Peasant and Tribal Movements in Bihar: Notes and MCQs

Bihar's countryside revolted more often than almost any other province of British India, and for BPSC, BSSC and SSC papers its peasant and tribal movements are among the most asked chapters of the state's history. Two things made the land explosive: the Permanent Settlement of 1793, which fixed the revenue and left the zamindar free to squeeze the tenant, and the indigo plantations of north Bihar, where European planters held the countryside through leases. Note that the tribal uprisings described here took place in undivided Bihar; the Chotanagpur and Santhal Parganas tracts where they happened went to Jharkhand when it was separated in 2000.

The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917

In Champaran the planters enforced the tinkathia system, under which a tenant had to grow indigo on three kathas out of every twenty kathas, or one bigha, of his holding, and pay illegal cesses besides. When German synthetic dye destroyed the market for natural indigo, the planters forced the peasants to buy their way out of the obligation. Raj Kumar Shukla, a cultivator of Champaran, met Gandhi at the Lucknow session of the Congress in 1916 and persuaded him to come; Gandhi reached Champaran in April 1917, was ordered to leave Motihari, refused, and so began his first satyagraha in India. He recorded thousands of statements with Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, J. B. Kripalani and others, sat on the official enquiry committee that followed, and the result was the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918, which ended tinkathia.

The Kisan Sabha and the bakasht movement

Organised peasant politics in the province began with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, who founded the Bihar Pradesh Kisan Sabha in 1929 and became the first president of the All India Kisan Sabha, set up at Lucknow in April 1936, with N. G. Ranga as general secretary. Its great struggle was over bakasht land, the land that zamindars had taken into their own cultivation after evicting occupancy tenants during the depression of the 1930s. The campaign to get it restored, strongest between 1937 and 1939, was led by Karyanand Sharma in Monghyr, where the Barahiya Tal struggle was fought, and by Yadunandan Sharma in the Gaya and Shahabad country. A separate body, the Triveni Sangh of 1933, organised backward-caste tenants in the Shahabad region.

The tribal uprisings

The tribal tracts rose against outsiders, moneylenders and the new revenue system. The Kol uprising of 1831 and 1832 in Chotanagpur, led by Buddho Bhagat, followed the transfer of tribal land to outsiders, and was answered by the creation of the South-West Frontier Agency. The Santhal Hul of 1855 and 1856, raised in the Damin-i-Koh by the brothers Sidhu and Kanhu, with Chand and Bhairav beside them, was the largest; it was crushed with heavy loss of life, and the government then carved out the separate district of Santhal Parganas. The last and most famous was the Ulgulan of Birsa Munda in 1899 and 1900 in the Munda country, a rising against the destruction of the khuntkatti system of collective tribal land. Birsa, honoured as Dharti Aaba, was born on 15 November 1875 at Ulihatu and died in Ranchi jail on 9 June 1900; his movement led to the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, which recognised khuntkatti rights and ended forced labour. In 1914 Jatra Oraon began the Tana Bhagat movement, a non-violent refusal of rent and of liquor that later drew close to the Congress.

The movements at a glance

What the movements won

The gains were written into law, which is what examiners test. The Santhal Hul produced the administrative separation of Santhal Parganas in 1855; Birsa's Ulgulan produced the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908; Champaran produced the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918; and the Kisan Sabha's agitation kept tenancy reform on the agenda until the abolition of zamindari after independence. Birsa Munda's birthday, 15 November, has been observed as Janjatiya Gaurav Divas since it was so declared in 2021, and 30 June is remembered as Hul Diwas.