PEASANT rebellions and tribal revolts were the two main, often overlapping, expressions of resistance against British rule in the 18th and 19th centuries. Anthropologist Kathleen Gough has compiled a list of no less than 77 peasant uprisings during the British period.

The Sannyasi Rebellion that shook vast areas in Bengal and Bihar in the second half of eighteenth century was one of the earliest instances of peasant resistance against British rule. The introduction of Permanent Settlement saw the flame of peasant rebellion engulf the southern region of Tamil Nadu. Palayankottai near Tirunelveli was the epicentre of this massive upsurge led by Veerapandaya Kattabomman. Kattabomman questioned the very legitimacy of British tax claims: “The sky gives us water and land gives us crops, why should we then pay taxes to you?” The Wababi Uprising in Bengal led by Titu Meer and his peasant followers in early 1830s combined aspects of religious reform and peasant insurgency. On the eve of the First War of Independence in 1857, the Birbhum-Rajmahal-Bhagalpur section of the Bihar-Bengal border region witnessed the great Santhal Uprising against the extortionist alliance of the police, landlords, moneylenders and court officials. The names of Sidho and Kano, the legendary heroes of this uprising, as also of Baba Tilka Manjhi who led an earlier phase of Santhal rebellion in 1784-85, are still widely remembered in Eastern India.

Recent researches have also established the fact that the First War of Independence in 1857 had an unmistakably pronounced peasant content. British colonialism went on to win this war and consolidate its grip over India, but the fire of peasant insurgency and tribal revolts continued to simmer over large parts of the country. Between 1836 and 1919, the Malabar region of Kerala recorded 28 outbreaks of Moplah Rebellion. Despite misleading religious overtones, it was essentially a revolt of Muslim leaseholders and landless labourers against Hindu upper caste landlords and their British benefactors. In 1860s Bengal witnessed the popular Indigo Rebellion, peasants rebelling against the forcible introduction of indigo cultivation by British planters.

The hills of the Godavari Agency region in Andhra also reverberated to repeated outbursts of rebellion through the nineteenth century. The British-backed mansabdar's attempt to enhance taxes led to the outbreak of a major revolt in March 1879 over an area as vast as 5,000 square miles and it could be suppressed by November 1880 only with the use of six regiments of Madras infantry. The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was rocked by the legendary Ulgulan (Great Tumult) of Birsa Munda in the region south of Ranchi. At the heart of this great rebellion lay the popular tribal will to defend their traditional khuntkatti (joint holdings) rights and reject the imposition of beth begari (forced labour) by alien landlords.

It is true that most of these early peasant upsurges and tribal revolts were localised or at best regional affairs and not all-India campaigns. It is also true that these acts of rebellion were not propelled by any grand vision or conscious doctrine of a free and democratic modern India. Rather they were rooted in the appalling conditions of rural existence-persistence of famine or a near-famine situation, acute social oppression, feudal coercion and a reign of unmitigated loot and plunder by an alliance of powerful rural forces under the protective umbrella of British colonialism. No wonder, religious customs, tribal traditions and elements of caste, locality and a host of other pre-modern identities often overlapped and intermingled in these early expressions of popular unrest. Yet there was something very genuine and solid about these revolts, which stands out in sharp contrast to the politics of collaboration and measured opposition pursued by and large by the business and mercantile community as well as sections of the newly emerging middle class intelligentsia in the period which followed.

An Everlasting Disgrace

THIS is indeed a pretty state of things in a civilized army in the nineteenth century; and if any other troops had committed one-tenth of these excesses how would the indignant British press brand them with infamy. But these are the deeds of the British army, and therefore we are told that such things are but the normal consequences of war. ... The feet is, there is no army in Europe or America with so much brutality as the British. Plundering, violence, massacre – things that everywhere else are strictly and completely banished — are a time-honoured privilege, a vested right of the British soldier. ... For twelve days and nights there was no British army at Lucknow – nothing but a lawless, drunken, brutal rabble, dissolved into bands of robbers far more lawless, violent and greedy than the sepoys who had just been driven out of the place. The sack of Lucknow in 1858 will remain an everlasting disgrace to the British military service.

— Engels on the role of the British army in India in 1857