Peasant and Workers Movements in Colonial India

1. Indian Nationalism —

A. Political Strategies of India’s Freedom Struggle : Constitutionalism to mass Satyagraha, Non- cooperation, Civil Disobedience; Militant and Revolutionary Movements, Peasant and Workers Movements
B. Perspectives on Indian National Movement; Liberal, Socialist and Marxist; Radical Humanist and Dalit

Section B: Indian Government and Politics

Peasants and workers were the two classes on whom colonial rule fell hardest and who, on most readings, gained least from the movement that ended it. Their agitations began before the national movement existed, ran alongside it with objectives of their own, and were only intermittently and partially absorbed into it. Whether they are best described as the rural and industrial wings of Indian nationalism, or as an autonomous politics that nationalism periodically borrowed, is the central historiographical question of this sub-topic — and the answer determines what the freedom struggle is taken to have been.

Why the countryside revolted

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• Colonial land settlements transferred risk downwards and security upwards.
  • The Permanent Settlement of 1793 created a class of zamindars with property rights and no productive function, and left the actual cultivator with no security of tenure against rent enhancement or eviction.
  • Ryotwari and mahalwari systems dealt with the cultivator directly but fixed cash demands that took no account of harvest failure, which converted a bad monsoon into permanent indebtedness.
  • Revenue in cash on fixed dates forced distress sales at harvest prices, and drove the cultivator to the moneylender as routine rather than emergency.
• Commercialisation moved risk onto the grower.
  • Indigo, cotton, jute and opium displaced food crops on the best land, tying the peasant’s survival to prices set in Liverpool and Manchester.
  • The collapse of the cotton boom after the American Civil War is the clearest instance: a price spike drew cultivators into debt, and the crash left the debt behind.
• The destruction of handicrafts increased the pressure on land. Artisans thrown out of weaving and spinning had nowhere to go but agriculture, so the share of population dependent on land rose across the colonial century while productivity did not.
• Famine was structural, not accidental — a system that exported grain during scarcity and treated relief as a charge on the poor.
• Forest legislation criminalised subsistence. The Indian Forest Acts turned grazing, firewood collection and shifting cultivation into offences, which is why forest law appears as a grievance in almost every tribal rising.

Every major peasant movement in colonial India was a demand for security — of tenure, of share, or of subsistence — and almost none of them began as a demand for independence.

How peasant movements are classified

Classification is not a formality here: the scheme you adopt determines whether the movements look like part of the national struggle or like something else running beside it.

• By phase, which is the most common scheme and the one the chronology below follows.
  • Autonomous and pre-national to about 1900 — local, restorative, directed at the immediate exploiter.
  • Absorbed into the national movement, roughly 1917-30 — satyagraha, Congress linkage, negotiation with the state.
  • Organised and radical, from the 1930s — permanent peasant organisations with programmes of their own.
• By the social stratum that leads them, which is the Marxist cut, and which separates movements of rich and middle peasants demanding lower revenue from movements of tenants and sharecroppers demanding security and share, and both from movements of agricultural labourers demanding wages and freedom from bondage.
  • This distinction explains a great deal about which movements the Congress could support: revenue reduction unites the village, while share and wage demands split it.
• By the object of the demand: against the state (revenue, forest law), against the landlord (rent, eviction, illegal cesses, forced labour), or against the moneylender (debt, bonds, mortgage).
• By the relationship to organised politics: Congress-led, Kisan Sabha-led, communist-led, or wholly autonomous.
• By the internal structure of the insurgency itself, which is the subaltern contribution — reading revolt as a form with its own grammar of negation, ambiguity, modality, solidarity, transmission and territoriality, rather than as a reaction awaiting explanation from outside.

