The Tribal Movement-Santhal hool (Rebellion) took place in

Question

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q107 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q107 — History PYQ with Answer