Write short note: The share-croppers’ movement in India. (1991)
The sharecropper — bargadar or adhiar in Bengal, batai or sanjha elsewhere — cultivates another’s land for a share of the crop, holding no recorded right in it. In Daniel Thorner’s scheme he belongs with the mazdoors, the stratum whose income comes from working others’ land. Their movements are therefore struggles over the division of the product and over recognition as a tenant — the sharpest form the agrarian question takes in India.
Tebhaga: the classic struggle
Tebhaga (1946–47) in Bengal demanded that the landlord’s customary half of the harvest be cut to one-third, leaving the cultivator two shares of three. The Floud Commission (Land Revenue Commission of Bengal, 1939–40) had already recommended it; the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha turned the recommendation into direct action in September 1946, with paddy harvested and stored in the sharecropper’s own yard. It drew in Rajbanshi and Santhal cultivators, Hindu and Muslim bargadars, and large numbers of women; Ila Mitra became its emblem. A Bargadars Bill was introduced in January 1947 but lapsed amid communal conflict and Partition.
Continuity after 1947
The struggle reappeared at Kakdwip in the Sundarbans and, most consequentially, at Naxalbari (1967), where adhiars seized jotedars’ land under Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal. Legislatively, the Bargadars Act of 1950 conceded the two-thirds share where the cultivator supplied the inputs but was barely enforced; only Operation Barga, launched in West Bengal in 1978, systematically recorded sharecroppers and made their right to cultivate secure and heritable — India’s most successful tenancy reform.
Sociological significance
- The middle-peasant debate. Hamza Alavi used Tebhaga to argue that the middle peasant, not the dependent poor peasant, initiates revolt. D. N. Dhanagare (Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950, 1983) countered that petty jotedars within the Kisan Sabha themselves employed bargadars, so the tebhaga demand threatened them and they withdrew.
- Why sharecroppers rarely lead. Their dependence on the landlord for land, credit and consumption loans — what Amit Bhaduri analysed as semi-feudal bondage — makes open action costly. James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985) suggests concealment, foot-dragging and pilferage are their more usual repertoire.
The question today
Tenancy has gone underground rather than disappeared. The NSS Situation Assessment Survey (77th round, 2019) records most leasing as oral and unrecorded, which keeps the sharecropper outside institutional credit, crop insurance and compensation, and invisible in today’s farmers’ movements — the 2020–21 agitation raised price, not tenancy.
Conclusion
The sharecroppers’ movement produced India’s most genuine tenancy reform and its most enduring theoretical debate. Its unfinished business, recording the tiller, remains the clearest test of whether agrarian reform in India was ever meant to reach the bottom.