Peasant Movements in India, Tribal Risings, Workers and Women in the Freedom Struggle

Why Peasants, Tribals, Workers and Women Joined the National Movement

Colonial Grievances Behind the Mass Movements

Colonial rule pressed on each of these groups in a different way, and their grievances were older than the Gandhian phase. In the countryside the burden was rent and revenue. In Awadh the talukdars and landlords demanded high rents and many other cesses, tenants had no security of tenure, and peasants had to perform begar, labour that villagers were forced to give without payment. In Gujarat the burden was the land revenue that the government itself collected and revised at each periodic resettlement.

The nineteenth century had already seen peasants rise against such pressure:

• Indigo Revolt, 1859‑1860: The indigo cultivators of Bengal, beginning in the Nadia district, refused to grow indigo for the European planters.
• Pabna Uprising, 1873‑1876: The ryots of the Yusufshahi pargana of Pabna in Bengal, now Sirajganj district in Bangladesh, resisted zamindars who enhanced rents and tried to stop them gaining occupancy rights.

Forest communities lost their livelihood when the colonial government closed large forest areas to grazing and to the collection of fuelwood and fruit. Factory and plantation workers faced long hours and low wages, and the tea-garden workers of Assam could not leave their gardens without permission under the Inland Emigration Act of 1859. Most women were kept out of public life altogether, many in the seclusion of the home and some in purdah, so that the national movement offered them a first public role.

Gandhi's Method and the Many Meanings of Swaraj

Gandhi's method gave these scattered grievances a national frame. His first campaigns in India, at Champaran, Kheda and Ahmedabad in 1917 and 1918, took up the cause of plantation peasants, revenue-paying peasants and mill workers, and showed that satyagraha could serve each of them. When the Non-Cooperation Movement began in 1921, the response went far beyond the towns. There were 396 strikes in 1921, involving about six lakh workers and a loss of 70 lakh workdays; hill tribes in northern Andhra broke the forest laws; farmers in Awadh did not pay taxes; and peasants in Kumaun refused to carry loads for colonial officials.

For the plantation workers of Assam, swaraj meant the right to move freely in and out of the gardens and to keep a link with their home villages; thousands left the plantations believing that Gandhi Raj was coming and that everyone would be given land. For the hill people of the Gudem hills it meant the return of their forest rights. These movements often went beyond what the Congress approved, yet when peasants and tribals acted in Gandhi's name they were also joining an all-India struggle that reached far beyond their own locality.

Peasant Movements in India from the Kisan Sabhas to Bardoli (1918‑1928)

Kisan Sabhas of the United Provinces and Baba Ramchandra

The first organised peasant movement of the Gandhian phase grew in the United Provinces, where the talukdars of Awadh held great power over the land. The UP Kisan Sabha was formed in Lucknow in February 1918 by Gauri Shankar Misra and Indra Narain Dwivedi, with the support of Madan Mohan Malaviya, and by June 1919 it had 450 branches. The tenants of the United Provinces faced high rents, summary evictions (bedakhali), illegal levies and renewal fees, and the price rise of the First World War made their condition worse.

Baba Ramchandra, a sanyasi who had earlier been to Fiji as an indentured labourer, became the leader of the Awadh peasants. In June 1920 Jawaharlal Nehru began going round the villages of Awadh to understand their grievances, and by October 1920 the Oudh Kisan Sabha (Awadh Kisan Sabha) had been set up, headed by Nehru, Baba Ramchandra and a few others. Within a month it had over 300 branches. Its programme had three parts:

• Revenue: A reduction of revenue.
• Forced labour: The abolition of begar.
• Social boycott: A boycott of oppressive landlords, enforced by panchayats through nai-dhobi bandhs that denied them even the services of barbers and washermen.

When the Non-Cooperation Movement spread in 1921, the movement took forms the Congress leadership disliked. Houses of talukdars and merchants were attacked, bazaars looted and grain hoards seized, often with the claim that Gandhi had declared that no taxes were to be paid. On 6 January 1921 the police fired on peasants near Rae Bareli. Repression, and the passing of the Awadh Rent (Amendment) Act, brought the movement to an end.

