Peasant and Tribal Movements in Rajasthan

Where this sits

Second of the four topics in RPSC's fifth syllabus line, after political and social conditions and before the Praja Mandals and the integration.

Start with the question the previous chapter answers. Why were Rajasthan's popular movements aimed at jagirdars and princely states rather than at the British? Because the treaties of 1817-18 took the states' external sovereignty and left their internal administration, revenue and justice entirely intact. The taxing power that pressed on a Rajasthan cultivator was the state's, not the Empire's. So when the pressure became unbearable, the target was the thikana.

And the machinery being resisted is already familiar. The administration chapter set out lata and kunta, the crop-share assessments taking between one half and one sixth of gross produce; the lag-bag cesses stacked above the land revenue; and begar, forced labour. This chapter is what happened when people refused to pay them. Bijolia, the thikana named in that chapter as assessing mainly by lata and kunta, is where the longest peasant movement in India began.

1. Bijolia, 1897 to 1941

The longest peasant movement in modern India, running roughly forty-four years, in the Bijolia jagir of Mewar.

The grievance was excessive land revenue and arbitrary cesses under the jagirdar Rao Krishna Singh. Peasants there paid, on the accounts followed here, 84 kinds of tax, including the chanwari levy and the talwar bandhai. A tax list of that length is the lag-bag system of the previous chapter seen from below.

What actually happened in 1897, and why the date is the start of anything

This page has carried 1897 as the opening of the longest peasant movement in India without saying what occurred in it. The Bhilwara District Gazetteer supplies the event, and it is not the one most notes give.

In 1897 the farmers of Girdharpura and the adjacent villages rose against the Maharana and sent their own representatives to have their grievances redressed. The grievances were enquired into and the ruler conceded to remove some of them. The gazetteer's verdict on the episode is the sentence to carry: "This may be termed as the first agrarian agitation in the region."

Note who was petitioned. Not the jagirdar of Bijolia, the Maharana of Mewar. That is the shape of every Bijolia round for the next forty years: the cultivators go over the thikana's head to the durbar, the durbar makes an enquiry, and the enquiry produces a partial concession that the thikana then declines to honour.

Then the tax that made the movement continuous. In 1903 the farmers of Bijolia decided to abandon their land and migrate to Gwalior in protest against the Rao's refusal to withdraw a new tax, the chanwari. When they were actually loading their carts the Rao came in person and promised to withdraw it. A mass departure is the same weapon as a fallow field, aimed one step earlier: it removes not the crop but the cultivator.

On the two taxes, because the pairing is regularly got wrong. Talwar bandhai is not a cess a jagirdar invented. It is the investiture due, the payment made on succession, and in Bijolia's case it ran the other way from what the summaries suggest: the gazetteer records that in 1913 the farmers petitioned the Rao not to levy an extra tax on them to meet the one lakh of rupees he owed the Mewar Durbar as talwar bandhai. The Rao was passing his own succession bill down to his cultivators. An option that reads "jagirdar X imposed talwar bandhai in year Y" has the direction of the payment backwards.

And the 1913 fallow now has its result attached. The Rao ignored the petition; the peasants resolved not to plough Bijolia's land but to plough the Khalsa land of Mewar instead; no land of Bijolia was cultivated that year, and it yielded neither revenue nor corn. Under that pressure the Rao withdrew six taxes out of the eighty-four, imprisoned some leaders and banished others.

Six out of eighty-four is the figure to remember, because it is what a year of total non-cultivation actually bought. The famous number in this chapter is 84. The useful number is 6.

The three phases

The leaders, in order, are the examinable part: Fateh Karan Charan, then Sadhu Sitaram Das, then Vijay Singh Pathik, then Manikya Lal Verma.

The turning point of the first phase is 1913. In March 1913 nearly a thousand peasants, under Sadhu Sitaram Das, assembled before the jagirdar's palace to present their grievances. They then resolved not to cultivate, and the lands of Bijolia were left fallow through 1913-14.

That is the tactic worth understanding, because it recurs across this chapter. A cultivator who refuses to sow is not rioting; he is withdrawing the thing the whole revenue system depends on. Against an assessment taken as a share of the crop, a fallow field yields the jagirdar exactly nothing. Lata and kunta made the no-cultivation strike unusually powerful, and that is a direct consequence of the assessment method described in the previous chapter.

MCQ WATCH — Bijolia

Span: 1897 to 1941, in the Bijolia jagir of Mewar; jagirdar Rao Krishna Singh.

Phases: 1897-1915 spontaneous and local · 1915-1923 national-standard leadership · to 1941.

Leaders in order: Fateh Karan Charan → Sadhu Sitaram Das → Vijay Singh Pathik → Manikya Lal Verma.

1913: about 1,000 peasants before the palace under Sitaram Das; lands left fallow in 1913-14.

Taxes: about 84 kinds, including chanwari and talwar bandhai.

The institution: the Panchayat Board at Bairisal

Bijolia's tactics are well known and its organisation is not, and the organisation is what made a forty-four year movement possible.

Uparmal is the plateau's own name, and naming the board after the plateau rather than the jagir is a small act with a large meaning: the body claimed a region, not a village. A school, a volunteer corps, a newspaper and an elected panchayat is not a protest. It is a parallel administration, and it is why the thikana could neither buy off nor disperse the movement for four decades.

MCQ WATCH — Bijolia, the second layer

1897: the farmers of Girdharpura and adjacent villages petitioned the Maharana, not the jagirdar; some grievances conceded. The gazetteer calls it the first agrarian agitation in the region.

1903: the chanwari tax; peasants began migrating to Gwalior; the Rao came in person as they loaded their carts and promised to withdraw it.

Talwar bandhai: the investiture due of one lakh the Rao owed the Mewar Durbar; in 1913 the peasants objected to an extra tax raised to pay it.

Result of the 1913 fallow: six taxes withdrawn out of eighty-four.

Organisation: Panchayat Board at Bairisal → Uparmal Sewa Samiti; Vidya Pracharini Sabha and a school; second centre at Umaji Ka Khera; newspaper Uparmal Ka Danka, founded by Pathik.

Press: Pratap (Kanpur), Abhyudaya (Allahabad), Bharat Mitra (Calcutta), Maratha (Poona).

Congress: seven Bijolia delegates at the 33rd Session, Delhi, 1918, arrested on return; Mahadev Desai's visit, 1918; Amritsar 1919 — Tilak moved a resolution, Kelkar seconded, it was dropped on Malaviya's assurance of private intercession.

Talks: 5 February 1922; agreement prepared in May 1922; the cultivators signed and then did not pay; 22 July 1922, the Rao dismissed his Kamdar.

Third phase: 18 May 1927 panchayat pledge, each member to teach three girls to read; 1928 movement handed to Jamnalal Bajaj, who deputed Haribhau Upadhyaya; Pathik released 1928 and externed.

2. Vijay Singh Pathik, and the organisation behind the movements

The same name runs through Bijolia, Begun and half of what follows, and the man behind it is more interesting than the summaries suggest.

Vijay Singh Pathik was born Bhoop Singh Gurjar, of Guthawali village in Bulandshahr district, United Provinces. He was connected with Rash Behari Bose's revolutionary network and was implicated in the Lahore conspiracy case of 1915, after which he took the name Vijay Singh Pathik. He was sent into Rajasthan to organise, and entered the Bijolia estate in 1916.

In 1919 he founded the Rajasthan Seva Sangh at Wardha, with Arjun Lal Sethi and Kesari Singh Barhath. In 1920 its headquarters moved to Ajmer.

Two things about that follow directly from the previous chapter. The Sangh was founded at Wardha, in British India, and moved to Ajmer — the one directly-administered British district in the region. A body organising against princely states could not comfortably be headquartered inside one, and Ajmer's anomalous status is exactly why it became the base. The political geography of chapter 5a is doing visible work here.

And note what Pathik was before he was a peasant organiser. A revolutionary from the Bose network, named in a conspiracy case, arriving in a Mewar jagir under an assumed name. The peasant movements of Rajasthan were not sealed off from the wider revolutionary and national movement; they were one of the places its organisers went.

