Peasant Movements in India: Tebhaga, Telangana and Naxalbari

Every peasant uprising in India tells the same basic story: people who grow the country’s food have almost no control over what happens to it. The Tebhaga, Telangana and Naxalbari movements are three separate chapters of that story, spread across two decades and different regions, but they share a common thread. Sharecroppers, tenants and landless labourers decided that the old terms of survival were no longer acceptable, and they organised to change them, sometimes peacefully, sometimes with weapons in hand. Understanding these three movements together helps explain why land and labour remain such charged subjects in Indian politics even today.

Peasants: a distinct socio-economic category 🔗

Before getting into the movements themselves, it helps to understand who a “peasant” actually is in this context. A peasant is not simply a farmer. Peasants are rural cultivators who combine subsistence farming with production meant for towns and cities, using family labour and low-intensity technology, and they remain heavily dependent on natural conditions like rainfall and soil quality. What makes the category distinct is not just how peasants farm, but their position in a larger social structure. Peasants typically hand over a portion of what they produce to a dominant group above them, whether that group is a king, a zamindar, a jotedar or a modern capitalist landowner, and this surplus is used to sustain people who do not themselves cultivate the land. Scholars researching agrarian societies describe this as a structural, not just an economic, relationship – peasants remain socially subordinate even when they appear self-sufficient on their own plots, because their surplus is systematically transferred upward to landlords, moneylenders or the state. This dependence is exactly what made Indian peasants vulnerable to exploitation, and exactly what pushed them, again and again, toward collective resistance.

The Tebhaga movement: sharecroppers demand two-thirds 🔗

The Tebhaga movement unfolded in Bengal between 1946 and 1947, right before Partition and independence. The word “tebhaga” simply means “three shares,” and it referred to a very specific demand: bargadars and adhiars, the sharecroppers who tilled land owned by jotedars and zamindars, wanted to keep two-thirds of their harvest instead of the traditional half. This was not a new idea. A decade earlier, a land revenue commission had already recommended cutting the landlord’s share to a third, but the recommendation was never enforced, and the system of exploitative rents, illegal cesses and moneylender debt continued largely unchanged.

From Dinajpur to a province-wide struggle 🔗

In September 1946, the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha, working under the Communist Party of India’s influence, called on sharecroppers to physically claim their two-thirds share by harvesting the paddy themselves and storing it in their own threshing yards rather than the landlord’s godown. The movement became a genuine revolt in Dinajpur district, where bargadars cut the winter paddy crop and carried it to their own khamars. Leaders such as Sushil Sen helped organise these protests on the ground, and the confrontation with landlords and police quickly turned violent, with several organisers arrested and some killed in police firing.

Spread, repression and a lasting legacy 🔗

From Dinajpur, the movement spread across nineteen districts of Bengal, with the most intense activity in Rangpur, Jalpaiguri, Khulna, Mymensingh, Jessore and the 24-Parganas. In Rangpur, thousands of peasants came together in a united front, and the police firing there claimed further lives among the protestors. What is notable about Tebhaga is that it managed to hold onto its identity as a peasant class movement even though the political backdrop of the time – communal riots and the run-up to Partition – gave the Muslim League an opening to try to reframe it in religious terms. The movement never fully achieved its central demand on a lasting basis, and many of its gains were rolled back once repression intensified, but it left behind a template: organised sharecroppers, backed by a disciplined political cadre, could genuinely shake an entrenched rural hierarchy.

The Telangana movement: an armed uprising against the Nizam 🔗

While Tebhaga was unfolding in British Bengal, a very different kind of peasant struggle was taking shape under a princely ruler. Telangana, then part of the Hyderabad State under the Nizam, had one of the most rigid feudal land systems in the subcontinent. Land was split between three categories of tenure – Diwani land under direct state administration, Jagirdari land held by hereditary nobles, and Sarf-e-khas land reserved for the Nizam’s own household – and cultivators across all three categories faced bonded labour, illegal exactions and the notorious vetti system, under which peasants, especially from the lowest castes, were forced to work for landlords without pay.