Eka Movement and the Mappila Rebellion of 1921

Peasant discontent surfaced again towards the end of 1921 in Hardoi, Bahraich and Sitapur, districts in the north of Awadh. This was the Eka Movement, or Unity Movement. Its grievances were rents about 50 per cent higher than the recorded rates, the oppression of the thekedars who collected the rent, and the practice of share-rents. At Eka meetings the peasants vowed, in a religious ritual, to pay only the recorded rent but pay it on time, not to leave when evicted, to refuse forced labour, to give no help to criminals and to abide by panchayat decisions.

The movement began under Congress and Khilafat workers, but its leadership passed to Madari Pasi and other grassroots leaders of low castes, with many small zamindars who resented the land revenue. Madari Pasi was not inclined to accept non-violence, and the movement lost the support of the Congress. Severe repression ended it by March 1922.

In Malabar, the Mappilas (also written Moplahs), the Muslim tenants of the region, had long resented their landlords over insecure tenure, high rents and renewal fees. Their movement merged with the Khilafat agitation, and in August 1921 a rebellion broke out in the Eranad and Valluvanad taluks of south Malabar. It began against the symbols of colonial authority and unpopular landlords, but under martial law and repression it took on communal overtones, which isolated the Mappilas from the Non-Cooperation Movement.

Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 and Vallabhbhai Patel

The most successful peasant campaign of the decade took place in Bardoli, a taluka of Surat district in Gujarat. When the revenue resettlement of 1926 raised the land revenue sharply, local workers such as Narhari Parikh, Ravi Shankar Vyas and Mohanlal Pandya asked Vallabhbhai Patel to lead the peasants. The Bardoli Satyagraha began on 12 February 1928. Gandhi gave it his blessing, but he and Patel agreed that the Congress would not be directly involved and that the struggle would belong to the people of the taluka.

Patel organised the satyagraha with care:

• Refusal of revenue: The peasants refused to pay the enhanced assessment until an independent tribunal looked into it.
• Zones and volunteers: The taluka was divided into zones, each with a leader and volunteers.
• Discipline: The peasants were told to remain strictly non-violent whatever the provocation.
• Social boycott and women: Those who broke ranks faced a social boycott, and special attention was given to mobilising women.

By August 1928 the government looked for a way out. Confiscated lands were restored, and the Maxwell-Broomfield inquiry found the increase unjustified and allowed a rise of only 6.03 per cent. NCERT records that Gandhi bestowed on Patel the title of Sardar after Bardoli; other accounts say the women of Bardoli first called him Sardar.

Kisan Sabha Movement and Peasant Struggles of the 1930s

Great Depression, Civil Disobedience and No-Rent Campaigns

The Great Depression that began in 1929 brought a new wave of peasant unrest. As the prices of commercial crops fell, rich peasant communities such as the Patidars of Gujarat and the Jats of Uttar Pradesh could no longer pay the revenue demand, and they became enthusiastic supporters of the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930. For them swaraj meant a struggle against high revenue. They were deeply disappointed when the movement was called off in 1931 without any revision of revenue rates, and many stayed away when it was restarted in 1932.

The poorer peasants wanted more. Many were small tenants who could not pay their rent as cash incomes shrank, and they wanted the unpaid rent remitted. They joined radical movements, often led by Socialists and Communists. The Congress, unwilling to upset the rich peasants and landlords, refused to support no-rent campaigns in most places, so the relationship between the poor peasantry and the Congress remained uncertain. In many regions forest people also broke the forest laws during Civil Disobedience, entering reserved forests to collect wood and graze cattle.

All India Kisan Sabha of 1936 and the Kisan Manifesto

The Kisan Sabha movement of the 1930s grew from Bihar, where Swami Sahajanand Saraswati formed the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha in 1929 to defend tenants against zamindari attacks on their occupancy rights. As the movement spread, the All India Kisan Sabha was founded at Lucknow in April 1936, with Sahajanand Saraswati as its president and N. G. Ranga as general secretary. The Kisan Manifesto, released in August 1936, demanded the abolition of the zamindari system and the cancellation of rural debts, and the Congress manifesto for the provincial elections of 1937 was strongly influenced by its agenda.