How Bijolia reached the national press, and what Congress did with it

The claim that Rajasthan's peasant movements were tied into the national movement can now be made with dates instead of atmosphere.

The newspapers first. Bijolia was given extensive publicity by the Pratap of Kanpur, the Abhyudaya of Allahabad, the Bharat Mitra of Calcutta and the Maratha of Poona. Four papers in four cities, none of them in Rajputana. A movement inside a Mewar jagir was being reported in the nationalist press of British India, which is precisely the pressure a princely state had no answer to.

Then the delegations. In 1918 a group of seven persons from Bijolia attended the Thirty-third Session of the Indian National Congress at Delhi; the Congress proceedings name them, and on their return to Bijolia they were arrested without warrant. The Thirty-fifth session was attended by Pathik, Manikya Lal Verma and Chandi Lal.

Then Gandhi's emissary. Also in 1918, Mahadev Desai visited Bijolia to enquire into the cultivators' demands and gave a very favourable report to Gandhi, who took personal interest in the movement and expressed his willingness to lead it if the situation required.

Then Amritsar, which is the examinable part and is usually reported wrong. At the Thirty-fourth Session of the Congress at Amritsar in 1919, Pathik met Bal Gangadhar Tilak and put the Bijolia case to him. Tilak moved a resolution on Bijolia in the session. It was seconded by Kelkar. It was then dropped, because Madan Mohan Malaviya gave an assurance that he would personally press the Maharana of Mewar to grant concessions to the Bijolia cultivators.

Read that sequence carefully, because it is a better answer than the one in circulation. The usual version has Malaviya and Gandhi opposing interference in the princely states and killing the resolution. The record is narrower and more interesting: the resolution was moved by the most senior man in the room, and withdrawn on a promise of private intercession. Congress did not refuse Bijolia. It chose quiet diplomacy over a public resolution, and the cultivators got neither for another three years.

A claim to handle carefully. It is often said that Bijolia inspired Gandhi's Champaran satyagraha. What is securely true is the chronology: Bijolia began in 1897, twenty years before Champaran (1917), so it is the earlier organised peasant movement by a wide margin. The causal claim of inspiration is a different and stronger assertion, and this page does not make it.

The commissions, and the talks of February 1922

Bijolia produced four separate enquiries before it produced a settlement, and the pattern across them is the whole argument of this chapter.

Four commissions and no verdict on begar is the finding, not a footnote. An enquiry that releases the prisoners and says nothing about the tax is a way of ending an agitation without ending a grievance, and Bijolia had it done to it repeatedly before Begun had it done once.

The talks of 1922, with the correct date. On 5 February 1922 the two sides met. For the paramount power: Mr Holland, Agent to the Governor-General, Mr Ogilvie, his Secretary, and Mr Wilkinson, Resident in Mewar. For the Mewar Durbar: Prabhash Chandra Chatterji and Bihari Lal. For the Rao: Kamdar Hira Lal, Fauzdar Tej Singh and Master Zalim Singh. For the cultivators: Ram Narain Chaudhary, Manikya Lal Verma, Sarpanch Moti Chand and Secretary Narain Patel.

Talks continued until an agreement was prepared in May 1922, which the farmers signed and adhered to faithfully. They did not, however, begin paying arrears or current revenue, and every effort by the British and the thikana to make them pay failed. On 22 July 1922 the Resident met the Rao, who dismissed his Kamdar and appointed a new one.

That is agreement and non-implementation running in both directions at once, and it is worth setting beside the Eki movement in section 6. In Mewar the state agreed and the officers did not implement. In Bijolia the cultivators signed and did not pay. Both sides had learned that a signature settles nothing, which is why the movement needed another nineteen years.

The third phase, and what the leaders did when the leader was gone

The chapter's phase table gives 1923 to 1941 a single cell. Three things fill it.

• 18 May 1927 — the members of the Bijolia Panchayat pledged to "observe the truth and non-violence, to wear khadi, to abstain from intoxicants and to maintain the Panchayat at all costs", and each took a pledge to teach three girls to read and write.
• 1927 — Pathik again engineered the Bijolia agitation of the tenant-cultivators against high rents.
• 1928 — with Pathik prohibited from entering Mewar, the political movement was put in the hands of Seth Jamnalal Bajaj, who could not attend to it personally and deputed Haribhau Upadhyaya. The movement became weak, because the new leaders were not acquainted with the pulse of the peasants.

Manikya Lal Verma was arrested three times in 1927 and again in 1931, having already been imprisoned in 1919 and 1923, and was interned at Kumbhalgarh in 1932-33. In the same years came a campaign of repression by the combined forces of the state and the thikana: workers arrested and beaten, women workers beaten and their houses locked.

The literacy pledge is the line worth an essay. A peasant panchayat under siege, in 1927, made each member personally responsible for teaching three girls to read. It is the sharpest available answer to the idea that these were movements about money. A body that had spent thirty years arguing about crop shares chose, when it wrote down what it stood for, to put girls' literacy in the same sentence as khadi and non-violence.

3. Begun, and the first peasant settlement in Mewar

Begun is Bijolia's neighbour and its sequel, and it produced something Bijolia took decades to win: an agreement.

The sequence:

• 1921 — a meeting at Bherukund, near Menal, resolves to resist the thikana.
• 1922 — a no-rent campaign is launched in Begun.
• An agreement is reached at Ajmer through Vijay Singh Pathik, and the British Resident of Mewar rejects it, calling it a "Bolshevik settlement".
• June 1923 — Udaipur State appoints a commission under G. C. Trench. The peasants boycott its proceedings, insisting it camp at Raita instead.
• 13 July 1923 — troops encircle the village and open fire. Two activists, Roopa and Kripa ji, are shot dead.
• December 1923 — a new settlement begins in Begun: tax rates fixed, many taxes withdrawn, and begar abolished.

Govindpura, and what the Trench Commission actually did

The chapter's sequence has the Begun firing at an unnamed village. It has a name, and the commission that produced it has a record.

The commission. G. C. Trench was the Revenue Commissioner of Mewar State, and he sat as a member of the commission rather than as its sole author. The commission halted at Begun from 13 June to 13 July 1923. The Dhakar peasantry sent in their petitions; the commission framed its findings; copies were sent to the Panchas, who refused to accept the copies and refused to comply with the decisions.

Then the commission turned into a collecting party. It began realising taxes and revenue, and proceeded against the peasants of Govindpura, near Begun, with Thikana police and State troops. The Bhilwara gazetteer gives the village its fuller name, Semlia Govindpura.

What happened on 13 July 1923. The village was besieged. The peasants beat the drum, and swarms of Dhakars, men and women, fell upon the troops; the troops opened fire and wounded many. The wounded were told to pay their arrears of hasil and send in their Panchas on pain of severe punishment. They refused, and were imprisoned. Peasants from the neighbouring villages then began arriving, group after group, and the troops did the same thing to each in turn, the mounted sowars driving the women off. Heavy rain ended it. The commission returned to Begun with the troops and the prisoners, who were handed to the thikana and put in the fort.

The number that measures the movement. 485 Dhakars were arrested, and they came from 45 different villages. A firing at one village that produces prisoners from forty-five is not a local riot; it is the reach of the panchayat network made visible by the state's own arrest register.

On the dead, where the sources part company. This page has carried Roopa and Kripa ji as the two men shot at Begun. The Bhilwara gazetteer, working from Home Department Political Branch files, records the troops killing one man: Rupa Dhakar of Jainagar. The Chittorgarh gazetteer, describing the same day, records many wounded and names no dead at all. Two named martyrs are the received account; one named death is the state record. Both are given here, with their basis, and neither is asserted over the other.

And the direction of the first blow is also disputed. Both gazetteers describe the peasants attacking the troops before the troops fired. The circulating account has troops encircling a village and opening fire on it. These are not the same event described twice; they are two accounts of who moved first, and a candidate should know the state's version exists.

Pathik's sentence, corrected. He reached Begun to hold the peasants' morale, was arrested, and was awarded five years' imprisonment; he was prosecuted at both Udaipur and Bundi, jailed at Udaipur, and released in 1928, then externed from Mewar. The April 1927 release date in circulation is not what either gazetteer records.

