Colonialism and the Countryside

When the British took control of India, one of their first concerns was land revenue. This was the tax on agriculture that would fund their rule. The systems they imposed transformed the countryside. They often impoverished peasants, enriched moneylenders, and sowed the seeds of rural anger. This story of colonialism and the countryside is vital to understanding both British rule and India's freedom struggle.

In 1793, in Bengal, the British introduced the Permanent Settlement. Under it:

• the zamindars were made the owners of the land,
• they had to pay a fixed revenue to the British permanently, and
• if they failed to pay on time, their estates were sold.

The demand was high and rigid. Many zamindars could not pay and lost their lands. The peasants who actually farmed the soil gained nothing and remained burdened. The fixed demand also meant the British missed out as agriculture later grew.

The British used different systems in different regions:

• the Ryotwari system (in Bombay and Madras), where revenue was collected directly from the cultivators (ryots). They were treated as owners but faced heavy, individually-assessed taxes, and
• the Mahalwari system (in the north-west), where revenue was assessed on the village (mahal) as a whole.

In all of them the revenue demand was usually high and inflexible. It was collected even in years of poor harvest, pushing peasants into debt.

The pressure of colonial revenue had harsh effects. To pay their taxes, peasants borrowed from moneylenders. They fell into deepening debt and often lost their land. Resentment grew against both the colonial state and the moneylenders.

This anger sometimes exploded into revolts. A famous example is the Deccan Riots of 1875. Peasants in western India rose up against moneylenders and destroyed the debt records (bonds) that trapped them. Such uprisings revealed how colonial land policies had devastated rural life. These grievances would later feed the wider national movement.

The Deccan Riots were only one episode in a much longer story of rural resistance. Revolts broke out across regions and decades, against the state, the planters, the landlords, and the moneylenders.

Resistance began early. In late-eighteenth-century Bengal, wandering Hindu ascetics (sanyasis) and Muslim mendicants (fakirs) clashed with the Company's new order in what is called the Sanyasi rebellion (with its companion Fakir rebellion). A century later it gained literary fame. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Anand Math was inspired by this rebellion, and the song Vande Mataram comes from that novel.

European planters in Bengal forced peasants to grow indigo, the plant that yielded a prized blue dye. The planters gave loans (advances) that bound the cultivators to the crop. Prices paid were low, and indigo exhausted the soil that could have grown rice. In 1859–60 the cultivators of Bengal refused to sow indigo and resisted the planters. This was the Indigo Revolt. The planters' system never recovered in Bengal and shifted to Bihar. The final blow came from science. By the early twentieth century the invention of synthetic indigo dye had made natural indigo unprofitable in the world market, and the cultivation collapsed.

Tribal communities rose against the same pressures of revenue, moneylenders, and outsiders taking their land.

• Santhal Hul (1855–56): the Santhals of the Rajmahal hills region rebelled against moneylenders, traders, and the colonial state. The rising was crushed, but it forced a change of policy. The British carved out a separate territory, the Santhal Parganas, and passed a law making it illegal for a Santhal to transfer land to a non-Santhal.
• Birsa Munda's revolt (1899–1900): the Mundas of Chhotanagpur (in present-day Jharkhand, then part of Bihar) rose under Birsa Munda against British rule and landlord exploitation. The uprising was called Ulgulan, the Great Tumult.

Exams often ask which revolt belongs to which region. Fix these pairs:

• Indigo Revolt (1859–60): Bengal, by indigo cultivators against European planters.
• Pabna agrarian revolt (1873–76): Bengal, by peasants against oppressive zamindars.
• Deccan Riots (1875): western India (Maharashtra), against moneylenders.
• Moplah (Mappila) revolt: Kerala (Malabar), by Mappila tenants against landlords.
• Eka movement (1921–22): Awadh in the United Provinces, by peasants against high rents.
• Tebhaga movement (1946–47): Bengal, by sharecroppers. They demanded two-thirds (tebhaga) of the crop, cutting the landlord's share from one-half to one-third.

The mid-nineteenth century packed its great upheavals close together. Keep the order straight: the Santhal Rebellion (1855–56) came first, then the Sepoy Mutiny (1857), then the Indigo Revolt (1859–60), and finally the Deccan Riots (1875).