Modern History GS Paper I by Rashid Yasin

Model Answer

Question #1. “The peasant revolts and uprisings in 19th century India against colonial rule were not religious, but in most of the cases, religion did play a very important role.” Discuss the nature of Peasant uprisings in 19th century India with appropriate examples considering the above given statement.
Approach:

• Introduce about the rise of early peasant revolts (40 words)
• Explain the nature of Peasant uprisings in 19th century India (30 words)
• Enumerate non-religious factors for peasant revolts (90 words)
• Briefly discuss the religious factors  (90 words)

Hints:

In the 19th century and early 20th century, there were hundreds of peasants and tribal movements, revolts or uprisings in India. Most of these revolts were suppressed by ruthless use of power by the British, yet they played a very significant role in the freedom struggle of the country

Nature of peasant uprisings in 19 the century:

• Peasants emerged as the main force in agrarian movements, fighting directly for their own demands.
• The demands were centered almost wholly on economic issues.
• The movements were directed against the immediate enemies of the peasant—foreign planters and indigenous zamindars and moneylenders.
• The struggles were directed towards specific and limited objectives and redressal of particular grievances.
• Colonialism was not the target of these movements.
• It was not the objective of these movements to end the system of subordination or exploitation of the peasants.
• Territorial reach was limited.
• There was no continuity of struggle or long-term organization.
• The peasants developed a strong awareness of their legal rights and asserted them in and outside the courts.

Non religious factors that contributed to the peasant revolts in 19th century:

• The economic policies devastated traditional ways of livelihood, and resulted in seizure of land and increase in debt of the peasants and farmers. The exploitations of British colonialism were borne by the Indian peasants adversely.
• In the 19th century, peasant mobilizations were in the nature of protests, revolt, and rebellions primarily aimed at loosening the bonds of feudal exploitation.
• Restorative rebellions aimed to drive out the British and restore earlier rulers and social relations:

1. 1. 1. The Bishenpur revolt of 1789 was led by the local ruler and supported by local people.
      2. Between 1799 and 1800 Poligars, who were deprived of their military power, adopted Guerrilla warfare to thwart the authority of British rulers.
      3. The Santhal rebellion was another revolt which was not focused on driving the British out but on restoring their traditional rights.

• Spontaneous and abrupt uprisings commonly without any leader or organizational base. Most of them were temporary in nature and came to a sudden end. Examples include revolt in Rangpur and Dinajpur of 1783 and the Deccan peasant uprising of 1875
• Recurring Famines and Peasant: The most important fact of Indian history during the second half of 19th century was the recurrence of famines and large scale starvation deaths of workers and peasants
• Peasant Participation in the Revolt of 1857: In most of Oudh and Western UP the peasant forgot the oppressive hands of the local Zamindars and joined the local feudal leadership in a bid to uproot foreign imperialism.
• Indigo revolt: One of the most popular events of peasant revolt was the conflict in indigo cultivation in Bengal. During 1859-60, the peasants were forced to cultivate indigo and sell them at cheaper rates to the British.
• The Deccan Riots, 1875: The Deccan peasants were directed mainly against the excesses of the Marwari and Gujarati money lenders. A combination of adverse circumstances excessive government land revenue demand, slump in the world cotton prices at the end of the American Civil War pushed the Deccan Peasants deeper in the morass of indebtedness.
• Pabna Agrarian Leagues: During the 1870s and 1880s, large parts of Eastern Bengal witnessed agrarian unrest caused by oppressive practices of the Zamindars. Some landlords forcefully collected rents and land taxes, often enhanced for the poor peasants and also prevented the tenants from acquiring Occupancy Right under Act X of 1859.

Religious factors responsible for outbreak of peasant movements:

•   Narkelberia Uprising: Titu Mir, who led the Narkelberia Uprising in 1831 adopted Wahabism, and advocated Sharia laws, bypassing the “tradition of folk Islam in Bengal”. Mir’s revolt was an uprising of peasants in Bengal, who were the first to suffer the impact of colonial systems of taxation and agricultural extraction.  Mir refused to pay the enhanced tax imposed on poor peasants in North 24 Paraganas district and then organised and led protests, which irked the land holders, both Hindu and Muslim. 
•   Pagal Panthi movement: Pagal Panthi was a socio-religious movement led by Karam Shah  against the oppressive rule of the British East India Company and the zamindars or landlords in rural Bengal in the 18th and 19th century.
•   Faraizi movement: The Faraizi movement was a movement led by Haji Shariatullah in Eastern Bengal to give up un-Islamic practices and act upon their duties as Muslims.  Founded in 1819, the movement protected the rights of tenants to a great extent. After the death of Haji Shariatullah, his son, Dadu Miyan, led the movement to a more agrarian character. He organised the oppressed peasantry against the oppressive landlords. 
•   Eka Movement:  It was a peasant movement which surfaced in  Hardoi, Bahraich and Sitapur during the end of 1921. The Eka meetings were marked by a religious ritual in which assembled peasants vowed that they would pay only recorded rent but pay it on time, would not leave when ejected, would refuse to do forced labour and would remain united under any circumstance.
•   Mappila Revolt: The Mappilas were the Muslim tenants inhabiting the Malabar region, where most of the landlords were Hindus. The Mappilas had expressed their resentment against the oppression of the landlords during the nineteenth century also.