The years from 1937 to 1939, under the Congress ministries, were a high point of peasant activity, carried on through kisan conferences and village campaigns:

• Malabar: Peasants organised in Karshak Sanghams campaigned in 1938 for the amendment of the Malabar Tenancy Act of 1929.
• Andhra: N. G. Ranga had set up the India Peasants' Institute in 1933, and Congress Socialists organised the peasants after 1936.
• Bihar: Sahajanand Saraswati led the Bakasht Movement of 1937‑1938 against the eviction of tenants by zamindars from bakasht (self-cultivated) land, and the Kisan Sabha fell out with the Congress over the issue.
• Punjab: The Punjab Kisan Committee of 1937 took up the resettlement of land revenue and the rise in water rates in the canal colonies.

The Second World War divided the movement. When the Communists, who had taken control of the All India Kisan Sabha by 1942, supported the war as a people's war, leaders such as Sahajanand Saraswati, Indulal Yagnik and N. G. Ranga left it, and the Sabha stayed away from the Quit India Movement.

Post-War Peasant Upsurges: Tebhaga, Telangana and Punnapra-Vayalar

Tebhaga Movement of 1946‑1947 in Bengal

The Tebhaga movement was a struggle of the sharecroppers of Bengal in 1946 and 1947 to reduce the landlord's share of the crop from one half to one third. The word tebhaga means sharing by thirds. The sharecropper, called a bargadar, would keep two thirds of the harvest instead of one half. The Bengal Land Revenue Commission, popularly called the Floud Commission, had already recommended this change.

In September 1946 the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha, the peasant front of the Communist Party, called for tebhaga to be enforced through mass struggle. Its slogan, "nij khamare dhan tolo", asked sharecroppers to take the paddy to their own threshing floor instead of the jotedar's house, so that the crop would be divided there. The movement was strongest in north Bengal, especially among the Rajbanshis, and in the Kakdwip and Namkhana areas of the 24 Parganas. Hindus and Muslims took part together in a year of communal riots, and associations, struggle funds and political education classes linked the struggles of east and west Bengal.

The movement faded under repression, the Muslim League ministry's Bargadari Bill, and the riots and partition politics of Bengal, though in parts of the 24 Parganas it went on until 1950. The demand did not disappear. The Bargadari Act of 1950 recognised the sharecropper's right to two thirds of the produce when he provided the inputs, but it was not implemented.

Telangana Armed Struggle of 1946‑1951

The Telangana struggle was the biggest peasant guerrilla war of modern Indian history, fought in the Telugu-speaking districts of the princely state of Hyderabad. The Nizam's state kept a harsh feudal order in which powerful landlords, the deshmukhs and jagirdars known locally as doras, also acted as moneylenders and village officials. They forced peasant families into bonded service through vetti, a form of forced labour, and land was concentrated in a few hands, above all in Nalgonda, Warangal and Mahbubnagar.

During the war, Communists working through the Andhra Mahasabha built a strong base in the villages, leading local struggles over wartime exactions, rationing, rent and vetti. The revolt began on 4 July 1946, when a village leader was killed by the agents of a landlord, and it spread from Nalgonda and Warangal across Telangana. The peasants organised village sanghams, fought the Nizam's forces and the Razakars, and at the peak in 1948 ran some 3,000 to 4,000 villages under their own administration.

In the villages they held, vetti and forced labour disappeared, agricultural wages were raised, illegally seized lands were restored and land was redistributed. Women's role in work and in the armed squads grew. After Indian forces took over Hyderabad in September 1948, the new military administration moved against the rebels, and the Communist Party of India called on them to lay down their arms on 25 October 1951.

Punnapra-Vayalar and the Warli Revolt

The last years before independence saw two more struggles that joined agrarian grievance to politics. In October 1946 the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising broke out in the princely state of Travancore. Led by the Communists, it was directed against the Diwan, C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, and his plan to make Travancore an independent country under an "American model" of government instead of joining the Indian Union.

In the Thane district, now in Maharashtra, the Warli adivasis were being pushed into forced and bonded labour by wealthy landlords. Godavari Parulekar, a law graduate who had founded the Maharashtra branch of the Kisan Sabha, led the Warli Adivasi Revolt from 1945 to 1947 with her husband Shamrao Parulekar, and she went on working for the Warlis after independence. The Warli revolt shows how the peasant and tribal streams often ran together.