Peasant movements: the sequence

The early, autonomous phase, to 1900

• The Sanyasi and Fakir rebellion in late-eighteenth-century Bengal, the Faraizi movement under Haji Shariatullah and Dudu Mian, and Titu Mir’s rising combined religious reform with a refusal of zamindari exactions.
• The Indigo revolt of 1859-60 in Bengal is the model case of the phase.
  • Planters compelled cultivation of indigo on the best land at ruinous prices, backed by advances that functioned as debt bondage.
  • The response was a collective refusal to sow, organised village by village under leaders including Digambar and Bishnucharan Biswas, and it succeeded: the Indigo Commission of 1860 reported, and indigo cultivation collapsed in Bengal.
  • Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Neel Darpan carried the revolt into educated urban opinion, which is the first instance of a peasant grievance becoming a national one.
• The Pabna agrarian leagues of 1873-76 in East Bengal fought enhancement and illegal cesses through rent strikes and litigation funds, and contributed to the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885.
• The Deccan riots of 1875 targeted moneylenders’ bonds and account books rather than persons, and produced the Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act of 1879.
• Tribal risings — Santhal, Munda, Kol, Bhil, Rampa — belong to this phase in form though they run past it in time, and were the most sustained armed resistance of the period.
• What characterises the phase: grievances are specific and local, the target is the immediate exploiter rather than the state, the method is refusal rather than petition, and the demand is restorative — a return to a customary position, not a new order.

Tribal risings within the agrarian story

Tribal movements are often listed separately, but their grievances are agrarian and their significance for the national movement is of the same kind.

• The tribal risings were the most violently suppressed and the most legislatively productive — the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 and the Santhal Parganas administration are direct results.
• Their leadership was internal and often prophetic, combining religious reform with land claims, which is why the older nationalist historiography, looking for secular political programmes, could not see them as political at all.

Absorption into the national movement, 1917-1930

• Champaran, 1917. The tinkathia system obliged tenants of indigo planters to grow indigo on three-twentieths of their holding. Gandhi’s method combined satyagraha with a systematic public enquiry, and it produced the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918.
• Kheda, 1918. A no-revenue campaign after crop failure, demanding the remission that the government’s own rules provided for; it secured relief for the poorest cultivators and brought Vallabhbhai Patel into national politics.
• Awadh, 1920-22. The Kisan Sabha organised by Baba Ramchandra, and the Eka movement that followed, attacked nazrana, illegal cesses and eviction; the Oudh Rent (Amendment) Act of 1921 was the concession.
  • The Congress’s involvement here is the classic illustration of the tension: Nehru was drawn into the district and radicalised by it, while the provincial leadership was anxious to keep the agitation within limits acceptable to landholding Congressmen.
• Moplah, 1921. Tenancy insecurity under janmi landlords fused with Khilafat mobilisation and turned communal; its suppression, and the damage it did to the wider movement, is one reason Gandhi’s caution in 1922 is defensible.
• Bardoli, 1928. A no-tax satyagraha against a 22 per cent revenue enhancement, organised with unusual thoroughness under Vallabhbhai Patel; the enhancement was cut to roughly 6 per cent and Patel acquired the title Sardar.
• What characterises the phase: grievances remain economic and specific, but the method is now satyagraha, the organisation is Congress-linked, and the demand is negotiated with the state rather than the landlord.

