Deccan Riots

In May and June 1875, peasants of Maharashtra in some parts of Pune, Satara and Nagar districts revolted against increasing agrarian distress. The Deccan Riots of 1875 targeted conditions of debt peonage (kamiuti) to moneylenders. The rioters' specific purpose was to obtain and destroy the bonds, decrees, and other documents in the possession of the moneylenders.^[1]

As Indian agriculture was drawn into the world economy, credit, commerce, inequality and growth were interrelated. The cultivators' distress resulted from falling agricultural prices, heavy taxation, and a sense of political powerlessness. The commercialization of agriculture under British land revenue policies burdened small peasants by placing a premium on access to credit to finance productive investments in the land. Employing capital advanced by European merchants, local moneylenders obtained unlimited title to the property and labor of their debtors; it gave them the "power to utterly ruin and enslave the debtor."^[2] During the 19th century, they used this power to control peasant labour, and not their land, which was of little value without people to work it.

These changes in agriculture undermined the communal traditions which had been the basis of Indian village life.^[3] Access to common resources declined steadily because various forms of joint use were misunderstood by the British, access to the forests was restricted, and the British redefined the state's relationship to pastoral communities.

Vasudeo Balwant Phadke launched a violent campaign against British rule in 1879, aiming to establish an Indian republic by driving them out. However, his insurrection met with limited success. Someone betrayed Phadke to claim a bounty offered by the British; he was arrested and deported to Aden, where he died of a hunger strike in 1883.

See also

• History of Maharashtra
• Vasudeo Balwant Phadke

References

1. "Report of the Deccan Riots Commission", Parliamentary Papers, 1878, LVIII, paragraph 12.
2. Report of the Committee on the Riots in Poona and Ahmednagar, 1875, Bombay (1876), p. 80. Quoted by Sven Beckert, "Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War", American Historical Review, vol. 109, no. 5 (December , 2004).
3. Thomas R. Metcalf, "The British and the Moneylender in Nineteenth-Century India", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 34, No. 4 (December 1962), pp. 390-397

Literature

• Ravinder Kumar, "The Deccan Riots of 1875", The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (August, 1965), pp. 613–635.
• David Hardiman, ed., Peasant Resistance in India 1858-1914, Oxford University Press, Delhi [etc.] (1992).
• Report of the Committee on the Riots in Poona and Ahmednagar, 1875, Bombay (1876).
• Neil Charlesworth, "The Myth of the Deccan Riots of 1875", Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1972), pp. 401–421.
• Ira Klein, "Utilitarianism and Agrarian Progress in Western India", The Economic History Review, N. S., Vol. 18, No. 3 (1965), pp. 576–597.