MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 11 of 100

Correct — option (3), Kerala. The Karshaka Sangham is the peasant union of Malabar, the northern part of present-day Kerala which was then a district of the Madras Presidency, and the year printed in the stem is the year the work of building them began. From 1934 the activists of the Congress Socialist Party — among them P. Krishna Pillai, E. M. S. Namboodiripad, A. K. Gopalan and Keraleeyan — went from village to village in Malabar organising cultivating tenants into Karshaka Sanghams, and out of that touring came the village unions of the following year, the Kolacheri Karshaka Sangham in Chirakkal and the Karivelloor sangham among the earliest, and then the all-Malabar conference of Karshaka Sanghams at Kozhikode in 1937. What gave the movement its force was the particular character of the Malabar land system, in which the janmi held permanent proprietary right and the cultivating verumpattamdar held no security at all: the sanghams campaigned against the customary exactions known as akramapirivukal, against the renewal fee a tenant had to pay to keep his holding, against advance rent, and above all against eviction on the landlord's plea that he intended to cultivate the land himself. The movement grew into one of the strongest peasant organisations in India, and its later episodes at Kayyur and Karivelloor belong to the standard account of agrarian struggle in the 1940s. Malabar is the region, so the answer is Kerala. The stem's own English is loose — 'which of the following region, witnessed' — but its sense is not in doubt.

• (1)Andhra Pradesh — Andhra is the most tempting wrong answer, because coastal Andhra was one of the two or three great centres of organised peasant politics in this period and produced N. G. Ranga, who did more than anyone to build a national peasant movement. The Andhra Provincial Ryots' Association dates from the late 1920s, the ryotwari and zamindari agitations there were sustained and large, and Ranga went on to become the first general secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha when it was founded at Lucknow in 1936. All of that is true and none of it is a Karshaka Sangham. The name in the stem is a Malayalam one, and the local vocabulary of a peasant organisation is usually the surest guide to its region.
• (2)Tamil Nadu — Tamil Nadu had its own agrarian agitations in these decades, and the Tamil districts of the Madras Presidency shared a political administration with Malabar, which is what makes this option superficially reasonable — a candidate who correctly places the Karshaka Sangham in the Madras Presidency but does not know which district of it may land here. The Karshaka Sangham movement, however, was specifically a Malabar development, built on the janmi-tenant relation peculiar to that region and organised in Malayalam, and its conferences were held at Kozhikode. Presidency and region are not the same unit, and the question asks for the region.
• (4)Bengal — Bengal's peasant politics of these years took a different institutional form altogether. The Krishak Praja Party, founded in the mid-1930s under Fazlul Huq, fought the provincial elections on the promise of abolishing the permanent settlement's zamindari, and the province's most famous agrarian struggle, the Tebhaga movement of 1946, was a sharecroppers' demand for two-thirds of the crop rather than a tenants' campaign against renewal fees and eviction. Bengal is offered because it is the province a candidate most readily associates with landlordism and peasant distress, but neither its organisations nor its vocabulary matches the body named in the stem.

The peasant movements of the 1930s grew out of the depression in agricultural prices, the collapse of rural credit and the political opening created by the Congress Socialist Party, founded in 1934, whose workers set out deliberately to organise peasants and workers rather than to wait for a national campaign. Two of the strongest regional movements were in coastal Andhra and in Malabar. Malabar's was built on a land system in which the janmi enjoyed permanent right in the soil while the cultivating tenant held on short and insecure terms, subject to renewal fees, customary levies and the ever-present threat of eviction. From 1934 Congress Socialist workers organised the cultivators into Karshaka Sanghams village by village; the first of them appeared in 1935 in the Chirakkal area, and an all-Malabar conference met at Kozhikode in 1937. Many of the same leaders carried the movement into the Communist Party after 1939. Nationally the strands came together in the All India Kisan Sabha, formed at Lucknow in 1936 with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati in the chair and N. G. Ranga as general secretary. The land legislation of independent Kerala, and the state's distinctive agrarian politics, descend directly from this organising decade.

