In the remote hills of West Bengal, the first great peasant insurrection in the history of British India broke out in June 1855. Assembling from more than 400 villages in the area of Damun-i-koh, 10,000 Santals gathered at Bhagnadihi, in the hills close to Barhait.1 Their leaders voiced their opposition to the continuing oppression of tax-collectors and money-lenders, but the peasants themselves had wider ambitions. Their initial plan was to march on Calcutta, ‘to take possession of the country and set up a government of their own’. One cause of the rebellion, a British official explained years later, was the yearning of the Santals ‘for independence, a dream of the ancient days when they had no overlords’2
The Santals were one of India’s many indigenous peoples, a group that had moved into this part of Bengal in the 1830s, clearing the forest and bringing large tracts of land into cultivation. Their principal quarrel was with the tax-collectors, but they also opposed the arrival of fresh settlers and traders, forever pushing into the woods of their pillared territory from the plains. British settlers had established indigo plantations in the area.
Real trouble started in 1854, after European officials arrived to construct a railway. The new line skirted the Santal country for 200 miles, and the construction of embankments, cuttings and bridges created a demand for workmen. It ‘completely altered’ the relation of capital to labour in Bengal, wrote Sir William Hunter, an official who worked there later.3 Something else was ‘altered’ too. One of the witnesses to a commission appointed to examine the causes of the rebellion blamed ‘the unwarrantable conduct of some of the railway employees, who insulted their women and refused to pay the Sonthals when [they were] employed on the railway works’4
The rebellion’s first leader was a peasant named Kanhu, who was supported by his brothers Sidhu, Chand and Bhairab. Kanhu rapidly acquired a god-like status, and the brothers explained that they had been led to rebel through divine intervention. They had received a visit from Thakur, a Hindu god who was ‘like a white man, though dressed in the native style’, according to a contemporary account in the Calcutta Review. ‘On each hand he had ten fingers. He held a white book and wrote therein.’ Thakur gave the brothers the book, and then ‘ascended upwards and disappeared’. He told them that the time was ripe for rebellion.
Thakur’s visitations continued in varying forms. ‘There was not merely one apparition of the sublime Thakoor; each day in the week, for some short period, did he make known his presence to his favoured apostles. At one time it was in a flame or Are, with a book, some white paper, and a knife; at another in the flgure of. . . a solid cart-wheel.’
Kanhu and Sidhu built a statue of Thakur in their garden, and soon began spreading the news of his revelation. They carried branches of the Sal tree into local marketplaces - a traditional method of communication among the Santals. Asked why he had participated in the revolt, a captured Santal quoted Kanhu saying that ‘it was our “Raj” now. We obeyed his words, for he was a Thakur.’5
The Arst Santal action was an attack on a local market. Half a dozen Hindu mahajuns - men who worked both as traders and as moneylenders - were killed, and a week after the initial gathering at Bhagnadihi, the rebels killed Mahesh Lal Datta, a daroga, or police inspector, who had arrived at the nearby town of Barhait with a small force. A week later, they attacked people working on the railway line, saying that ‘the Company’s rule is at an end’.
The authorities were initially bewildered. The Santals had never given trouble before. ‘Their industry, their perseverance, their love of order, their inquisitiveness, their joviality’, said the Reverend Ernest Droese, a missionary, ‘are conspicuous to the most casual visitor.’ Yet the attack on the police and on the railway line showed that something unusual was underway.
The Santal rebels were soon confronted by a British force, led by Major F. W. Burroughs, sent out from Bhagalpur to crush them. Yet when a battle took place at Pirpainti on 16 July, the Santals were victorious, much to the major’s surprise. Six officers and twenty-Ave soldiers were left for dead. ‘The rebels stood their ground Armly’, Major Burroughs reported later, ‘and shot not only with hand-bows but with bows which they used with their feet, sitting on the ground to pull them, and fought also with a kind of battle-axe.’
