11 Indian Peasantry and the National Movement II

Manish Thakur

Introduction

In the last module, we saw as to how the Indian Constitution largely belonged to Ambedkar so far as his views on the village were concerned. However, this was not to be the total picture. Even now the echoes of the Gandhian nostalgia can be heard in the theory and practice of Gandhians and neo-Gandhians. In large measure, though, nationalists had accepted the portrayals of the village contained in colonial accounts as an article of faith. The nationalists’s formulations of the village did not highlight their direct knowledge and experience of the village life. Rather, their sense of the village rested firmly on the official knowledge generated by the British colonial rule.

At its most extreme, the nationalist position held that the pre-British village community, destroyed by the colonial administrative and economic frontiers, had not merely been integrated but had been a happy community. It was also asserted that it had been a republican community, and this assertion was usually interpreted to mean that it had been a democratic community. It is important to remember that both colonial and nationalist constructions of the village were too ideologically charged and politically motivated to stoop down to the level of empirical enquiries. As a consequence, they imparted to the village and the peasnts an intellectual and political salience which it did not have earlier. In this module, we offer you an overview of differing assessments of the interface between Indian peasantry and Indian national movement. This module tells you about the ways in which peasant politics got intermeshed with nationalist politics. It also looks at the implications of this intermeshing for both peasant politics and nationalism.

Peasants and Nationalism

One finds a definite congruence between the boundaries of influence of peasant movement and the national movement. In other words, there is less or negligible incidences of peasant resistance in areas not under the influence of Indian national movement. This makes it clear that the mobilisation of the peasantry was largely contingent upon the nationalist mobilisation. By mobilising the peasantry Indian national movement created a new political awareness and awakening among the peasants. In the process, Indian national movement also made peasants receptive to more radical or class-oriented ideas. Moreover, peasants provided political cadres and workers to the national movement. After all, for a colonial people, nationalism offers powerful elemental urge to fight united against a common enemy. On the contrary, class ideology has little chance of success if pitted against nationalism. Though there have been instances where class-based and nationalist mobilisations have gone hand-in-hand, most prominently in the case of Chinese revolution. These exceptions apart, nationalism has turned out to be an historically appropriate progressive ideology providing basis of unity and common struggle to different strata of peasantry that was divided on caste, religion, language, class and along similar other axes. In many countries, it has been seen that modern nationalist political consciousness acts as the precursor of class consciousness. In most cases, peasant political consciousness and nationalist consciousness emerge together in mutually constitutive ways. In fact, there is an organic and dialectical process binding the two, the common drive of both (nationalist and peasant political consciousness) being to reach out to each other.

Also, any understanding of the role of peasantry in revolutionary transformations in the modern world including the nationalist movements should move beyond an exclusive focus on their overt political behaviour. Through carefully detailed examination of the archival material, historians in India have demonstrated the transformation of the Indian peasant consciousness along anti-colonial, democratic and class lines. We will base this module on the study of peasants and their mobilisations by nationalist historians such as Mridula Mukherjee. We will also briefly draw upon the works of other historians.

In fact, analyses of peasant consciousness and political behaviour have disproportionately dwelt on their manifestations in the form of violent mass insurrections. Indeed, they have occasioned grandiloquent historiographical and sociological debates about the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and the unravelling of the nexus between peasant and nationalist revolutions. On the other hand, there have been studies highlighting the everyday acts of apolitical peasant resistance – the so-called ‘weapons of the weak’ approach. The advent of the Subaltern studies on the historiography scene has added another dimension to the on-going debate between the ‘heroic’ and ‘everyday’ of peasant resistance. In this module, we will steer clear of these historiographical extremes. Instead, we critically look at the role of peasantry in the Indian national movement in order to probe the making of an Indian peasant consciousness. We will make some general remarks about the actual political practices of Indian peasants. At times, we will refer to generalisations from other parts of the country and broader historiographical debate.

