Enforcement Officer / Accounts Officer (EO/AO) 2017 recruitment test. Transcribed from the Commission's own booklet (series A, GRS-A-TNS); answer as per the official UPSC final answer key. This question is in Part B. Answer last reviewed 24 August 2026.

What were the peasant associations set up in Kerala in the 1930s called?

(a)Kisan Sabha
(b)Kirti Kisan
(c)Karshaka Sangam
(d)Kisan Morcha

Answer

Why

Correct — C, (c) Karshaka Sangam. In Kerala the peasant associations of the 1930s were called Karshaka Sangams — karshakan is the Malayalam word for a cultivator — and they were built village by village, mainly in Malabar, by activists of the Congress Socialist Party who had been touring the countryside since about 1934. The first of them was formed in Chirakkal taluk in northern Malabar in 1935, and within a few years they had been federated into an All Malabar Karshaka Sangham. What they agitated about was the everyday economics of tenancy under the janmi landlords: the illegal exactions collected over and above rent, the renewal fees a tenant had to pay to have his lease continued, the demand for rent in advance, and above all eviction, which a landlord could obtain by pleading that he wanted the land for personal cultivation. Their methods were the methods of the national movement scaled down to a village — enrolling members into a sangam, holding conferences, taking out marches to the taluk and district offices, and presenting written memoranda of grievances to officials. The name matters for the answer, but the movement matters more: these sangams carried the peasant question into Kerala politics, and the militancy they built up ran on into the confrontations at Kayyur in 1941 and Karivellur in 1946.

Why the others are wrong

(a)Kisan Sabha — The right family of organisation under the wrong name. Kisan Sabha is the north Indian term, and it belongs to a real and important lineage — the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha built up by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati from 1929, and the All India Kisan Sabha founded at Lucknow in April 1936 with Sahajanand as its first president and N. G. Ranga as general secretary. The Kerala sangams worked in the same national current and sent their delegates to the same all-India platform, but the bodies actually set up in Malabar villages were called Karshaka Sangams, and it is the local name the question asks for.
(b)Kirti Kisan — Kirti Kisan belongs to Punjab, not Kerala, and to a different political stream. The name comes from the journal Kirti, started in 1926, around which returned Ghadar revolutionaries and communists in Punjab organised themselves as the Kirti Kisan Party in 1928. Its concerns were the Punjabi peasantry, the canal colonies and revolutionary politics in the north-west, and it has no organisational connection with the tenancy agitation of Malabar. Distance alone is the giveaway: nothing in the Kirti group’s work reached the Malabar coast.
(d)Kisan Morcha — No peasant association of the 1930s went by this name. Morcha means a front or a line of agitation, and the expression belongs to later political usage rather than to the organisations of the national movement. It is included here as the option that sounds like a peasant body without ever having been one, and a candidate who reaches for it is usually reasoning from the two familiar words in it rather than from anything remembered about Kerala.

Concept

The organised peasant movement of the 1930s is a set of regional bodies with regional names, drawn together late and loosely at the all-India level. Its background is the depression: agricultural prices collapsed after 1929, rents and debts did not, and tenants across India found themselves squeezed at exactly the moment when Congress Socialists and communists were looking for a rural base. Out of that came the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha under Sahajanand Saraswati, the Andhra Ryots Association work of N. G. Ranga, the Karshaka Sangams of Malabar, and, in 1936, the All India Kisan Sabha, which for the first time gave them a common platform and a common charter of demands. Their demands were remarkably consistent from region to region: security of tenure against eviction, reduction of rent, abolition of illegal cesses and forced exactions, and relief from debt. Their significance is that they made agrarian grievance a permanent part of nationalist politics, and in Kerala they became the foundation of the political organisation that dominated the state after independence.

Peasant movements are a standing favourite of EPFO general-ability papers because they combine a fact that can be asked cleanly — a name, a place, a year, a leader — with a theme the syllabus values. This item is at the easiest end of that range: it asks only for the local name of an organisation, and gives three plausible alternatives drawn from other regions. That construction is itself the lesson. When option sets are built out of the same category from different provinces, the discriminating knowledge is regional, so the efficient revision is a table of movement, region, leader and decade rather than a narrative. Karshaka Sangam and Malabar belong together in that table exactly as Kisan Sabha belongs with Bihar and Sahajanand Saraswati.