The organised and radical phase, 1930-1947

• The Depression of 1929-33 collapsed agricultural prices while revenue and rent demands stayed fixed, which is what converted scattered agitation into organisation.
• Sahajanand Saraswati’s Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (1929) was the first durable provincial peasant organisation, and its demand went beyond relief to the abolition of zamindari.
• The All India Kisan Sabha, founded at Lucknow in 1936 with Sahajanand Saraswati as president and N. G. Ranga as general secretary, adopted a Kisan Manifesto demanding abolition of zamindari, reduction of rent and revenue, debt relief, security of tenure, and a living wage for agricultural labour.
  • Its red flag and its willingness to press demands the Congress found awkward mark the point at which peasant politics acquired an organisational existence independent of the Congress.
• Congress ministries of 1937-39 passed tenancy legislation in several provinces, and the gap between what the Kisan Sabhas demanded and what the ministries delivered sharpened the split.
• Bakasht movement in Bihar fought the eviction of tenants from self-cultivated lands; the Warli revolt of 1945 in Maharashtra organised adivasi agricultural labour against forced labour.
• Tebhaga, 1946-47. Bengal’s bargadars — sharecroppers — demanded two-thirds of the crop instead of half, taking the Floud Commission’s own recommendation as their slogan.
  • Organised by the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha and the communists, it spread across much of northern Bengal before being broken by repression and by the communal violence preceding partition.
• Telangana, 1946-51. The largest armed peasant movement in modern Indian history, against vetti (forced labour) and illegal land seizure under the Nizam’s regime and his deshmukhs.
  • Beginning through the Andhra Mahasabha and led by the communists, it established village committees across roughly three thousand villages, redistributed land on a substantial scale, and abolished vetti in the areas it controlled.
  • It continued after the Indian army’s Operation Polo in 1948 and was called off in 1951.
• Punnapra-Vayalar (1946) in Travancore linked agricultural and coir workers to a political demand against the Diwan’s proposals — the clearest instance of peasant and worker action converging.

The Congress’s structural problem with the land question

• The Congress contained landholders and depended on them, particularly in the United Provinces, Bihar and Bengal, which set a hard limit on how far it could support tenant demands.
• Gandhi’s own position was trusteeship: the landlord should treat his holding as a trust for the tenant, and the tenant should not treat the landlord as an enemy. Applied to Awadh in 1921 this meant urging restraint on precisely the people with the grievance.
• The Karachi Resolution of 1931 and the Faizpur session of 1936 committed the Congress to a substantial reduction of rent and revenue and to an agrarian programme, but stopped short of endorsing abolition without compensation.
• The Congress ministries of 1937-39 legislated on tenancy in the United Provinces, Bihar, Bengal and Madras, and the legislation was real; it was also less than the Kisan Sabhas demanded, and the gap is what produced the open break between Sahajanand Saraswati and the Congress leadership.
• The resolution came only after independence, when zamindari abolition was carried by the same Congress that had declined to demand it — the clearest illustration of a movement’s agenda being inherited by a state rather than won by a class.

The workers’ movement

Origins and the early phase

• A modern working class appeared from the mid-nineteenth century with railways, the post and telegraph, plantations, coal, jute and cotton textiles, concentrated in Bombay, Calcutta, Kanpur, Ahmedabad, Madras and the Assam tea districts.
• Conditions generated the movement: twelve to sixteen hour days, no weekly rest, women and children in the mills, company housing, truck payment, and a legal position in which breach of contract by a worker was a criminal offence in the plantations.
• The first phase was philanthropic rather than organised.
  • S. S. Bengalee and Sasipada Banerjee campaigned on conditions and welfare rather than organising workers as a class.
  • Narayan Meghaji Lokhande founded the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1890, generally treated as the first Indian labour organisation, and his evidence shaped the Factory Acts of 1881 and 1891.
  • These bodies had no membership, no funds and no strike capacity; they were pressure groups on behalf of workers rather than organisations of them.
• Early strikes were spontaneous and issue-specific, but a political dimension appeared early: the Bombay textile strike of 1908 against Tilak’s conviction was a political general strike in all but name, and Lenin cited it as evidence that the Indian proletariat had entered politics.

