large land owners as two different and opposed classes. 6 In any case, the social differentiation within peasant or agrarian societies was basically not ge1111ane to Marx's general thesis on the political orientation and revolutionary disposition of various social classes. It seenis that Engels had a more balanced view of the peasantry, a clearer understanding of the internal stratification and differentiations within a peasant society, and he better aniculated his position on the role of newly-emerging agrarian classes in the attainment of revolutionary objectives: Thus, to ~ngels, the 'fa1111-labourers' rather than 'tenant-farmers' or 'peasant-proprietors' were the most natural ally of · the urb~industrial proletariat. 7 All the same h~ readily subscribed to the notion of the pre-en1inence and leadership of the proletariat in a revolutionary movement. Therefore, Engels too viewed the peasantry as internally split, unorganized and politically impotent unless mobilized by the organized working class.• This suggests that although the issue of revolutionary potential and the role of the peasant was discussed in the early Marxist tradition, the question of political orientation and practice Qf different agrarian classes was not directly posited. '

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Framework ofthe Study

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The encounter betwe~n Marxism and the non-European world, particularly the 'third world' with its predominantly peasant economies, pre-capitalist social structures and colonial experience, required a mediation which was carried out by Lenin. 9 The Russian experience prevailed upon Lenin and his Bolshevik Party to draw the peasantry and the working class into an alliance that finally carried out the 'October Revolution'. The decisive contribution of the peasantry to the Russian revolution thus precipitated tiie question of the peasant's revolutionary potential, in a more c~ncrete and acute for rn . ' 0 The classical Marxian conceptions of the peasantry, subsequently modified by Lenin, were seriously _challenged first in China where the peasantry and the leadership of Mao Tse Tung played a decisive role in the Chinese revolution of 1949. In this instance the peasants not only fo1111ed the great bulk of the fighting revolutionary forces and party cadres but also provided a good part of the leadership. 1 ' Similar peasant revolutions occurred, besides Mexico, in Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam, thus demonstrating the revolutionary pot\!ntial of the peasantry. 12 Frantz Fanon, the ideologue of the Algerian revolution, illustrates how far the classical Marxian thesis on the peasantry has been revise4. when he writes: ... In the colonial countries peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compre,mise, no possible coming to te1111s; colonization and decolonization are sin1ply a question of relative strength. 11

Thus, the peasant revolutions th:n ·shook large parts of the 'third world' during the last nalf-crntury or so, were successfully launched and sometimes even led by the peasants themselves. This may seem to have settled the i~sue of the peas.mt's revolutionary potential, but the question still remains problen1atic particularly in the newly-dev~loping ex-colonial societies such as India. It is in this context that Barrington Moore-reopened the~ssue in his celebrated comparative study of dictatorship and democracy. 14 Although basically Moore's malytical framework is Marxiar., his approach to the question is sl1ghtly different. For example, Marx, Engels and Lenin looked for 'economic exploitation', 'class-anta~nism /conflict' and 'alie11ation' as the preconditions and main sources of radical, that is revolutionary, change; in that frame of reference they all fou!"1d the exploited peasantry a suitable al)y of the working class.

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Peasant Mooements in India, 1920-50

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Although Moore does not deny the fundamental truth involved in this approach, he relegates the phenomenon of 'class exploitation' per se to the background and focusses on the power structure of a given society. To him it is the power structure which deter n1ines the parameters of radical change and modernization. More prec;sely Moore does not dispute the thesis of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry but argues that the concrete manifestations of this revolutionary potential hinge largely on the structure of power alignments and class alliances in a given society at a particular time. Thus in England the peasants proved themselves to be non-revolutionary, and were wiped out by rapidly-growing rural and industrial capitalism. 15But in France the peasants aligned themselves with the urban middle class which guaranteed private property-a consideration that is fundamental to any peasantry, and therefore, could make a substantial contribution to the French Revolution. 16 Generally speaking, in his revolutionary model Lenin put a special e111phasis on the alliance of the peasantry with the proletariat because there was neither a strong middle class nor industrial bourgeoisie in Russia at that time. Thus, the nature of the power structure and alignments of social classes largely deter 1nine the for 111 in which the revolutionary potential of any class would ultimately manifest itself and contribute to change. Moore has epitomized these for ins into what he has called the three 'ideal-type' routes to radical change and modernization, namely: l) the bourgeois-democratic revolution (as it took place in England, France and America); 2) the Fascist revolution (as in Ger111any and Japan); and 3) the communist revolution (like the Russian or the Chinese revolution). While the peasantry has traversed each of these routes elsewhere, confoundingly, the Indian peasantry has not. Moore therefore raises the question as to why the case of India should not confor111 to any of his three paradigms and why it should stand out as an exception. 17 The lack of revolutionary experience in India has been explained by Moore partly in tet 111s of 'the traditionally docile and passive character of the Indian peasantry' and partly with reference to the structural peculiarities of the village social organization, castesanctions and religio-ethical precepts that dominate peasant life in India. All these social forces, to Moore, have not only remained relatively unchanged over the past centuries but have also prevented peasant discontent from developing into the extre111e fo1 ms of class

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Framework of the Study

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antagoni~m, and thus immunised the Indian peasant against any potential rebellious impulse.•• Significantly enough, in his analysis of the Indian situation, ge does not apply his perspective of powerconstellations and of the dynamics of power very rigorously. One of the reasons why Moore found the record of the Indian peasant so 'unimpressive' 19 is that he searched for a revolutionary phenomenon that could well stand as a parallel to any of the three ideal types. There is, however, a streak of dogmatism in his assertion that the revolutionary potential of a class must manifest itself in one of the three 'ideal-type' for iris, a pcsition that is both untenable and self-defeating, even within his own framework of 'power-structure and class alignment'. Secondly, Moore did not realize that given a fsocio-culturally plural and complex society such as India, with her --.., institutional peculiarities, prolonged subjugation to colonial rule and a sustained anti-imperialist freedom struggle, a full-fledged revolu tionary tut 111oil was less likely to occur. The search for an Indian equivalent to any of these three fo1 ins o revolution has led Moore to jump to the conclusion that the Indian peasant has been made passive by the negative effect of the tural social structure. We argue that Moore's conclusion is not deduced from any systematic theory but is only a reiteration of cenain stereotypes of the Indian peasant and society, and that his empirical generalizations are questionable. His thesis on the Indian peasantry, therefore, r,eeds re-examination in the light of a more extensive survey of various peasant resistance movements and revolts in India. Barring a brief account of the Telangana revolt, t 946-5 t (which is discussed later in Chapter 8), Moore has completely ignored an array of several other peasant struggles which involved a variety of complex issues and different ctgrarian classes during the first half of this century. This is of course not to under 111ine either the significance and validity of Moore's brilliant exercise in comparative historical sociology, or his contribution to our understanding of the role played by peasants in modem revolutionary movements. 'W"hat we question is not Moore's v · central thesis on 'power-,Jynamics' as the key-variable but his conclusions on the Indian peasantry. In their recent writings scme cont~mporary Marxist sociologists and social scientists have concurred, consciuusly or unconsciously, with Barrington Moore's general thesis. For example, Paul Sweezy argues that 'the revolution:iry role and le:iJership of a cenain social class is essentially the product of historical circ1unstances and objective

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,., , ,Z forces' and that 'no revolutionary path is immutable or invariable'.

Somewhat in keeping with this, T eodor Shanin has emphasised that 'the whole question of revolutionary potential of a certain social class must be treated as historical, i.e. temporary, relative and changing'. 21 This suggests that the question as to 'whether or not the peasantry has revolutionary potential' becomes less pertinent for our purpose and could therefore be more usefully replaced by the questions: What role do different classes of peasantry in a society play in revolutionaitJ; or near-revolutionary movements? What ol soc-1al structure and historical circumstances are conducive to peasant revolts or movements? and, Why the mobilization of peasants at one time and place leads to peaceful or constitutional agitations, but assumes an insurrectionary or rebellious fo1 an io another place and time ?22 These three questions thus provide us with the point of departure for our enquiry into peasant movements in India. So far discussion in contemporary sociology on the three questions has centred mainly on the extreme case of revolutionary upheavals such as in Russia, France or China, and has tended to bypass those societies which did not witness a full-scale revolution in their history. Therefore, these questions need to be examined .in the context of near-revolutionary or no!!-revolutionary situations. The main burden this inquiry is that, for .a sociologi"cal an-:ilysis social and political movements-whether agitations, revolts/rebellions or insurrections of peasants-are as much significant social facts as are 'revolutions'. 2 = Therefore, given that none of the 'tl1ree types' of revolutionary transfoa 111ation took place in India, it becomes all the more important to investigate the nature and extent of peasant discontent, resistance and revolts in the country. Such an exercise should be extren1ely rewarding if it takes into account that crucial phase of the Indian freedom movement in which the Rightist, revivalist and politically liberal-refo1111ist parties as well as the Leftist or self-styled revolutionatj' panies, all wooed the peasantry almost simultaneously. The assumption underlying the first question is that each social moven1ent has a location in social structure. Thus, a peasant movemP.nt ma)· appeal only to some segments or strata of an agrarian socie-ty. Such location and class character of the Indian peasant movement can possibly be analysed by using some workable model of agrarian classes in India. It should then be pos~ible to assess the role of different agrarian strata or classes in some specific peasant

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Framework ofthe Study

revolts and resistance movements, and their relative contribution to change in the agrarian social structure over a period of time. The second and third questions, interrelated as they are, hinge on two assumptions: first, that while each social movement has certain corn. mon as well as unique features it is a product of peculiar historical circumstances, and second, that the phenomena of socio-political movements are p~ocessus or diachronic in the sense that they signify a sequence of events, or a process in time; therefore, each sy~chro!_lic event in the course of the development of movement may bear some

