An important impact of British rule on rural India was the far-reaching changes in Indian agrarian structure. The old agrarian system gradually collapsed under new administrative innovations. The new land tenures created new types of land ownership. New social classes emerged in rural India.

Land became a marketable commodity. The excessive state land revenue demand and exactions of the zamindars drove the peasant into the clutches of the moneylender and the trader. Absence landlordism, parasitical intermediaries, the avaricious moneylender-all combined to push the peasant deeper into the depth of poverty. A massive process of pauperization and proletarianzation began and created a new category of agricultural proletariat. The peasant had to face oppression at the hands of not only foreign but indigenous exploiters and capitalists also.

In the 19th century peasant mobilizations were in the nature of protests, revolts and rebellions primarily aimed at loosening the bonds of feudal exploitation; they protested against enhancement of rent, evictions, usurious practices of moneylenders; their demands included occupancy rights, commutation of produce rent into money rent etc. In the absence of class consciousness of proper organizations the peasant revolts did not develop a political matrix.

The 20th century, witnessed the emergence of class consciousness and formation of peasant organizations like the Kisan Sabhas. In the decade preceding the advent of independence the Kisan Sabhas increasingly came under the spell of left political parties like the congress Socialist Party and the Communist Party of India.

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Recurring Famines and Peasants:

The most prominent fact of India history during the second half of the 19th century was the recurrence of famines and large-scale starvation deaths of workers and peasants. During this period 24 famines, bit and small, affected various parts of the country and took an estimated toll of 25.5 million soles.

The great famines of 1876-78, 1896-97 and 1899-1900 and the large-scale morality revealed the cumulative effect of oppressive land policies. Scarcity and famine conditions created law and order problem in the countryside, striking terror into the hearts of not only the rural rich but the townsmen and even the local officials.

The Famine Commissions of 1880, 1898 and 1901 made recommendations which revealed that by and large the famine relief system was “devised not so much with any laudable philanthropic sentiments as by the anxiety of the government to protect the institution of property and slave off the growing threat to the established order.”

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Right from the beginning of the 19th century many retired officers of the East India Company and some upstarts who had earlier been slave traders in America acquired land from Indian zamindars in Bihar and Bengal and began large-scale cultivation of indigo.

These planters committed great abuses and oppressions on the cultivators in the process of forcing them to grow indigo crop under terms which were the least profitable to them. In April 1860 all the cultivators of the Barasat subdivision and in the districts of Patna and Nadia resorted to, what may be called, the first general strike in the history of Indian peasantry. They refused to sow any indigo. The strike spread to Jessore, Khulna, Rajasthan, and Dacca, Malda, Dinajpur and other places in Bengal.

Faced with such solid unity and determination and apprehending a great agrarian uprising, the Government ordered a notification to be issued enjoining on the police to protect the riot in the possession of his lands, on which he was at liberty to sow any crop he liked, without interference on the part of the planter of anyone else.

The planter could, if he liked, without interference on the part of the planter of anyone else. The planter could, if he liked, move the civil court for breach of contract. An indigo Commission was also appointed in 1860. Its recommendations were embodied in Act VI of 1862. The Bengal indigo planters developed cold feet and gradually moved out to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

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The Indian National Congress, to begin with at least, worked as a joint venture of British imperialists and the Indian bourgeoisie and could not be expected to champion the cause of the oppressed peasants. The Congress year after year passed resolutions on the existence of Indian poverty but the methods it suggested smacked of class interest; it asked for extension of Permanent Settlement to different parts of India and restrictions on over assessment where Permanent Settlement could not be introduced, Indianisation of public services, State help for industrialization, abolition of salt tax etc. but never officially demanded tenancy reforms in Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Assam, Madras, the U.P., C.P. or the Punjab.

R.C. Dutt’s Open’s Letters to Curzon on famines and land assessments in India were, consciously or unconsciously, more calculated to espouse the interests of the Indian landlords than the Indians peasants. Curzon’s sarcastic dig at R.C. Dutta that the Government had done to protect the tenants from the rapacity of the zamindars than the Indian National Congress remained unanswered.

Gandhiji and Peasant Struggles:

Gandhiji’s entry into Indian politics marked a change into the politico-economic life of India. In his anxiety to broaden the social base of the Congress he carried his message to the villages and sought to involve the peasants in the nationalist struggle.