The Unfinished Struggle of Santhal "Bataidars" in Purnea District, 1938-42

• Published in: Economic and political weekly 1986-10, Vol.21 (43), p.1897-1909
• Main Author: Chakravarti, Anand
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agricultural land; Crops; Landlords; Oppression; Peasant class; Revenue; Special Articles; Tenancy; Tenants; Villages; Workforce
• ISSN: 0012-9976; 2349-8846

In recent years the countryside in Bihar has been convulsed by severe agrarian tensions arising to a large extent from the deliberate negligence on the part of the government of issues affecting the interests of oppressed sections, such as tenants-at-will and agricultural labourers. The persistence of the problems of these sections is an outcome of the failure of the Indian National Congress to effectively integrate agrarian issues with its programme for attaining Independence. This argument has been demonstrated here by examining in detail the struggle of the Santhal "bataidars" (sharecroppers who were tenants-at-will) against their maliks (comprising tenure-holders and occupancy tenants) in Dhamdaha revenue circle in the western part of Purnea district between 1938 and 1942. The conflict occurred in a political environment dominanted partly by the national movement and partly by the struggles of the upper layers of the tenantry against the zamindars in Bihar. The capacity of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha and the Congress to take up the problems of tenants-at-will has been critically examined, and a point of view that endorses the latter's position giving primacy to the campaign against colonial rule, while postponing the solution of agrarian issues till the attainment of Independence, has been questioned. The conflict between the Santhal "bataidars" and their maliks has been examined in the context of the ecological setting in which the two groups came to be involved in a common scheme of production relations. It has been argued that the principal shortcoming of much of the work on agrarian struggles in Bihar during the period of British rule in the twentieth century is the failure to postulate a clear picture of agrarian differentiation based on the unique features of the pattern of production relations in the area of conflict. While emphasising the unique elements of class relations in Dhamdaha, including the capacity of the Santhal "bataidars" to pilot their own struggle, the limitations of regarding them as an autonomous group have been stressed. [This is the second and concluding part of this paper; the first part appeared last week.]