Radical Peasant Movements in India: A Detailed Analysis

India’s agrarian history is marked by deep-rooted inequalities – feudal land systems, bonded labour, and generations of rural poverty. While many peasant movements sought reform through negotiation or petition, a distinct strand of movements chose a more confrontational path: radical, often armed uprisings that challenged the very structure of land ownership and class power. The Tebhaga movement in Bengal, the Telangana armed struggle, and the Naxalite insurgency are the three landmark radical peasant movements that reshaped India’s agrarian and political landscape. Each was shaped by its specific historical context, yet all shared a common thread – the refusal of the rural poor to accept exploitation as their fate.

What made these movements “radical”? 🔗

Not all peasant movements are radical in the same sense. Many historical agitations sought modest reforms – lower rents, protection from eviction, or fairer wages. Radical movements go further. They question the legitimacy of the existing agrarian order itself and seek its fundamental transformation, often through organised mass action or armed struggle. In India, this radicalism emerged where feudal exploitation was most extreme, where the state offered no recourse, and where communist and socialist organizers were able to channel rural grievances into a revolutionary programme. The three movements discussed here each represent a different stage in the evolution of that radicalism.

The Tebhaga movement (1946-1947): Bengal’s sharecroppers rise up 🔗

The Tebhaga movement was launched in Bengal in late 1946 by the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the peasant front of the Communist Party of India. The word “tebhaga” literally means “three shares” in Bengali – and it captured the movement’s central demand: that sharecroppers (bargadars) should receive two-thirds of the crop they cultivated, with only one-third going to the landlords (jotedars), rather than the existing fifty-fifty split.

The movement did not emerge from nowhere. Bengal’s agrarian structure was built on the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793, which created a class of zamindars who collected revenue from peasants. Below the zamindars, jotedars owned large tracts of land, controlled local markets and moneylending, and exercised near-total authority over poor cultivators. Sharecroppers worked the land but were systematically exploited, left with barely enough to survive. The Bengal Famine of 1943 deepened this misery enormously, radicalising the rural poor.

Mobilisation and the slogan that shook Bengal 🔗

By September 1946, the Bengal Provincial Kishan Sabha issued a call for a mass movement to implement the Floud Commission’s recommendation – that sharecroppers retain two-thirds of their produce. Communist cadres, including urban students, fanned out into the countryside to organise peasants. The slogan “Adhi noy, tebhaga chai” (“We want two-thirds, not half”) reverberated across districts. Peasants began cutting and threshing their crops on their own threshing floors rather than the jotedars’ – a direct, physical assertion of their claim.

The movement spread across 19 districts of Bengal and was most intense in Dinajpur, Rangpur, Jalpaiguri, Jessore, and the 24 Parganas. One of the movement’s notable features was the large-scale participation of women, who guarded crops, organised protests, and confronted both police and landlord militias – making it one of the earliest mass rural uprisings in India to prominently involve women.

Repression and limited gains 🔗

The colonial government, responding to jotedar pressure, deployed police to suppress the uprising. There were mass arrests, lathi charges, and firing on crowds. By mid-1947, the movement declined under this repression, compounded by internal divisions and the political upheaval of Partition. The Bengal Bargadari Act of 1950 formally recognised sharecroppers’ right to two-thirds of the produce when they provided inputs – but implementation was weak, and large landholdings above the ceiling remained with wealthy landlords. Yet the movement’s significance was lasting: it demonstrated the capacity of the rural poor for organised collective action and strengthened the Communist Party’s base in rural Bengal, laying the ground for later land reforms under the Left Front government, including Operation Barga in the late 1970s.

The Telangana movement (1946-1951): from agitation to armed uprising 🔗

If Tebhaga was a fierce but largely non-armed agitation, the Telangana rebellion was a full-scale armed insurrection – described by historians as the biggest guerrilla war in modern Indian history. It unfolded in the Telugu-speaking region of the princely state of Hyderabad, where feudal exploitation under the Nizam was far more extreme than almost anywhere else in India.