The two women of Rawarda, and the Rao who was deposed

Begun's June 1922 rising was against the Rao and the Thakurs of Rawarda, Semlia and Charchha. Cultivators were arrested, their houses burnt, cattle driven off, crops crushed and families beaten. At Rawarda, two women whose husbands were away, Ratni Bhilni and Udi Malini, were beaten mercilessly by being hung upside down. They were freed after more than a hundred cultivators sat in dharna and satyagraha at the jagirdar's residence.

And the settlement cost the Rao his estate. When the Rao of Begun liberalised his policy and considered the cultivators' demands, the Mewar Durbar did not appreciate it: the Rao was deposed and the estate was placed under the Court of Wards. His agreement with the cultivators was the one the British Resident called a "Bolshevik Agreement", and it was cancelled.

That completes the argument this chapter already begins. The Resident's phrase was not a rhetorical flourish. A jagirdar who settled with his own peasants was removed from his own jagir for doing it, and the paramount power and the durbar acted together to remove him. The 1818 settlement left internal administration to the states; it did not leave them free to make peace on terms the Residency disliked.

Leadership was provided by Vijay Singh Pathik and Ram Narayan Chaudhary. After Pathik's arrest on 10 September 1923, Chaudhary carried the movement on.

The Resident's phrase is worth keeping. A settlement between a jagirdar and his cultivators was refused by the paramount power as "Bolshevik" — in 1922, five years after the Russian revolution. It shows how the British read agrarian bargaining in a princely state, and it is the sharpest single illustration of paramountcy's real posture: the Company's successors had left internal administration to the states, but not the right to settle with peasants on terms London would find alarming.

A note on one term. The Begun settlement is often said to have ended "lata-kutan", glossed in circulating summaries as physical punishment. Treat that gloss with caution. Lata and kunta are the crop-share assessment methods established in the administration chapter, and kutna means to pound or thresh — so "lata-kutan" most plausibly names the share taken after threshing, not a beating. This page does not assert either reading, but a candidate should know the two are in conflict.

MCQ WATCH — Begun and Govindpura

Trench: Revenue Commissioner of Mewar State, and a member of the commission, not its sole author.

Commission: halted at Begun, 13 June to 13 July 1923; the Panchas refused to accept its findings.

The firing: 13 July 1923 at Govindpura, given by the Bhilwara gazetteer as Semlia Govindpura, near Begun.

Arrests: 485 Dhakars from 45 villages.

Dead: the state record names one, Rupa Dhakar of Jainagar; the received account names two, Roopa and Kripa ji. Both are carried.

Pathik: five years, prosecuted at Udaipur and Bundi, released 1928, externed from Mewar.

The Rao of Begun: deposed, estate placed under the Court of Wards, his agreement cancelled as a "Bolshevik Agreement".

4. The three massacres

Three firings define this chapter, and they are constantly merged. Keep them apart by year, place and community.

Neemuchana carries the quotation. The peasants of Alwar had gathered at Nimuchana on 14 May 1925 to protest an increase in exactions. Mahatma Gandhi, writing in Young India, judged the massacre worse than Jallianwala Bagh and called it "Dyerism double distilled".

Dabi carries a specific death. On 2 April 1923, Nanak Bhil was hoisting a flag at a gathering at Dabi in Bundi when police under S. P. Ikram Hussain opened fire, and he was killed on the spot.

On the casualty figures. Numbers circulate for all three — over 1,500 at Mangarh, about 800 at Neemuchana — and none is verified here. They come from tribal narratives, contemporary journalism and later accounts rather than from counted records. Carry the dates, the places and the named dead; treat the totals as contested.

Mangarh today, and a status claim that has to be handled carefully

This is where the chapter meets current affairs, and where almost every preparation source gets it wrong.

What is on the official record. On 6 July 2022 a team from the National Monuments Authority, led by its chairman Tarun Vijay, submitted a report on declaring the Mangarh hillock a monument of National Importance to the Minister of State for Culture, Arjun Ram Meghwal, at the IGNCA in New Delhi. The PIB release states that the report "carries relevant details about the Mangarh hillock and recommendations by National Monuments Authority", and quotes the minister saying that "we will positively take forward the report".

On 1 November 2022 the Prime Minister attended a public programme, Mangarh Dham ki Gaurav Gatha, performed Dhuni Darshan, laid floral tributes at the statue of Govind Guru, and said that "Mangarh is a shared heritage of the people of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat".

What is not on the official record. No notification declaring Mangarh a Monument of National Importance was found in this pass. A report was submitted and a commemorative programme was held. Neither is a declaration.

And the distinction is not a quibble, because the two acts belong to different bodies. Under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, a monument is declared to be of national importance by the Central Government, by notification. The National Monuments Authority recommends; it does not declare. So a headline reading "NMA declares Mangarh a monument of national importance" — and several circulate — is wrong twice over: wrong about the act, and wrong about the body empowered to perform it.

What to write in an exam. The NMA submitted a report recommending the declaration in July 2022, and the Prime Minister attended the Mangarh Dham ki Gaurav Gatha on 1 November 2022. Both are safe. If an option asserts that Mangarh has been declared, treat it as unsupported unless the question supplies a notification date. A recommendation is not a declaration, and an anniversary programme is not a legal status.

Four states, not one. The Prime Minister's phrase is itself examinable: Mangarh is described as the shared heritage of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, and the site sits on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border. Govind Guru spent the last years of his life on the Gujarat side, and his death anniversary falls on 30 October.

Mangarh in the state's own record

The Banswara District Gazetteer carries an account of 1913 that neither the coaching summaries nor this page has been using, and it changes three things.

How the siege began. The armed Bhils assembled at Mangarh, a hillock on the borders of Banswara and Sunth states, and seized the sepoys sent by the Sunth State. They then attacked the fort of Partabgarh, in Sunth Rampur, and proceeded to loot the village of Bhamri in Banswara. The Maharawal, apprehending danger, asked for British assistance, and troops of the Mewar Bhil Corps were requisitioned. The hillock was besieged.

The Mewar Bhil Corps is the detail to underline. Section 4b of this chapter argues that the British answered rebellion with recruitment, raising the Mewar Bhil Corps from the Bhils in April 1841. At Mangarh in November 1913 that corps was one of the forces sent against Bhils. The argument does not need to be inferred any more. The state's own gazetteer records the instrument being used for the purpose it was built for, seventy-two years after it was built.

12 November 1913. A deputation sent by the insurgents with a statement of grievances met the British officer, and negotiations did not take place. This is separate from, and twenty-two years after, the charter of 33 demands the chapter already carries.

17 November 1913. The combined forces of the British and the local rulers attacked. The gazetteer's own words for the outcome are "several Bhils died", and it records that Govindgiri and Punja, along with 900 others, were captured.

Now put the casualty figures side by side, because there are now three bases and no count.

The prisoner figure is the only counted number anyone has. Nine hundred people were taken alive off that hill, and a government that counted its prisoners to the hundred did not publish its dead. That silence is the fact to write about, and it is stronger than any of the totals.

The trial, the sentence, and a correction to this page

This page has said that Govind Guru's death sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment on an isolated island. That is not what the record shows, and the claim is withdrawn.

Three corrections follow. The reduction was made by a court on appeal, not by an administrative decision taken out of fear of the movement. The sentence was transportation for life, not a fixed term of twenty years. And the sentences of the other twenty-three collapsed from three years to six months on the same appeal, which tells you something about the quality of the tribunal's original findings.

What is still unresolved, and is stated rather than smoothed over. The Banswara gazetteer says Govindgiri "is said to have died in jail." That cannot be reconciled with the account this page carries from the PIB release of 1 November 2022, which records the Prime Minister saying that Govind Guru spent the last years of his life in the Gujarat portion of the region and that his death anniversary falls on 30 October. A state gazetteer and a Government of India release are in direct conflict about whether he died a prisoner. The year of his release is therefore not settled here, and any option that supplies one should be treated with suspicion. The death date of 30 October 1931 and the place, Kamboi in Gujarat, are what the central record supports.

