During 1931, under whose leadership, did a strong Kisan Sabha Movement develop in the Gaya District of Bihar ?

Correct — A, (a) Yadunandan Sharma.

Yadunandan Sharma, whose name is also written Jadunandan Sharma, was the leader of the peasant movement in Gaya district. He was born in 1896 in Manjhiyawan village in that district, inside the Tekari zamindari, matriculated in 1919 and took his degree at the Banaras Hindu University in 1929. He joined the Civil Disobedience Movement and was arrested and sentenced to sixteen months in 1930. On his release he threw himself into the Kisan movement of his own district, where he became, in the words of the standard account, the undisputed leader of the peasants of Gaya and second in command to Swami Sahajanand Saraswati.

He is remembered above all for the Reora Satyagraha, and for the Sandako campaign alongside it. He worked from an ashram at Neyamatpur village; Jawaharlal Nehru visited him there in December 1936; he served on the Provincial Kisan Sabha’s enquiry committee of 1933 with Yamuna Karjee and Jugal Kishore Singh; and he wrote a tract on the bakasht question, ‘Bakasht Mahamari Aur Uska Achook Ilaaz’, in 1947. He died in 1975.

The question is asking about a DISTRICT, and that is what decides it. The Kisan Sabha in Bihar had a provincial leadership and a set of district leaderships beneath it, and Gaya’s was Sharma’s. Reading the stem for the level it names — district, province or country — is the whole technique for this item.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)Sahajanand — Swami Sahajanand Saraswati is the towering name of the Kisan Sabha in Bihar, and the option is placed here because of it. He founded the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha at the end of the 1920s against zamindari attacks on occupancy rights, and he became the first president of the All India Kisan Sabha when it was formed at Lucknow in April 1936. He led the Bakasht movement of 1937–38 against the eviction of tenants from bakasht land, and his ashram was at Bihta near Patna. But the question asks about the movement in GAYA DISTRICT, and there the leadership was Yadunandan Sharma’s — Sharma is described in the standard account as second in command to Sahajanand precisely because the provincial leader was one man and the district leader another. The option is right about the movement and wrong about the level the stem names.
• (c)Sheetla Sahai — Sheetla Sahai belongs to an entirely different period and a different state. He lived from 1932 to 2011 and was a Bharatiya Janata Party politician from Gwalior who served as a cabinet minister in Madhya Pradesh. A single arithmetical check disposes of the option: he was born in 1932, after the year named in the stem, so he cannot have led anything in 1931. Options of this kind — a real public figure from the wrong century of the wrong state — are common in this paper’s history block, and the fastest way to eliminate them is to ask whether the person was even alive and adult at the date named.
• (d)Tilka Manjhi — Tilka Manjhi, more usually spelt Tilka Majhi, belongs to eighteenth-century tribal resistance in the Bhagalpur region and is popularly dated to the second half of the 1700s; he is said to have been executed at Bhagalpur. Some historians question how much of the received account can be established, but no version of it places him anywhere near the twentieth century, so he cannot have led a Kisan Sabha in 1931. The option is doing a particular job in the set: it supplies a Bihar name associated with agrarian and tribal revolt, so that a candidate who is matching on ‘Bihar’ and ‘peasant unrest’ without attending to the date has something to reach for.

The Kisan Sabha movement is the organised peasant politics that grew up alongside the national movement and often in tension with it, and Bihar is where it was strongest.

The structure had three levels, and questions are set on all three. At the DISTRICT level, local leaders built sabhas around specific grievances — Yadunandan Sharma in Gaya, with the Reora and Sandako satyagrahas. At the PROVINCIAL level stood the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, founded by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati at the end of the 1920s, working from his ashram at Bihta near Patna. At the ALL-INDIA level came the All India Kisan Sabha, formed at Lucknow in April 1936 with Sahajanand as its first president and N. G. Ranga and E. M. S. Namboodiripad prominent in it. The Kisan Manifesto of August 1936 demanded the abolition of zamindari and the cancellation of rural debts, and in October 1937 the All India Kisan Sabha adopted the red flag.