Tribal Movements in the Gandhian Era

Forest Laws, Ulgulan and the Roots of Tribal Resistance

Tribal resistance in this period grew out of colonial control of the forest. Under laws such as the Madras Forest Act of 1882, the government took control of the forests mainly for commercial use, for timber for railways and ships, with no regard for the needs of the hill people. They lost free movement in their own habitat and were stopped from practising podu, the shifting cultivation in which a patch of forest is burnt each year to clear land for crops. When officials also demanded begar for road building, the hill people revolted.

The pattern had been set before the Gandhian phase. Birsa Munda, from the Munda tribe of the Chotanagpur region, then in the Bengal Presidency and now in Jharkhand, rose against British exploitation, oppressive landlords and missionaries. In 1899‑1900 he led the Ulgulan, the Great Tumult, which called on the tribal communities to reject colonial authority and reclaim their land. He was arrested in early 1900 and died in jail on 9 June 1900, at the age of 24. Jharkhand was later carved out of the southern part of Bihar, and its first chief minister took the oath on 15 November 2000, the anniversary of Birsa's birth.

Rampa Rebellion of 1922‑1924 and Alluri Sitarama Raju

The Rampa rebellion, also called the Manyam rebellion, was a tribal uprising in the Gudem and Rampa hills of the Godavari Agency in the Madras Presidency. It began in August 1922, after Gandhi had withdrawn the Non-Cooperation Movement, and lasted until its leader was captured and killed on 7 May 1924. The attack on the police station at Chintapalli marked its beginning.

Its leader, Alluri Sitarama Raju, had become a sanyasi at 18 and a leader of the tribal people. He spoke of the greatness of Gandhi, said he was inspired by the Non-Cooperation Movement and persuaded people to wear khadi and give up drinking, yet he held that India could be freed only by force. His followers raided police stations for arms and fought a guerrilla war across the hill border of present-day Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, and the British needed a two-year manhunt to end it. Remembered as Manyam Veerudu, the hero of the jungle, Raju became a folk hero; the 100th anniversary of the rebellion was marked in 2022.

Tana Bhagats, Rani Gaidinliu and the Heraka Movement

Not all tribal movements took up arms. The Tana Bhagat movement of 1914 among the Oraons of the Ranchi and Gumla area, begun by Jatra Bhagat and Turia Bhagat, sought to reorder Oraon society and opposed British taxes as well as the zamindars and moneylenders. It practised civil disobedience even before Gandhi's satyagraha movement, and the Tana Bhagats became followers of Gandhi; they still hold to non-violence.

In the north-east, Gaidinliu, a Rongmei Naga girl from present-day Tamenglong district of Manipur, was 13 when she joined the Heraka movement of her cousin Haipou Jadonang in 1927. The movement began as a revival of the tribal religion and turned into a political movement to drive out the British. She urged the people not to pay taxes and not to work for the colonial rulers. Arrested in 1932 at the age of 16, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Jawaharlal Nehru met her in Shillong jail in 1937 and gave her the title of Rani. She was released only in 1947 and was later awarded the Padma Bhushan.

Workers and the Trade Union Movement in India

Early Labour Organisation: From Lokhande to the Madras Labour Union

Organised labour in India began in the textile mills of Bombay in the late nineteenth century. The first labour law, the Indian Factory Act of 1881, dealt mainly with child labour. It banned the employment of children under seven, limited children's work to nine hours a day, gave them four holidays a month and required dangerous machinery to be fenced. Its provisions dealt only with children and machinery; wages and trade unions lay outside it. In 1890 N. M. Lokhande, a colleague of Jyotiba Phule in the Satyashodhak Samaj, founded the Bombay Mill Hands Association, generally credited as the first association of Indian workers; he is called the father of the trade union movement in India.

Workers soon joined national politics as well. From 24 to 28 July 1908, the industrial workers of Bombay went on strike against the six-year sentence passed on Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The First World War raised prices and profits while wages stayed low, and unions spread. On 13 April 1918 B. P. Wadia and V. Kalyanasundaram Mudaliar founded the Madras Labour Union, one of India's first organised trade unions. In the same year Gandhi took up the cause of the Ahmedabad mill workers, whose dispute ended, after arbitration, with a 35 per cent wage increase.

AITUC of 1920 and the Labour Upsurge of the 1920s

The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was founded in Bombay on 31 October 1920, with Lala Lajpat Rai, the Congress president of that year, as its first president and Diwan Chaman Lall as its first general secretary; Joseph Baptista and N. M. Joshi were among its founders. Lajpat Rai linked capitalism with imperialism, and at its second session at Jharia in 1921 the AITUC adopted a resolution for swaraj, years before the Congress adopted complete independence in 1929.

