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Unit 8: Peasant Movements

• Forced conversions, attacks on and murders of Hindus increased as the sense of desperation Notes
mounted. What had been largely an anti-government and anti-landlord affair acquired strong
communal overtones.
• The toll was heavy indeed: 2,337 Mappilas had lost their lives. Unofficial estimates placed
the number at above 10,000. A total of 45,404 rebels were captured or had surrendered. But
the toll was in fact even heavier, though in a very different way. From then onwards, the
militant Mappilas were so completely crushed and demoralized that till independence their
participation in any form of politics was almost nil. They neither joined the national movement
nor the peasant movement that was to grow in Kerala in later years under the Left leadership.
• In Avadh, in the early months of 1921 when peasant activity was at its peak, it was difficult
to distinguish between a Non-cooperation meeting and a peasant rally.
• This divergence between the actions and perceptions of peasants and local leaders and the
understanding of the national leaders had often been interpreted as a sign of the fear of the
middle class or bourgeois leadership that the movement would go out of its own ‘safe’ hands
into that of supposedly more radical and militant leaders of the people.
• Their advice that peasants should not push things too far with the landlords by refusing to
pay rent could also stem from other considerations. The peasants themselves were not
demanding abolition of rent or landlordism, they only wanted an end to ejectments, illegal
levies, and exorbitant rents
• The no tax movement that was launched in Bardoli taluq of Surat district in Gujarat in 1928
was also in many ways a child of the Non-cooperation days. Bardoli taluq had been selected
in 1922 as the place from where Gandhiji would launch the civil disobedience campaign
• The relationship of Bardoli and other peasant struggles with the struggle for freedom can
best be described in Gandhiji’s pithy words: ‘Whatever the Bardoli struggle may be, it clearly
is not a struggle for the direct attainment of swaraj. That every such awakening, every such
effort as that of Bardoli will bring swaraj nearer and may bring it nearer even than any direct
effort is undoubtedly true.
• The Civil Disobedience Movement was launched in this atmosphere of discontent in 1930,
and in many parts of the country it soon took on the form of a no-tax and no-rent campaign.
• The Civil Disobedience Movement contributed to the emerging peasant movement in another
very important way; a whole new generation of young militant, political cadres was born
from its womb.
• The culmination was the establishment of the All-India Kisan Congress in Lucknow in April
1936 which later changed its name to the All-India Kisan Sabha. Swami Sahajanand, the
militant founder of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (1929), was elected the President, and
N.G. Ranga, the pioneer of the kisan movement in Andhra and a renowned scholar of the
agrarian problem, the General Secretary.
• At Faizpur, in Maharashtra, along with the Congress session, was held the second session of
the All India Kisan Congress presided over by N.G. Ranga.
• The formation of Congress Ministries in a majority of the provinces in early 1937 marked the
beginning of a new phase in the growth of the peasant movement.
• In Malabar, in Kerala, for example, a powerful peasant movement developed as the result of
the efforts mainly of CSP activists, who had been working among the peasants since 1934,
touring villages and setting up Karshaka Sanghams (peasant associations).
• The Karshaka Sanghams also organized a powerful campaign around the demand for amending
the Malabar Tenancy Act of 1929. The 6th of November, 1938 was observed as the Malabar
Tenancy Act Amendment Day, and meetings all over the district passed a uniform resolution
pressing the demand.
• 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.

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