The grievance that gave the Bihar movement its edge was BAKASHT land — land the tenant cultivated but from which the landlord sought to evict him, ‘bakasht’ meaning self-cultivated. The Bakasht movement of 1937–38 led to changes in the Bihar tenancy law. Behind it lay the older structure of the great zamindaris, Tekari among them, in which Sharma’s own village lay.

The United Provinces produced a parallel movement with a separate cast — Baba Ram Chandra organising the Awadh peasants from 1920, and Acharya Narendra Deva, the founding theorist of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, who presided over the All-India Kisan Congress. Examiners regularly swap a UP name into a Bihar question and a Bihar name into a UP one, so the two lists are best learnt side by side.

One point of scholarly detail worth recording: this stem dates the Gaya movement to 1931, which follows the standard textbook accounts, while Sharma’s biography dates his entry into the Kisan movement to 1933, after his release from the imprisonment of 1930. The identification of the leader is not in doubt on either dating.

Key facts

• Yadunandan (also written Jadunandan) Sharma, 1896–1975, was the leader of the peasant movement in Gaya district, Bihar, and is described as second in command to Swami Sahajanand Saraswati.
• He was born at Manjhiyawan village in Gaya district, within the Tekari zamindari, and graduated from the Banaras Hindu University in 1929.
• He joined the Civil Disobedience Movement and was sentenced to sixteen months’ imprisonment in 1930.
• He is remembered for the Reora Satyagraha and the Sandako campaign, and he worked from an ashram at Neyamatpur village; Nehru visited him there in December 1936.
• Swami Sahajanand Saraswati founded the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha at the end of the 1920s and was the first president of the All India Kisan Sabha, formed at Lucknow in April 1936.
• The Kisan Manifesto of August 1936 demanded abolition of zamindari and cancellation of rural debts; the All India Kisan Sabha adopted the red flag in October 1937.
• ‘Bakasht’ means self-cultivated land, and the Bakasht movement of 1937–38 in Bihar resisted the eviction of tenants from it.
• Sheetla Sahai, 1932–2011, was a Madhya Pradesh politician from Gwalior — born after the year named in this stem.
• Tilka Manjhi, usually spelt Tilka Majhi, belongs to eighteenth-century tribal resistance around Bhagalpur, not to the twentieth century.

Common traps

• Answering with the provincial leader when the stem names a district. Sahajanand led the movement in Bihar as a whole; Gaya district was Sharma’s.
• Ignoring the date. One option names a man born in 1932, which the year in the stem rules out at once.
• Matching on region and theme alone. Both a twentieth-century Kisan Sabha leader and an eighteenth-century figure of tribal revolt can be attached to Bihar and to agrarian resistance.
• Confusing the Bihar leaders with the United Provinces leaders of the same movement, which is a swap examiners make often.
• Assuming a single spelling of a name. Yadunandan appears as Jadunandan and Tilka Manjhi as Tilka Majhi in different accounts.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who was the first President of the All India Kisan Sabha, formed at Lucknow in April 1936 ?

  • (a)N. G. Ranga
  • (b)Swami Sahajanand Saraswati
  • (c)Yadunandan Sharma
  • (d)Baba Ram Chandra

  Answer(b) Swami Sahajanand Saraswati — he had earlier founded the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha and became the first president of the all-India body, with N. G. Ranga and E. M. S. Namboodiripad prominent in it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term ‘bakasht’, around which a major peasant movement developed in Bihar in 1937–38, refers to which one of the following ?

  • (a)A tax levied on indigo cultivation
  • (b)Land self-cultivated by the landlord, from which tenants were sought to be evicted
  • (c)The share of the crop paid to a moneylender
  • (d)Common grazing land attached to a village

  Answer(b) Land self-cultivated by the landlord, from which tenants were sought to be evicted — the Bakasht movement resisted such evictions and led to changes in the Bihar tenancy law.