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'Ihe methodological implications of the questions and the under- , ·~ 't·;~ ._ lying assumptions are again twofold: first, that a sociological study of peasant movements has to.be one of historical analysis and, secondly, that if it is comparative in perspective, it would lead to useful empirical generalizations, and through them, to theory-construction, application and testing. As regards the first question as to the role and political orientations of different agrarian classes, 'the middle-peasant thesis' has become fairly controversial over the past decade or so: Since we intend to examine the role of agrarian classes in different peasant resistance movements in India, it would be useful to trace the origin and development of this thesis briefly. It is iri Lenin's work that we first encounter the concept of 'middle easant' clearly fo1111ulated. Lenin distinguishes the 'middle peasant' rom the 'poor peasant' as well as from the 'well-to-do peasant bourgeoisie'. To him the internal differentiation within the peasantry becomes more and more elaborate with the introduction of capitalism in agriculture. 24 The position of 'middle peasant' is transitional, and 'their·income being somewhat lower than the average expenditure, their position in the rural social structure is most unstable., To Lenin, this class 'provides ~ore work~rs ~an it hires'; except in perhaps the best years, the middle peasant's position is_3!1 ~~~rel!lel.Y_E~~carious one. It is important however that Lenin did not subscribe to the ~otion of the structural independence of the middle peasants just because they had access to ~and. In fact he believed that the 'majority of thein could make both ends meet without resorting to loans to be repaid by labour services. ' 25 'The proc~ss ~_!.~epeasantization, result~g fro~ the capitalist deveJop~ent i!J~ri~~lture, sweeps away the middl~J?e~~t.~~~Qry_~_d_reinJ_o_r_c.~~ extr~~~_QQ~~-l n~e]fTue

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easant bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat.' In Lenin's view, alt oug 1n their social relations the middle peasants keep oscillating between the two extremes 'only a small minority of them succeeds in entering the top group while the bulk is pushed into the bottom group by the :whole course of social evolution. ' 26 Lenin thus sketched the middle pea.;ants as more akin to the poor peasants particularly in te1 ins of placement in the socio-economic hierarchy, but not in te111is of their political orientation, although this is not explicitly stated. In this characterization there is no suggestion whatsoever that the precarious, marginal, and hence unstable position of the middle peasants equips them with any specially revolutionary proclivities. On the contrary, both in his theory and in the practice of revolution Lenin never seems to have shed his basic conviction about the proletariat ·the working class-:as the avant garde of revolutionary movements. 27 To achieve the revolutionary objectives however, he did stress on 'mobilizing all classes and on arousing discontent wherever possible'. 28 These classes, of course, included among others the middle peasants insofar as the Russian scene was concerned. Mao Tse Tung was the next in the Marxian tradition to apply with finesse the class model and the notion of dialectical materialism in ' analysing the Chinese agrarian society, and to bring abo9t a revolutionary change in it. Whereas Lenin's model of rural classes and his characterization of the middle peasant are based on the presuppositions of the capitalist relations of-production in agriculture, Mao's framework is more elaborate and comprehensive enough to encompass the re-c~italist, qu_asi-(_~~4al landlor~:-~en~t r~J~~i~~s as well as capita 1st relations. His concept of th·e middle peasant thl1s refers to: 'those who own land, or own only part of their land and rent the rest and also those who own no land of their own and rent all their land, but all of them having a fair number of implements.' To Mao Tse Tung 'a middle peasant derives his income wholly or mainly from his own labour and as a rule does not exploit others; in many cases he himself is exploited by others having to pay in land rent and in interest on loans. But generally the middle peasant does not sell his .~ labour-power. Although some well-to-do middle peasants do practise -- exploitation to a small exteat that is not their regular or the main source of income. ' 29 The middle peasant (i.e. owner-peasant), in Mao's assessment, has typical petty bourgeois predilections and is 'afraid of the revolution', whereas the poor peasant (i.e. tenant-

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peasant) is more revolutionary than the forn1er. 3° Clearly then, Mao too does not bestow any 'vanguard' role on the middle peasant. It is true that Mao visualized a multi-class 'joint-dictatorship of all th_e revolutionary classes' (and presumably these included all the strata of peasantry) clJ.~er the establishment of what he called 'the new democracy' . the first stage of the revolutionary movement; but l?. ~ · there is no indication that Mao deviated much from the MarxistLeninist emphasis on the proletarian leadership of revolutionary movements. 31 It is interesting to note that as contemporary social scientists and historians became more and more inclined to use the 'class' model in studying agrarian societies and agrarian movements, they began to discover t!ie middle pe~sant ~ the most volatile, revolutionary and -:/dynamic force in the rural _!_ocial_9~er. -- 'I'eodor Shanin has systematically delineated the sociological concept of 'peasantry', and has apparently drawn heavily from the syndrome of the 'middle peasant' as it was used in the classical texts. Shanin places emphasis on such characteristics as 'relationship to land and relative stability of the peasant household', 'family fa11r1 as a production-consumption unit', 'use of family labour (mainly)', and 'relatively high degree of independence from other.... prod~_cers and from the market'. Shanin has also stressed the ,,~enieinsch!'ft' type organization, distinctive cultural pattern ('a la R'ooE-rt'Keafield) and 'low classness' as some of the other defining ele111ents of 'peasantry'. n Of course, this is a characterization of 'peasantry' in general and not of the 'middle peasant' in panicular. But it hardly needs to be pointed out that Shanin has an ideal-type subsistence peasant economy (comprised of independent small-holders) in mind, as against either the capitalist type or a pre-capitalist one involving a landlord-tenant type system of production relations. His notion of 'peasantry' as an analytical tool, therefore, helps little in comprehending the complex fo11ns of social arrangements such as those in the Indian countryside that began to be penetrated deep enough by colonial capitalism nearly two centuries ago. Shanin, however, admits that the domination of the peasant by outsiders and the consequent 'underdog' position of peasantry are pervasive phenomena, 'land te~'!~~, ~li!_~al power and market__~rtelization being the major mechanis~~f-~~Ioitation'. 33 But Shanin neither glorifies nor unde111·iines-the revolutionary potentialities of the peasantry in general; tacitly though, he stresses that a leadershie drawn from _t~~-1:1rba.n !~~~~~g_e nt~ia-mainly

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of rural origin and with a powerful middle-range cadre had directed the.rank and file in China. 34 Beyond this Shanin does not dwell on the middle peasant concept or thesis as such. The first streaks of the middle peasant thesis are seen in Hamza Alavi's famous essay. 35 His concept of the middle peasant does differ sligptly from the ,one used in Lenin's or Mao's writings. However, his views on the middle peasants' revolutionary potentialities, political orientation and their role in the actual struggles in Russia and China differ vastly from the classical views. o Alavi, middle peasants ¥- belong to that sector of the rural economy which-consisu-·oTlncfependent small-holders _and wliicli·a~rs·q~~!fatively·-froiri both the 'landlord-tenant' sector or from the sector of capitalist farmers and ricli..peasants'36 Alavi arglles that -Lenin looked upon die classes in the capitalist sector of agrarian economy rather than upon the disintegrati~g class of midQ!e peasant!_ the mainstay of the com- · mune in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Lenin over-estimated the role of the rural bourgeoisie and completely overlooked the potential of the middle peasant who, in fact, had contributed most to the revolutionary struggles in Russia in 1905 and als_o in 1917. 37 Two major factors, according to Alavi, account for the greater initial militancy. of the middle peasant. First, rel~~~d from feudal bonds, he enjoys reed~m and structural ind_ependence ll:f!like th~ poo~_p~~-~ t1 . and ~e.~J ar 11-.y .w~s the cultivating ~~~t who resi~ed the intruders ~~~ther th_~Y...~~~~-~~ n~~ 7:~~~-n ~~s, money-lenders, or the British t!oops often c~mmissio_n_ed ~ e~[?.r~_!b~-~~~_sy~e_m.n · 'lbe Santai uprising oft 855-6 was in fact part of the same tribal a~d ~ agrarian unrest. Even in the Santai region their ethnic identity and peasant economy were strongly offended by the imposition of an alien land revenue administration, and of stranger zamindars. A wholesale appropriation of land for recovery of revenue dues and land transfers to urban money-lenders, had deeply hurt the tribal sentiment. Their response to official tyranny was widespread and • violent. When the Santals rose in arrns, several landlords, mahajans, . , ,. and darogas (police) were murdered. British forces suppressed the insurrection ruthlesslr. and several thousand Santai insurgents were massacred in the operation. 38 These rebellions of the first half of the nineteenth century differed slightly from those of the latter part of the Mughal era. A strong tribal identity provided the later peasant uprisings with the necessary impetus, but in level of political consciousness, there probably was hardly any difference between the two. Agrarian discontent was however the only common element, besides the fact that both tended to be restorative types of revolt. The circumstances in which the great Indian revolt of 1857 occurred and its consequences are relevant in this context. It is true that ✓ liquidation of the landed aristocracy in Oudh (U. P.) under the principle of British paramountcy was one of the most important and immediate causes of the revolt. But this does not mean that the entire uprising was engineered by the dispossessed landed elite and that the masses played no pan at all. While participation of the peasant masses in the revolt was either at the behest of their caste superiors or due to ethnic or religious loyalties to their chiefs, rajas or the overlords under whom many of them held lands, 39 an examination of original

