The Indian peasantry lacked revolutionary potential and were comparatively docile and passive in the face of poverty and oppression. Thus, peasant rebellions in India were ‘relatively rare and completely ineffective and where modernization impoverished the peasants as least as much as in China and over as long a period of time’. This view of the Indian peasant was challenged by many historians.
Kathleen Gough, in her article on ‘Indian Peasant Uprising’ (1974), counted 77 peasant revolts during the colonial period. Her conclusion is that ‘the smallest of which probably engaged several thousand peasants in active support or combat’. And the largest of these ‘is the “Indian Mutiny” of 1857-58, in which vast bodies of peasants fought or otherwise worked to destroy British rule over an area of more than 500,000 square miles’.
Ranajit Guha, in his book, states that ‘there are no fewer than 110 known instances of these even for the somewhat shorter period of 117 years – from the Rangpur dhing to the Birsaite uIgulati’. A.R.Desai is also against this view of the docility of the Indian peasantry and asserts that ‘the Indian rural scene during the entire British period and thereafter has been bristling with protests, revolts and even large scale militant struggles involving hundreds of villages and lasting for years’. It is, therefore, clear that, at least during the British period, the quiescence of the Indian peasantry is a myth and a large number of works explode this myth.
On Bengal, Suprakash Roy’s pioneering work in Bengali published in 1966, and translated into English as Peasant Revolts and Democratic Struggles in India (1999), looks at these revolts basically in terms of class struggles of peasants against the imperialist and landlords’ exploitation and oppression. He also linked these rebellions to the fight for a democratic polity in India. Muinuddin Ahmed Khan’s History of the Faraidi Movement in Bengal (1965) sought to interpret this peasant movement basically as a religious movement against the non-Muslim gentry.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
However, Narhari Kabiraj, in his A Peasant Uprising in Bengal (1972) and Wahabi and Farazi Rebels of Bengal (1982) refuted this thesis and emphasized on economic factors as the cause of the rebellion. His conclusion was that during this movement the ‘agrarian aspect took precedence over the communal one’. Blair King’s study of the indigo rebellion in Bengal also reaches the conclusion that it was a secular movement which combined all sections on Indian society.
Ranajit Guha views the Indigo rebellion differently and argues that there were contradictions between various sections of the peasantry. Some of the other important regional studies on peasant movements are: Girish Mishra’s study on Champaran movement, Agrarian Problems of Permanent Settlement: A Case Study of Champaran (1979), and Stephen Henning ham’s Peasant Movements in Colonial India, North Bihar, 1917-1942 (1982s Agrarian Unrest in North India: The United Provinces, 1918-32 (1978), and Kapil Kumar’s Peasants in Revolt: Tenants, Lanlords, Congress and the Raj in Oudh (1984) on U.R; works by Stephen Dale, Robert Hardgrave, Sukhbir Chaudhary and Conrad Wood on the Moplah rebellion in Malabar, Kerala. Apart from these there are also several works on peasant movements in other parts of India.