While anchoring the historiographical debate between class and nation in the political world of the peasants of Punjab (a major north Indian province), Mridula Mukherjee (2004) convincingly demonstrates the congruence of the boundaries of influence of the peasant and national movements. For the author, ‘the anti-imperialist movement created the initial political space in which peasant movement emerged by mobilising the peasantry into anti-imperialist political action, it created a new political awareness and awakening among them which made them receptive to the more radical or “class-oriented” ideas of peasant organisation and peasant struggles’ (p. 314). The organic relationship between peasant and nationalist movements is manifest in the overlapping political cadres and workers animating them simultaneously. In fact, ‘the ideology of class or economic struggle had no chance of success if it raged itself against nationalism’ (p. 318). No wonder, even communists’ success depended on their being good nationalists!

According to Mukherjee, peasants and nationalists were fired by a common desire to reach out to each other. In her reading, peasant movements in India, were, by and large, ideologically and organisationally linked to the Indian National Congress and, in that sense, were launched as part of the anti-colonial nationalist struggles. She assets that even as nationalists were striving to come out of the limitations of the hitherto moderate politics peasants too were looking beyond their numerous local autonomous sporadic struggles under the traditional leadership. In other words, there had been a dialectically reciprocal relationship between nationalism and peasantry.

Forms of Mobilisation

Peasants have been remarkably adept at the use of modern forms of politics – press, posters, meetings and pamphlets. Yet, the romantic notion of subaltern violence refuses to die down. Unjustifiably though, the use of violence has been equated with radical and revolutionary forms of peasant protest while non-violent means have been seen as sure signs of pro-landlord, pro-bourgeois and reactionary nature of the peasant movement. This dichotomisation between mass agitations and insurrections has been a staple of great many works on forms of peasant protest and mobilisation.

Of late, the Subaltern historians have further glorified the inherent rebelliousness of the subaltern classes. While refuting these binaries, Mukherjee posits a relationship between the character of the political struggles and the state and the forms of protest. The hegemonic/semi-hegemonic or autocratic/non-hegemonic nature of political struggles, and the strength and weaknesses of the state, largely determines the violent or non-violent articulation of the peasant protest. In the Indian context, ‘both the availability of political space within the semi-hegemonic political struggle as well as expediency and calculation of costs organically propelled the pm towards use of non-violent or non-insurrectionary forms of resistance and struggle’ (p. 382). According to Mukherjee, the ideas of democracy and republic (and, hence, non-violent mass character of the peasant movements) have found relatively easier acceptance among Indian peasants because the traditional functioning of the village landowning community was, at least in theory, on democratic lines. Mukherjee underlines the singular absence of the idea of ‘land to the tiller’, or any other constituent of modern anti-feudal consciousness, among Indian peasants. Peasants struggled more for restoration of their lost rights in land than the abolition of landlordism. Most of their struggles were oriented towards upholding their right to subsistence. Any threat to this right, be it the undue increase in land revenue, or illegal cesses and abwabs, or dispossession of traditional or customary rights in land, provoked widespread resistance.Interestingly, a close examination of the interface between the peasant and the nationalist movement also highlights the historic failure of the left-popular leadership to ideologically transform peasant consciousness along modern class-based politics. In doing so, it calls for a renewed assessment of the relative merits and viability of class and nation as sources of peasant mobilisations. This leads us, among other things, to the need for a clear distinction between peasant consciousness and consciousness of the peasant leadership. While peasants were more willing to struggle on issues that emanated from sanctioned tradition, past history, or notion of legitimacy, the leadership was apparently engaged in organising peasant resistance along nationalist lines. As a matter of fact, one comes across considerable similarity in the demands and issues raised by similar strata of peasantry all over India.

The remarkable absence of wage struggles, food riots, and the looting of bazaars and haats (weekly markets) is another noteworthy characteristic of the Indian peasant movement. Even when violence has not been a prerogative of the subaltern, one finds some sort of nationalist regulation of peasant violence. Very often, one comes across the popular idea of backward level of class and political consciousness among the peasants, something that historians have refuted. One also notes the failure of the peasants, except occasionally, to throw up insiders as leaders. The very subalternity of the vast mass of the Indian peasantry, their backwardness and deprivation, had made it historically imperative that the initiative for organisation and mobilisation and leadership would either come from outsiders or insiders who had exposure to the outside world. In this sense, travel and education played a key role in providing leadership to peasant movements and according them a well-articulated political consciousness beyond subaltern insurgency and everyday resistance. One finds an interesting set of people among the leaders of the peasant movements – moneylenders, rich peasants, government officials, ex-terrorists and non-Gandhian urban political workers, nationalist upper layers of rural society, and the radicalised sections of intelligentsia, monks and the literate peasants. One also finds village as the basic unit of politicisation and participation as a cohesive social unit.