Conclusion:

Although the 19th century peasant movements were not entirely nationalistic, but they inspired the coming generations to fight against the British colonial rule through various means that were already developed earlier and also provided impetus to the anti British freedom fight in coming years.

Question #2. The Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) revolutionaries aimed not only at the overthrow of the British by the gun, but they also had a vision of social and economic transformation. Elucidate.

Approach

• Briefly describe about HRA in introduction (40 words)
• Discuss the revolutionary action of HRA members (90 words)
• Discuss the socialist vision of HRA (90 words)
• In conclusion briefly  write the significant of HRA (30 words)

Hints:

Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) was a revolutionary organization in the Punjab-UP-Bihar belt, established in Kanpur by Ramprasad Bismil, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee and Sachin Sanyal. Its objective was to establish a “Federal Republic of the United States of India” basic principle would be adult franchise through an organized and armed revolution. It was later rechristened to Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA).

In the 1920s there began a second phase of revolutionary terrorism due to the failure of the NCM, and the regressive policies of the British. The HRA under Azad and Bhagat Singh became a leading revolutionary organization during this period.

Revolutionary acts by HRA members:

• The early attempts targeted disruption and obtaining funds, such as the robbery of a post office in Calcutta and of monies belonging to a railway at Chittagong, both in 1923.
• Kakori robbery: The most important action of the HRA was the Kakori robbery. The men held up the 8-Down train at Kakori, an obscure village near Lucknow, and looted its official railway cash.
• Government crackdown after the Kakori robbery led to arrests of many, of whom 17 were jailed, four transported for life and four—Bismil, Ashfaqullah, Roshan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri—were hanged.
• Saunders’ Murder: Bhagat Singh, Azad and Rajguru shot dead Saunders, the police official responsible for the lathi charge in Lahore in which Lala Lajpat Rai died due to lathi blows received during a lathi- charge on an anti-Simon Commission procession (October 1928).
• Bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly: Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly on April 8, 1929 to protest against the passage of the Public Safety Bill and Trade Disputes Bill aimed at curtailing civil liberties of citizens in general and workers in particular.
• The bombs had been deliberately made harmless and were aimed at making ‘the deaf hear’. The objective was to get arrested and to use the trial court as a forum for propaganda so that people would become familiar with their movement and ideology.
• Viceroy’s train attack: Azad was involved in a bid to blow up Viceroy Irwin’s train near Delhi in December 1929. During 1930 there were a series of violent actions in Punjab and towns of United Provinces (26 incidents in 1930 in Punjab alone).

Socialistic agenda of HRA:

However, unlike other revolutionary terrorist organizations which had only one objective of killing infamous Britishers and aimed at throwing out British using guns, the HRA later on, developed a vision of Independent India. They said that independence has to be achieved from internal ills like exploitation and inequalities.

• Inspired by socialism, the HRA was renamed as Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) under the leadership of Chandra Shekhar Azad. The HSRA decided to work under a collective leadership and adopted socialism as its official goal.
• The new vision of HRSA included the following:
  • A new social order in which there is no exploitation of man vs. man.
  • Anti-communal
  • Anti-superstition
  • Role of the state in reorganizing the economic structure
• Bhagat Singh and his comrades also realised that a revolution meant organisation and development of a mass movement of the exploited and the suppressed sections by the revolutionary intelligentsia.
• Even before his arrest, Bhagat Singh had moved away from a belief in violent and individual heroic action to Marxism and the belief that a popular broad-based movement alone could lead to a successful revolution.
• The Founding Council of HRA had decided to preach revolutionary and communist principles, and the HRA Manifesto (1925) declared that the “HRA stood for abolition of all systems which made exploitation of man by man possible”.
• The HRA’s main organ Revolutionary had proposed nationalisation of railways and other means of transport and of heavy industries such as ship building and steel.
• The HRA had also decided to start labour and peasant organisations and work for an “organised and armed revolution”.
• During their last days (late 1920s), these revolutionaries had started moving away from individual heroic action and violence towards mass politics.
• Bhagat Singh helped establish the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha (1926) as an open wing of revolutionaries to carry out political work among the youth, peasants and workers, and it was to open branches in villages. Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev also organised the Lahore Students’ Union for open, legal work among students.

Conclusion:

Thus, HRA members presented a different form of struggle against the British which included not only fighting with guns but also with thoughts. HRA revolutionaries penned a post independent economic plan for the sovereign government that would curb social inequalities at root and establish socio-economic justice in the country. It also inspired the younger factions of Congress led by Nehru and Bose who had developed a socialist vision. They sought to revolutionize the whole socio-economic and political system of India.