MCQ WATCH — Mangarh and Govind Guru, corrected

Before the siege: Bhils seized Sunth State sepoys, attacked the fort of Partabgarh (Sunth Rampur) and looted Bhamri in Banswara.

Force: troops of the Mewar Bhil Corps were requisitioned for the siege. A Bhil corps was used against Bhils.

12 November 1913: a deputation with a statement of grievances met the British officer; negotiations did not take place.

17 November 1913: combined British and princely forces attacked. The Banswara gazetteer says "several Bhils died" and records Govindgiri, Punja and 900 others captured.

Trial: 30 tried by a special tribunal at Ahmedabad; 5 acquitted; Govindgiri sentenced to hang, Punja transportation for life, 23 given three years' RI.

On appeal to the High Court: Govindgiri and Punja, transportation for life; the 23, six months' RI. Not twenty years, and not an administrative commutation.

Formation: Banjara, born Govinda; lost wife and children in the famine of 1899-1900; went to Gujarat, met Rajgiri Gosain, became Govind Giri; returned to Bedasa, lit his dhuni on Chhani Dungari, planted his neji.

Programme: daily bath and prayer, no meat, no liquor, fasts, dig wells, give up ornaments, against the kidnapping of women and against dapa, bride-price.

Samp Sabha: about 1905 per the Sirohi gazetteer, which also records an uprising against the Maharao of Sirohi suppressed in 1908. The 1883 date is contested and is not carried here.

4b. The Mers, and the tribal risings that came first

The Rajasthan Board opens its chapter on tribal movements with a sentence this site should have had from the start: the unholy alliance between local feudalism and British imperialism in Rajasthan was first opposed by the Mer, Mina and Bhil tribes.

First. Before Bijolia, before the Praja Mandals, before 1857. This chapter began at 1818 with the Bhils and had no Mers in it at all.

The Rebellion of the Heroic Mers

The Mers of the Ajmer-Merwara region come with a pre-history the board treats as part of the same story, and it is worth carrying because it explains why the British found them so hard to absorb.

The structural fact is in the next line, and it is the whole explanation. Before the British came, the country the Mers lived in was not directly under any political authority. The areas lay within Mewar, Marwar and Ajmer, but those states had no political or administrative control over them. The British tried to bring them under complete control, and that attempt is the main reason for the revolt.

How it ran:

• 1818 — F. Wilder, English Superintendent of Ajmer, makes an agreement with Jhak and other villages taken to be the focal points of Merwara: the Mers agree not to plunder.
• March 1819 — Wilder attacks Merwara, treating any ordinary incident as proof that the Mers had broken the agreement. He brings soldiers from Nasirabad and begins a punitive campaign. The Mers are punished and police posts are planted across Merwara to keep watch. The policy of encircling the Mers begins.
• Early 1820 — the Mers revolt from place to place, trying to remove the police posts and stations.
• November 1820 — the massacre of the British police at Jhak, which frightened the British and the states of Mewar and Marwar alike. The rebellion is described as widespread and terrible; police posts burnt and soldiers killed in many places.
• To suppress it, three battalions of the British Army together with the combined forces of Mewar and Marwar attack the Mers, with heavy loss of life and money. By the end of January 1821 the rebellion is put down.
• 1822 — the Merwara Battalion, raised from the Mers themselves, is established with headquarters at Beawar.

That last line is the one to underline. The men who had just been defeated were made into a battalion. Rebellion answered by recruitment is the most economical instrument of colonial control there is — it removes the fighters, pays them, and turns the frontier into a garrison — and Merwara is Rajasthan's clearest example of it. Note also where the headquarters went: Beawar, which the 1857 chapter lists as one of the six cantonments and as the town British officials fled to from Nasirabad. The battalion raised from a defeated tribe in 1822 is part of the military furniture of 1857.

By the end of the nineteenth century the administration had imposed peace by drastic repressive measures; in the early twentieth it turned to social reform activities among the Mers. The board's summary is that the British were successful in controlling the Mer rebellions till 1947.

The Bhil Rebellion, 1818 to 1860

The board dates a distinct Bhil Rebellion to 1818-1860, separate from the Bhagat movement of Govind Guru below, and gives four causes for the rising in Udaipur state in 1818:

1. British efforts to impose taxes on the Bhils.
2. The British policy of Bhil suppression, which bred deep distrust.
3. James Tod. Immediately after the Subsidiary Alliance with the East India Company, the internal administration of Udaipur was taken over by James Tod, who tried to bring the Bhils under his control and so extend the state's domination over them.
4. The disbanding of the native armies after the Treaty of 1818. Bhils had been regularly and irregularly employed in the armies of the state and of the jagirdars, and dissolving those armies threw them out of work.

The fourth cause is the one most accounts leave out and it is the most concrete. The Bhils were soldiers. A treaty that dissolved the states' armies removed a livelihood, and a tribe that had been paid to fight was left with the skill and without the wage. Put that beside the Merwara Battalion of 1822 and the pattern is exact: the same colonial settlement disbanded Bhil soldiers in Mewar and enlisted Mer soldiers at Beawar.

The Bhils are also described as having been an originally peaceful tribe, leading an independent life until the British arrived, and revolting only after 1818 under semi-feudal and semi-colonial control. That framing is the board's, and it is worth reproducing because it sets the Bhil risings as a response rather than a disposition.

Bolai and Rakhwali: the Bhils did not merely pay taxes, they levied them

This is the fifth cause of the 1818 rising, and it is sharper than the four the chapter already lists.

The Bhils were organised into settlements called pals, each under a hereditary headman, the gameti, and grouped under a chief, the naik, who commanded the defence network. When a threat appeared, the community was summoned by a shrill cry, the kulki.

The gametis levied two taxes of their own on the neighbouring plains villages: rakhwali, a protection or watch tax, and bolai, a safety tax taken for the security of the passes and roads. These were not extortion in Bhil eyes; peer-reviewed work on the risings describes them as "ancestral customs through which the Bhils protected and managed the lands they had stewarded for generations", and as lifelines and symbolic bonds to the land.

James Tod moved to abolish both. That decree, in the same years as the disbanding of the native armies, is identified in the scholarship as a strike at Bhil identity and a significant impetus for the revolts of 1818.

Set that beside the fourth cause this chapter already gives and the picture inverts. The received story is that the Bhils rose because the British began taxing them. The record is that the British stopped them taxing others. A community that had held a recognised fiscal right over the roads was reduced, in a single administrative decision, to a community with nothing to sell but its labour. Losing the power to levy is a different and larger injury than being levied on, and it is the one that explains why the risings recur for sixty years.

The same tax explains 1844. The Banswara rising of that year was precipitated by the British prohibition of the rakhwali tax the Bhils had long taken from neighbouring Malwa villages; on that pretext the Bhils attacked Mokheri village in Malwa, where the Mukhia's brother was killed. The chapter's 1844 line has had no cause attached to it. This is the cause.

The Mewar Bhil Corps, and a sentence that names the whole method

The paragraph above suggested a pattern — rebellion answered by recruitment. The textbook does not leave it as a suggestion. Of the British response to the Bhils it says, in as many words, that they prepared a long military plan against the Bhils on the method of Merwara Battalion, under which it was decided to form an Army of Bhils for the purpose of controlling the Bhils.

The board is telling you the Merwara Battalion was a template, consciously reapplied.

Now put the three together, because this is the most useful structural fact in the chapter.

Beawar, Khairwada and Deoli are three of the six cantonments the 1857 chapter lists. Half the British military establishment in Rajasthan in 1857 consisted of units raised from tribes the British had defeated in the preceding decades. That is not a coincidence to be noted in passing; it is the mechanism by which a supervisory staff of thirty officers held a province — and it is why section 2 of that chapter can say there were no British soldiers in any cantonment.

And the corps did the work it was raised for. In 1863 the Bhils of Kotra turned violent, and the commanding officer of the Mewar Bhil Corps placed responsibility on the state of Udaipur, on the ground that the state's administrators were not treating the Bhils properly; the administrators were transferred and the rising was silenced by a mixture of military action and persuasion. In 1867 the Bhils of Devalpal, between Khairwada and Dungarpur, rose and were crushed by the Mewar Bhil Corps.