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.records and sources by Sulekh Gupta has revealed that in those districts where the 1857 uprising was violent, practically all rural classes had been disturbed by the British land revenue policy and v administration. Between 1840 and 1857, the transfer of land frorn cultivators to non-cultivating classes of money-lenders, urban traders and so on had increased considerably. Evictions, the imposition of levies and illegal taxes by corrupt revenue officials had steadily built up tension. 40 The unrest finally culminated in the 1857 revolt. There were clearly other forces that contributed to the revolt and any atte111pt to reduce then1 to agrarian discont~nt alone would be grossly ~- misleading. Once the beginning was made in the for 10 of the soldiers' mutiny in Meerut, it did at least create the impression that British authority was weakening, so that different agrarian interests in the U.P. coalesced and pushed the revolt funher. Without the agrarian disaffection at the grass-roots level, the peasant masses would not ha~e panicipated in the Mutiny on such an extensive scale as they did in Oudh and other pans in nonh India. Unfortunately, the agrarian aspect of the Indian mutiny has been either underplayed or overlooked both by official sources and by those historians who have relied exclusively on then1. Even Marx, in his despatches on the Indian revolt (written for the New York Daily Tribune), did not take sufficient notice of peasant unrest at the grass-roots level. He thought that the only class affected by the British land policy was the feudal aristocracy of Oudh and that it had not touched the actual cultivators, who supponed the landed nobility during the uprising. 41 This is not to deny that there were reactionary elements in the revolt which was led by the feudal and landed aristocracy, but to brand the 1857 revolt as an 'out and out reactionary upheaval', as Barrington Moore does, 42 is to grossly underrnine the role popular agrarian discontent played in 1857. Marx was aware of the feelings of the disaffected peasantry and knew that their suppon for the leading rebels had made it exceedingly difficult for British troops to suppress the mutiny. 43 But he neither took the peasantry's potential for revolutionary upheaval very seriously; nor did he visualize the possibility of a revolution in a non-European settiqg and under conditions of colonialism and imperialist 'exploitation at that stage .._ The fact that the peasantry supported feudal chiefs and landlords against the British in the t 85 7 revolt simply reflected the stage of historical development, the pre-capitalist agrarian relations, and the level of consciousness among the lower strata of peasantry.

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The attitude of Marx toward 'peasantry' in general, and towards the role of the Indian peasantry in the 1857 revolt in panicular, is of special significance for this study of peasant movements because the same attitude was adopted by the first generation of Indian Marxists. It dete11nined their strategies and revolutionary tactics in dealing with the colonial question and national liberation moven1ents in India, an issue which will be examined later in Chapter VI. - After the 1857 revolt had been crushed with considerable difficulty, the British fi1111ly established their authority and restored law and order. However, one of the immediate effects of the revolt was that the Crown took over colonial administration from the East India Company. The Upper stratum of Indian rural society w1¥> had helped in rehabilitating the British raj in the post-Mutiny years, in tum derived rich dividends for their loyalty. The post-revolt period was thus the 'landlord's paradise'. 45 Several factors account for this symbiosis of the 'Pax Britannica', the landlords and money-lenders. Firstly, through a network of new transport and communication 1 facilities the I~dian countryside was linked _wi~ coastal towns and 10 ~ .,, r 1 . ports. The agncultural produce of the deep 1Rtenor was now drawn ~ ~'- "- , ., · ;'. into the world market. Therefore, commercial agriculture production of cash crops, increased steadily. The shift from food crops to commercial crops required ~redit facilities, which were poor and not properly organized in nineteenth-century India. The needy, peasant naturally turned to the money-lender, who exploited him by charging exorbitant interest rates on loans, and thus pocketed the vast economic surplus generated in the oountryside; soon the moneylender besides supplying credit"6 spread his tentacles over a wider realm of agricultural activities and transactions. Peasants unable to repay loans with interest had to surrender their land to their creditors. Sometimes auctioned land was purchased by rich-owners too. The v new legal and judicial institutions that the British had introduced with the intention of distributing justice with equity, helped, ironically, to reinforce the money-lenders' influence. , Another important factor that contributed to the growth of the alliance between the landlords/money-lenders and the British, was the revenue demands which were steadily going up throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. 47 Cash was needed to mett those demands. At times the market price of agricultural produce would fall and funher pressurise peasants into borrowing. Similarly, the wages of agricultural labourers who constituted the lowest stratum

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~- did not rise proportionately with the cost of living. This too contributed to growing indebtedness" and strengthened the position of the money-lenders and landlords in rural India. The growing pauperization of the cultivating classes in the latter half of the nineteenth century. must also be attributed partly to sudden population growth. The demand for cultivable land increased steadily and so did land value. In his study of the money-lending system and its effects on the Punjab peasantry, Darling has shown that an acre worth 10 rupees in the year 1866 was sold at an average price of 238 rupees in the years 1921-6 and that land which was hardly saleable in certain parts of the Punjab in 1860 was pc111aanently irrigated by the 1920's and was sold at the rate of 600 rupees per acre. 49 The situation in other parts of the country was no different. This naturally benefited landlords, land speculators and moneylenders. Rents could now be increased arbitrarily by landlords because no tenant ~ould afford to give up land, and similarly, money-lenders could tig~ten their grip on the credit-seeking peasantry. In the z_amindari areas such as Bengal, rising land values enabled the landed classes to resort to a somewhat different fo1 rn of oppression. Most of then1 also supplied credit to their tenantry; rent-enhance111cnt and rack-renting were of course more profitable devices to exploit the needy peasant. The zamindars had powers to create fresh tenures and sub-tenures, and this subinfeudation had multiplied a number of :-----, : inter 1nediary proprietors between the state and the actual cultivator. ·Such provisions as legal eviction of a tenant had greatly facilitated rack-renting. '

In nine years (1863-68 and 1873-n) there were 72,148 notices for rent enhancen1ent only! The years 1871-75 record an average of 103,016 of rent-suits out of an average total of 195,247. In 1876, a total of 130,593of rent S~ts out of a total of 344,357 of which again l n ,473 were money-suits, were tried by the Civil Couns ... With each recorded case of enhancemeDt by fair means, there were a number of cases where the villagers were coerced into paying enhanced rates. In each year the rents of l ,202,880 ryots have been enhanced by fair means. 50

· The decisions of munsif (lower) courts could easily be influenced by the zamindars, and the raiyats were forced to sign Jeab,,liyats (agreements or contracts) to pay higher rents (sometimes twice as high as the old rent) and also extra taxes and cesses. 51 In those districts of Bengal -where the raiyats produced indigo under European planters, rack-renting, illegal extortion and evictions

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reached a climax in 1859. As a result, the indigo tenants united in resi~tance against their landlords in 1859-62,52 and challenged en masse the orders Qf the Munsifcourts. The higher courts quashed the lower. courts' orders (passed in collusion with the planters and zamindars), and declared rent-enhancements as well as extra taxes to be illegal. 53 However, one of the side-effects of the successful agitation was ·fateful for the actual cultivators: the raiyats were supponed mainly by the rural middle strata of petty landholders, moneylenders, some substantial raiyats and village headmen who were emerging as dominant pressure groups in the countryside .

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. . . they supponed the ryots only for the sake of undermining the economic power of their archrivals, the indigo planteis. Ultimately they snatched the fruits of victory from the peasants, and the indigo disturbances mark(ed) the transfer of power from planter to money-lender in Lower Bengal."'

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Similar distribution in Pabna and Bogra (in Bengal) in 1872-3, only a decade after the indigo disturbances, took a more violent fo11n. The peasants in large numbers seized and destroyed the agreement fo11ns • frabuliyats. 55 The rural middle class of petty landholders, moneylenders and headmen again supponed the raiyats but primarily with the motive of gaining positions ~f dominance. Thus in the zamindari . areas too, the old feudal zamindars and-planters were on the decline, giving way to those classes who controlled land as well as credit. In the decades following the 1857 Mutiny, then, the landowning and money-lending classes gradually rose to power in the rural areas. This was a pan-Indian development irrespective of the system,zamindari., raiyatwari or mahalwari. It had immediate and direct social consequences: the courts, police and petty revenue officials now safeguarded the interests of the usurers-the money-lending and rich landowning classes. The new alliance also worked against the interests of small landowners, raiyats and share-croppers who constituted the poor peasantry. The money-lender's tyranny prevailed throughout the latter halt of nineteenth-century India, and its immediate victims were the small landholders, tenants and undenenants, and share-croppers, whose lands were passing to the money-lenders and rich landowners. Th·e economic lot of the landless agricultural labourer was·stiil worse on account of poor wages and the high cost of living. The peasants did not suffer the oppression quietly, but revolted against it in some, though not all, areas. One of their vehe~ent responses took place

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in 1875 in Bombay Presidency (large parts of which are in Maharashtra today). ✓ The disturbances, known as 'the Deccan riots of 1875', occurred in western Maharashtra. After the British introduced the raiyatwari systein of land tenure here, the old institutions of caste and village communities had little role to play as landholders were made directly and individually responsible to the state for payment of revenue. They now sought credit individually without the protective cover of the community. The vanis, a caste of merchants and money-lenders, · supplied credit in the Deccan villages. The cultivators were mostly ,; kunbis, numerically a dominant caste. Fo11nerly the kunbis controlled village panchayats but, after the new civil and criminal couns were set up, they lost that traditional political power. The increasing revenue demands were also inflexihle and the cultivating classes had to take credit to meet then1. At the village level ~e vanis, being the only source of credit, gained considerable economic power. Attachment of· land or redemption of mongages in case of defaults became common. Between 1835 and 1839 such cases involving raiyats had increased by over 100 per cent. 56 As land value went up, the 'Vanis intensified the usurpation of peasants' lands through civil suits. Between 1851 and 1865 such civil suits had increased out of all proponion. 57 · The vanis took no interest in actual cultivation owing to their social values. Their newly-acquired lands were cultivated by the fot 111er proprietors who now worked as subtenants and the vanis left them only a bare subsistence. 51 The decline of the kunbis who were being systematically disposses~ and the vanis' rise in social status and economic power sharpened the kNnbt-JVani antagonism. Between v j 1836 and 1866 grain prices fell steadily. The American Civil War had i give:11 a spun to the de111and for Indian cotton, cotton prices were rising and several kNnbi cultivators switched over to growing cotton. " ;But this boom was shonlived, and there _was an acute agricultural Idepression in which the farmers' cash incomes and reserves suffered a serious blow. As if this was not enough, the revenue rates were increased after 1860 when an ill-conceived and ill-timed revision of 1 assessment took place. To crown it all, the 1871-2 rains were insufficient 59 f for no1111al crops. Consequently, the burden on the kNnbi culti; vating peasantry in western rural Maharashtra became unbearable. Somewhat corresponding to the 'rich, middle and ·poor peasant' categories of our model, Ravinder Kumar has distinguished three I