The union movement grew with the national movement. The Gaya session of the Congress in 1922 welcomed the AITUC, C. R. Das presided over two of its sessions and argued that the Congress must take up the cause of workers and peasants, and leaders such as Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, C. F. Andrews, V. V. Giri and Sarojini Naidu kept close contact with it. The early movement drew at first on the social democracy of the British Labour Party, and Gandhi's ideas of non-violence, trusteeship and cooperation between classes also shaped it.

Trade Unions Act of 1926, the Communist Turn and the Meerut Case

The Trade Unions Act of 1926 recognised trade unions as legal associations, laid down rules for their registration and regulation, and gave them civil and criminal immunity for legitimate activities, while restricting their political work. Its provisions now form part of the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, which brought it together with two other labour laws and took effect on 21 November 2025.

Communist influence made the movement more militant in the late 1920s. In 1928 the Girni Kamgar Union led a six-month strike in the Bombay textile mills, and the whole year saw unprecedented industrial unrest. The government answered with the Public Safety Ordinance and the Trade Disputes Act of 1929, which made strikes in public utilities illegal without a month's notice from each worker and forbade coercive or purely political union activity.

In March 1929 the government arrested Communist and trade union leaders, among them S. A. Dange, in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, a trial that lasted until 1933 and weakened the working-class movement. In December 1929 the Communists took over the leadership of the AITUC, when the moderates led by N. M. Joshi walked out of the session.

Industrial workers did not join the Civil Disobedience Movement in large numbers, except in the Nagpur region, because the Congress was reluctant to include their demands in its programme for fear of alienating the industrialists. Some still took part. After Gandhi's arrest in May 1930 the industrial workers of Sholapur attacked police posts, municipal buildings, courts and railway stations; railway workers struck in 1930 and dockworkers in 1932; and thousands of workers in the Chotanagpur tin mines wore Gandhi caps at protest rallies.

Workers from the Congress Ministries to Independence

The AITUC supported Congress candidates in the provincial elections of 1937, and the Congress ministries were generally sympathetic to workers' demands. The Second World War changed the picture. After the Soviet Union joined the Allies in 1941, the Communists called the conflict a people's war and kept away from the Quit India Movement, though students, workers and peasants in large numbers joined it.

Workers returned to the forefront in the post-war upsurge. In 1945 the dockworkers of Bombay and Calcutta refused to load ships carrying supplies for the troops sent to Indonesia, and in 1946 workers struck in support of the naval ratings of the Royal Indian Navy. On 3 May 1947 the Congress founded its own trade union centre, the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), and after independence the labour movement divided along the lines of political parties.

Women in the Freedom Struggle of the Gandhian Phase

Gandhi's Call and Women in Mass Politics

Women entered the national movement on a large scale only in the Gandhian phase. The Salt Satyagraha of 1930 was the first nationalist activity in which women took part in large numbers. The socialist activist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay persuaded Gandhi not to restrict the salt protests to men, and she was herself one of the many women who courted arrest by breaking the salt or liquor laws.

Thousands of women came out to hear Gandhi on the march, made salt, joined processions and picketed foreign-cloth and liquor shops, and many went to jail. A British report noted that "thousands of women, many being of good family and high educational attainments, suddenly emerged from the seclusion of their homes, and, in some instances, actually from purdah". In the towns these women came mostly from high-caste families, and in the countryside from rich peasant households.

This public role had limits. Gandhi held that women's first duty was to home and family, and for a long time the Congress was reluctant to give women positions of authority within the organisation. Even so, many women came to see service to the nation as a sacred duty, and for many of them the movement was the first time they had stepped out of their homes into public life.

Women Presidents of the Congress and the Organised Women's Movement

Women also rose to the leadership of the Congress. Annie Besant, the English theosophist who helped launch the Home Rule League in India, became the first woman president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. Sarojini Naidu, poet and orator, became the first Indian woman president in 1925, and Nellie Sengupta presided over the Calcutta session of 1933. These firsts are easily confused with another first of the Congress: Its first Muslim president was Badruddin Tyabji, at the Madras session of 1887.