The poor and the low-caste members generally did not participate in the nationalist mobilisation of the peasants. The definition of village did not include them. Mukherjee writes, ‘there was hardly any political participation in any political movement by those at the lowest end of social and economic scale, the low castes agricultural labourers and artisans’ (2004: 455). On the other hand, the Communists’ economic struggle had blinded them to the possibilities for political work for removing social disabilities and introducing new elements into their traditional consciousness.

At the same time, colonial state played a crucial part in shaping peasant identity and politics including peasant activism (Robb 2008). Taking agrarian policies as his point of departure, Peter Robb discounts the possibility of an unambiguous class identity for cultivators. While detailing the context wherein the colonial state entered the indigenous setting with far-reaching legal and administrative changes, he finds the discourse of the peasant and the organised peasant protest as contingent upon this encounter if not totally derivative of it. In his reading, the collective experience of the new laws and new rights laid down the conditions for the emergence of peasant associations. The latter were not simply caste associations by other name. Instead, they had emergent anti-landlord rhetoric and an armoury of tenancy rights. In other words, social categories were of mixed basis. Caste, tenure, occupation fused together without any one of them being decisive. It was this fusion and the increasing awareness to a discourse of rights that facilitated an easy reception among the peasantry to the not-so-original diagnoses of peasant conditions by peasant leaders like Swami Sahajanand Saraswati.

According to him, ‘very little would have been possible except under the circumstances that colonialism helped create – especially the access to intellectual trends, theories and methods, some of it through the English language’ (2008: 50). Arguably, Robb credits colonial rule for making available a different vocabulary to Indians agitating for agrarian and other rights. Here, official categorisations and policies become privileged sites engendering contested politics of rights and the consolidation of interest-constellations as well as their organised articulations.

Put it differently, in Robb’s reckoning, peasant mobilisation is essentially linked to the evolution of the state and its standardisations, the emergence of new institutions, professions and expectations, the growth, increased spread and reduced cost of communications, through transport, language and print, the increasingly shared economic and political experiences, the awareness of western ideas in relation to individual or equitable rights. Not only colonial rhetoric emphasised given identities of language, tribe, caste or community, and British policies helped define class interests, pre-colonial inheritances equally channelled western influence. After all, European categorisations were not inscribed on a clean slate but had to contend with a set of historically enduring social relations.

Majid H. Siddiqi (2008) too examines the interpenetration of peasant movements and nationalist politics. He underlines the point that the complexity of the character of Indian nation is linked to the complexity of agrarian struggles that underpinned it. What is striking for him is that most of the peasant movements in some way represented anti-landlord tendencies in the colonial agrarian society. However, there is historical evidence that poor peasant protests have strengthened rentier structures as well. At times, anti-moneylender riots have stood opposed to the nationalist political idiom, and movements under a communist leadership have served to strengthen the domination of the rich peasants. More importantly, many a peasant movements have reinforced, at a remove, even the post-colonial state. In his panoramic survey of peasant protests, Siddiqi foregrounds a set of disconcerting questions. For example, lack of common leadership for various instances of peasant protest has been one of the abiding features of peasant politics in India. Except for the All India Kisan Sabha (1936), no organisation ever spoke for the entire Indian peasantry and, as a consequence, peasant demands hardly had an all-India character. Sure enough, the very specificity of each local variant of the agrarian structure as well as the sheer diversity of peasant communities in India led to lack of any generalised acceptance of their programme. Siddiqi puts it pithily, ‘the ideological distance between the ultimate act of Zamindari abolition (and other land reforms of the 1950s) and the series of peasant agitations over a hundred years of British rule was never bridged’ (p. 64).

Evidently, there is the urgent need to disaggregate the story of peasant struggles and to undertake an evaluation of the cultural moorings of peasant leadership. Siddiqi’s own past historical research has shown that peasant leadership came from the ranks of the mofussil middle classes and from elements déclassé. Much of this leadership had tenuous links with the institutional forms of the modern state. This culturally heterogeneous and socially stratified leadership stood on a rural-urban continuum in its many manifestations and was strategically relevant to the peasantry. It was this ‘rurban’ intelligentsia who produced mobilisational literature for the peasantry. It was they who helped shape peasant demands and who represented peasant interests in the nationalist press to integrate the little traditions of peasantry with Indian nationalism.

