In 1934

A. D., which of the following region, witnessed the establishment of 'Karshak Sangham' as a peasant organisation ?

Question

In 1934 A. D., which of the following region, witnessed the establishment of 'Karshak Sangham' as a peasant organisation ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

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

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2023 Q11 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q11 — History PYQ with Answer