Vetti, jagirs and the spark at Kadavendi 🔗

The Andhra Mahasabha, working alongside the Communist Party of India, began organising peasants against vetti and illegal evictions from 1944 onward. The uprising turned violent in July 1946, when an Andhra Mahasabha activist, Doddi Komarayya, was killed by a local landlord’s men in Kadavendi village. His death triggered a much wider revolutionary movement that spread rapidly across Warangal, Nalgonda and Khammam districts, with village-level peasant associations, called sanghams, forming armed squads to defend seized land and resist landlord reprisals.

From village communes to integration with India 🔗

By 1947 and 1948, peasant squads had established a form of self-rule across thousands of villages, redistributing land and abolishing forced labour in areas they controlled. Hyderabad’s accession to India came in September 1948, when the Indian Army moved into the state in what is remembered as Operation Polo, ending the Nizam’s independent rule. But this did not immediately end the peasants’ struggle. Communist-led squads continued to hold onto the land they had seized, and the new Indian state, rather than immediately backing them, launched its own operations against these communist strongholds. The armed struggle continued for nearly three more years before the Communist Party formally called it off in October 1951. Thousands of peasant militants and party cadres lost their lives over the course of the movement, and tens of thousands more were jailed, making Telangana one of the largest and most sustained peasant guerrilla struggles in modern Indian history.

The Naxalbari movement: a new revolutionary current 🔗

Twenty years after Tebhaga and roughly a decade after Telangana’s armed phase ended, a much smaller uprising in a corner of northern West Bengal set off consequences that are still felt today. The Naxalbari movement began in March 1967 in the Terai region of Darjeeling district, where a faction within the CPI(M) started organising landless peasants and tribal sharecroppers to reclaim land that tea estates and jotedars had encroached upon.

Land, guns and a new political vocabulary 🔗

Leaders Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, along with local tribal leader Jangal Santhal, encouraged peasants to seize land directly and arm themselves with traditional weapons. Their demands went further than Tebhaga’s or even Telangana’s early phase: cancelling unequal loan agreements with moneylenders, redistributing hoarded grain, and, most strikingly, calling for jotedars accused of exploitation to be given death sentences by peasant tribunals. Tensions escalated through May 1967. A police inspector was killed in Naxalbari on 24 May, and the following day, police opened fire on a crowd of villagers at Bengai Jote, killing eleven people, most of them women and children. That single act of state violence turned a local land dispute into a national political symbol almost overnight.

From a Bengal village to a national movement 🔗

The uprising itself was suppressed by the West Bengal government within months, but its political aftershocks were far larger than the original event. Radicals expelled from the CPI(M) formed the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries in late 1967, which became the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in April 1969, with Majumdar as general secretary. The movement’s methods and language spread far beyond Bengal, most notably to the Srikakulam uprising in Andhra Pradesh and to parts of Bihar, giving rise to what is now broadly known as the Naxalite movement. Decades later, people who lived through the original uprising still describe how it permanently altered the balance between landlords and tenants in the region, even where the movement itself failed to seize lasting political power, as accounts gathered from surviving participants and organisers show.

Reading the three movements together 🔗

Placed side by side, Tebhaga, Telangana and Naxalbari trace an arc in how Indian peasants responded to exploitation across roughly two decades. Tebhaga was primarily about renegotiating the terms of an existing tenancy arrangement – sharecroppers wanted a fairer division of the harvest, not the abolition of the system itself. Telangana went considerably further, aiming to dismantle feudal bondage entirely and briefly succeeding in setting up peasant self-government in thousands of villages. Naxalbari pushed the logic furthest of all, framing land seizure as part of a broader revolutionary project rather than a demand to be negotiated with existing authorities. Each movement was crushed or wound down by state power, yet each also left the rural power structure permanently altered, whether through legislation, land redistribution, or simply a demonstrated willingness among landless cultivators to organise and fight back. That legacy is why these three episodes remain central to any serious study of agrarian politics, ethno-political mobilisation and the modern Indian left.

What do you think? Do you think the more radical, armed approach of Telangana and Naxalbari achieved more lasting change for peasants than the negotiated demands of Tebhaga, or did all three ultimately depend on the state’s willingness to act?

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/peasantry
2. https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Tebhaga_Movement
3. https://www.historyjournal.net/article/188/5-1-13-622.pdf
4. https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india%2Funion-ministers-flay-suppression-of-telangana-liberation-history-2-3732610
5. https://www.epw.in/naxalbari-and-after
6. https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/naxalbari-fifty-years-uprising