Bring out the main features of farmers’ movements in Modern India. (2013, 15 Marks)
“Modern India” here begins with the colonial remaking of land relations — the Permanent Settlement of 1793 and the ryotwari and mahalwari settlements — which turned custom into contract, revenue into a cash obligation and the cultivator into a debtor. Peasant movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present are responses to that transformation, and their features are best read across its whole arc.
Feature 1: the movements are anti-feudal and anti-colonial at their core
The antagonists are the zamindar, the moneylender and the planter, with the colonial state behind them. The Indigo Revolt of Bengal (1859–60) resisted forced cultivation; Pabna (1873) fought illegal cesses; the Deccan Riots (1875) of western Maharashtra targeted moneylenders’ bonds in a ryotwari tract; the Moplah risings of Malabar expressed long-standing tenant grievance in a religious idiom.
Feature 2: early movements were localised, restorative and short-lived
Between 1858 and 1914 they remained disjointed and tied to particular grievances. Kathleen Gough’s typology captures their forms — restorative rebellions, religious movements, social banditry, terrorism for collective justice, and mass insurrections for specific redress.
Feature 3: religion, kinship and community supply the idiom
Peasant grievance rarely spoke a class language. Ranajit Guha (Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 1983) argued that this idiom is not false consciousness but a distinct insurgent consciousness with its own logic of negation, solidarity and territoriality — the case for subaltern autonomy.
Feature 4: nationalisation and organisation after 1917
Mahatma Gandhi’s Champaran (1917), Kheda (1918) and Bardoli (1928) satyagrahas fused agrarian demands with the freedom struggle and made non-violent mass discipline the dominant method. Organisation followed: the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha and then the All India Kisan Sabha (1936), with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati as first president. The relation with nationalism was two-edged — the Congress mobilised peasants but restrained conflict between tenant and landlord to preserve an all-class alliance.
Feature 5: the class base shifts, and leadership comes from outside
D. N. Dhanagare (Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950, 1983) showed that leadership usually came from richer strata or from outside the peasantry. Tebhaga (1946–47), where bargadars demanded two-thirds of the crop, and Telangana (1946–51) against the Nizam and the deshmukhs, were the great transitional struggles; both were led by Kisan Sabha and communist cadres. After 1947 the base moved upward again: Naxalbari (1967) was the last major poor-peasant insurrection, and the new farmers’ movements from the late 1970s — Sharad Joshi’s Bharat versus India frame — belonged to surplus-producing owner-cultivators demanding price, not land. The 2020–21 Samyukta Kisan Morcha agitation, which forced repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021, is that movement at its height.
Feature 6: they are far more widespread than once believed
Barrington Moore Jr. (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966) held that Indian peasants were docile and revolt rare. A. R. Desai, Gough and Dhanagare refuted him: Gough counted 77 revolts in two centuries, each engaging thousands.
Conclusion
The thread running through modern India is a shift from insurgency over land to bargaining over price, and from the cultivating poor to the propertied producer. That the countryside can still veto national legislation shows the tradition’s vitality; that agricultural labourers — 6,096 of the 10,786 suicides NCRB recorded in the farming sector in 2023 — remain outside it shows its limit.