Organisation and radicalisation, 1918-1935

• The war years brought inflation without wage adjustment, and the founding of the International Labour Organisation in 1919 — with its requirement of worker representation — gave Indian labour an external reason to organise nationally.
• The Madras Labour Union (1918) under B. P. Wadia was the first modern trade union in the strict sense.
• The Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (1920) grew out of the 1918 strike in which Gandhi fasted, and institutionalised the Gandhian model: arbitration, trusteeship, and the union as a partner rather than an antagonist — a model that produced stable gains and a politically quiescent union.
• The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920 with Lala Lajpat Rai as its first president and Dewan Chaman Lall as general secretary, initially as a nationalist body with an eye on ILO representation.
• The Trade Unions Act of 1926 gave registered unions legal recognition and immunity from certain civil and criminal liabilities, which mattered more than it sounds — before it, a strike could be prosecuted as criminal conspiracy.
• Communist influence grew rapidly through the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties and, in Bombay, the Girni Kamgar Union, which led the six-month textile strike of 1928 and a further wave in 1929.
• The state responded with law. The Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Act of 1929 (compulsory conciliation, restrictions on strikes in public utilities, a ban on political strikes) were followed by the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929-33), which prosecuted thirty-three communist and trade union organisers.
  • The trial backfired politically: it gave the accused a four-year national platform and spread their ideas far more widely than their organising had.
• Sholapur in 1930 — where workers took over the town for several days during civil disobedience and martial law was imposed — is the high point of labour’s participation in the national movement.
• The organisational history is one of repeated splits, and this is the movement’s defining weakness.
  • 1929: moderates under N. M. Joshi left to form the Indian Trade Union Federation.
  • 1931: communists formed the All India Red Trade Union Congress, returning to the AITUC later in the decade.
  • 1942: the communists’ “people’s war” line and their opposition to Quit India split the movement again along political rather than industrial lines.
  • 1947: the Congress left the AITUC to form the Indian National Trade Union Congress, and the socialists followed with their own federation — establishing the pattern of party-affiliated union centrals that has persisted ever since.
• The Karachi Resolution of 1931 registers labour’s influence inside the national movement: a living wage, limited hours, protection for women workers, the right to organise, and state ownership of key industries.

Plantations: the extreme case

• Assam tea is where colonial labour relations were harshest, and it is routinely omitted from accounts of the workers’ movement.
• Recruitment worked through arkatis and sardars who indentured labour from Chotanagpur and the Santhal Parganas under contracts the workers could not read.
• The Workmen’s Breach of Contract Act (1859) and the Assam Labour and Emigration Acts made desertion a criminal offence and gave planters powers of private arrest — a legal regime closer to bondage than to employment.
• The Chargola exodus of 1921, when thousands of tea workers walked off the gardens during Non-Cooperation, was one of the largest single labour actions of the period, and it was not sustained by the Congress, which was uneasy about its consequences.
• Plantations are the clearest case of the general pattern: where labour was most exploited, organisation was weakest, because the workforce was migrant, indebted, physically isolated and legally unfree.

Why the workers’ movement stayed weak

• Trade unions were junior partners of political parties rather than autonomous organisations, so strategy followed the parties’ national calculations rather than workers’ industrial interests.
• Workers remained divided on caste, religion, region and language, and employers used those divisions in recruitment deliberately.
• A largely first-generation workforce retained village ties, returning for harvests and remitting wages, which weakened both organisation and militancy.
• The organised sector was tiny relative to the working population, so even total victory in the mills touched a small fraction of Indian labour.
• The consequence is the standard verdict: the workers’ position was worse than the peasants’, and independence did not produce a strong autonomous trade union movement either.

Where the two movements met, and where they did not

• Convergence was rare but significant. The Ahmedabad mill strike of 1918 and the Kheda satyagraha ran in the same months and drew on the same organisation; Punnapra-Vayalar (1946) united coir workers and agricultural labour; and Sholapur in 1930 saw mill workers and the surrounding countryside act together.
• Structural obstacles kept them apart.
  • Different adversaries — the peasant’s opponent was the landlord, the moneylender or the revenue official; the worker’s was the mill-owner, frequently an Indian nationalist financier of the Congress.
  • Different geographies: labour was concentrated in a handful of industrial centres while peasant agitation was dispersed across the countryside.
  • Different organisational sponsors: the Kisan Sabhas and the trade union centrals were built separately, and the communists who worked in both were repeatedly diverted by national political turns.
• The one force that consistently tried to join them was the communist movement, through the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties of the late 1920s — which is precisely why the state prosecuted their organisers at Meerut.

A comparison of the two movements

The historiographical argument

This is where the sub-topic becomes analytically interesting, because the same events support radically different accounts of the national movement.