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classes of k11nbi peasants/cultivators and has emphasised that the class of poor le11nbis, living on the margin between bare subsistence and starvation, suffered most due to the rising cost of living, lo~ wages, poor crop yields, bad seasons and harvests, the agricultural depression and the increased revenue rates. 'C:Onsequendy, the conflict · with the tJanis had hit the poorer stratum of k11nbi-cultivators harder than it did the well-off k11nbis. 60 Before hostility between the"""" and k11nbis broke out in riots in v 1875, some influential landed families (rich k1mbis) had launched a constitutional agitation to focus on deteriorating agrarian relations in western Maharashtra. In this agitation, the poor le11nbi did follow the lead of the rich and middle k11nbis for some time. But it only showed the limitations on the poor peasantry when it is led in political action by rich peasants with whom they have caste, kinship or ethnic bonds. In the 1875 riots the poor le11nbis acted independently though impulsively, and without proper objectives or organization. Spontaneous rioting broke out and spread over a wide area covering several villages in Poona, Ahmednagar, Satara and Sholapur districts. Bands of ✓ k11nbis burnt houses and fJanis' shops, seized and destroyed agreements, contracts, or other legal documents which the fJanis held. Physical violence was rare and resorted to only when the fJanis refused to surrender the legal documents they u~ for exploiting their le11nbi debtors. 61 The government of course took repressive measures, imposed collective fines on the rebellious villages, arrested about 1,000 peasants and took over three weeks to suppress the riots. 62 One of the direct results of the Deccan riots was the Deccan Agri- v cul ral Relief Act of 1879. The Act required that all documents of c~·eait transaction be su · by village registrars and also by the cou~, if necessary. Although it curbed fraud, the Act did not curtail ·the arbitrary powers of"""" who could still withhold credit. Since the poor k11nbis had no alternative sources to borrow from, 'they had to purchase the tJani's favour at a fearful price. 163 The more affluent among the k11nbis, being less dependent on credit, manag~ to adjust to the growing dominance of the fJanis. But despite the Relief Act the poor peasant in Maharashtra was left compl~~ly unprotected, at the mercy of the money-lender-the new despot. The rich le11nbis subse- / quendy en1erged as a dominant interest-group in Maharashtra politica aher 1875, and continued to be so in the twentieth century. ·Like westetn tra, Punjab also expet ienced serious agrvian

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unrest. Although the Punjab land tenure syster11 was peasant proprietary in spirit, nearly half its cultivated land was cultivated by tenantsat-will who had to pay as much as 50 per cent of their gross produce as rent. These tenants, shar~-croppers, and poor.landholders faced .J enor rnous economic burdens, evidenced by the fact that by 1874 a million acres of land were mortgaged in the Punjab and the figures had gone up to four million acres in 1891. 64 Growing indebtedness among the poor cultivating classes and consequent transfer of lands to money-lenders (land alienation) had considerably worsened ag,·arian relations and the resultant unrest threatened the political stability of British rule. A senior British official who had foreseen the dangers inherent in the deteriorating agrarian class relations in Punjab, warned the government of a possible agrarian outbreak on the pattern of the Santai insurrection (185~7), peasant participation in the Indian revolt of 1857, and the Deccan riots of 1875; he also urged the government to take immediate preventive measures. 65 The advice did not go ,: ; unheeded. The Punjab Alienation of Land Bill of 1900, a prototype \ of th~ Deccan Relief Act, was the outcome of the government's I growing awareness. Those who conceived the Punjab Land Alienation Bill thought that by preventing transfer of land to non-cultivating classes, such as money-lenders, the value of agricultural land could be raised, and that thereby the economic conditions of the cultivators could be I\ alleviated and agrarian relations improved. However, Congress nation, alists in Punjab disputed these claims and opposed the Act on the grounds that it would lead to contraction of credit (money-lenders being still the only source in rural areas) ultimately forcing land 66 . \ values downward. ' • Thr. similarities between the after-effects of the Punjab Bill and those of the Deccan ,Relief Act are striking because the for 1ner also failed to alleviate the conditions of the peasant. The Act neither brought any substantial benefit to the peasant nor did it curtail the economic power of the money-lender who could still contract credit · and keep land values down. Similarly the legal s_afeguards could not prevent land-transfer taking place from cultivators to the noncultivating classes. Professional money-lenders were now replaced by agricultural money-lenders who had substantial land but rented it out for actual cultivation to needy tenants. They now supplied credit as well. These rich landholders were getting richer as they could invest their surpluses in buying more land. 67 Once again then the

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relief legislation left the poor peasantry completely exposed to usury and expropriation in the Punjab as it had done in western Maharashtra. The agrarian distress of the peasantry and the discomfon of the urban non-cultivating classes. of credit suppliers, whom the Land Alienation Act had precluded from buying cultivators' lands, were then two interrelated grievances but seized separately by ~ifferent groups of Punjabi politicians. Their atten1pts to stir up agitation were v being suppressed by the government when fierce rioting broke out in 1907 in several districts of Punjab.~ The pattern of outbreak was generally the same as in the Deccan riots but with the added flavour of a nationalist agitation, under the leadership of the urban middle J classes. The partition of Bengal had radicalized the national move-/ men~ in Punjab where militant organizations like the Arya Samaj ~ · were already active. The Punjab riots were neither a purely agrarian nor purely nationalist political agitation, but a weak combination of both, and hence failed to bring about any change in agrarian relations. The causes of this failure were in fact built in into the class character of nationalist politics in India, and_in the low priority the nationalist movement gave to economic programmes in general and to the problems of the poor peasantry in particular.

The Indian National Movement and Agrarian Problems: 1885-1920 The growth of political consciousness, and of the nationalist movement in India was certainly a post-1857 development, although the early nineteenth-century renaissance of the Bhakti, and Brahma Samaj movements had laid the foundation of a nascent Indian national.ism. Their leaders like Raja Rammohan Roy faced the dilemma of how best to eradicate the evils in the Indian society, to adopt the best of Westem civilization, without necessarily sacrificing India's national and cultural identity. The Brahmo Samaj set up by Roy in 1828 was the manifestation of these complex urges. In 1838 Dwarakanath Tagore established the Landholders' Society, primarily to assen and preserve the class interests of the zamindars. The Bengal British India Society, founded in 1842 with an upper middle-class membership, however, sympathised with the condition of the raiyats. These two bodies representing class interests were supplanted later in 1851 by the British-India Association, strong proof that political aspirations were dorrnant in the early period of new political awareness. 69 A

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plethora of semi-religious and political organizations in diHerent regions in India in the mid-nineteenth century and thereafter, was another symptom of embryonic nation~ism and growing political consciousness. Thus a Mahajana Sabha en1erged in Madras, San.oajanik Sa~ha in Poona, Ahmedabad Association (later the Gujarat Sabha) in Gujarat and so on. The social origins of these regional organizations were in the upper castes, urban middle and professional classes. The ftrSt all-India political body-the Indian National Congress"-"""was established only in 1885. It represented a curious blend of a vague nationalis111 and the semi-political organizations mentioned above, the hopes and fears of diverse interest-groups and bureaucratic initiative. Such were the undercurrents of the first Indian national movement. The spread of western education in India and also of the ideas of libeny, equality and fraternity, had greatly contributed to its growth. 70 Some Indian Marxists have emphatically stated that the National Congress was brought into being by the British Government as pan of a deliberate policy to ensure that the rising popular unrest and agrarian discontent did not go out of 11 hand. The ~laim has a basis of fact in that British rulers were definitely haunted by the fear of agrarian uprisings after the 1857 revolt, the indigo disturbances (1859 62), the Deccan riots of 1875, and so on. The agitated peasant, poverty-stricken, indebted and dispossessed, caused them serious anxiety. The binh of the Congress helped the British to divert the tides of popular discontent into a manageable constitutional and peaceful struggle for political conces:sions and power in self-governing institutions. J The Congress was basically an elitist organization. Its leading men drew their inspiration from mode, 11 democratic idealism and Gladstonian liberalism. It was also a federation affiliating diverse interest·groups that had very little in common except a vague patriotic urge for independence. The strength of the Congress as a national movement hinged largely on its ability to contain and reconcile often conflicting objectives within a broad consensus of opinion. At the level of political activity the Congress went no fanher than demand- · ing cenain concessions from the government ~t would satisfy the dominant sections. The decisive comment of a London daily-that Congressmen were 'nien of straw who were only place seekers', was not an exaggeration. 72 Like a 'political spons club' the Congress went into the competition for positions of power and to win concessions

