Interpreting the Santal Rebellion (original) (raw)
Related papers
Santal Women and the Rebellion of 1855 in Colonial India
ANTYAJAA: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change, 2017
It is generally assumed that Santal women contributed an imperative role in the Santal rebellion of 1855. According to the judicial records of the rebellion, almost every Santal woman was a rebel and many of them were arrested for their active involvement in the rebellion. Scholars on Santal rebellion have used such colonial administrative accounts to emphasize the subaltern protest against colonialism. However, a detailed study of administrative accounts also reveals that, after trial, most of the women prisoners were released as they were found innocent. Access to insider voices reveals how Santal women were persecuted under the pretext of witch-hunting by the very orders of Santal leaders. This article would argue how the women became the victims of the unrest and how the Santal rebellion was not spontaneous, and would critically propose how the age-old concept of women’s participation in the Santal rebellion of 1855 needs reconsideration.
The Santal Movement (1854-56) Hazaribag Chapter
SAMPRATAYAYA, 2024
The Santal Movement, in two distinct but interrelated phases (1854-54 and 1855-56) with the sole objective of establishing 'self-rule', is an important chapter in the history of freedom movements organised against the East India Company's government in the country. In this movement, the phase of 1855-56 has engaged the attention of historians and other scholars more than the events during 1954-55, which still await their due places in history. In this regard, mention may be made of the Hazaribag chapter of the Santal movement before 1855-56 and its contribution to the movement. Though the Hazaribag chapter of the movement is not unknown, its centrality is not duly established on par with the 1855-56 phase. In this essay, an attempt is made to study the causes, organisation, leaders, British policy, and approach to deal with the Santals, as well as the course of events in the Hazaribag division.
The Changing Colonial Market Economy & A Resistance of The Santals of Birbhum in 1855
isara solutions, 2018
The first half of the 19th century was the era of devastating changes in the physical environment of rural areas of India. Pre- colonial states never tried to demarcate clearly the sources from the forests or pastoral lands and from that of agriculture .The Company Raj first redefined Indian forest as separate from the agricultural plains before launching a major onslaught on forests and its peaceful people . Large scale deforestation not only resulted in climatic changes but led to the disruption of tribal lands and the rude intrusion of money in the tribal economies. The company with the assistance of Indian money lenders, merchants and neo –zamindars, subdued newly redefined internal tribal frontiers of India .The attack on forests was followed by an invasion on the nomadic-pastoral economy of the tribes leaving them in landlessness, low-wages and bonded labour . This changing market economy of the forest provoked the tribal insurrections in these areas and their migration to plain agricultural lands. The Santal insurrection of 1855 which is also well known as Hool Uprising.
From ‘Savages’ to ‘Saviours’: Genealogy of Santal Portrayal in Colonial Modernity
2018
This chapter examines pictures of the Santal community produced during colonial modernity, first by the British and then by the painters of the Bengal School. It suggests that the conventional academic tropes of understanding these pictures—power and emasculation on one side, and empowering nativism on the other—may not give adequate insight. In fact, the Santals, as mediated through colonial art, were given far more agency and strength than generally acknowledged, while Indian painters, rather than hoisting them as symbols of resistance, actually imprisoned them in an Arcadian past and robbed them of the temporal imperatives to act in the present. The visual story of indigenous groups in colonial India is thus a complex one—first of fear, admiration and avoidance, and later, of recognition, disciplining and cultural captivity.
Santhal Rebellion -A Counter Insurgency against 'Outsiders' As Ordained By a 'Thakur'
The Santhals were a peace loving people for whom agriculture was one of the main occupations and of great significance where forest land and the sacred grove were symbolic of their guardian spirit or protector. Due to Colonial rule and the local moneylenders, the Santhals faced undue oppression which finally led to the Santhal Rebellion of 1855. Prior to this, when the Santhals had gathered in their sacred grove, an occurrence transpired which is considered a miracle. The legend narrates the presence of a Thakur or god who guides the Santhals to divest their land of every 'diku' or outsider in order to retrieve the ownership of their land. It was their faith in this Protector that gave them the strength to fight against the Colonials and the Zamindars but did it finally free them from the oppression of both? This paper focuses on this legend and its outcome while tracing the Santhal movements and ascertains the outcome with reference to Acts passed media reports and Subaltern writings.
Topic: Pan-Indian character of the Revolt
2022
Shiv Gajrani has focused on the Revolt if 1857 in Punjab and especially focused on the Sikhs. Surprisingly, almost a majority of historians agree that the Punjabees, particularly the Sikhs cooperated with the British, and aided their victory in 1857. This conclusion, ignores very important issues relating to the nature of the Revolt , a primitivist response to the western threat. Shiv Gajrani argues that the important question is whether the Sikhs acted as a community in favour of the British. In pre-modern societies cohesion has always been far less than in modern societies because in rural economics the role of economic exchange was very confined or limited. The aristocracy interrelated with wider society through institutions which expressed society as a whole, secondly through their political authority. The unit of organised action for the peasantry was either the community or the tribe. In the pre-modern hierarchically stratified society initiative rested with the top. Lower section of the society, especially the peasantry could merely exhibit a readiness to follow a direction. This was the reason that the Revolt took the found individual heroism rather than a General Revolt heroism. Another important point of the Revolt if 1857 was that it was spearheaded by the agrarian based military elite of the poor bias.
Rebellion and Ethnogenesis in Colonial North-Eastern Bengal: The Garos as Pagul Panthis
Studies in People's History, 2022
In the closing decades of the eighteenth and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, peasant insurrection was endemic to the northeastern borders of Bengal, including the submontane region of Gird Garrow, a characteristic shared with the contiguous Garo Hills. Locating these conditions of insurrection within changes in the order of the regional economy under the Company's rule, the article elucidates the economic rationale of 'primitive violence' and reflects on the processes generated by the state itself in the course of subjugation of the Garo peasants in the region.
Journal of adivasi and Indigenous Studies X,1: 2020
I argue that, rather than representing the hegemonic worldview in colonial times, the Scandinavian Santal Mission in its early phase was based on counter-hegemonic and egalitarian ideas. Its main ideologist, Lars Olaf Skrefsrud, came from Norway, which was engaged in its own struggle for independence. I try to show that the countryside he came from was hardly more 'advanced' than the Santal country, thus negating the 'evoltionary gap' often thought to exist between missionaries and their converts - with one important exception: the Norwegian peasantry was already literate. I argue that the Mission's early success was partly due to an egalitarian ideology which resembled that of the santals themselves, and that the failure of the Mission to continue its success in the 1890s was due to a new, authoritarian strain. The Santals, eatrly on, felt they could use the mission for their own purposes: later, their goals and that of the Mission diverged.