The feudal order that triggered rebellion 🔗

Hyderabad’s agrarian system was dominated by the jagirdari system, where nearly 40% of the land was controlled by landlords called jagirdars, deshmukhs, and doras who extracted heavy rents, evicted tenants arbitrarily, and imposed the vetti system – a form of forced, unpaid labour that amounted to bonded servitude. Peasants had no legal protection, no security of tenure, and no recourse against landlord violence. The slogan that circulated among the rural poor – “Dorala rajyam, ryotula rajyam kaadu” (This is the landlords’ rule, not the peasants’ rule) – captured the depth of popular resentment.

The Communist Party of India (CPI), working through the Andhra Mahasabha (AMS), began organising village-level committees called sanghams from the early 1940s. These sanghams became centres of village political organisation against zamindars and the Nizam’s paramilitary Razakars, often redistributing land to the peasantry and establishing a parallel governance structure at the village level.

The spark and the armed uprising 🔗

The rebellion’s trigger came on 4 July 1946, when peasant leader Doddi Komarayya was shot dead by a landlord’s armed men during a protest in Kadavendi village, Warangal district. His death transformed localised resistance into a mass armed uprising. Within months, hundreds of villages across Nalgonda, Warangal, and Khammam were in open revolt. The rebels established gram rajyams (village communes) that functioned as parallel self-governing bodies – resolving disputes, redistributing land, and abolishing forced labour wherever they gained control. Around 10 lakh acres of land were reportedly redistributed during the peak of the movement.

The movement achieved something extraordinary: a social revolution within the rebellion, with caste and gender hierarchies reduced in the areas under peasant commune control, and women participating actively as fighters, couriers, and organisers. Chityala Ailamma, a Bahujan labourer, became one of its most celebrated figures – her defiance of Razakar violence inspiring hundreds of women to join the struggle.

Military intervention and the movement’s end 🔗

After India’s independence in 1947, the Nizam sought to keep Hyderabad autonomous. On 13 September 1948, the Indian Army launched what was officially described as a “police action” to integrate Hyderabad into the Indian Union. With the Nizam’s surrender within a week, peasants initially welcomed the army as allies. But the Nehru government subsequently launched a military offensive against the rebel communes themselves – resulting in mass detentions and the dismantling of the gram rajyams. The CPI formally withdrew the armed struggle on 21 October 1951, after negotiations with the Congress government. The movement left behind the Hyderabad Jagir Abolition Act of 1949 and tenancy reforms, though their implementation was uneven. Its unresolved agrarian grievances would later fuel the Naxalite movement in the same region.

The Naxalite movement (1967 onwards): revolution from the village 🔗

Two decades after Telangana, a new wave of radical peasant politics emerged – this time from a small village in West Bengal that would give its name to an entire political phenomenon. The Naxalite movement, born from the Naxalbari uprising of 1967, was distinct from its predecessors in its explicitly revolutionary ideological framework and its ambition to replicate the Chinese Communist Revolution on Indian soil.

Naxalbari 1967: the spark 🔗

In March 1967, peasants in Naxalbari, Darjeeling district, West Bengal, began seizing land from jotedars. The immediate trigger was the attack on a tribal farmer, Bimal Kissan, by a landlord’s private armed men, after he obtained a court order allowing him to plough his own land. The local population erupted. By May 1967, armed peasants were seizing land, crops, and ammunition from landlords across the Naxalbari, Kharibari, and Phansidewa areas. When police arrived to intervene, an ambush resulted in deaths on both sides. The state government sent in paramilitary forces, and by July 1967, the uprising was militarily suppressed.

Ideology and organisation 🔗

What set Naxalbari apart was its ideological clarity. Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, and Jangal Santhal – leaders of what was called the “Siliguri group” within the CPI(M) – had been advocating for a Maoist-style protracted people’s war. Majumdar’s Historic Eight Documents became the foundational text of the Naxalite ideology. He argued that India’s independence was incomplete, having transferred power from British colonisers to Indian landlords and the bourgeoisie without dismantling the structures of exploitation. The movement drew inspiration from Mao Zedong’s strategy of “surrounding cities from the countryside” through rural revolution.

The movement’s ideological foundation was rooted in Marxist-Leninist principles, advocating the seizure of state power through armed struggle and the establishment of a classless society. It called for the establishment of liberated zones where peasants would govern themselves and defend redistributed land through armed resistance. Debt cancellation and immediate redistribution of landlord land without compensation were among its core demands.