A corps of Bhils suppressing Bhils, whose British commander blamed the Rajput state's officials for provoking them, is the double subordination of this whole unit compressed into one incident.

The Bhil risings, decade by decade

One line in this sequence is worth more than the rest and is regularly got wrong. During the revolution of 1857 there was a possibility of Bhil risings, but the Bhils were unaware of the national revolution and the state platoons did not revolt against the British. The most rebellious population in Rajasthan sat out 1857 — not from loyalty but from not knowing — which is a sharper version of the 1857 chapter's second cause of failure, the absence of contact between rebels.

1881 and 1882, the years the decade table skips

The table runs to 1874 and then jumps to Govind Guru. The largest Bhil rising of the century sits in the gap.

The causes, which are unusually well documented:

The trigger. A thanedar, Sunder Lal, used force to compel two gametis, Rupa and Kuvera, to appear as witnesses. The Bhils attacked the police station at Barapal, killing the thanedar and his constables.

The rising and the settlement. The Bhils blocked communications and attacked the marks of state authority; the state burnt Bhil villages and deployed troops; the Bhils used the terrain against superior firepower under leaders named as Neema Gameti, Khema and Joyta. Negotiations were opened by Shyamaldas, the Maharana's personal secretary, and the Bhils put three demands: stop interfering in their social and religious affairs, stop the census, and withdraw the oppressive taxes. An agreement was reached in April 1881, the state conceding some of them. The British were displeased, fearing concessions would encourage further resistance. In March 1882 the Bhils revolted again.

Shyamaldas is the name to notice. The man who negotiated with the Bhils in 1881 is the author of the Vir Vinod, the Mewar chronicle that the sources chapter treats as a principal state history. The historian of the Rajput court is also the durbar's negotiator with the tribe the court was suppressing, and both roles are in the same career.

And the census point deserves a line. The single most ordinary act of a modern state, counting its people, was read here as preparation for extermination. That is not superstition; it is an accurate reading of what enumeration had preceded elsewhere, and it is the same instinct that made the Criminal Tribes Act legible to the Meenas forty years later.

The Mina Rebellion, 1851-1860

To express their anger at the new land and revenue system, the Minas of Jahajpur pargana of Udaipur state revolted against the British.

The board's explanation of why they could is the same explanation it gave for the Mers, and the parallel is deliberate: the Mina caste of this region was sufficiently free from the subjugation of any political power, accepting only the symbolic power of Mewar — a state of affairs for which the board cites Colonel Tod's living account. It was the British who established Udaipur state's strict control over the region, because the Mina country lay next to the British-ruled Ajmer province.

And then the sentence that ties the two tribal risings together. The people of the Mina community were well acquainted with the suppression of the Mer by the British in 1820-21, and it was from that knowledge that opposition developed.

How it ended, with dates. In January 1860 the Meenas of Jahazpur rose again. On 29 January the Maharana sent a force under Chand Singh against the villages of Gadoli and Luhori in Jahazpur. The villages were looted and burnt by the state forces, numerous Meenas were arrested, and six men were executed by cannon fire. Afterwards the Meenas were placed under strict surveillance and required to attend the police station regularly.

The last clause is the one that carries into section 10. A community whose men were made to report to a police station in 1860 was classified as a criminal tribe by statute in 1924 and made to serve as chowkidars under supervision. Sixty-four years separate the practice from the law, and the law only wrote down what Jahazpur had already been living under.

They had watched what happened to their neighbours. The Minas did not rise in ignorance of what the British would do; they rose because they had seen it done to the Mers thirty years earlier — which is precisely the contact and foreknowledge the Bhils lacked in 1857.

Motilal Tejawat after the Eki movement

This chapter follows Tejawat to 1922 and then stops. The board follows him to 1947.

• 1923 — he tries to restart the Eki movement and fails, though unrest continues in the Bhakhar, Santhpur and Pindwara parganas of Sirohi.
• After January 1924 — he goes underground; Udaipur, Sirohi and Eider states announce rewards for his arrest.
• 1927 — the Adivasi Panchs reach an agreement with the Sirohi authorities and peace returns to those parganas.
• 3 June 1929 — the police of Eider State arrest him at a village called Khedbrahm and hand him to Udaipur, where a criminal case is filed.
• To 1936 — no final decision; he stays in jail.
• 3 April 1936 — released on condition that he would do no agitational work and would not leave the city of Udaipur without permission, with an allowance of Rs 30 a month from Udaipur state.
• January 1945 — imprisoned again for trying to enter the Bhomut area; released in February 1947.

The release terms are the part to carry. A man is let out of jail on condition that he neither agitates nor leaves the city, and is paid thirty rupees a month by the state that jailed him. That is not clemency; it is a pension as an instrument of control — cheaper than a prison and quieter than a trial. The board records that the tribal movement of Sirohi ended in a true sense only after Tejawat's arrest in 1929, and the Bhils and Girasias of Udaipur and Sirohi were turbulent throughout 1921-29 under him.

5. Govind Guru, the Samp Sabha and the Bhagat panth

Govind Guru was born in 1858, at Bedsa (also given as Bansia) in Dungarpur, into a Banjara family. That last detail is worth pausing on: the organiser of the largest Bhil movement in western India was not himself a Bhil.

Govind Guru before the movement, and a founding date this page got wrong

The Dungarpur District Gazetteer gives the life, and it is the life that settles the date.

He was Govindgiri Gopalia, a Banjara of the district, earlier known simply as Govinda. In the famine of Samvat 1956, the Chhappaniya famine of 1899-1900, many people died and Govinda lost his wife and his children. Sad and depressed, he left Dungarpur for the adjoining state of Gujarat, where he married again. In Gujarat he came in contact with Rajgiri Gosain, and, charmed by him, Govinda became Govind Giri; his wife also became Rajgiri's disciple.

He then returned to Dungarpur, came to Bedasa, and established his dhuni on a hillock called Chhani Dungari, planting his neji, his flag. To draw the Bhils in, he styled himself an incarnation of the almighty.

His teachings, in the gazetteer's own list, went well beyond abstinence: a daily bath and prayer, giving up meat and liquor, fasting on religious occasions, digging wells in the fields, giving up the ornaments the Bhils prized, and a raised voice against the kidnapping of women and against dapa, bride-price.

Well-digging in a temperance programme is the detail that explains the movement's hold. A guru who tells a famine-scarred community to stop drinking and start sinking wells is offering the second thing as the reason for the first. The Bhagat panth was a famine response before it was a reform movement and long before it was a confrontation, and Govind Guru's own family had died in the famine that began it.

And now the correction. This page has stated that the Samp Sabha was founded in 1883, reported as established in Sirohi. The Sirohi District Gazetteer, which is evidently where the Sirohi detail comes from, dates it differently: it records that "a sanyasi, named Govind set up a 'Samp-Sabha' about 1905 A.D.", whose object was to demand local self-government, that Bhils, Minas and others of the hill tracts rallied to him, that intoxicating drugs and foreign articles were boycotted, and that he led an uprising against the Maharao which was suppressed in 1908.

Two independent state gazetteers therefore point the same way. Sirohi says about 1905. Dungarpur has him losing his family in the 1899-1900 famine and only then leaving for Gujarat, taking a guru and returning. An 1883 founding requires him to have built the Samp Sabha sixteen years before the event that, on the state's own account, set him on the path. The 1883 date is not carried here. It is recorded as one of two, with the state record preferring about 1905, and the earlier date resting on a citation to Gopinath Sharma that this page has not been able to check.

A note on the 1908 uprising. The Sirohi gazetteer's line that Govind's rising against the Maharao of Sirohi was suppressed in 1908 is a separate episode from Mangarh, five years earlier and in another state. It is not in general circulation and it is not asserted beyond what the gazetteer says.

