Erased from the record: The Adivasi freedom fighters of Bardoli

In 1927, the colonial British government announced a revision in the land tax rate in the Bardoli taluka of Surat district in South Gujarat.

Citing factors such as increased land prices and agricultural wages, it declared that it was increasing the tax rate by 22%.

The local population criticised this hike vociferously – they had, in fact, been hoping for a reduction, given that they were facing considerable economic hardship.

The scholar and independence activist Mahadev Desai noted in his 1929 book The Story of Bardoli that the Taluka Congress Committee formed an inquiry committee which found that “the agriculturist had no profits out of land which could sustain even the existing rate of assessment”.

Local community leaders decided to protest by refusing to pay the land revenue the government was demanding.

On February 4, 1928, the Bardoli Satyagraha was launched under Vallabhbhai Patel’s leadership. It continued for six months until the government agreed to revise down the revenue rate and return the lands it had seized. Bardoli became one of the most successful peasant revolts the country had seen.

Reflecting on its success in July 1929, Mohandas Gandhi wrote, “Bardoli has shown the way and cleared it. Swaraj lies on that route alone and that alone is the cure for starvation.”

In Lahore, The Tribune declared that the Bardoli struggle had shown that if all of India rose up “as satyagrahis, the arms of the British government would prove a matter for mere jest”. The Chennai daily Swaraj described the people of Bardoli as “the vanguard of the army of liberation of our enslaved country from perpetual thraldom”.

But only few in this vanguard have been recognised in the historical memory of the Bardoli satyagraha. While the role of Patidar leaders such as Vallabhbhai Patel, Kunvarji Mehta and Kalyanji Mehta has been well documented, the participation of Adivasis of the region has been largely overlooked.

“Hundreds of Adivasis who were inspired by Gandhian leaders participated in the nationalist movement,” Arun Vaghela, head of the history department at Gujarat University, wrote in a recently published paper in Hindi after conducting research about Adivasi participation in Bardoli.

During his fieldwork in the village of Veddchi in 2010, Vaghela came across evidence of around 40 Adivasi freedom fighters who had participated in the Bardoli Satyagraha. He spoke to a few who were still alive. Among them were people who had never received any official recognition, let alone the pensions given to freedom fighters.

There was other evidence of the community suffering disproportionately. “It was recorded as a non-violent movement but at least two of those Adivasi freedom fighters died in jail,” Vaghela said, citing his research from administrative records. “Nobody else is recorded to have died in the Bardoli movement,” he added.

Trapped in bonded labour

According to the 1921 census, Bardoli comprised 137 villages that had a total population of around 87,000.

The social composition was mixed. The dominant landed class, also known as the Ujaliparaj or fair-skinned people, included the Patidars, Anavil Brahmins and Baniyas. Alongside them, more than half the population was made up of Adivasis, colloquially known in Gujarati as the Kaliparaj or “black people”, later to be known as the Raniparaj, or “people of the forest”.

This term included the Gamit tribe, the Chodhara, or the Chodhari tribe, and the Dubla tribe, whose name literally means “weak” – the community is known as the Halpati tribe today.

A large number of the Raniparaj worked as agricultural labourers for the landed castes. “The control of the caste Hindus – mainly Baniyas and Patidars – over the tribesmen was almost absolute,” political scientist Ghanshyam Shah wrote in a paper on Bardoli. A large number of Halpatis, in particular, were trapped in the hali system, which was akin to bonded labour.

In his book The Story of Bardoli, Desai who was also Gandhi’s secretary, wrote about the Halpatis, “There is very little that is voluntary about their labour. They get married at the expense of their masters, get into their debt, and remain attached to the masters practically as their serfs.”

Adivasis back Gandhi

Despite their oppressive circumstances, Adivasis played a key role in the freedom struggle in the region.

Indeed, veteran Adivasi activist Ashokbhai Chaudhari, whose family has deep Gandhian roots, explained that Adivasis participated in large numbers, not only in the Bardoli Satyagraha, but also the subsequent Dandi March. “Gandhi used to be surrounded by four-five circles of people so that the colonial police couldn’t touch him,” he said. “Who were these masses? A large number of them were the local Adivasis.”

Prior to the Bardoli satyagraha, the region had already seen some organisation among Adivasi communities – many had attained higher education owing to the efforts of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III to promote education in the communities, and had become teachers in South Gujarat.

Some of these educated members of the communities started an organisation named Kaliparaj Parishad for the upliftment of their community against rampant socio-economic oppression by landowners. In fact, five years before the Bardoli satyagraha, the organisation had announced its decision to back Gandhi and other Congress leaders in the freedom struggle.