Yet, the leadership’s reinforcement of culture and community served to widen the distance between town and country and furthered the ideological disarticulation of Indian politics locally. Very often, processes of political mobilisation did not respond to the secular formulae of class struggle. Even when some form of social class alignments were present in peasant protests, much of the mobilisation was the consequence of those features of Indian society which in their customary rooting did not share the modernity of the urban social contract. One does not fail to notice the differences in approach between Robb and Siddiqi. For the latter, the pervasiveness of religious beliefs by way of invoking the sanction of village deities for protest initiatives, the frequent recourse to caste-based sanctions for violation of food taboos for enlisting the wider support and participation of caste members, deification of Gandhi, regard of the laity for the renouncer and the ascetic as their leaders are evidence enough of the temporally disjunctive character of the peasant leadership. The overlapping of religious beliefs and symbols with the social identity of the community and caste provided many of the symbols for protest in places as different as Uttar Pradesh (1918-22), Bardoli (1928), Bihar (1920-35), Bengal (1938-47). In Malabar (1836-1921), Islam was a source of cohesion among the poor peasantry and for the linking up of this community with the urban-based sabhas of the richer Muslims.Steering clear of the rhetoric of the Marxian left which celebrated peasant radicalism and eulogised its ascendance as a prelude to revolutionary upheavals, Siddiqi engages with the problematic of the writing of peasant history where contemporary concerns can no longer be read back into peasant history. More importantly, he attempts to bridge the disjunction between the past before Independence and the years since with a view to reformulate historical categories. Not surprisingly, he gestures towards tracing the roots of peasant populism and their cynical manipulation through electoral politics in Independent India in the historically evolving character of peasant leadership. True, the historicity of peasant insurgency in modern India has come full circle. To quote Siddiqi, ‘the deeper sinews of community economy, traditional moralities, and customary bindings have transmuted through land reform and in a strange marriage with the social contract of political democracy into becoming a mix of casteist movements, communal politics and class struggles’ (p. 64). To gain perspective on this legacy remains a serious challenge for the historiography of peasant movements in India both before and after Independence. The issue is not merely that the ‘progressive’ peasant movements of yesteryear have turned conservative, both politically and socially. It also begs the question as to how in the past fifty-sixty years the character of the nation itself has undergone change. Drawing upon its jawan and kisan, this nation has no qualms in crushing militant radical movements of the rural poor and tribals.

According to Harold A Gould, in terms of political expression, peasant ideologies and mobilisation styles present a melange of both modern and nativist and chiliastic characteristics. In fact, these characteristics resonated well with the Mahatma’s symbolism and traditional imagery of Ram Raj which had historically legitimised collective action among the peasantry. Agrarian discontent of this half-way house variety offered enough room for selective co-optation and ideological manipulation that marked the Congress Party’s interface with agrarian unrest in the Gandhian phase. The way the Congress ‘roped the peasantry in’ (2008: 79) may have loosened its hold over the latter had the Congress Socialist faction not forced the party to at least tacitly adopt a semblance of a Marxist orientation to peasant mobilisation. In fact, Gould’s use of the expression ‘babas, non-co-operators and revolutionaries’ (2008: 79), assumes that tenants had class-driven concerns whereas the Congress leadership had nationalist concerns. Be that as it may, Marxist millennium was never on the political agenda of the cultivating elite and middle castes who were more interested in obtaining legal titles to the lands they cultivated as tenants of different sorts. Of course, local level elections opened up the class cleavages based on status discrepancies between high-caste and middle-caste cultivators and they percolated upward through the political system by way of democratic use of the power of ethnic solidarity and numbers. Middle castes owner-cultivators finally did succeed in challenging the authority of the long-entrenched upper-caste establishments.