• Give up alcohol, meat and gambling
• Tend a dhuni, a fire pit, and hoist a nishan, a flag, outside the house
• Unite politically against the local rulers and the colonial state

The ritual form was borrowed, drawing on the practices of the Shaivite Dashanami Panth. A household with a fire kept burning and a flag flying is visibly enrolled, and that visibility is what turned a reform movement into something a state could count and fear.

Through the early 1900s the movement grew across Banswara, Dungarpur, Sirohi and Mewar. By 1913 it was demanding tax relief from the Maharawals of Banswara and Dungarpur, the abolition of begar, and a new social code for the Bhils, and a charter of 33 demands had been placed before the British by 1910, concerning forced labour, the taxes imposed on Bhils, and the harassment of the guru's followers by the princely states.

Then Mangarh. On 17 November 1913, around 1,500 Bhil Bhagats had gathered on Mangarh Hill, on what is now the Rajasthan-Gujarat border, for Govind Guru's annual meeting and to press their demands. British and princely-state forces fired on them.

Read that figure carefully, because it matters. The number 1,500 attaches, in the sources used here, to the size of the gathering — the Bhagats who assembled for the annual meeting. The widely-circulated claim that "over 1,500 were killed" may well be the same figure, transferred from the crowd to the casualties. This page does not assert either number as a death toll, and a candidate should know that the most-quoted statistic about Mangarh has an identifiable and innocent alternative explanation.

Govind Guru was sentenced to death. Fearing that execution would turn the movement violent, the authorities postponed it and commuted the sentence to twenty years' imprisonment on an isolated island. He died on 30 October 1931.

Read the Bhagat movement for what it actually was, because the massacre tends to eclipse it. It was a reform movement before it was a confrontation — temperance, moral discipline, self-respect — of exactly the kind that was being conducted in the same decades among non-tribal communities, and it collided with the state because a disciplined and organised tribal population was itself read as a threat. The 33 demands are about begar and taxation, which places Govind Guru in the same argument as Bijolia and Begun rather than in a separate tribal category.

6. The Eki movement and Motilal Tejawat

Motilal Tejawat (1885-1963) led the Eki, or Bhomat Bhil, movement in the adivasi-dominated border areas of present Rajasthan and Gujarat in the 1920s, seeking to unite the Bhil and Garasia communities.

The 21 demands, known as Mewar ki Pukar, are the item to carry. Tejawat placed them before the Maharana of Mewar, who agreed to 18 of the 21 — refusing those on forest rights, begar, and the killing of wild pigs. The officers then failed to implement even the eighteen that had been agreed, and Tejawat intensified the revolt.

That detail is the whole point of the episode. The movement was not defeated by refusal; it was defeated by agreement followed by non-implementation, which is a different and more corrosive thing. It is also the clearest evidence in this chapter that the states' internal authority, left untouched in 1818, was exercised without any effective check.

The firings of 1922:

Sirohi, and where the 1,800 figure actually comes from

The chapter treats the Eki firings as a Mewar story with a Sirohi appendix. The Sirohi District Gazetteer treats Tejawat as the beginning of politics in that state, and it prints a number this page has been quarantining.

"The first political agitation was organised by Shri Moti Lal Tejawat in the year 1922." He belonged to the former Mewar State, and he organised the Bhils and Girasias of Sirohi to the extent that the State and the jagirdars got alarmed.

The rising and its suppression. In May 1922 an uprising in Rohera tahsil against the jagirdars' atrocities was raised under Tejawat, the Girasias and Bhils being the main sections among the agitators. It proved abortive and, with British assistance, was ruthlessly crushed. The gazetteer's sentence on the cost is: "It is said that even women and children were shot dead, 1,800 men were killed and 600 houses burned and razed to the ground."

The villages. In a separate chapter the same gazetteer records that the jagirdars, to smash the organisation, set fire to four villages: Bhula, Valoria, Siwaya and one more, and that all those villages were resettled later.

Three things change.

First, Siyawa belongs in this chapter. It is one of the burnt villages, alongside Bhula and Valoria, which is the same place this page has been spelling Balohiya. Any list of the Eki sites that stops at Bhula and Balohiya is short by one.

Second, the 1,800 has changed standing without gaining proof. This page has carried it as an unverified coaching figure. It is printed in a Rajasthan government district gazetteer, hedged with "It is said that", and attached to a May 1922 uprising in Rohera tahsil rather than to a single day. A hedged figure in an official publication is not a counted record, and the gazetteer's own "it is said" is the reason it is still not asserted here. But a candidate should know the number is in the state's book.

Third, the agency is described differently. The gazetteer attributes the burning of the four villages to the jagirdars, not to the state army and the Mewar Bhil Corps. The two accounts are not necessarily inconsistent, since the corps and the state forces were used in the same season, but who burnt the villages is not settled and this page does not settle it.

One place-name warning. A widely set question asks where the Mewar Bhil Corps fired on Tejawat and his followers on 7 March 1922, with "Pal" as the key. This page cannot verify that answer, and there is a specific reason for caution: pal is the ordinary Bhil word for a settlement, the unit governed by a gameti. A place-name answer that is also a common noun for "village" is exactly the kind that decays in transmission. The date, the Mewar Bhil Corps and Major H. G. Sutton are secure; the place-name is not asserted here.

• 7 March 1922 — the Mewar Bhil Corps, a paramilitary force under the British officer Major H. G. Sutton, fired on a large gathering of adivasis led by Tejawat.
• 8 May 1922 — the villages of Bhula and Balohiya were besieged, fired upon, and houses burnt.

By the end of 1922 the Eki movement had collapsed. Casualty figures circulate for both incidents and are not verified here.

7. Shekhawati: the Jat kisan movement

Bijolia and Begun are Mewar. Shekhawati is the northern counterpart, covering the districts of Sikar and Jhunjhunu, and it peaked in the 1930s.

Through the 1920s and 1930s educational societies began supporting schools for Jat students, and Jat reformers from the British provinces turned their attention to the thikanas of Shekhawati. Jat Panchayats and Kisan Sabhas were formed in villages under various thikanadars and larger jagirdars. The farmers, mainly Jats, organised as the Sikar Jat Kisan Panchayat and stopped paying the lags, the cesses of the administration chapter.

The 1935 sequence is the examinable part:

Panchpana, Captain Webb, and a chronology that does not match the notes

Two of this section's dates are contradicted by the Sikar District Gazetteer, and the contradiction is worth knowing before an exam rather than during one.

The gazetteer's sequence:

Two divergences, stated and not resolved. This page dates the tax rise to 1922 and the Jat Mahayagya at Sikar to January 1934; the Sikar gazetteer puts the new taxes in 1924 and the Mahayagya in 1935. Both accounts are internally coherent. Carry the 1935 firing sequence, which both agree on, and treat the 1922 and 1934 dates as contested.

A name the notes do not have. The gazetteer records that "the name of Capt. Webb, who was Senior Officer of Sikar Thikana, became a synonym of repression." Webb is the officer of the Shekhawati repression on the state's own record, and he is worth more than the martyr lists that circulate without attestation.

Panchpana is a real administrative term, and it is not what the notes say it is. It appears in the gazetteer in the 1932 enquiry by Mr C. U. Wills, a retired ICS officer appointed Officer on Special Duty to examine and report on the status of the Thikanedars of Panchpana Singhana, including Khetri, and of Sikar, Khandela, Udaipurwati, Patao and Uniara. Panchpana Singhana is one named thikana group among several, not a five-thikana bloc holding three-quarters of Shekhawati. The word is real; the composition given in preparation material is not verified here.

The Sikar rebellion of 1938, which is missing from every summary

And then the thikana itself rebelled against Jaipur, which is the strongest possible proof of the point this chapter makes about Sikar's constitutional position.

Relations between the Jaipur State authorities and the Sikar thikana broke down over Jaipur's interference in Sikar's internal administration, and worsened when Jaipur tried to remove Kunwar Hardayal Singh, the only son and heir of Rao Raja Kalyan Singh, from his father's custody and send him to England. The Rao Raja was repeatedly summoned to Jaipur and humiliated, and an attempt was made at Sikar to arrest him by force. Several thousand armed Rajputs, Qayamkhanis and others assembled in the fortress against the state's forces.