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while the British umpires did everything possible to keep the rewards unevenly distributed and the groups divided. 73 ) An 'important characteristic of early It,dian politics was that although v . the contending power groups were modern in their material and ~ political aspirations they were highly tradition.al in their methods of political mobilization. Caste, kinship, and religious ties were ~ot only preserved but even preferred as power-bases. So long as group interests were fulfilled through compromise and conciliation, there was neither urgency nor the will to search for a more fundamental policy or programme of political and economic transfo11nation. Annual sessions of the Congress came and passed. High-sounding resolutions were moved without much concern for implementation. At any rate, most of these resolutions voiced the aspirations of the rising urban middle classes or of the national bourgeoisie, leaving the masses untouched. 74 In short, internal pressures and constraints in the early years rendered the Congress very weak both ideologically and organizationally. This weakness lingered throughout its infancy, adolescence and youth; from 1885 to 1920 or so. It also explains why the forces favouring co-operation with British imperialism and eschewing mass uprisings, agitations and movements grew gradually within the Congress. Occasionally the Congress took note of key issues and problems that affected millions of the masses; land revenue assessment and the increasing burden of taxation on poor peasants was one of then1. In 1888 a Congress resolution ·drew attention to the hardships of the raiyats caused by the periodical revision of revenue assess111ents and in 1892, in another resolution, a plea was made for fixing the government's revenue de111ands. 75 Indian famines and the widespread poverty v in rural areas kept the Congress interest in the key agrarian issues . alive. Dadabhai Naoroji, Romesh Chandra Dutt, C. Sankaran Nair, R. M. Sayani, Dinshaw E. Wachaandseveralotherfoundingmembers of the Congress sessions echoed the agrarian unrest in their presidential addresses. Some put the blame squarely on the British land revenue policy and administration for the peasants' poverty and indebtedness. Others made repeated pleas from Congress platfo11ns for assessn1ents to be ftx:ed in perpetuity, for a COf1lpassionate land revenue policy, and for relief measures. 76 In 18~7 one of the worst famines occurred in Mahar~htra (then Bombay Presidency). There was considerable unrest among-cultivators and peasants as .they were not given any revenue remission. Tilak, one of the leading figures among militant

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nationalists in the Congress, advised cultivators to refuse to pay lan4 taxes. Unfortunately the deep political implications ofTilak s campaign were not grasped by other leaders at that stag~; thus an opponunity to bring the peasant masses within the fold of the national movement and to make the Congress broad-based was c~mpletely lost. 77 Nevertheless,. the ritual of passing resolutions at Congress sessions and demand.ing a substantial reduction in revenue or its fixed assessment, was not abandoned till 1915 or so. 71 Another important agrarian issue was land alienation and the growing transfer of land from the actual cultivator into the hands of the non-cultivating classes, which has been discussed before. But on this q~estion the Congress failed to take a stand, as the Punjab Alienation of Land Act of 1900 proved. Since the Act had prevented transfer of land to the non-cultivating classes, urban money·-lenders were unhappy about it. Representatives of urban interests in the Pun jab Congress denied that land alienation was causing unrest, and opposed the Act on the grounds that the limitation it placed on land transfer would not only destroy the land market but also contract credit,. 79 But. the spokesmen of poor cultivators in Punjab fully supported the Bill. The controversies arising out of the land alienation issue had also brought to the surface the communal aspect of the problem because, in large parts of Punjab, the cultivators whom the Bill intended to protect were mostly Muslim while most of the urban traders and money-lenders were Hindu. When the Muslim elite came: out strongly supporting the Bill, the Congress' image suffered badly as a 'pro-Hindu' national movement.'° The Punjab land alienation issue then was yet another pointer that the Congress was not only ridden by internal conflicts but was also divorced from the masses and their aspirations. The ambivalence of Congress in the early years to the basic socioeconomic issues affecting the masses, and ics inaction on the agrarian front can be explained in two different ways. First, the elite leadership of the rndian national moven1ent was concerned with the problems of economic development of the country as a whole rather than the economic bette1111ent of isolated segments. With the genuine conviction that British colonial rule was draining India of her rich resources and was mainly responsible for the country's poverty and backwardness, the leaders had to give priority to ending that exploitation rather than to taking up 'class demands'; the latter. would have weakened the natiQnal movement. The political necessity of national 1

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liberation was more expedient than class war. Secondly, it has also been argued that the worst sufferers of the British tariff and protectionist trade policy were the Indian national bourgeoisie. Since the landed classes-zamindars, landlords, talukdars, and so on were allied with the British, the Indian bourgeoisie collaborated with the professional classes, intelligentsia and urban middle classes, all of whom were predominant in the Indian National Congress between 1885 and 1920. Since it was these classes which deter 111ined the · J economic outlook of the Indian national movement, the neglect of agrarian issues and problems was inherent in the class character of Indian politics. 81 Both these explanations, although logically sot1nd, tend to distort the reality if used in isolation. In fact the two are complementary frames of reference. The vague economic nationalism of the early Congress and its social origins only helped to prorr1ote the domination of the Ind,ian bourgeoisie in the nationalist movement. Links between the urban commercial, trading, and induitrial f. capitalists (Indian bourgeoisie), and the peasant~' were established for the first time in India after Gandhi arrived on the scene in 1915. The main emphasis of the Gandhian programme was on the sociocultural revival and regeneration of the village community, its solidaricy and self-sufficiency. His idealistic aim of a 'return to the past', and the new slogan for purging the age-old social evils in Indian society, sucl!i as 'untouchability', drew the rural masses to the Indian national movement. Some young intellectuals as well as the liberal p·r ofessional classes were also attracted to the new Gandhi an 'moral politics'. In the context of the present discussion, however, only two, somewhat paradoxical, aspects of Gandhi's contribution need to be stressed. First, _it was only Gandhi who first saw the problem of v Indian nationalism and social reconstruction in a non-elitist perspective, and realized th_a t no anti-Imperialist stru~gle could possibly succeed in India without the involvement of millions of village folk and peasants whom the Congress had hitherto ignored. He therefore devised a programme for politically mobilising the rural masses and for drawing them nearer the elitist Indian _nationalist movement. Secondly, at the same time,· Gandhi avoided committing himself to "' any categorical and concrete objectives of economic and social reconstruction. This avoidance of economic radicalism was partly on account of the fact that he feared it would antagonise or har 1n the

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wealthy classes-such as the industrialists, mill-owners, landed zamindars and so on, and would divide the national movement; and panly because any radicalism would have been tantamount to violation of his political ethic of 'non-violent struggle'. The Gandhian political idiom of 'village uplift', swaraj (freedom), swadeshi (selfreliance through the spinning wheel etc.), and satyagraha-nonviolent political struggle, etc., undoubtedly endeared the Indian rural masses.-the peasants and village artisans-but the substance of his economic programme was far from what the masses really needed. Although therefore, the charismatic Gandhi aroused the rural masses, he did little or nothing substantial to bring about changes in land relations which alone could have alleviated the conditions of the peasant masses who followed him. We shall go into the relationship between Gandhi and agrarian movements in greater detail in Chapters IV and V. The alliance between the peasantry and the Indian bourgeoisie that Gandhi established was inherently weak, and likely to be ruptured in · a violent fo11n ,vhenever the rural masses were disillusioned. Such outbreaks were in fact rare for two reasons: first, the presence of the British rulers and the continued colonial exploitation of the Indian economy enabled the ruling classes, who dominated the Congress and the Indian national movement, to deflect the hostility of the peasantry and the working classes to an external target (viz. the British rule); secondly, traditional social institutions such as caste, religion, etc., created a major obstacle in the e111ergence of new 1 classes and class consciousness. This was doubly true for the rural areas where tradition and custom have always been strong. But · where traditional caste or religious identities were juxtaposed with. class interests in land, conflicts occurred in severely violent form. Such violent resistance was witnessed in Malabar where the Muslim peasantry (the Moplahs) revolted against their landlords-mostly upper caste Hindus. The historical background of the Malabar uprising in 1921, the agrarian social structure, the political circumstances in which the revolt occurred, and the role different social cWSCS played in the Moplah uprising have been examined in Chapter III. What section of the Indian peasantry has been more rebellious? A straightforward answer to this question is difficult to .o ffer because of the nature of the evidence which is cursory and often haphazard. All the same, the available sources and accounts seem to indicate that small landholders, tenantry with inferior (insecure) rights in land, share-

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croppers and landless labourers, who constituted an overwhelming majority in the agricultural population, were the main, if not the only, force behind such rebellions and uprisings. What manifested their pote~tial for revolutionary violence was cenainly not a 'class consciousness, in the Marxist sense of the te,111. Their ethnic and primordial consciousness was often enmeshed with a quasi-nationalist consciousness. But their capacity to resist oppression, undo injustice and their urge to change the syste,11 had a deep historical meaning that was lost sight of in the early stages of Indian politics (1885-1920).

REFERENCES 1. At present a large number of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds are working on the nature of agrarian social structure and change in contemporary India. 2. W. H. Moreland, Agrarian System ofMoslem Jndui, Delhi, 1968, p. xi. 3. See Marx's despatch 'The British rule in India', New York Daily Tril,,,n~, hereafter NYDT, 25 June, 1853, in S. Avineri (ed.), /Gn-1 Marx on Colonialism ad Modnniuation, New York, 1969, p. 90. 4. For a detailed account of the hierarchy of revenue officials in the Mughal period see B.R. Grover, •~ature of land-rights in Mughal India', Tht Indian Economic .,,J Social History Rn1w, I, 1 Quly-Septe11abcr, 1963), pp. 1-15; also W.H. Moreland, Agr•rian S:,ste1:J of Moslnn lndi., pp. 92-110 and I. Habib, Tbt Agrarian System ofM11gh.L lndui, 1963. S. T. Raychaudhuri, for example, a,aphasises this po~nt in his very searching review of Professor Habib's book; see Enqlliry, No.2 (Spring 1965), p. l 02. 6. Some even argue that the right of private property in land existed in the Mughal period and a peasant could alimaie his land by sale, transfer or mortgage; stt Habib, Agrarian S:,sttm of MNghal lndill, pp. 12l-5; also Grover, NatNrt of und-rights in M11gh.L Indw, p. 15. 7. See J. Sarkar, History of ANrangzib, V, Tht Closing Ytars, London, 1924, pp. 1-19. 8. For details see, Th~ Cimbridgt History of lndill, IV, Tht MNghJ Pmod, pp. 243-4, 305 603 and 335 44. 9. Habib, Agr.,.;.,, Syst~m ofMNgh.L Jndill, p.117. 10. Moreland, Agrarian S;stt~ of Moslnn Jndi., pp. xi-xii; and W. H. Moreland, lndi. .t tht Dellth ofAltb•r, Delhi, 1962, pp. 94 6 . ., 11. L. Dumont, Homo Hinarchiou-TIH Gastt Systtm .md its lmpliations, London, 1970, pp. 133-SO. 12. Marx's thesis of 'communal ownership of land in India' is well-known; stt Q,pitdl-A Critiqiu ofPolitici,l Economy, (I, 14, Section 4), London, 1970, pp 357-9.