Charan Singh was the principal architect of the middle caste reclassification who frequently made use of the class attributes of the middle castes as an increasingly self-conscious basis for differential political mobilisation. In the words of Gould, ‘in the culturally multiplex world of Indian society, interest-based mobilisation, howsoever universalistic, can hardly avoid enmeshment in the particularising power of the ethnically structured social formation that prowl the country’s democratically structured political arenas’ (2008: 102). Expectedly, no single uniform ‘class thesis’ can provide a basis to account for variations in social context, historical time and systematic economic factors in a large and diversified country like ours. At most, one can discern certain common threads running through the historical manifestations of agrarian unrest. For example, caste hierarchies have everywhere correlated with differing relationships to the means of production: ‘land controllers have been concentrated in the higher castes, small-scale cultivators and tenantries have come from middle range castes, and landless labourers have come from the lower castes” (2008: 103). Depending on the regional agrarian system and culture, details would vary but the underlying structural relationships have always had the potential for class formation and class conflict. And, such relationships have embodied inequities in wealth, social condition and status deprivation reaching critical levels of intolerability. But, we know that mere intolerability of conditions does not lead to protest and mobilisations. Other critical features go into its making and they have been issues of scholarly debates and perspectival and ideological stances.

On the contrary, William R. Pinch underlines the need to accord more attention to religion and religious belief for a fuller understanding of what empire meant to the individuals who lived it. He contests the recent post-colonial depictions of British India as a site of unidirectional mental colonisation by a rationalising scientific empire on a pliable, pre-modern Orient. For him, religious culture offers us a peep into the world of peasant mobilisations. This is in synch with his overall emphasis on reading Bhakti into British Indian History. In his framework, British-Indian experience cannot be reduced to colonial antipathy enacted in racism, violence, anxiety and displacement. He joins issue with the mainstream historiography of colonialism that discounts Indian participation in empire and fails to acknowledge that British India was more of an imperial than colonial entity.

James R. Hagen (2008) looks at the environmental contexts of food and agrarian relations in the Gangetic plain where biomass depletion and arable expansion were marked by a continuing supply of cultivable lands. As the availability of these increasingly marginal soils came to an end toward the end of the nineteenth century, the stark picture of rural social distress began to appear. In his reckoning, limits to biomass abundant extensive agriculture made the Gangetic middle region the epicentre and most active area of peasant-land conflict in South Asia. And thus, peasant protests and mobilisations would have taken place with or without the nationalist appropriation of the peasant cause.

Conclusion

A scholarly analysis of the relationship between the peasantry and the Indian national movement brings several issues to the fore – class contradictions within the peasantry and their multiple identifications including caste and religion, the question of peasant leadership and its cultural and religious correlates, aspects of commerce and commercialisation, agrarian struggles, religious beliefs and practices, artisanship and human ecology, and the place of peasants in the colonial-imperial epistemology. Peasant politics and its nationalist articulation have been tied up with the issue of land in endless permutation and combinations of the historically evolving tenurial regimes. Nationalist movement certainly facilitated the scaling up of the much-debated terrain of peasant politics and unleashed new forms of possibilities for a variety of peasant mobilisations.

References and Further Readings

• Bhattacharya, Neeladri. 1992. ‘Colonial State and Agrarian Society’, in Burton Stein. (ed.). The Making of   Agrarian Policy in British India, 1770-1900 (Themes in Indian History). Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 113-49.
• Brass, Tom. 2000. Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth.
• London: Frank Cass Publishers.
• Hobsbawam, Eric J., W. Kula, Ashok Mitra, K. N. Raj and Ignacy Sachs. (eds.). 1980. Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner. Calcutta: Oxford University Press.
• Kumarappa, J. C. 1958. Why the Village Movement?(sixth edition). Wardha: Akhil Bharat Sarva Seva Sangh.
• Mukherjee, Mridula. 2004. Peasants in India’s Non-violent Revolution: Theory and Practice. NewDelhi: Sage Publications.
• Pinch, William R. 2008. Speaking of Peasants Essays on Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser. New Delhi: Manohar.
• Pouchepadass, Jacques. 1999. Champaran and Gandhi: Planters, Peasants and Gandhian Politics. Delhi: xford University Press; in Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1, October 2002, pp. 183-188.
• Robb, Peter. (ed.). 1983. ‘Introduction: Land and Society: The British Transformation in India’, in Peter Robb. (ed.). Rural India: Land, Power and Society Under British Rule. London and
• Dublin: Curzon Press, pp. 1-22.