• The nationalist account treats peasant and worker mobilisation as the broadening of the national movement — the Congress reaching beyond the towns, with Gandhi as the agent of that extension.
• The Marxist account reads the same events as class struggle imperfectly contained. The Congress included landholders and depended on business funding, so it could mobilise peasants against the state but not against the zamindar, and workers against the empire but not the mill-owner.
  • A. R. Desai grounds the whole national movement in the social classes colonialism itself produced, and treats peasant and worker entry as its fourth and fifth phases.
• The subaltern account denies that either framing sees what actually happened.
  • Ranajit Guha argues in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India that peasant revolt has its own structure — negation, ambiguity, solidarity, transmission, territoriality — and is not a spontaneous or pre-political outburst awaiting elite direction.
  • Gyanendra Pandey shows that peasant mobilisation in Awadh arose before and independently of Non-Cooperation, so the sequence assumed by the nationalist account is simply wrong.
  • Shahid Amin’s work on the eastern United Provinces shows peasants acting on rumours of Gandhi’s miraculous powers rather than on Congress instructions — a “Gandhi” of their own construction.
  • The general charge is that Indian nationalism was primarily elitist, and that Gandhi’s approach asked the peasantry to compromise with its oppressors in the name of class harmony.
• Bipan Chandra’s counter is that autonomy and integration are not exclusive: peasants acted for their own reasons, and the national movement created the political space in which those reasons could be expressed at scale without being crushed.
• The comparative point recurs in every assessment. Indian peasant movements produced no Mao — no leader who came from the peasantry and served as its organic intellectual, and no all-India peasant party capable of taking power.
  • Movements were spontaneous, localised and episodic, and divided along caste and religious lines.
  • That absence explains a great deal about post-independence India, including why land reform was legislated by a state rather than won by a class, and why it largely failed outside the few states where a peasant or left political force existed to enforce it.

The peasantry entered the national movement in very large numbers and left it without an organisation of its own — which is why its agenda passed to the state after 1947 rather than to a peasant political force.

What these movements achieved

• They gave the national movement its mass depth. Without the countryside, non-cooperation and civil disobedience would have been urban agitations.
• They put land on the national agenda, and made zamindari abolition the first great legislative programme of independent India — the abolition acts of the early 1950s are the direct legacy of the Kisan Sabhas.
• They created independent organisation that sometimes pressed against the Congress’s own landholding members, which is precisely what made it effective.
• They produced protective legislation in colonial India itself — from the Bengal Tenancy Act to the Trade Unions Act — that would not have existed without agitation.
• They shaped the Constitution. Article 23’s prohibition of begar and forced labour, the Directive Principles on a living wage, workers’ participation and the distribution of material resources, and the early placement of land-reform legislation in the Ninth Schedule all descend from these struggles.

Where labour was most exploited, organisation was weakest — which is why the plantation, not the mill, is the true measure of colonial labour relations.

After 1947: continuity and rupture

The colonial-period movements do not end in 1947, and the post-independence trajectory is part of any assessment of what they achieved.

• Zamindari abolition was legislated across the states in the early 1950s, and it was the largest single transfer of property rights in Indian history — but it abolished intermediaries rather than redistributing land, and the tenant below the intermediary frequently gained nothing.
• Land-ceiling legislation and tenancy reform were substantially evaded through benami transfers, resumption for “personal cultivation” and the sheer absence of accurate records; West Bengal’s Operation Barga and Kerala’s reforms are the exceptions that prove the rule, and both occurred where a left political force existed to enforce them.
• Bhoodan and Gramdan under Vinoba Bhave attempted the moral route to redistribution and collected substantial pledges of land, much of it uncultivable — an experiment whose failure is itself an argument about whether the agrarian question can be solved without conflict.
• Naxalbari (1967) revived the Telangana model and put armed agrarian struggle back into Indian politics for half a century, with the left-wing extremism of the central Indian districts as its long tail.
• The “new farmers’ movements” of the 1980s — Sharad Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana, Mahendra Singh Tikait’s BKU, Nanjundaswamy’s Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha — changed the axis of demand from land to prices, arguing a Bharat-versus-India thesis of rural terms of trade rather than a class thesis of ownership.
• Organised labour after 1947 was absorbed into the state’s industrial-relations machinery — the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, tripartite bodies, and the party-affiliated union centrals — which delivered security to a small organised sector and left the rest untouched.
• Their politics was not pre-political. The recurring colonial and nationalist description of peasant revolt as spontaneous, blind or instinctive is itself an ideological move; the risings had leaders, planning, negotiation, published demands and, frequently, a clear conception of legitimacy which the state was violating.
• Their memory has become politically active again, in the commemoration of tribal risings, in the iconography of contemporary farmer mobilisation, and in the recovery of names — Birsa Munda, Sidhu and Kanhu, Alluri Sitarama Raju, Sahajanand Saraswati — that the older account treated as marginal.