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Habib, Agrarian System of M11gh.J ln'dw, pp. 123--4; also sec Habib's critical essay: 'An examination of Wittfogel's theory of ''Oriental Despotism'' ', Enq11iry, No.6, pp. 54-73. 14. This has been rather overe111phasised by Barrington Moore, Jr., SocuJ Origins of Dict4torship and Democracy, pp. 330-2. 15. W. C. Smith, 'Lower-class uprisings in the Mughal Empire', Isl.mic C11l~11re, XX, 1 Qanuary 1946), pp. 21-fO. For an excellent case study of such p~~ant wars in medieval Europe, see F. Engels, Peasant War in Germany, London,

13.

1969.

Smith, 'Uprisings in the Mughal en1pire', see pp. 29 and 33. Habib, Agrarian System of M11ghal India, pp. 120-1. See S. R. Sha, 111a, 'Organization of public services in Mughal India', journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, XXIII (1937) 2, p. 16. 19. Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, pp. 119-20. 20. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar, pp. 100-2. 21. For details see Marx, 'The British rule in India'; 'The East India Company-Its history and results', NYDT 11 July, 1853; and the 'The Government of India NYDT, 20 July, 1853, in Avineri, Marx on Colonialism, pp. 88-95, 99-108 and 16. 17. 18.

1

115-22.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

See B. H. Baden-Powell, A Short Acco11nt of the I.And Rroen11e and its Administration in British India, Oxford, 1913, pp. 12+-5. For this view see -V . Anstey, The Economic Droelopment of India, London, 1957, p. 98. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Deniocracy, pp. JS. and 431. Many Indian Marxists subscribe to this view. For instance see Bhowani Sen, Evol11tion of Agrarian Rel.tions in India, New Delhi, 1962, p. 63. Bernard S. Cohn, 'Initial British impact on India' ,Jo11rnal ofAsian Studies, XIV, 4 (August 1960), pp. 42+-31. See for example Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar, pp. 119-21, and Agrarian System of Moslem India, pp. 168-72, 20◄ 8; Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 346; also W. C. Neale, 'Land is to rule', in R.E. Frykenberg (ed.), I.And Control and Social. Structure in Indian History, Wisco~sin, 1969, p. 14. Thomer says 'it was a kachcha kind of ownership that the British created'; see his Agrarian Prospect in India, p. 7. This expression has been taken from Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, pp. 346-7. For details see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford, 1959, pp. 81-139. Baden-Powell, Land Revenue in British India, p. 126. For the increase in land revenue demands in the raiyatwari areas in the 19th century, see R. C. Dutt, The Economic History ofIndia, II, In the Victorian Age: 1837-1900, Delhi, 1963, pp. 230-3 and 372-6. See Dha11r1a Kumar, land and Caste in South India, Cambridge, 1965, pp. 21-33 .

•

34.

Baden-Powell, I.And Revenue in British India, pp. 171-90; also B. H. BadenPowell, The Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India, London, 1899 (Reprinted by the Johnson Corporation, 1970), pp. 59-80.

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37.

38. •

.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

51

Baden-Powell, Land Systems ofBritish India, II, pp. 618-20. See S. B. Chaudhuri, Civil Disturbances During British Rule in India 1765-1857, Calcutta, 1955, pp. 58-65. Chaudhuri has discussed several agrarian uprisings and disturbances that occurred _in that period. The fakir and sanyasi rebellion in Bengal in 1783 has been described by Sen as a peasant revolt. See Sen, Evolution ofAgrarian Relations in India, pp. 61-2. · This conclusion is suggested by two pioneering studies ort tribal insurrections by J.C. Jha: The Kol Insurrection ofChota Nagpur, Calcutta, 1964, particularly see pp. 240-2; and The Bhumij Revolt (1832-33), Delhi, 1967, pp. 106 43. K. K. Datta, The Santai Insurrection of 1855-57. Calcutta, 1940, pp. 1-37 and 69-71; also L. Natarajan, Peasant Uprisings in India (1850-1900), Bombay, 1953, p. 17-31 . Eric Stokes, for example, has emphasised the elitist character of the 1857 revolt. See his 'Traditional elite in the Great Rebellion of 1857: some aspects of rural revolt in the upper and central doab', in E. Leach and S. N. Mukherjee (eds.), Elites in South Asia, Cambridge, 1970, pp. 16-32. S. C. Gupta, 'Agrarian background and the 1857 rebellion in the North-Western Provinces', Enquiry (Bombay), No. 1 (February 1959), pp. 69-95. See Karl Marx, 'Land tenure in India', NYDT, 7 June 1858, inAvineri (ed.) Marx on Colonialism, p. 315. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 352. Marx, 'The Indian insurrection', NYDT, 29 August 1857: in Avineri (ed.) Marx on Colonialism, p. 214. For details see 'Marxist view of the non-European world prior to the October Revolution', in D'Encausse and Schram (eds.) Marxism and Asia, pp. 7-16. See T. R. Metcalf, 'Struggle over land tenure in India 1860-1868', Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XXI, 3 (May 1962), pp. 295-308; and 'The influence of the Mutiny of 1857 on land policy in India', The Historical Journal, Vol. IV, 2 (1961), pp. 152~3; also by him, The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857-1870, 1-'rinceton, 1965, Chapter IV, pp. 134-73; also see Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship anJ Democracy, p. 353. Thomer and Thomer, Land and Labour in India, pp. 54-5. Even in the areas where revenue assessments were either stationary or reduced, peasants were unable to pay. ror the burden of land taxes, etc., see Dutt, Economic History of India, Vol. II, pp. 230-8 and 351-2. A. Loveday, The History and Economics of Indian Famines, London, 1914, pp. 113-14. M. L. Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, l.ondon, 1947, p. 208.

Abbay C. Das, The Indian Ryot, Land Tax, Permanent Settlement and the Famine,, Howrah, 1881, p. 284. 51. See The Administrative Report of Bengal for 1872-73, pp. 146-9. 52. A first-hand account of the indigo problem and the resultant disturbances is available in the authentic though slightly emotive despatches of Sisir K. Ghose (the founder Editor of the Amrit Bazar Patrika) written between April anc December 1860; see J. C. Bagal (ed.) Peasant Revolution in Bengal, Calcutta, 19!;3. 53. For details see B. B. Kling, The Blue Mutiny-The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal: 1859-1862, Philadelphia, 1966 . 50.

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52 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

Ibid, p. 222; also see Kling's excellent chapter on 'The Conspirators' which gives details of the raiyats' political alliance~ during the indigo struggle, pp. 84-102. The Cambridge History of India, IV, 38, p. 249. For an excellent historical analysis of the Deccan riots, see R. Kumar, Western lndw in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1968, pp. 151-188. Neil Charlesworth has, however, argued that the 'Deccan rios' are a myth created by some historians and that actually the increased land litigation in western Maharashtra was the result of the Limitation Act of 1859 which restricted the validity of bonds and suits for money and debts t Madras, 1906, esp. Ch. 7, 'Slavery•, pp. 441-63. S. See 1..ogan, M""""1, pp. 347-403; also Krishna Ayyar, Z."Wfim of u.lialt, pp.

138-237.

6. L.B. Bowring, H•idM Ali Mid Tip11 S11/un, Mid tht Stn1ggk with tht M11Slllm.n Powns oftht So11th, R•k•s ofIndi.. series, Oxford, 1893, p. 44. 7. Logan, M""""/, p. 419. 8. See Krishna Ayyar, Z.mo,"im of c.Jic,.t, p. 245; M.T. Houtsma et al. (eds.) Tht

EncydopMdi. ofIs!.m, 4 vols., Leiden and London, 1908-36, iii, p. 261. 9. M""rdS District Gamttn: M•IAb•radAnjn,go, 2 vols., Madras, 190S-33, i. p. 75.

10. Logan, M.,,,..J, pp. 483-1; Buchanan,]0117719 from M.drdS, ii, pp. 189-91. The

te1111 'banditry' is used here in the sense used by E.J. Hobsbawm in his &uulits, London, 1969, pp. lJ-23. • 11. C.D. Maclean, Swuling InfOJ'mlltion Reg•rding the 0/ficW Administrlltion·of tht M""rdS Pnsidmcy, Madras, 1877, p. 88. · 12. The current te1111 for mortgagee tenant in Malabar is lt•NMnd.r. The word has been in use for many decades ..an~ appears traditionally to have been lun.ltlun (singular, Jt.n.lt/ur.,, ). · 13. See B.H. Baden-Powell, The und-Systems of British lndill, 3 vols., Oxford, 1892, Vol. Ill, p. 159; Logan, MllmlM, pp. 607-8. 14. Maclean, Adminittration ofthe MadrdS Prnitkncy, pp. 88-9; sec: also A.C. Mayer, Lmd .wl S ~ in J!•IAb•r, Oxford, 1952, pp. 80-1. , 15. Buchanan,Joa,nu')'from MtUlrdS, Vol. I, p. 450, and Vol. II, p. 65; Baden-Powell, Luul-Systt,ns ofBritish lndill, Vol. III, pp. ln-3. . 16. D. Forrest, Tiger of Myson; The Life tUJd Dt.th of Tip11 Sa,/un, London, 1970, pp. 21}-14. 17. Rq,ons of·• Joint Commission from Be,,g.J Mid Bomb., Appoinud to Inspect into tht State and Condition oftht Ptooina ofM•IAb•r in the YtMS 1792 u,J • ""'93 .... , 3 vols., Bombay, 1793, Vol. II, pp. 68-9, 17)-90. 18. Logan, .v.n""1, pp. 539~0, 618; cf. Buchana."1,] carried on since 1921 had brought very littl~ or no change to the social conditions of the Kaliparaj community in general and to the Dublas in particula1·. Complaints made by the untouchables against Patidars, who use:! to beat md force them to remove carcases, were heard freqt:.ently and Gandhi often described th~ Pat:dar oppression :lS 'Swadeshi Dyerisrra'. 9 In the mid- t 920's, therefore, Gandhi considered Bardoli