Read that against section 7's argument and it does two jobs. It confirms beyond dispute that Sikar was a thikana of Jaipur and not a state, since a state cannot have its ruler declared insane and its lands taken into the Court of Wards by a neighbour. And it shows the Jats and the Rajputs of Sikar on the same side within four years of Kudan, demanding responsible government under the same Rao Raja whose police had fired on Jat cultivators. A movement that looks like a caste confrontation in 1935 looks like a town against its overlord in 1938, and an answer that carries only the first is carrying half the decade.

The Khuri demonstration began over something that looks small and was not. The issue was whether a Jat bridegroom might ride to his bride's house on a horse — a ceremonial act asserting a standing that Rajputs were not prepared to concede.

That is the most instructive fact in this chapter. A movement about revenue and cesses ignited over a wedding procession, because in a jagirdari order the two are the same question. Who pays what, and who may ride a horse, are both statements about rank, and a community contesting one was always going to contest the other. An answer that treats Shekhawati as purely economic misses why it started where it did.

7b. Five more peasant movements

The Rajasthan Board's prescribed textbook names nine risings in all. The five below complete the set: Bharatpur, the Meo movement, Alwar and Neemuchana, Bundi's Barad and Dabi, and the peasant movement in Jaipur State, which is where the board files Shekhawati.

Bharatpur, 1931 — the movement that began because conditions were good

The board opens the Bharatpur entry by saying the condition of the farmers was good, and that is the point. Ninety-five per cent of the land was directly under state control, and the five main cultivating castes — Brahmins, Jats, Gurjars, Ahirs and Meos — stood more or less alike.

Then a new land settlement in 1931 increased the land revenue, and it was the Land Revenue Officers, the lumberdars, who began the protest. When the state ignored them, on 23 November 1931 about 500 farmers gathered at Bharatpur under Bhoji Lumberdar, who spoke against the state. He was arrested in November 1931 and the movement ended.

A revenue official leading a revenue protest is the detail to carry. Where the state holds the land directly, the man who collects for it is also the man who knows exactly how much the new settlement takes — and Bharatpur is the one Rajasthan rising led from inside the administration.

The Meo movement, 1932

The Meo movement in the Alwar record, and a founding date corrected

The Anjuman was not founded in 1932. The Alwar District Gazetteer records that the Anjuman-i-Khadimul-Islam was set up in the State in 1923 by some leading Muslims, that its aim was to encourage education among Muslim children, and that its base was theocratic. It turned political only later, drawing inspiration from the Anjuman-i-Ahrar of Bombay and Delhi, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema bodies of Ambala and Badaun, the Rajputana Muslim League at Ajmer and the All India Muslim Conference. 1932 is the year the Anjuman changed what it did, not the year it was founded.

The 1932 sequence, dated:

The state's first answer was an enquiry, and the Meos refused it. The Maharaja appointed a commission under Rao Bahadur Raja Durjan Singh, jagirdar of Jaoli, with Raja Ghazzanfar Ali, the Revenue Minister, and Lala Ganeshi Lal, extending its enquiry to all ten Nizamats. The Meos did not appear before it, on a resolution of no confidence passed at an Anjuman conference at Ferozepur Jhirka. The commission concluded that the agitation was the work of outside agitators and that retired officers of the British Army were organising the Meos in a military fashion.

Its second answer was money. At a public durbar on 12 December 1932, with the Agent to the Governor-General present, the Maharaja announced the return of Muslims who had left the State, releases of prisoners, and a remission of three lakh ten thousand rupees.

It did not work. Non-payment of revenue and forced collection of subscriptions spread; roads between Tijara and Kishangarh were cut. At Govindgarh, troops who had arrested about 25 Meos were surrounded in the Nizamat building by a crowd the gazetteer estimates at 30,000, and fire was exchanged.

Then the paramount power took over. The Government of India sent its own troops, which took control of the four Meo Nizamats of Ramgarh, Lachhmangarh, Tijara and Kishangarh under a special Commissioner, and martial law was declared. A District Magistrate borrowed from the United Provinces was appointed to try the resulting cases.

And the revenue remedy came with a new Prime Minister. Sir Francis Wyllie was appointed Prime Minister of Alwar in 1933, taking over the administration after the agrarian trouble of 1931-32 over rent rates. Wyllie reduced the State demand from about Rs 29.4 lakh to Rs 21.6 lakh, bringing it to, and in places below, the level of the earlier O'Dwyer assessment, and his rates were announced in 1934. He did no field work, revising the assessment in consultation with local officers.

That is a cleaner account of what the Meo movement won than the one this page has carried. A seven-lakh cut in the state's revenue demand, imposed by a British Prime Minister installed over the ruler's administration, is a measurable result. It also confirms the chapter's structural point in the hardest possible form: the Meo cultivators could not move their Maharaja, so the outcome arrived when the paramount power replaced him with its own man.

In 1932 Mohammad Hadi established the Anjuman Khadim ul Islam in the Alwar-Bharatpur region to organise the Meo peasants. The Meo movement of Alwar was led by Chaudhary Yasin Khan of Gurgaon, and under him the farmers stopped paying rent on the kharif crop.

The state's answer was a communal appointment rather than a settlement: it brought Khan Bahadur Kazi Azizuddin Bilgrami, a Muslim member, onto the state council to satisfy the Meos. The movement intensified anyway. In 1937 a special committee under Bilgrami investigated the Meo crisis, and on its report land revenue and other taxes were remitted and the social and religious grievances of the Meos addressed.

Note the shape of that. A tenurial grievance was met first with a religious appointment and only afterwards with a revenue remedy — and the second worked where the first did not.

Alwar and Neemuchana, 1921-1925 — and it began with pigs

What Neemuchana finally cost the ruler. The Alwar gazetteer does not narrate the firing, but it records its consequence in one sentence: "Bad finances of the State coupled with Meo agitation and the Neemuchana trouble gave the British authorities opportunity to interfere in his administration, and he was in 1933 ultimately asked to leave the State." Maharaja Jai Singh died in Paris on 19 May 1937, leaving no lineal or adopted son.

That is the answer to the question of whether these movements achieved anything. The Neemuchana peasants did not remove Jai Singh in 1925. But Neemuchana and the Meo agitation together are the two grounds the paramount power named when it removed him eight years later, and the ruler who ordered machine guns turned on his cultivators died in exile in France. A movement can lose the day and still be the reason cited in the file.

The origin of the Alwar movement is the sort of fact that sounds trivial and is not. In Alwar wild pigs were reared and fed on grain, and these pigs ruined the farmers' crops — while the princely government banned killing them. The farmers began agitating in 1921 over the pigs, and eventually the government allowed them to be killed.

Then the rent. In 1923-24 Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar raised the rates of rent, and on 14 May 1925 about 800 farmers gathered at Neemuchana village. Military forces fired indiscriminately with machine guns, killing hundreds. Gandhi described the incident as more disgusting than the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and termed it deep and widespread Dyeredom. The government then had to bow to the farmers on revenue, and the agitation ended.

A correction follows from this and is set out in section 12. This chapter has flagged "about 800 killed at Neemuchana" as unverified. The board's account makes the 800 the size of the gathering, not the death toll — the dead are given only as "hundreds".

Bundi: Barad, Dabi and the Hindoli conference

Bundi, and a date this chapter cannot reconcile

The Bundi District Gazetteer tells the Nanak Bhil story with a different year and different leaders, and the divergence is too large to smooth over.

What the gazetteer says. "In 1926, in the time of Maharao Raja Raghubir Singh, a movement against Begar and Charai was started in Kota and Udaipur under the leadership of Manikya Lal Verma of Udaipur and Shri Nanu Ram of Kota. The public of Bundi co-operated with this movement and, in the agitation that followed, Nanakji Bhil was shot dead by the State Police and thus became the first martyr in the history of Bundi's fight for freedom."

What this page says, on the accounts it has used: Nanak Bhil was shot on 2 April 1923 while hoisting a flag at Dabi, by police under S. P. Ikram Hussain, in a movement begun in April 1922 in the Barad region under Nainuram of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh.