Contemporary relevance

• Agrarian mobilisation remains the largest form of collective action in India.
  • The farm laws of 2020 were repealed in November 2021 after a year-long agitation on Delhi’s borders.
  • The Samyukta Kisan Morcha has since pressed the unfinished demand — a legal guarantee for minimum support prices, with debt relief — through renewed border protests and periodic nationwide actions.
  • The continuity of form is striking: dharna, encampment, no-payment, and the deliberate courting of arrest are the Bardoli repertoire at national scale.
• The composition of the agrarian question has changed. The pressing issues are now tenancy that is invisible because it is informal, the position of landless agricultural labour, women cultivators without recorded title, and indebtedness to non-institutional lenders — none of which the zamindari abolition framework was designed to address.
• Labour law has been rewritten wholesale. The four labour codes consolidating twenty-nine central labour laws were brought into force on 21 November 2025, covering wages, industrial relations, social security, and occupational safety.
  • Central trade unions have opposed them as weakening collective bargaining — through higher thresholds for recognition, wider fixed-term employment and easier retrenchment in smaller establishments — and the general strike of 9 July 2025, which unions claimed brought out around twenty-five crore workers, was called principally on this question.
  • The counter-argument is that the codes extend statutory protection and social security to categories that had none, including gig and platform workers, who are for the first time defined in central law.
• The structural weakness identified in the colonial period persists. Around nine-tenths of Indian workers are in informal employment, union density in the organised sector is modest, and the union centrals remain affiliated to political parties — the same dependence on party patronage the colonial movement never escaped.
• New forms of organisation are emerging outside that structure, in platform-worker associations and state-level legislation on gig work, which is the first significant departure from the party-affiliated model in a century.
• The gig and platform economy is the newest frontier, and it is being contested in a form the colonial-era movement would recognise — a workforce that is dispersed, formally self-employed and hard to organise, seeking statutory recognition first and bargaining rights afterwards.
  • Aggregators are now defined in central social-security law, and state legislation in Rajasthan and Karnataka has begun creating registration and welfare-board mechanisms for platform workers.
  • The e-Shram register of unorganised workers is the administrative attempt to make an invisible workforce countable, which is the precondition of any protection at all.
• Agrarian distress remains the structural background to all of it: small and marginal holdings dominate, non-institutional debt persists, and the share of the workforce dependent on agriculture remains far above agriculture’s share of output — the same imbalance that colonial deindustrialisation created.

Conclusion

Peasant and worker movements are the part of the freedom struggle least well explained by any single framework. They began before nationalism and pursued objectives nationalism did not share; they were partly absorbed and partly resisted absorption; and they were indispensable to the national movement without ever controlling it.

• Their contribution was real: mass depth, protective legislation, the land question, and the constitutional commitments that followed.
• Their limitation was organisational: localised, episodic, divided by caste and religion, never consolidated into an all-India political force.
• The consequence outlived colonialism. An agenda inherited by the state rather than won by a class is implemented at the state’s convenience, which is the shortest explanation of why land reform stalled and why labour’s position has been renegotiated repeatedly since.