The authorities were now thoroughly alarmed. The insurrection has ‘assumed all the characteristics of a rebellion’, wrote C. F. Brown, the commissioner at Bhagalpur, on 19 July. He issued a proclamation sanctioning ‘the destruction of the rebels found in arms’. Large rewards were offered for any leaders captured, and the soldiers were told ‘to take all the measures considered necessary for the extirpation of the rebels’. They were asked to ensure that their families were spared, since ‘the British government does not make war against women and children’. Commissioner Brown had ‘deemed it necessary’ to declare martial law, but he does not seem to have done so with adequate formality, and the Calcutta government told him later that his ‘proclamations’ were illegal.
Concerned by the defeat at Pirpainti, the commissioner told Major-General Lloyd at Dinapur that more troops would be needed if the rebellion was to be suppressed: ‘Not a day passes without fresh atrocities being perpetrated, villages plundered and burnt, and the unfortunate inhabitants massacred without respect to age or sex.’
Rebuked by Calcutta for his premature proclamations, Commissioner Brown wrote on 29 July to Frederick Halliday, the governor of Bengal, to restate his case:
It appears that the Santhals are led on and incited to acts of oppression by the gowal-lahs (milkmen), telis (oilmen), and other castes, who supply them with intelligence, beat their drums, direct their proceedings, and act as their spies.
These people, as well as the lohars (blacksmiths) who make their arrows and axes, ought to meet with condign punishment, and be speedily included in any proclamation which government may see fit to issue against the rebels.
Government forces were now mobilised to crush the rebels. A. C. Bidwell was appointed by the Bengal governor as the ‘Special Commissioner for the Suppression of the Santal Insurrection’. He was ordered to take measures necessary ‘for the entire suppression of the insurrection. . . and for restoring tranquillity to the disturbed districts’ At this stage, Halliday believed that Commissioner Brown had overreacted, and Bidwell was urged to err on the side of leniency. He was told to declare that the government would ‘freely pardon all who may tender a speedy submission, except those who shall be proved to have been the principal leaders and instigators of the insurrection’ Halliday added further warnings against the burning of Santal villages in reprisal raids. ‘It can never conduce to the early settlement of the present unhappy disturbances’, he remarked, ‘to make large bodies of armed men, our subjects, homeless and desperate.’
In spite of the repression, some 30,000 Santals had been actively mobilised by the middle of August. ‘They have as yet shown no signs of submission to the government’, Commissioner Brown noted on 11 August, ‘but are on the contrary openly at war with our troops.’ The Santal rebel army had now divided into two large groups, and further attacks occurred in September. One magistrate noted that ‘their numbers average, as nearly as we can ascertain, from 12,000 to 14,000, and are receiving augmentation from all quarters’
Governor Halliday was lobbied in Calcutta by a deputation from Nelson and Co., the contractors building the railway line. Worried about their investment, they requested firmer action, and told him that ‘great consternation prevailed in that neighbourhood among the Europeans as well as the Indians’ It would be difficult to start work again ‘unless very active measures be taken to preserve the peace’ Under pressure, Halliday agreed to allow the firm to recruit a paramilitary force with fifty muskets ‘for the defence of his people and works, and the neighbouring villages’
‘It is only through striking terror into these bloodthirsty savages. . . that we can hope to quell this insurrection, wrote the editor of the Friend of India, published in Calcutta:
It is necessary to avenge the outrages committed. . . India has not arrived at the point where armed rebellion can be treated with the contemptuous forbearance with which the English ministry can pardon a knot of Chartists or banish a gang of Irish patriots. Let the Santhals' punishment be entrusted to a special Commision as was done in Canada in 1838.
In November the Calcutta authorities reappraised the situation. Martial law was formally declared, and 14,000 soldiers were deployed against the Santals. In the ensuring campaign, innumerable Santal villages were destroyed; the villagers, according to the account of L. S. S. Malley, showed ‘the most reckless courage, never knowing when they were beaten, and refusing to surrender’. Armed with axes and bows and arrows, they were mown down by British guns. They refused to surrender:
On one occasion, forty-five Santhals took refuge in a mud hut which they held against the sepoys. Volley after volley was fired into it, and, before each volley, quarter was offered. Each time, the Santhals replied with a discharge of arrows. At last, when their fire ceased, the sepoys entered the hut and found only one old man was left alive. A sepoy called on him to surrender, whereupon the man rushed upon him and cut him down with his battle axe.