MPSC asks about peasant movements as a mapping exercise: a movement or an organisation is named and the candidate has to place it in a region, or a region is named and the candidate has to produce the movement. The reliable clue is usually linguistic, because these organisations carried local names — Karshaka Sangham in Malabar, Kisan Sabha across the Hindi belt, Ryots' Association in Andhra, Krishak Praja in Bengal — and the language of the name is the language of the region. A second clue is the specific grievance, since each region's agitation attacked the particular defect of its own land system: renewal fees and insecure tenancy in Malabar, zamindari exactions in Bihar and Bengal, sharecroppers' shares in the Tebhaga areas, and revenue enhancement in the Deccan. Building a short table with four columns — movement, region, years, grievance — answers almost everything MPSC sets on this topic, and it also protects against the commonest error, which is to answer a regional question with the name of the most famous leader of a neighbouring region.

• Karshaka Sanghams were the peasant unions of Malabar, the northern part of present-day Kerala, then a district of the Madras Presidency; Congress Socialist Party workers began organising them from 1934.
• The earliest village unions followed in 1935, among them the Kolacheri Karshaka Sangham in Chirakkal and the sangham at Karivelloor, and an all-Malabar conference of Karshaka Sanghams met at Kozhikode in 1937.
• Their demands were the abolition of customary exactions known as akramapirivukal, of renewal fees and of advance rent, and an end to eviction on the landlord's plea of personal cultivation.
• The Malabar land system set a janmi holding permanent proprietary right against cultivating tenants with no security of tenure, which is what gave these demands their edge.
• The All India Kisan Sabha, which drew such regional bodies together, was founded at Lucknow in 1936 with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati as president and N. G. Ranga as general secretary.

• Answering with Andhra because N. G. Ranga and the ryots' associations dominate the peasant chapter; the Karshaka Sangham is a Malabar body with a Malayalam name
• Confusing the administrative unit with the region: Malabar was part of the Madras Presidency but is not Tamil Nadu
• Assuming Bengal whenever landlordism is mentioned, when Bengal's characteristic agitations were the Krishak Praja Party and the Tebhaga sharecroppers' movement
• Attaching the movement to the year a formal federation was founded rather than the year the organising began, which is what this stem asks about

Peasant movements appear in MPSC papers as one-line placing questions — name the region, the year, the leader or the organisation — and occasionally as a match-the-columns item pairing movements with regions or leaders. The Commission draws on the whole country for this topic, not only Maharashtra, and it prefers organisations with distinctive local names because those names can be tested for recognition. Expect the 1930s to be the most heavily sampled decade, since it contains the Congress Socialist Party of 1934, the regional sanghams and sabhas that followed, and the All India Kisan Sabha of 1936. The names should be learnt with their regions attached and with one line on the specific grievance, because the grievance is what the Commission uses when it wants a harder version of the same question.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The All India Kisan Sabha, founded in 1936, held its first session at which place and under whose presidency ?

  • (a)Lucknow; Swami Sahajanand Saraswati
  • (b)Patna; N. G. Ranga
  • (c)Kozhikode; E. M. S. Namboodiripad
  • (d)Faizpur; Jawaharlal Nehru

  Answer(a) Lucknow; Swami Sahajanand Saraswati — the All India Kisan Sabha was founded at Lucknow in 1936 with Sahajanand Saraswati in the chair and N. G. Ranga as its general secretary, drawing together provincial peasant organisations that had grown up separately in Bihar, Andhra, Malabar and elsewhere. Faizpur is remembered for the Congress session of 1936 held in a village setting, not for the Kisan Sabha.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The peasant unions known as Karshaka Sanghams, organised from the mid-1930s, campaigned chiefly against which set of grievances ?

  • (a)Sharecroppers' demand for two-thirds of the produce
  • (b)Renewal fees, customary levies and eviction by the janmi
  • (c)Enhancement of land revenue under the ryotwari settlement
  • (d)Forced cultivation of indigo for European planters

  Answer(b) Renewal fees, customary levies and eviction by the janmi — these were the specific defects of the Malabar tenancy system, where the janmi held permanent proprietary right and the cultivating tenant had no security. The sharecroppers' two-thirds demand belongs to the Tebhaga movement in Bengal, and forced indigo cultivation to the Champaran and Bengal indigo agitations of a much earlier period.