Peasants and Farmers Movements

Understanding Social Movements

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• A social movement is not the same thing as a spontaneous outburst of anger — people damaging a bus after it runs over a child is an isolated protest that flares and dies, not a movement. A genuine social movement requires sustained collective action over time, is often directed at the state (demanding a change in policy or practice), shows at least a minimal degree of organisation (leadership, a structure governing how members relate and decide), and rests on shared objectives and ideology among participants.
• Social change and social movements are related but distinct: social change is the continuous, ongoing sum of countless individual and collective actions across time (Sanskritisation and Westernization are examples of social change as a broad process), whereas a social movement pursues specific goals through long, continuous, organised effort — the nineteenth-century social reformers’ campaigns are the paradigm case of a movement rather than a diffuse change process.
• Until the British period, Indian social movements were predominantly religious in orientation; a national liberation movement, overtly anti-colonial, emerged after the 1930s. After independence, the targets of movement activity diversified sharply — political authority, economic exploitation, cultural domination, and gender-based subordination all became separate axes of mobilisation, producing a real proliferation of distinct movement types.
• M.S.A. Rao classifies movements into three types: reformist, transformative, and revolutionary. Ghanshyam Shah insists that what some scholars dismiss as mere “agitation” (such as the demand for linguistic states) should often be classified as a genuine social movement of a particular social stratum — the demands for Jharkhand, Uttaranchal, and Chhattisgarh being cases in point. A.R. Desai attributes many Indian movements to the Constitution’s inability to adequately protect citizens’ civil and democratic rights, while Rajni Kothari locates their cause in the state’s failure at genuine “social transformation,” where repression and intimidation of large populations compels people to assert their rights through struggle.
• Gurr and M.S.A. Rao explain movements through relative deprivation theory, with Rao adding the crucial qualifier that deprivation alone is not enough — what matters is the “possibility of doing something,” i.e., the sufferer’s perceived capacity for effective action. Ghanshyam Shah and T.K. Oommen reject the relative-deprivation approach on two grounds: Oommen argues it fails to treat movements as an ongoing process of change and ignores the actual sources of deprivation, while Shah argues it neglects the role of consciousness and ideology among participants — a movement is not just an automatic response to felt grievance, but a product of how participants come to understand and frame that grievance.
• Even where social movements ultimately reshape society, they rarely do so easily: because they run up against entrenched interests and values simultaneously, sustained resistance and outright counter-movements are the norm rather than the exception — when Raja Rammohan Roy campaigned against sati and founded the Brahmo Samaj, defenders of the practice founded the rival Dharma Sabha specifically to petition the British against legislating it away, and identical resistance met movements for girls’ education, widow remarriage, lower-caste school enrolment, and later reservation expansion.

The Agrarian Class Structure Underlying Peasant Movements

• India’s agrarian structure is genuinely complex, reflecting varied patterns of landownership, tenancy, and control across regions. Daniel Thorner identified three broad agrarian classes based on the nature of rights in land and the type of income derived from it: Maliks (big landlords and rich landowners), Kisans (self-cultivating owners and small landowners, inferior in status to Maliks), and Mazdoors (those who earn their livelihood working others’ land — poor tenants, sharecroppers, and landless labourers).
• This agrarian hierarchy tends to correspond, though never perfectly, with caste hierarchy: rich landowners and moneylenders are disproportionately drawn from upper castes, middle and small peasants from traditional peasant castes, and landless labourers primarily from lower castes — a pattern rather than an exact description of ground reality in any given village.
• D.N. Dhanagare defines a “peasant movement” broadly as any collective attempt by a stratum of the peasantry either to change a system it perceives as exploitative, or to seek redress for a specific grievance without necessarily aiming to overthrow the system altogether — a definition that deliberately spans both violent and non-violent, organised and localised forms of peasant collective action.
• Sociologists have studied Indian agrarian movements from at least six distinct angles: their functioning as micro-level associations; the relationship between political parties (Congress, Communists) and peasant mobilisation; the relationship between social structure (caste, class, power) and agrarian movements; the relationship between the Green Revolution and agrarian movements (the Green Revolution accentuated economic disparities even as it accelerated villagers’ social aspirations); the relationship between agrarian legislation and movements (movements causing legislation, and legislation in turn provoking further movements); and the relationship between mobilisation strategy and organisational form.

