Explain briefly the role of Peasant Movements after 1857 and before independence. (2025, 10 Marks)
After 1857 the peasant carried the heaviest burden of colonial rule — cash revenue on fixed dates, compulsory commercial crops, rack-renting landlords and the moneylender. Across ninety years peasant movements moved from local revolt to organised class politics, and their role changed with each phase.
Phase-wise role
| Phase | Key movements | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous (1859–1900) | Indigo revolt (1859–60); Pabna leagues (1873–76); Deccan riots (1875) | Spontaneous, local refusals aimed at planter, zamindar and sahukar; won protective laws — Indigo Commission (1860), Bengal Tenancy Act (1885), Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act (1879) |
| Integration (1917–1934) | Champaran (1917), Kheda (1918), Awadh Kisan Sabha and Eka (1920–22), Moplah (1921), Bardoli (1928) | Gave Congress its rural mass base; satyagraha tested on economic demands; peasants entered national politics |
| Organised and radical (1936–1947) | All India Kisan Sabha (1936); Tebhaga (1946–47); Telangana (1946–51) | Independent class organisation; zamindari abolition and sharecroppers’ share placed on the agenda |
What the movements achieved
- Economic defence: early revolts were restorative — against the immediate exploiter rather than the Raj — yet each forced the state to legislate on tenancy and debt.
- Mass base for nationalism: M. K. Gandhi’s Champaran enquiry drew the peasantry into the national movement; Vallabhbhai Patel’s Bardoli showed no-tax resistance could win.
- Radicalisation: under Swami Sahajanand Saraswati and N. G. Ranga, the Kisan Sabha pressed demands — abolition of zamindari, debt relief, tenure security — that landholding Congressmen resisted; communist-led Tebhaga and Telangana carried them into armed struggle.
- Constitutional legacy: zamindari abolition in the early 1950s, the Ninth Schedule and Article 23’s ban on begar descend from these struggles.
Limits
- Localised, episodic and divided by caste and religion; Moplah’s communal turn weakened Hindu–Muslim unity.
- Congress’s trusteeship line restrained anti-landlord action, which is why land reform later came from the state rather than from a peasant party.
- Ranajit Guha reminds us that these were not “pre-political” outbursts awaiting elite direction but insurgencies with their own logic.
Conclusion
Peasant movements were the social depth of the freedom struggle: they supplied its numbers, broadened its programme from political to agrarian freedom, and set the first agenda of the republic. The All India Kisan Sabha, founded in 1936, stood among the constituents of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha whose year-long protest secured repeal of the farm laws in 2021 and still presses for legally guaranteed MSP — the organisation outlived the empire it was born to resist.