BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 107 of 142

Correct — A, 1855-56. The hool began on 30 June 1855, when the brothers Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu gathered about ten thousand Santhals at Bhognadih in the Rajmahal hills and declared that they had been commanded by Thakur Bonga, the great spirit, to drive out the dikus — the moneylenders, the zamindars and the Company — and set up Santhal rule. Their brothers Chand and Bhairav took command alongside them. What followed was not a riot but a war: rebel columns burnt railway bungalows, threatened Pakur, and inflicted a humiliating defeat on Company troops at Narayanpur, and the Company had to bring in regular regiments and elephants from Murshidabad before it could break the rising. Estimates of the dead run to ten to fifteen thousand. The fighting is dated from 30 June 1855 to 3 January 1856, which is precisely the span the option gives. The aftermath is the other half of the answer and is what most questions actually test: the Company created a separate administrative unit, the Santal Parganas, by the Sonthal Parganas Act, Act 37 of 1855, and two decades later the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act of 1876 made it illegal to transfer Santhal land to a non-Santhal — a protective land law born directly out of this revolt and still in force in substance today. Jharkhand observes 30 June as Hul Diwas; the tract was part of Bihar until Jharkhand was carved out on 15 November 2000, which is why the hool sits squarely in the BPSC syllabus.

• (b)1854 — A year too early, and it corresponds to no event in the hool. It is the sort of option that catches a candidate who remembers 'mid-1850s' but not the year, and the fix is to anchor the rising to a single date — 30 June 1855, the day of the Bhognadih assembly, which is why 30 June is Hul Diwas.
• (c)1858-59 — Places the hool after the Revolt of 1857, which reverses the actual order. By 1858 the Santhal rising was long over and the Santal Parganas had already been constituted as a separate district under the Act of 1855; what belongs to 1859-60 is the Indigo Revolt of Bengal, a different movement with different participants.
• (d)1857-58 — The most seductive wrong answer, because it merges the hool with the Revolt of 1857 — and the two are genuinely close in time and place. But they are separate events with separate causes: the hool was a tribal and agrarian rising against moneylenders and land-grabbers that had been fought and suppressed before the sepoys at Meerut mutinied on 10 May 1857.

The Santhal hool is the largest of the tribal revolts that punctuate the first century of Company rule, and it fits a pattern the syllabus expects you to recognise. Permanent Settlement and the extension of revenue administration into the forest tracts brought in outsiders — zamindars with legal titles, mahajans lending at ruinous interest, contractors recruiting labour for the new railway — and tribal communities that had cleared and farmed land under customary right found themselves tenants, debtors and bonded labourers on it. The Santhals had themselves been settled in the Damin-i-Koh tract of the Rajmahal hills to clear and cultivate it, so the sense of betrayal was sharp. The revolt's vocabulary was religious — a divine command, an assurance that Company bullets would turn to water — and its programme was simple: expel the dikus. The same shape recurs in the Kol uprising of 1831-32 and in Birsa Munda's ulgulan of 1899-1900, and the colonial answer each time was a mixture of severe repression and a special legal regime for tribal land.

Two anchors settle almost every date question in this cluster. First, the hool comes before 1857 — it is the last great pre-Mutiny rising, and any option that places it in or after 1857 can be rejected on that ground alone. Second, the chronology of nineteenth-century popular revolts runs Kol 1831-32, Santhal hool 1855-56, Revolt of 1857, Indigo Revolt 1859-60, Pabna 1873-76, Deccan Riots 1875, Munda ulgulan 1899-1900. Learn that spine and the option sets on this topic collapse, because each of them tests one adjacency within it. It is also worth attaching the consequence to the event, since UPSC in particular prefers to ask what the government did afterwards rather than when the rising happened: for the hool, the Santal Parganas district and the ban on land transfer to non-Santhals; for the ulgulan, the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908.

• The hool began on 30 June 1855 at Bhognadih, where Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu gathered about ten thousand Santhals; the rising was suppressed by 3 January 1856
• Its declared object was to drive out the dikus — mahajans, zamindars and the East India Company — and establish Santhal self-rule; casualty estimates run to 10,000–15,000 dead
• Sidhu and Kanhu were joined in command by their brothers Chand and Bhairav; the Santhals defeated Company troops at Narayanpur before being broken near Maheshpur
• Aftermath: the Sonthal Parganas Act, Act 37 of 1855, created the Santal Parganas as a separate district, and the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act of 1876 barred the transfer of Santhal land to non-Santhals
• 30 June is observed as Hul Diwas; the Santal Parganas lay within Bihar until Jharkhand was created on 15 November 2000

• Folding the hool into the Revolt of 1857 — it began two years earlier and was over before the sepoy mutiny broke out
• Attaching the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act of 1876 to the wrong revolt; the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 is the one that followed Birsa Munda's ulgulan
• Assuming a tribal revolt was directed only at the British — the hool named the mahajan and the zamindar first, and the Company second

BPSC asks the hool as a date or a leader, because the Santal Parganas were Bihar territory until 2000 and the movement is treated as regional history; expect the answer to hinge on a single year. UPSC has asked it twice as consequence and chronology instead — what the colonial government did after the uprising subsided, and where the hool sits relative to the Mutiny and the Indigo Revolt — so the event has to be learnt with its legislation and its neighbours attached.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Santhal hool of 1855-56 was led by

  • (a)Birsa Munda
  • (b)Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu
  • (c)Tilka Manjhi
  • (d)Jatra Bhagat

  Answer(b) Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu — the brothers who assembled the Santhals at Bhognadih on 30 June 1855; Birsa Munda led the ulgulan of 1899-1900, four decades later.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act of 1876 principally provided for

  • (a)abolition of the zamindari system in Bengal
  • (b)a bar on the transfer of Santhal land to non-Santhals
  • (c)fixing of revenue in perpetuity
  • (d)recruitment of Santhals to the Company's army

  Answer(b) a bar on the transfer of Santhal land to non-Santhals — the protective land law that followed the hool, along with the creation of the Santal Parganas district in 1855.