Spread, fragmentation, and the continuing insurgency 🔗

The Naxalbari uprising, though militarily defeated, generated enormous political momentum. By 1971, nearly 60% of India’s population was landless, with the lion’s share of land owned by the richest 4% – conditions that made the Naxalite message resonate across states. The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was formally established in 1969, becoming the organisational centre of the movement. It inspired similar uprisings in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and Madhya Pradesh.

However, the movement fractured rapidly. By 1973, its main leaders had been killed or arrested – Charu Majumdar himself dying in police custody in 1972. Internal ideological divisions split the original party into more than 40 separate factions. The late 1970s and 1980s saw Naxalism revive in South India, eventually consolidating in the Communist Party of India (Maoist), formed in 2004. Today, the insurgency remains active in forested, mineral-rich regions of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha – areas where tribal communities and the rural poor continue to face land alienation and state neglect.

Common threads across all three movements 🔗

Despite their different geographies and eras, the Tebhaga, Telangana, and Naxalite movements share several defining features. First, all three were responses to failed or absent land reform – the promise of redistributive justice that independent India made but could not consistently deliver. Second, all three relied heavily on the organisational infrastructure provided by communist parties and peasant associations, which gave individual grievances a collective political form. Third, all three faced violent state repression – and in each case, repression was an instrument of preserving the existing agrarian order as much as maintaining law and order.

A fourth common thread is the role of women. From Ila Mitra in Tebhaga to Chityala Ailamma in Telangana, women were not passive participants but central figures in radical agrarian resistance – a dimension that mainstream political history has often underplayed. Finally, all three movements highlight the limits of purely electoral or legislative reform in addressing deep structural inequalities. Where laws were passed – the Bargadari Act, the Jagir Abolition Act – implementation faltered under landlord pressure and administrative indifference.

Legacy and continuing relevance 🔗

The radical peasant movements of India did not achieve their stated revolutionary goals. None succeeded in overthrowing the agrarian order or establishing the classless societies their ideologues envisioned. Yet their legacies are real and lasting. They forced land reform onto the political agenda. They demonstrated that the rural poor could organise, resist, and – for periods – govern themselves. They profoundly shaped left-wing politics in India and influenced the policy trajectories of state governments, particularly in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. And they left behind questions about land, labour, and justice that remain live and contested in contemporary India.

The continuing Naxalite insurgency, whatever one thinks of its methods, is a reminder that the root causes of agrarian unrest – land alienation, extreme inequality, tribal dispossession – have not been resolved. As analysts have noted, economic growth without equitable distribution continues to create conditions for social unrest in India’s rural heartlands.

What do you think? Nearly eight decades after the Tebhaga and Telangana movements, India’s agrarian inequalities persist in new forms. Does radical collective action by the rural poor remain a legitimate response to structural injustice, or do these movements’ outcomes suggest that institutional reform is the only viable path? And what does the continued relevance of the Naxalite insurgency tell us about the limits of post-independence land reform in India?

References

1. https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Tebhaga_Movement
2. https://www.insightsonindia.com/modern-indian-history/other-dimensions/peasants-movement/tebhaga-movement/
3. https://www.clearias.com/tebhaga-movement/
4. https://www.gktoday.in/tebhaga-movement/
5. https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/tebhaga-movement/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telangana_Rebellion
7. https://pwonlyias.com/telangana-peasant-revolt/
8. https://feminisminindia.com/2020/08/12/women-armed-revolution-telangana-peoples-struggle/
9. https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/telangana-movement/
10. https://www.ritimo.org/The-Telengana-Movement-Peasant-Protests-in-India-1946-51
11. https://www.iassite.com/telangana-movement-1946-1951-upsc/
12. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Naxalite
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalbari_uprising
14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalism
15. https://edukemy.com/blog/beginning-of-naxalite-movement-naxalbari-uprising-1967-upsc-post-independence-notes/
16. https://www.efsas.org/publications/study-papers/an-introduction-to-naxalism-in-india/
17. https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/naxalism-in-india/
18. https://polsci.institute/india-democracy-development/naxalbari-uprising-genesis-naxalite-movement-india/