Women built their own organisations at the same time. The Women's Indian Association was founded at Adyar in Madras on 8 May 1917 by Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, Dorothy Jinarajadasa and others, and the All India Women's Conference was founded at Pune in 1927 to promote the education and welfare of women and children. In 1926 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay became the first woman in India to stand for a legislative seat, in the Madras provincial legislature. These bodies linked the freedom struggle to the wider women's movement in India.

Women Freedom Fighters in Satyagraha, Revolution and Quit India

Women freedom fighters came from every region, age and form of struggle. In the Salt Satyagraha, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Avantikabai Gokhale were the two women in the seven-member team that Gandhi announced to make salt on the Bombay beachfront. The march on the Dharasana salt works in May 1930 set out under Abbas Tyabji, with Kasturba Gandhi at his side. Both were arrested on the way, and Sarojini Naidu and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad then led the volunteers who faced the police beatings at the salt works.

Other women joined the revolutionaries of Bengal. In Comilla, now in Bangladesh, two schoolgirls, Suniti Chowdhury and Shanti Ghosh, shot dead a District Magistrate in 1931, and a few months later Bina Das, a student of Calcutta University, fired at the Governor of Bengal at a convocation.

The Quit India Movement of 1942 brought women to the front of an underground struggle. On 9 August 1942, with the senior leaders in jail, Aruna Asaf Ali, who had married the Congress leader Asaf Ali in 1928 despite her family's opposition on grounds of religion and age, presided over the rest of the session of the All India Congress Committee and hoisted the Congress flag at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay, then went underground. Usha Mehta ran the Secret Congress Radio, and Sucheta Kripalani worked in the movement and was arrested.

Matangini Hazra, a peasant's daughter born in 1870 and known as Gandhi buri, Bengali for "old lady Gandhi", was shot dead on 29 September 1942 while leading volunteers to capture the Tamluk police station. Kanaklata Barua, born in 1924, was shot dead on 20 September 1942 while carrying the national flag at the head of a procession at Gohpur in Assam. Abroad, the Indian National Army raised the Rani of Jhansi Regiment in July 1943 under Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan, better known as Lakshmi Sahgal.

Bengal Famine of 1943 and the Politics of Hunger

Causes of the Bengal Famine: War, Burma and Policy

The Bengal Famine of 1943 was the gravest human disaster of the last years of British rule, and historians still debate how far it came from a shortfall in the harvest and how far from war and policy. Bengal, with a population of about six crore in 1941, had already turned from an exporter of food grains into an importer. Several shocks then struck together in 1942 and 1943:

• Loss of Burmese rice: The fall of Rangoon in March 1942 cut off the import of rice from Burma, on which many districts of Bengal depended, and set off a scramble for rice and a sharp rise in prices.
• Denial policies: Fearing a Japanese invasion, the British applied denial policies to rice and boats, and the loss of boats crippled transport in Bengal.
• Trade barriers: Several provinces banned grain exports in 1942, among them Punjab (wheat), the Central Provinces and Madras (rice), and these barriers blocked the movement of grain between provinces.
• Natural disaster: A cyclone and storm surges struck south-western Bengal in October 1942, and a fungal disease damaged the aman rice crop of that year.
• Limited relief: Bengal went on exporting rice to Ceylon for months, and Winston Churchill's war cabinet limited food aid, ostensibly for want of shipping.

The Famine Inquiry Commission of 1945 estimated the rice deficit of Bengal in 1943, allowing for stocks carried over, at about three weeks' supply, though other experts of the time put the shortfall much higher. Aid increased when the army took control of relief funding in October 1943, but effective relief came only with a record rice harvest in December.

Death Toll and Political Impact of the Famine

Estimates of the dead range from about 8 lakh to 38 lakh people, and a widely cited scholarly estimate puts the toll at about 21 lakh. People died of starvation and of malaria and other diseases made worse by malnutrition, displacement and the lack of health care. Families broke up as men sold their land and left to find work, and women and children wandered to Calcutta in search of relief.

The famine deepened anger at colonial rule. Many Indians felt that they were making huge sacrifices for a war that was not their own while their own freedom was still denied. The Kisan Sabha did notable relief work during the famine, and the Communists brought relief to the peasants of the Sundarbans, where the Tebhaga movement would find some of its strongest centres three years later.