Peasant Movements in Colonial India

• Nineteenth-century India is, in the phrase used by movement historians, a genuine “treasure house” of peasant collective action. Movements between 1858 and 1914 tended to remain localised, disjointed, and confined to specific grievances — the most militant of this period was the Indigo Revolt of 1859–60 in Bengal, directed against zamindars as the visible face of exploitation, followed a decade later by comparable unrest in Pabna and Bogra (1872–73).
• Similar patterns recurred elsewhere: the Deccan Riots of 1875 in western Maharashtra targeted the tyranny of moneylenders in Ryotwari areas, while a series of Moplah uprisings across the nineteenth century in Malabar expressed long-standing agrarian discontent among poor Moplah peasants.
• Peasant grievances became directly woven into the freedom struggle in the early twentieth century through the Champaran Movement (1917), the Kheda Satyagraha (1918), and the Bardoli Satyagraha (1928) — all non-violent anti-British struggles associated with Gandhi and therefore often described as “Gandhian agrarian movements,” notable for simultaneously advancing specific agrarian demands and arousing broader political awareness among the masses.
• Peasant organisation also proceeded on more explicitly class-conscious lines: the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha and, in 1936, the All India Kisan Sabha were founded to demand freedom from economic exploitation for peasants, workers, and other exploited classes, feeding directly into the more militant regional movements — Tebhaga, Telangana, and the Naxalite movement — that followed.

Peasant Movements After Independence: Tebhaga, Telangana, and Naxalbari

• The Tebhaga movement (1946–47) in Bengal was driven by a convergence of factors: the trauma of the 1943 famine, a drive against jotedars, hoarders, and black-marketeers, the social solidarity of the tribal participants, and sharecroppers’ increased bargaining leverage. According to Dhanagare, it ultimately failed because its geographic spread was limited and because communal politics (the Hindu-Muslim divide among participants), the lack of harmony between caste and class, and upper-class manipulation of peasant loyalties all worked against it.
• The Telangana movement (1946–52) in Andhra Pradesh confronted a distinct feudal structure: jagirdars and deshmukhs functioned simultaneously as intermediary landowners, moneylenders, and village officials, mostly upper-caste or from the influential Muslim community, using the vetti (forced labour) system to subject the poor peasantry — untouchable castes and tribals at the very bottom of the agrarian hierarchy — to extra-economic coercion. Political consciousness built through the Andhra Mahasabha (which the Communist Party captured after 1942) culminated, after Independence and the Nizam’s refusal to accede to India, in a CPI-led guerrilla struggle: vetti was abolished in roughly 4,000 villages, untouchability was formally prohibited, land was rapidly redistributed, and armed women defended their villages against the Nizam’s razakars before the Indian Army’s intervention, and subsequent action against the CPI itself, brought the movement to an end by 1951.
• The Naxalbari movement, beginning in 1967 under Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal’s leadership in Darjeeling district, marked a decisive tactical shift: mass participation aimed at the forcible occupation of benami land gave way to the deliberate “liquidation of class enemies” through guerrilla tactics carried out by small underground squads rather than open mass mobilisation. R.K. Mukherjee offers an important structural qualification: although the movement’s declared intention was to capture state power, in practice the revolt was directed less against the system itself than against its worst excesses — an attempt to properly regulate, rather than abolish, the exchange relationship between peasant and landlord.
• The Naxalbari uprising’s defining characteristics were its cross-cutting mobilisation of peasant and labourer classes across ethnic (including tribal) and caste lines; its embrace of non-institutionalised, explicitly violent means; leadership drawn from Communist Party cadres; and its aim of downward mobility for jotedars paired with upward mobility for peasants and labourers — a goal that distinguished it sharply from the Sarvodaya movement, since Naxalbari sought individual peasant ownership of seized land where Sarvodaya sought communal redistribution. The movement’s failure has been attributed to its anti-national overtones (Chinese support and rhetoric), open denunciation of Indian national leadership, explicit intention to capture state power through violence, and internal factionalism among the Indian left.

