Phase Two: The Tribal Risings

In one line

The second phase was the tribal risings, and they are the only agrarian violence in Indian history that produced protective legislation while the risings were still going on.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: from roughly 1830 to 1860, and continuing at intervals into the 1900s, the sharpest agrarian conflict was in the forest and hill tracts, where communities whose relation to land was occupation and use rather than documentary title were dispossessed by the arrival of outsiders holding paper; the risings that followed, of which the Kol, the Santhal and later the movement led by Birsa Munda are the best documented, were directed at the moneylender, the outside cultivator and the revenue and police officials together; and the colonial response was distinctive in that it combined military suppression with the creation of excluded and partially excluded areas and of legislation restricting the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals, which is the ancestor of the Fifth Schedule and of the statutes taken later in this module.

Why this phase is different

Two features separate it from every other phase in this module, and both are examinable.

The dispossession was of a right the law did not recognise. A tribal community's relation to its land was collective, undocumented and grounded in occupation and use. The settlements recorded proprietors, tenants and revenue payers, and none of those categories fitted. So the community was not deprived of a right by a wrongful act; it was found, on the record, never to have had one.

And the colonial State legislated in response. Having suppressed the risings, it accepted a version of the grievance and answered it with restrictions on the alienation of tribal land and with a separate administrative regime for the areas concerned. That is not a pattern the rest of this module offers, and a question on remedies can use it.

The mechanism of dispossession

It repeats with very little variation, and a student who can state the mechanism can handle any of the risings.

1. The area is settled or surveyed. Rights are recorded in the categories the settlement uses.
2. Outsiders arrive, holding money and understanding the paper: traders, moneylenders, cultivators from settled districts, and contractors.
3. The tribal cultivator borrows, because the demand is in money and his production is not.
4. The debt is secured on land, and the security is enforced through a court which applies the recorded position.
5. The community finds itself labouring on land it had occupied, for the person who now holds the paper.
6. The forest, on which the community depended for what the fields did not supply, is reserved by the State for its own revenue, and customary use becomes an offence.