Significance of the Many Voices for the Nationalist Movement

How the Many Voices Strengthened and Enriched the Movement

The movements of peasants, tribals, workers and women strengthened the national movement by giving it a mass base and enriched it by widening the meaning of freedom. Each stream added something of its own:

• Peasants: They gave the Congress a mass base in the countryside and put rent, revenue and land on the national agenda.
• Tribals: They brought the forest and the hills into the struggle and showed, from Rampa to Manipur, that resistance to colonial rule reached the most remote communities.
• Workers: They added the strike and the trade union to the methods of protest, and brought low wages and poor working conditions into the debate on swaraj.
• Women: They added moral force to satyagraha, filled the jails and processions, and led the underground in 1942.

Other voices joined them. Business groups formed the Federation of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industries (FICCI) in 1927 and backed Civil Disobedience at first. The depressed classes pressed their own claims in the struggle against untouchability, and revolutionaries and students kept alive a spirit of defiance.

Tensions Between the Congress and the Radical Streams

The many voices did not always speak in harmony with the Congress. The Congress tried to keep all classes together against colonial rule, and so it held back demands that might divide them. It refused to support no-rent campaigns that would alarm landlords, kept workers' economic demands out of its programme to avoid alienating industrialists, and withdrew its support from the Eka Movement when it turned away from non-violence, while the Mappila rebellion was isolated once it took a communal turn. Women, for their part, gained a public role but for long only a symbolic presence in the leadership.

The radical streams also moved away from the Congress at times. The AITUC came under Communist leadership in 1929, the Kisan Sabha came to be dominated by Socialists and Communists in the later 1930s, and the Communists kept away from Quit India in 1942. Because these differences never went away, the high points of nationalist unity were often followed by phases of disunity, and the Congress had to keep resolving them so that the demands of one group did not alienate another.

Legacy of the Peasant, Tribal, Labour and Women's Movements

These movements shaped the agenda of independent India. The Kisan Manifesto of 1936 had demanded the abolition of zamindari, and after independence land reforms abolished the zamindari system. In West Bengal, where the Bargadari Act of 1950 had not been implemented, Operation Barga later set out to secure tenancy rights for sharecroppers. The labour movement continued through the AITUC and the INTUC.

Women who led the struggle went on to lead the republic: Sarojini Naidu became India's first woman governor in 1947, in the United Provinces, Aruna Asaf Ali became Delhi's first mayor, and Sucheta Kripalani became India's first woman chief minister, in Uttar Pradesh in 1963. Tribal heroes such as Birsa Munda, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Rani Gaidinliu are now honoured as freedom fighters.

Sources

• NCERT: India and the Contemporary World II, Class X, Chapter 2, Nationalism in India
• NCERT: Themes in Indian History III, Class XII, Theme 13, Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement
• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond, Class VIII, Part 2, Chapter 2, India's Long Road to Independence
• NCERT: Indian Economic Development, Class XI, Chapter 2, Indian Economy 1950‑1990
• PIB: Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government announces the implementation of the four Labour Codes, 21 November 2025
• PIB: Ministry of Culture, PM launches the 125th birth anniversary celebration of Alluri Sitarama Raju, 4 July 2022
• PIB: Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Janjatiya Gaurav Divas: Celebrating Tribal Heritage, 14 November 2024
• Akashvani News: Nation observes Janjatiya Gaurav Divas, 15 November 2025
• Akashvani News: Janjatiya Gaurav Varsh Pakhwada begins, honouring Birsa Munda's 150th birth anniversary, 31 October 2025
• Wikipedia: Kisan Sabha movement (1919‑1922)
• Wikipedia: Eka Movement
• Wikipedia: Hardoi district
• Wikipedia: Malabar rebellion
• Wikipedia: Bardoli Satyagraha
• Wikipedia: Indigo revolt
• Wikipedia: Pabna Peasant Uprisings
• Wikipedia: All India Kisan Sabha
• Wikipedia: Sahajanand Saraswati
• Wikipedia: Tebhaga movement
• Wikipedia: Telangana Rebellion
• Wikipedia: Punnapra-Vayalar uprising
• Wikipedia: Godavari Parulekar
• Wikipedia: Birsa Munda
• Wikipedia: Jharkhand
• Wikipedia: Rampa Rebellion of 1922
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