Ashokbhai’s maternal family was one such family, which became staunch Gandhians devoted to the freedom struggle. His great-grandfather Jeevanbhai Chaudhari was one of the first Adivasis to organise against British oppression in the region. “They started small ashrams in every five to six villages dedicated to swarajya,” said Ashokbhai.

He recounted that his mother, Dashriben, met Gandhi when she was only eight years old, and decided after to only wear handspun khadi, and no jewellery. Local lore has it that many years later, Dashriben and Kasturba Gandhi were cellmates at Yerawada jail – and that it was Dashriben, who had studied up to Class 5, who taught Kasturba to read and write. Though this story is not corroborated by documentary records, Tushar Gandhi, an author and the great-grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, told Scroll that it was highly likely the two women were in prison together, and that Kasturba was known to take the help of educated prisonmates to write letters.

Shah wrote in his book that local leaders like Kunvarji Mehta also worked to draw widespread grassroots support for the freedom struggle. Among the messages they sought to communicate was that Gandhi was devoted to the poor of the country, including Adivasis. Shah wrote that the leaders told locals that after his return from South Africa, Gandhi “travelled over the country to find that the people were poor and naked, or at best wearing a langoti (loin cloth), as was true of the Adivasis. He, therefore, put away his own clothes and wore only a langoti.”

Vaghela noted that movement leaders also used myth to convince people to support the movement. Specifically, they projected Gandhi as a god who was endorsed by their own gods – Siliya and Simaliya Dev. “They were told that their two gods went flying to South Africa and saw that Gandhi was doing god’s work,” he said. “So they told him that he was required in India which is why Gandhi returned to serve his people”.

Shah wrote that community leaders in the region spoke of “their new ‘god’”, who “deeply felt their misery and therefore lived like them”.

Lack of recognition

The Adivasi freedom fighters that Vaghela interviewed during his field-work gave a vivid account of their resistance. They recalled that during the movement, “one person was always on the lookout for government officials. If he saw them coming he would alert the entire village by playing warning sounds on the nagada, then the whole village would lock up their homes and run into the forests,” Vaghela said.

Chaudhari recounted that his mother and others from the Adivasi community formed bhajan mandalis and travelled from one village to another, inviting people to join the satyagraha through their songs. They would also leave behind written messages in earthen pots kept in villages during their journeys.

But the communities’ contributions received little recognition. Of the 40 or so freedom fighters he learnt about in Vedcchi, Vaghela wrote, only between 10 and 15 freedom fighters had received official letters of recognition and pensions from the government, owing to the general “indifference and negligence” towards the Adivasi population.

Further, Vaghela said that while independence leaders had assured Bardoli’s local population that if their lands were seized during the satyagraha, they would be returned, he learnt that several Adivasis never had their lands returned to them – and that it was largely the upper caste landed communities who had their land returned.

‘Community betrayed’

Chaudhuri recalled his elders telling him that Gandhi and other Congress leaders had encouraged them to fight for independence, and assured them that after independence, they could jointly fight internal exploitation within society.

In her book, The Peasantry and Nationalism, Mehta wrote that in 1927, Gandhi insisted on setting up an enquiry committee to examine the socio-economic conditions of the Kaliparaj. The enquiry report noted that several Kaliparaj women endured sexual violence at the hands of their landowning masters. It stated that the hali system had led to an “unending perpetuation of slavery”.

But, Mehta wrote, “Though the inquiry committee led the Congress workers to activise and intensify the Gandhian programme of constructive work it did not lead them to strike at the root of the economic and social injustice – abolition of the Hali system. The Halis continued to suffer under the typical oppressive agrarian system.”

The Dutch sociologist Jan Breman who studied the hali system in South Gujarat between 1962 and 2017 wrote that in the early 1960s, he found the community “in a state of pauperism”.

He observed that the political leaders of the freedom struggle “ had closely allied themselves with the dominant landowners”, and thus “did not want to antagonize them by introducing radical reforms to the agrarian regime and were not overly concerned with the predicament of the landless masses”.

Thus, despite the promises made to the community, the conditions of the Halpatis remained deplorable in independent India too. “The struggle for national freedom was waged with the promise to return land to the tiller, but the landless remained as dispossessed as before,” Breman wrote.

While the hali system eventually disappeared, Breman noted, it was replaced by the “casualization of employment” and the “replacement of farm servants with daily wage labour”, which only further deepened inequality.

Unsurprisingly then, in free India, Chaudhuri noted, there was a strong sentiment amongst his elders that “Our community has been betrayed.”

Vaghela echoed this account. “Independence leaders always told people that their main fight was to get rid of the British colonisers, it was after independence that they would address internal problems,” he said. “It is only in the last few decades that there has been some material change. But I feel that we are still addressing many of those problems.”