The “New Farmers’ Movements”

• A distinct wave of “new farmers’ movements” emerged in Punjab and Tamil Nadu from the 1970s, organisationally and analytically different from classical peasant movements: they were regionally organised, explicitly non-party, and mobilised farmers — market-involved actors who are simultaneously commodity producers and purchasers — rather than subsistence-oriented peasants.
• These movements carried a strongly anti-state and anti-urban ideological orientation, focused on subsidies for agricultural inputs, taxation, and loan non-repayment, and used novel agitational methods (blocking roads and railways, barring politicians and bureaucrats from entering villages) rather than the classical repertoire of peasant revolt.
• Because farmers’ movements have progressively broadened their agenda to include environmental and women’s issues, scholars increasingly situate them within the global category of “new social movements” — issue-based, mass-based, and oriented toward questioning state policy broadly, rather than the older, more narrowly class-based and ideologically anchored peasant movement model.

Debating the Peasantry’s Revolutionary Potential

• Barrington Moore Jr. (as cited by Ghanshyam Shah) argued that Indian peasants were traditionally docile and passive, which he held responsible for lackadaisical, inefficient cultivation throughout the Mughal and British periods and for the corresponding absence of widespread peasant revolt.
• This reading has been substantially challenged. A.R. Desai, Kathleen Gough, and D.N. Dhanagare all argue historians have simply overlooked a large number of genuine peasant revolts. Gough documented 77 distinct revolts over the preceding two centuries, the smallest still involving several thousand active participants; Desai found the Indian rural scene “bristling” with protests, revolts, and militant struggles spanning hundreds of villages across years; and Ranajit Guha counted no fewer than 110 known agrarian disturbances across 117 years of British rule, describing such unrest as effectively endemic through the close of the nineteenth century.

Classifying Peasant Movements

• A.R. Desai and Ghanshyam Shah classify Indian peasant movements temporally — pre-British and post-independence, with the post-independence period further divided into pre- and post-Naxalite or, alternatively, pre- and post-Green Revolution phases (the latter further split by the Emergency). Desai further classifies colonial India’s agrarian structure into Ryotwari areas (British territory), Zamindari areas (princely authority), and tribal zones, arguing that peasant struggles in each zone had genuinely distinct characteristics, issues, and participant strata — and that post-independence agrarian struggles themselves split further into those launched by rich farmers and those launched by poor farmers.
• Kathleen Gough classifies peasant revolts by goal, ideology, and organisational method into five types: restorative rebellions (aiming to drive out the British and restore earlier rulers), religious movements, social banditry, terrorism for collective justice, and mass insurrections for the redress of specific grievances.

Contemporary Developments: The 2024–25 Farmers’ Protest and the MSP Demand

• A fresh wave of farmer mobilisation, led primarily by Punjab and Haryana farmers under the banner of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (Non-Political) and allied bodies, began in February 2024 and continued into 2025, centred on a single core demand that echoes the “new farmers’ movement” repertoire this article has traced: a statutory legal guarantee for Minimum Support Price (MSP) across all crops, alongside full loan waivers, farmer pensions, and withdrawal of cases from the 2020–21 protest cycle.
• As of the most recent rounds of government-farmer dialogue, no legal MSP guarantee has been enacted, even as active protest activity itself has wound down — leaving the movement’s central demand still unresolved and illustrating, in real time, Dhanagare’s point that a peasant or farmer movement can achieve partial, ongoing negotiating leverage over the state without necessarily securing its stated goal outright.