Key facts

Karshaka Sangams were the peasant associations of Kerala in the 1930s, strongest in Malabar; karshakan is Malayalam for a cultivator.
They were organised largely by Congress Socialist Party activists who had been working in the villages from about 1934, and the first was formed in Chirakkal taluk in 1935.
Their central demands were an end to illegal exactions and renewal fees, an end to advance rent, and protection against eviction on the landlord’s plea of personal cultivation.
The All India Kisan Sabha was founded at Lucknow in April 1936, with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati as president and N. G. Ranga as general secretary.
The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, founded by Sahajanand Saraswati in 1929, was the most important of the provincial bodies that preceded the all-India organisation.
The Kirti Kisan Party of Punjab, formed in 1928 around the journal Kirti, drew in returned Ghadar revolutionaries and belongs to the north-west, not to Kerala.
The militancy built by the Malabar sangams carried on into the peasant confrontations at Kayyur in 1941 and Karivellur in 1946.

Four names from four regions; the discriminating knowledge is regional

(c) Karshaka Sangam — Kerala→The peasant associations of the 1930s in Kerala, strongest in Malabar; karshakan is the Malayalam word for a cultivator. The first was formed in Chirakkal taluk in northern Malabar in 1935, and within a few years they were federated into an All Malabar Karshaka Sangham.

What they agitated about→The everyday economics of tenancy under the janmi landlords: illegal exactions collected over and above rent, the renewal fees a tenant paid to have his lease continued, rent demanded in advance, and above all eviction, which a landlord could obtain by pleading that he wanted the land for personal cultivation.

(a) Kisan Sabha — north India→The right family of organisation under the wrong name. The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha was built up by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati from 1929, and the All India Kisan Sabha was founded at Lucknow in April 1936, with Sahajanand as its first president and N. G. Ranga as general secretary.

(b) Kirti Kisan — Punjab→From the journal Kirti, started in 1926, around which returned Ghadar revolutionaries and communists organised themselves as the Kirti Kisan Party in 1928. Its concerns were the Punjabi peasantry and the canal colonies, and nothing in its work reached the Malabar coast.

(d) Kisan Morcha→No peasant association of the 1930s went by this name. Morcha means a front or a line of agitation, and the expression belongs to later political usage rather than to the organisations of the national movement.

What the sangams led to→The militancy they built up ran on into the peasant confrontations at Kayyur in 1941 and Karivellur in 1946, and made agrarian grievance a permanent part of nationalist politics.

Study next

The All India Kisan Sabha of 1936: its founding, its charter of demands and its relations with the CongressRegional peasant movements between the wars — Bihar, Andhra, Malabar, Bengal’s Tebhaga and Hyderabad’s TelanganaThe Congress Socialist Party, formed in 1934, and its work in mobilising peasants and workersTenancy legislation in Malabar and the janmi system that the sangams were formed againstThe Moplah rebellion of 1921 in Malabar and how it differs from the organised sangam movement of the 1930s

Common traps

Answering with the generic north Indian term when the question asks for the name used in a particular region.
Attaching Kirti Kisan to the wrong province. It is Punjab, and it belongs to the Ghadar and communist stream.
Assuming any plausible Hindi-sounding combination of words was a real organisation of the period.
Confusing the Moplah rebellion of 1921 with the organised, secular tenancy movement of the 1930s in the same region.

The national-movement block of an EO/AO paper reliably contains one or two items on peasant or labour organisation, and they are asked as flat identification questions: what were they called, who founded them, in which year, in which province. The options are usually four names of the same type, which means recognition alone will not do — the candidate has to have stored the name with its region attached. Where the paper goes one level deeper it asks for the demand rather than the name, so it is worth remembering that this whole family of movements agitated about eviction, rent, illegal cesses and debt.

Related PYQs

EPFO_EOAO_2017_Q27Open & attempt →

Which one of the following is not a feature of the Non-Cooperation Movement?

(a) Economic boycott was intense and successful.
(b) The middle class participated in very large numbers in the movement.
(c) It was marked by uneven geographical spread and regional variations.
(d) Along with Non-Cooperation, other Gandhian social reform movements like the anti-liquor campaign achieved some success.

Answer(b) The middle class participated in very large numbers in the movement.

The Non-Cooperation item in this block; the same paper tests the mass movements of the 1920s and the organised peasant movements of the 1930s side by side.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
The All India Kisan Sabha was founded in 1936 at which city, with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati as its first president?
- (a)Patna
- (b)Lucknow
- (c)Nagpur
- (d)Faizpur
Answer(b) Lucknow
practice — not a real PYQ
The Karshaka Sangams of the 1930s were organised chiefly in which region, and largely by activists of which body?
- (a)Malabar, by the Congress Socialist Party
- (b)Telangana, by the Andhra Mahasabha
- (c)North Bihar, by the Kisan Sabha
- (d)Coastal Andhra, by the Justice Party
Answer(a) Malabar, by the Congress Socialist Party

Why