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Indian Freedom Struggle (1707–1947 A.D.)

Notes The peasants of Punnapra-Vayalar in Travancore fought bloody battles with the administration.
In Telengana, the peasants organized themselves to resist the landlords’ oppression and played an
important role in the anti-Nizam struggle. Similar events took place in other parts of the country.
Tebhaga Struggle in Bengal
But in British India. They were no doubt encouraged by the fact that the Bengal Land Revenue
Commission, popularly known as the Floud Commission, had already made this recommendation
in its report to the government. The Hajong tribals were simultaneously demanding commutation
of their kind rents into cash rents. The tebhaga movement, led by the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha,
soon developed into a clash between jotedars and bargadars with the bargadars insisting on storing
the crop in their own khamars.

It was the tebhaga struggle in Bengal that held the limelight. In late 1946, the share-
croppers of Bengal began to assert that they would no longer pay a half share of
their crop to the jotedars but only one-third and that before division the crop would
be stored in their khamars (godowns) and not that of the jotedars.

The movement received a great boost in late January 1947 when the Muslim League Ministry led
by Suhrawardy published the Bengal Bargadars Temporary Regulation Bill in the Calcutta Gazette
on 22 January 1947. Encouraged by the fact that the demand for tebhaga could no longer be called
illegal, peasants in hitherto untouched villages and areas joined the struggle. In many places,
peasants tried to remove the paddy already stored in the jotedars’ khamars to their own, and this
resulted in innumerable clashes.
The jotedars appealed to the Government, and the police came in to suppress the peasants. Major
clashes ensued at a few places, the most important being the one at Khanpur in which twenty
peasants were killed. Repression continued and by the end of February the movement was virtually
dead. A few incidents occurred in March as well, but these were only the death pangs of a dying
struggle.
The Muslim League Ministry failed to pursue the bill in the Assembly and it was only in 1950 that
the Congress Ministry passed a Bargadars Bill which incorporated, in substance, the demands of
the movement.
The main centres of the movement were Dinajpur, Rangpur, Jalpaiguri, Mymensingh, Midnapore,
and to a lesser extent 24-Parganas and Khulna. Initially, the base was among the Rajbansi Kshatriya
peasants, but it soon spread to Muslims, Hajongs, Santhals and Oraons. Among the important
leaders of this movement were Krishnobinode Ray, Abani Lahiri, Sunil Sen, Bhowani Sen, Moni
Singh, Ananta Singh, Bhibuti Guha, Ajit Ray, Sushil Sen, Samar Ganguli, and Gurudas Talukdar.
Peasant Movements and National Movement
To draw up a balance sheet of such a diverse and varied struggle is no easy task, but it can be
asserted that perhaps the most important contribution of the peasant movements that covered
large areas of the subcontinent in the 30s and 40s was that even when they did not register
immediate successes, they created the climate which necessitated the post-Independence agrarian
reforms. Zamindari abolition, for example, did not come about as a direct culmination of any
particular struggle, but the popularization of the demand by the kisan sabha certainly contributed
to its achievement.
The immediate demands on which struggles were fought in the pre-Independence days were the
reduction of taxes, the abolition of illegal cesses or feudal levies and begar or vethi, the ending of
oppression by landlords and their agents, the reduction of debts, the restoration of illegally or
illegitimately seized lands, and security of tenure for tenants. Except in a few pockets like Andhra
and Gujarat, the demands of agricultural labourers did not really become part of the movement.

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