‘It was not war’, wrote Major Vincent Jervis,
It was execution. We had orders to go out wherever we saw the smoke of a village rising above the jungle. . . As long as their national drums beat, the whole party would stand, and allow themselves to be shot down. Their arrows often killed our men, and so we had to fire on them as long as they stood. . . There was not a Sepoy in the war who did not feel ashamed of himself. The prisoners were for the most part wounded men. They upbraided us with fighting against them. . . They were the most truthful set of men I ever met; brave to infatuation. A lieutenant of mine had once to shoot down seventy-five men before their drums ceased, and the party fell back.
Months of bloody fighting took place before the rebellion began to falter early in 1856. ‘The details of border warfare’, wrote Sir William Hunter in 1868, ‘in which disciplined troops mow down half-armed peasants, are unpleasant in themselves, and afford neither glory to the conquerors nor lessons in the military art.’
Thousands of Santals were killed. Kanhu and other leaders were captured in February, and hanged at Barhait after a summary trial. Some 200 of those captured were given prison sentences of between seven and fourteen years.
With the rebellion crushed, the railway construction work began afresh, creating a huge new demand for workers, recruited from among the Santals. Some years later, Hunter recorded,
Twenty thousand were required in Beerbhoom alone; and the number along the sections running through, or bordering on, the Santal territories amounted to one hundred thousand men. . . The contractors sent their recruiters to every fair, and in a few months the Santals who had taken service came back with their girdles full of coin, and their women covered with silver jewellery. . .
One lasting outcome of the insurrection, recorded by the historian Kalikinkar Datta in 1940, ‘was the direction of missionary activities to the aboriginal races’. Soon the Santal hills were ‘studded with missions’. As a result, ‘rude tribes have been taught the value of British contact and civilisation, and together with the policy of favourable and special treatment of aborigines and converted Christian aborigines, this made aboriginal discontent a very remote possibility. The god Thakur conjured up by Kanhu was forced to retreat after a bombardment from Christian missionaries.
While the rebellion of the Santals was well underway, a party of enraged Muslim peasants at the opposite end of India descended in September 1855 on the bungalow of Henry Valentine Conolly, the magistrate and tax collector of Malabar. The peasants, called Moplahs, killed the magistrate as he sat on his verandah reading to his wife. His immediate crime was to have sent the Moplah leader into exile, but the Moplahs had other grievances: he had confiscated their knives and sent many of them to prison.
The Moplahs had rebelled frequently in earlier years, usually against their Hindu landlords. From 1800 to 1802, they had waged a guerrilla war after the overthrow of Tipu Sultan;6 their most recent actions had been in 1849 and 1850, and in 1851 the British authorities had sent army units to crush them. A report on this perennial Muslim insurgency, prepared in 1852 by Thomas Strange, a government official, had recommended that harsh measures be taken against the peasants. Legislation was drafted to give increased powers to the police. One particular measure that annoyed the Moplahs was the withdrawal of their right to carry knives. Conolly’s task had been to disarm them, and he seized more than 7,000 knives. Many peasants were arrested and given long prison terms.
Conolly’s decision to send the Moplah leader into exile was the event that sparked his death. His house had been inadequately guarded. After his death, the peasant group was surrounded by military and police guards. The Moplahs refused to surrender and the police took seven days to subdue them. All were killed.
The Moplahs continued to rebel at intervals over the next sixty years, culminating in the great revolt of 1921. British officials remained uncomprehending of their purpose. One described the violence as ‘not mere riots or affrays, but murderous outrages, such as have no parallel in any other part of Her Majesty’s dominions’.7
World History