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unfit to launch any civil disobedience movement because, he thought, the lower peasantry was still isolated socially. The 'constructive programme' needed implementation with a far greater degree of commionent and sincerity than in Gandhi's views, Congressmen had till then. 10 Interestingly enough, although dissatisfied, Gandhi did not attack the economic basis of the hali system nor did he disapprove of the then prevailing serf-master relationship. He simply expected his Patidar followers to be more compassionate towards Dublas and liberalize their conditions of work because Gandhi believed that such compassion would bring more prosperity to Patidar landowners. 11 His silence, whether calculated or otherwise, on the Dubla bondage per se is very significant, for it reflected the limits to which Gandhi was prepared to go in changing the agrarian social structure by involving peasants in political movements. He ga;e priority to covering up class contradictions rather than resolving then1. Although this strategy of class collaboration succeeded, as it did to a considerable extent in the Bardoli ta/uk·-which was the scene of the 1928 movement. The total population of this taluk was about 87,000 around 1927. Nearly The Gandhian attempt to unite agrarian classes through the 'constructive programme' during 1921-7 was spectacularly successful in the Bardoli taluka•- which was the scene of the 1928 movement. The total population of this taluka was about 87,000 around 192 7. Nearly half that number came from the scheduled tribes, while Patidarsincluding all their subcastes-fo11ned a fourth of the total population. The rest comprised other castes who were numerically not very significant. . A number of Patidars had been Gandhi's satyagrahis in South Africa, 12 and with all the experience they had of the use of passive resistance for political purposes, they were a great ·asset both to Gandhi and to Kunvarji Mehta-the moving spirit behind the Patidar Manda!. • A seemingly secular-politic~ programme of 'constructive work' was so implemented as not to disturb the tradi.tional caste structure and the dominant position Patidars enjoyed in it. On the contrary it reinforced the gemeinschaft solidarity of castes in Gujarat districts. The time to test that solidarity came when, after a periodic land reassessment in the Bardoli taluk in 1925, the government decided to increase land revenue. The Patidar land-owners were dete11nined to resist the enhancen1ent. In raiyatwari {peasant proprietry) areas, such revisions of revenue-rates were not new, and in most cases were

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made unilaterally by the district- and vilJage-level revenue bureaucracy. Not infrequently assessments and revisions were based on unreliable reports and statistics. The settlen1ent officials in charge of reassessment work used notoriously arbitrary methods and revised rates often without actually visiting and surveying fields. 13 Any arbitrary enhancen1ent in revenue affected the interests of Patid:tr landowners directly as it curtailed their profits. Anticipating such arbitrary reassessments in Bardoli around 192~ 6, Patidar landowners had already started mobilizing opinion against them. They expressed their fears first at the Gujarat Political Conference held in Godhra in November1917, some eight years before the actual resurveying of lands was due to begin. In a resolution the Conference demanded that the Government consult an advisory body of elected men1bers in revenue matters instead of relying exclusively on the Collector and his revenue administration. 1" A similar demand was echoed in the evidences before the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs in 1919 and the Committee in tum had recommended legislative and constitutional controls over the question of land revenue assessment and revision, which till then was the monopoly of the revenue bureaucracy. 15 Various Legislative Councils, particularly that in Bombay, had passed resolutions, but the government paid no heed. In the Bardoli taluk, revenue demand had gone up steadily over the years and was raised by another 30 per cent after the resettlement in 1925 .. Naturally Patidar landowners wanted to get the enhanrement waived as the rising cost of cultivation did not justify it, 16 and were prepared for a trial of strength with the lo~al administration on that issue if necessary. One of the chief reasons for the Government to raise the revenue was that the rental value of land in the Bardoli area had gone up considerably during the period between two assessments. According to official estimates nearly half the total area held by landowners in Bardoli was not cultivated by the111selves but was leased out to others {tenants) on rent. The demand for land was so high that the rental charged by land-owners fast outstripped the amount of revenue they paid to the government. 17 Further details of the claims and counterclaims of the Patidar landowner and the government are not relevant here. Although the revenue revisions were quite indefensible in the manner they were made, the government had certainly spotted a newly developing class of rentiers among those who in the records, were owner-cultivators (raiyats) in the Surat district. Perhaps the government wanted to check this trend of absentee landlordism by

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slicing away a larger sl1are of their rental profits:-an intention that was undoubtedly sound although the methods e111ployed in its execution were both crude and wrong. The peasant proprietors of Bardoli, already politicized and organized, did not miss the opportunity of exposing the government. The Bardoli satyagraha of 1928 a 'notax' campaign was geared to this purpose. Although increased revenue rates did affect the Patidctr landowners, their situation could hardly be described as one of economic distress. In fact, between 1896 and 1926 (the thirty-year interval between two assessmen~s), the govern- · ment had never had to resort to coercive action for revenue r~overy in this part of Gujarat 18 and this spoke of the level of general.prosperity among peasant proprietors. Therefore, notwithstanding the fact that the grievance that sparked off the agrarian movement in Bardot was basically economic, its political overtones must not be lost sight of. What particularly angered the Patidar elite was the fact that their dominance, so visible in the local social hierarchy, was not acknowledged by tl1e government. The actual enl1ancement ordered by the governmf'nt was 22 per cent over the previou~ rates. Initially the Bardoli peasaitts wer.e rather liberally disposed to the government's decision. In a largely-attended conference in Septen1ber 1927 at Bardoli, the Patidar landowners liad decided to withhold pa)rment cf only the enhanced rates and expressed their willingness to pay revenues at the old rates. 19 But later, as they sought counsel from Gandhi anq Vallabhbhai Pa:el, their attitude became mc,re radical. They now resol,..ed to w;thhold revenue dues altogether until either the enhancement already ordered was suspended, or a fresh inquiry ai1d revisions were conducted. The Bardoli leaders sent petitions md representations, b1Jt the government promptly turned them down. In this process the disp11te b~came a prestige issue both for the government a.id for the Patidars and their leaders.

The Bardoli Saty~graha When peasa.1ts agitate or participate in .mti-imperialist political movements t!'adltionai values f:nd the ful~est possible expression. In the Bardoli satyagraha of ! 928 this was all tht" more evident since its lea,Jership had cot 011ly recognized traditio11al caste associatio11s (of upper castes arid also t'he )ower cnes) but also had called upon them to support the moven1ent. Even the support of Mus!ims and Parsis was enlisted b,.· the Ba!"doli n1oven1ent orgmizer~. All-Jndia leaders of Original from

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these minority groups such as Dr Ansari, Maulan2 Shaukat Ali, Nariman and Barucha visited the Bardoli area to appeal to their communities to join the campaign and stand firmly behind the Patidar leadership. 20 . Despite the timorous suppon given, the Bardoli campaign achieved a reasonable degree of cohesion among quite disparate elements in rural society. For obvious reasons the Patidars did the bulk of organizational work, named their students' ashrams (hostels) into campaign cenr~es and harnessed the entire network of Kh~di ~1a!1dals (Sp;nners' Associatior•) into the 'no-tax' agitation. Thus, the groundwork do!)e for the 'constructive progranur,e' paid rich dividends to the Patidars. Their local leaders were very active interpreting the Gandhian ethic of 'non-violence' as it suited the111. At times, some of then1 even coerced local patels and talatis (village-level rev·enue officials) to resign from their joLs and paralyse the local administration. :i A publicity depat u11ent was set up to organize a quick circulation of instructions and the latest developments to all satyagrahis. Ov~r 10,000 copies of bulletins and pamphlets were distributed daily to peasants all over the taluka and about 4,000 copies were circulated outside. 22 This signifies the monumental scale not only of the publicity arrangen1ents but also of the finances available for the campaign. In fact, the Bardoli satyagraha~a 'no-tax' agitation against the government, sought redress for the grievances of rich and middle peasants who were either Patidars or non-agriculturist land-owners like Vanias (money·-lenders) in Surat district. However, Kunvarji Mehta and workers of the Patidar Yuvak Mandal struck ai, alliane;e ~rith the poor peasantry made up mostly of the Adivasis---(the tribals)untouchables, and other backward classes in Bardoli .. The poor agricultural labourers and share-croppers, who somehow survived under the economic oppression of the rich, well-to-do pea~ants, though politically docil~ were stirred up by the new urban and elitist· political culture conveyed tQ then1 in a moral and religious idiom. The suppon of the poor peasantry was indispensable for the campaign. A large number of landholders in Bardoli, roughly t 7,000; never cultivated the land then1selves but subleclSed it to tenants, or hired labour for cultivation under their personal management. Since land was in great demand, no share-cropper or actual cultivator would have foregone his livelihood from the land. Hence there was every possibility that these sharecroppers-tenants would pay the

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revenue dues in order to sav.e their land from attachment and forfeiture. This siruation could be avoided only by soliciting the poor peasantry's support, which the organizers of the campaign secured by invoking traditional caste ties and caste solidarity, as well as by the 'constructive. programme' that had to a large extent softened the edge of economic relationships in the agrarian structure of Bardoli. . There were three different levels of leadership operating in the Bardoli moven1ent, viz. the national, regional and the local. Gandhi, an acclaimed national leader after the first non-cooperation and civil disobedience movement, was not directly involved in the campaign although he was the moving spirit behind it, and provided moral strength to the peasant proprietors. He wrote articles in Young India and Navajivan, 13 his chief organs of publicity, in suppon of the Bardoli satyagraha, and spared no efforts in building the image of the Bardoli leaders and boosting the agitators' morale. He was also constantly available for advice whenever the Bardoli peasants or their leaders needed it. Vallabhbhai Patel and several other politicians associated with the Gujarat Sabha and the Gujarat Congress, represented the regional cadre. Patel, in particular, played a leading role in. organizing the Bardoli satyagraha. Aher giving up his legal practice during the non-cooperation movetnent, he had devoted himself to Gandhi's 'constructive programme' and had thus established his name in politics in Gujarat. When he led the Bardoli agita~on Patel was President of the Ahmedabad Municipal Committee and also of the Gujarat Congress Committee. He knew the Charotar area of Gujarat where Patidar landowners were the dominant class. He was also actively associated with the Kheda agitation of 1918. Given the area, the people and the political climate, Patel was the best available regional or link leader between the fer rnenting local social scene and national politics. Kunvarji Mehta· and other workers of the Patidar Mandal for 1ned a cadre of local leaders at the grass roots level who operated only with Gandhi's and Patel's acquiescence. Leaders of all three tiers acted with a sense of unity throughout the Bardoli campaign. They unifo1111ly perceived the objectives of the agitation to be primarily local, although they were aware that a successfullyorganized local agrarian campaign could unde11nine government authority, paralyse local administration, and by discrediting the government could secure tactical advantages for the national freedom struggle. 24

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The Bombay Government and its revenue administration in the \,,-Gujarat divisio~, however, failed completely to realize the farreaching political consequences of the Bardoli agrarian moven1ent, took the local grievances over revenue assessment at their face value, \ and reacted sharply with naive and stereotyped repressive methods. \ Government served notice on defaulters, asking them to pay up the ·• dues and threatening attachment of property for revenue recovery. As expected, instead of curbing the moven1ent, the repressive measures strengthened it. Some influential Vanias (money-lenders and landowners) who had joined the satyagraha after a great deal of hesitation were the weakest elements among the Bardoli satyagrahis. Therefore the government picked on the111 to serve notice on first. Some of these vulnerable landowners even paid up the dues in a few villages" but such retreat or surrender was the exception rather than the rule; on the whole peasant proprietors, small or big, stood fir n1ly by their pledges. The Dubla slaves and other labourers and sharecroppers, either belonging to untouchable castes or to tribal groups, also retnained loyal to the rich landowning castes they worked for. Through the Gandhian constructive activities, the Patidars had won then1 over to such an extent that when Japti (confiscation) officers came to implement attachment and confiscation orders, the Dublas 26 and other sections of the poor peasantry refused to help them. In a sense, class collaboration, atten1pted through reasserting traditional values and caste organizations, showed at its best in the Bardoli agitation. V allabhbhai Patel was aware of the fact that without such collaboration no anti-imperialist struggle could succeed. From the beginning of the agitation, therefore, Patel tried to unite various c~tes and agrarian classes in Bardoli by calling all peasants khedut-a terrn symbolising the identity of anyone connected with the cultivation of land, whether absentee owner, tenant-sharecropper, or even landless and bond-labourer. For Patel, 'the moneylender was merged in the tenant like water in milk ' 27 and their relations were nonantagonistic. The notion of a vertical solidarity of the peasant community suited his purpose best. The Government of Bombay continued its repressive measures such as attachment of land, and crops, and confiscation of cattle and other movable property. But it failed to create a division among the Baridoli agitators. Instead of realizing how mistaken its policy was, it adopted even more coercive methods such as the deployment of Pathan parties to assist attachment officers, believing rather naively,

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that the mere presence of the Pathans would either frighten tl1e satyagrahis or, or1 account of their being Muslims lead to communal strife with the largely Hindu agitators. In the same spirit it appointed a Mussalman Mamlatdar (a taluk level revenue official) to diw~e the ranks of the Muslim peasants (landowners) who supported the satyagraha. It is not surprising that such repressive methods gave a communal tinge to the Bardoli issue. 21 Another ruthless fo11n of repression was that for the reco,·ery of relatively small amounts of r~venue dues, lArge landed and movable properties were attached, confiscated, and even disposed of in auction for nominal or even thro,v-away frices. 29 The agitation began in mid-Febn,ary 1928; by July all non-agriculturists' holdings (about JS,000 acres) were declared forfeited arid over a tenth of them were even scld. As regc1rds the cultivating la.ndowners, 50,000 -acres of land were forfeited though not soJd. Despite all these measures; the government could not collect more than a sixth of the total revenue due. 30 In May 1928 the satyagraha agitators boycotted all government officials and pur- · chasc·rs of auctioned property arid thus drove them to desperation. In short, the government's handling of the Bardoli agitation was both impolitic and crude. With this united opposition, Patel was in a strong position to negotiate witli the government whom anxiety had driven to seek a settlement. The. Government of Bombay's reaction to the agitation had only given ·w ide publicity to the Bardoli grievances and aroused sympathy all over India for the agitating peasants. The INC now took up the cause of the Bardoli peasants. A number of political leaders from different parts of the country sought advice from Gancllii and Patel on whetl1er they should join the satyagraha campaign, and this increased the possibility of a local agitation spreading and developing into a country-wide mass struggle. The Gujarat members of the Bombay Legislative Council resigi1ed en masse as a mark of protest against the government's · policy; this was followed by Vithalbhai Patel's threat to resign. 3 1 Vithalbhai; who was President of the Bombay Legislative Council and was reckoned to become speaker of the Imperial Legislative Assembly, carried far greater political weight in government circles than did any of his liberal contemporaries in the 1920s; his threat could not be ignored by government. Thus the pressure on government to come to tet rns on the Bardoli issue was mounting on all sides. Naively enough> though, the local authorities in Gujarat still

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believed that the Bardoli movement would fizzle out if the screws of repression were tightened funher; at one stage they even envisaged using military force. 32 But Vallabhbhai had a realistic assessment of both the government's intentions and of the ~trength and weaknesses of the agitators he was working with. He therefore responded to conciliatory overtures made by Diwan Bahadur Harilal Desai in May 1928. The Diwan represented that class in Gujarat which had managed to earn power, both in and outside the bureaucracy through sycophancy of the British. It was therefore not surprising that when he · initiated a dialogue between Patel and the Bombay Government, he suggested that the peasants ought to pay their revenue dues (including enhanced rates) first, so that the government could appoint an impartial inquiry into the assessments. Patel turned dowr1 the offer promptly as he was in no desperate hurry to settle the dispute.33 At the other end Vithalbhai Patel worked to apprise the Viceroy about Bardoli and to seek his intervention in introducing a compromise. In June 1928, the pressure on government was funher intensified when K.M. Munshi, a leading lawyer and constitutionalist from Bombay, began correspondence with the Governor of Bombay to explore the possibility of a compromise. Later on Munshi headed an unofficial committee consisting of prominent .ul m'-'"Y citizens like Rao Bahadur Bhimabhai Naik, Dr Gilder, H. Lalji, Shivadasani, Chandrachud and B.G. Kher, who ~ere concerned about Gujarat, and enquired into the Bardoli grievances. The committee's findings confi1 rned that the local revenue authorities had indeed gone beyond legal provision by disposing of the confiscated lands for as little as one-thinieth of their actual market value, and by imposing ftjghtful sentences on defaulters and agitators just after summary trials. But such fmdings failed to evoke any response from Wilson, the Governor of Bombay, and his provincial executive. Munshi, who was then a member of ·the Bombay Council, even tried high-level pressure politics-and asked the Coalition National Pany _in the Bombay Council, of which he was the Secretary, to withdraw its mandate to two of its mernbers serving as ministers in the government :w But th~ provincial government did not give up its obstinate stand. The British Government had, however, high stakes at issue, and did not want to precipitate a crisis in the constitutional progress in India following the Montford refo11ns. It had announced the Indian Statutory Commission (Simon Commission) as a follow-up of the refor 111s and was looking forward to a compromise with the Indian

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bourgeoisie and the Congress. But the Congress declaration of a nationwide boycott of the Simon Commission ·had upset British plans, and the measures the Bombay provincial government had taken on the Bardoli agitation were about to unde1111ine them completely. Lord Irwin, the Viceroy, was however a sober and politically sagacious administrator. He saw the disparity between the imperial policy on constitutional concessions to a colony, and local executive action, as in Bardoli; and the dangers involved in making Bardoli a .J prestige issue. Since his release from prison Gandhi had been waiting for an opportunity to launch a general moven1ent of civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes. Irwin .realized that Bombay acting on its own over the Bardoli agitation would play into Gandhi"s hands, 35 and hence directed Wilson to adopt a soft line on the Bardoli issue, _ J meet Patel and negotiate a settlement. 36 Accordingly, on 18 July 1928, Wilson offered te11ns to Patel whereby the peasants of Bardoli paid the full assessment or the difference between the old and new revenue demands, and abandon°d the sa:yagraha first so that ·'a special inquiry into only the disputed_facts regarding revenue settlement in Bardoli taluk could be conducted.' The difference between the Bombay Govemment"s earlier position·and the fresh te11ns offered by Wilson was negligible. Patel once again rejected them and insisted • on 'the release of all prisoners · satyagrahis", 'restorat10n of forfeited lands (whether sold or not) to original landowners", and 'appoinunent ·. of an impartial committee" as his preconditions for_withdrawing the agitation. 37 · · Despite Lord lrwin"s advice, Wilson.was in.no mood to submit. It \\'ilS evident from the tenor of his a\idress to the Bombay Council on 23 July 1928 in which he only reiterated the te1n1s and his dete1i11ina- t~