Neither is dismissed here. The gazetteer is the district's own state record and calls Nanak Bhil Bundi's first martyr, which is a claim about precedence that the 1926 date makes coherent within its own account. The 1923 dating is supported by the Bhilwara gazetteer's independent record that State troops were moved to Dabi about the end of May 1922 and withdrawn from Barrad village after 15 June, leaving a reserve of forty muskets at Dabi. The 1922 troop movements to Dabi and Barad are documented; the 1926 martyrdom is documented; the two do not sit together, and this page reports both with their basis.

One more thing the Bundi gazetteer does. Its chapter on land reform states flatly that, apart from "an inconclusive movement against cesses, localized in the herd area of Talera tehsil", the district "has not witnessed any serious agrarian disputes." A district gazetteer that records a martyr in one chapter and no serious agrarian disputes in another is a useful object lesson, and it is a good reason to read a gazetteer's history chapter and its revenue chapter against each other rather than trusting either alone.

Bundi's other grievance, which was not about land at all

A Brahmin named Ram Nath Kudal was killed on the order of the ruler for refusing to perform the cremation ceremony of a deceased concubine of the royal family. There was great public agitation and a nine-day hartal, during which the police fired on a crowd of demonstrators.

The Praja Mandal that grew out of the 1926 movement was led by Gopal Sutania, Jai Lal Jhandel and Gopal Lal Kotia, gained strength after Maharao Raja Ishwari Singh was installed in 1927, and was reorganised on 9 July 1944 as the Lok Parishad, with Hari Mohan Mathur as its first elected President and Pt. Brij Sunder Sharma as Secretary. On 24 October 1946 the new ruler, Maharao Raja Bahadur Singh, conceded to its demands.

The Kudal episode is the one to carry into a Mains answer on why these movements were never purely economic. A man was executed for refusing a ritual duty, and a princely capital shut for nine days over it. Bijolia began at a funeral feast and Bundi's town movement began at a cremation, which is the same argument section 7 makes about a bridegroom's horse: in a jagirdari order, the question of what a person may be compelled to do is the same question as what he may be compelled to pay.

The farmers of Bundi paid about twenty-five kinds of tax and forced labour. Influenced by Bijolia and Begun, the farmers of the Barad region — which borders Bijolia — began a movement in April 1922 against the Bundi administration, led by Nainuram, a committed worker of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh.

On 2 April 1923 a meeting of farmers at Dabi village was lathi-charged and fired on, and the board names two martyrs: Nanak Bhil and Devlal Gurjar. Bundi then redressed some grievances and made concessions on taxes and forced labour. The movement lapsed by 1923 partly because the farmers had stopped getting guidance from the Rajasthan Seva Sangh, and revived in 1936 in the Barad region.

On 5 October 1938 a conference of 500 representatives of Gurjar and Mina farmers from 90 villages met in the temple of Hudeshwar Mahadev at Hindoli and drew up a demand charter. When it was ignored the movement resumed, and the government eventually exempted grazing taxes, ceased recovering war debts and released those arrested.

The peasant movement in Jaipur State — which is where Shekhawati belongs

This entry reframes section 7 and the reframing is examinable. The board files the Shekhawati risings under the peasant movement in Jaipur State, whose original centres it gives as Shekhawati, Toravati, Sambhar, Sikar and Khetri thikanas in the west of the state, the movement being kicked off in the Sikar thikana. Sikar was a Jaipur thikana, not an independent state, and an answer that treats Shekhawati as free-standing has lost the constitutional relation the whole dispute turned on.

The elephant is not a decorative detail. Section 7 argues that Shekhawati ignited over whether a Jat bridegroom might ride a horse. Here the same dispute recurs at the level of an institution — who may ride what, in whose procession — and the refusal of a mount to a Mahayagya's president sits in the same grammar as the refusal of a horse to a bridegroom. Two refusals of a mount, nine years apart, both producing a movement.

Bikaner: Dudhwakhara and Hanuman Singh

The Bikaner movement outside Dudhwakhara, and the man who died at Raisinghnagar

This chapter has Bikaner as one movement in one village. The Ganganagar and Churu gazetteers show a state-wide sequence with a firing at the end of it.

The one death has a name, and the gazetteer supplies it obliquely. Neither history chapter names the man killed at Raisinghnagar. But the Ganganagar gazetteer's list of the district's important local fairs includes the "Birbal Singh Shaheed fair" at Raisinghnagar. A state gazetteer that records one death in a police firing at Raisinghnagar and, in another chapter, an annual martyr's fair for Birbal Singh at Raisinghnagar is as close to a state identification as this record comes, and it is stated here as that and not as more.

And the Dudhwakhara lathi-charge is independently confirmed, in two gazetteers, with its tehsil: Rajgarh, in Churu district. The refusal of medical aid to the injured is the state's own record of its own conduct.

Note what the sequence does to the chapter's verdict on Dudhwakhara. This page quotes the board's judgment that the movement "was not successful" but raised confidence. The gazetteers show what that confidence produced: a state-wide conference eleven months later, a death, and a constitutional proclamation seven weeks after the death. The failure and the proclamation are fourteen months apart.

Bikaner had 2,917 villages, of which 1,393 lay in jagir areas, and in those areas thirty-seven taxes were levied along with forced labour.

The Sikar and Shekhawati agitations carried across the border: Bikaner's Jat representatives attended the All India Jat Mahasabha at Jhunjhunu and the great Jat Mahayagya at Sikar from 20 to 26 January 1934, and came back willing to speak against the jagirdars. In 1937 at Udarasar the peasants protested the taxes, and at the request of their leader Jeevan Chaudhary the Bikaner Praja Mandal put their grievances to the state — without result.

The movement at Dudhwakhara, near Churu, is the one to know. The farmer leader Hanuman Singh spoke against the Thakur's atrocities, met Maharaja Shardul Singh at Bhadra and followed him to Mount Abu without getting a satisfactory answer, and was arrested at Ratangarh in June 1945 on the way back.

And the board's verdict on it is worth quoting rather than improving. The Dudhwakhara movement was not successful — but it brought political consciousness among the farmers and raised their confidence, and they now raised their voices against the atrocities. A movement can fail and still be the reason the next one succeeds, which is the argument this whole chapter is making.

On 30 June to 1 July 1946 the Praja Parishad held a political meeting at Raisinghnagar; police attacked it with sticks, injuring many, and opened fire on the crowd that surrounded the state rest house.

8. The women of these movements

This chapter named Vijay Singh Pathik, Ram Narayan Choudhary, Manikya Lal Verma, Sardar Harlal Singh and Kesari Singh Barhath, and until 21 August 2026 it did not name a single woman. That is not because the women were not there. Anjana Devi Choudhary, Narayani Devi Verma, Kishori Devi and Nagendra Bala were in the same movements as the four men above — one was married to Ram Narayan Choudhary, one to Manikya Lal Verma, one to Sardar Harlal Singh, and one was Kesari Singh Barhath's granddaughter.

Notice the shape of that omission, because it is the historiographical point and it is worth a Mains paragraph. These women are not obscure. They are attached to the best-known men in the chapter, and were dropped anyway. A movement history that lists the husbands and omits the wives is not reporting a scarcity of women; it is reproducing the filing system of the records it was built from.

Anjana Devi Chaudhary

Upgraded on 21 August 2026 to the Rajasthan Board's own account, which is fuller and more precise than the secondary sources this entry first rested on.

Give up the pardah system is not a decorative phrase and should not be read as one. It is the precondition of everything in the rows beneath it. A woman who cannot appear in public cannot organise a satyagraha, and the board records the renunciation before it records the politics — in that order, and rightly.

On the first-arrest claim. This site declines first-ever superlatives on secondary authority. This one is different: it is asserted by the Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan, in a prescribed textbook, and it is carried here on that footing, in the board's own formulation — first woman arrested in the princely states — rather than in the looser "first woman of Rajasthan" form that circulates.

She was later imprisoned during the Quit India movement of 1942, along with her six-month-old son. That detail is from secondary sources and not from the board text, and it is kept because a prison term served with an infant says something about the cost of participation that no account of resolutions conveys.

Narayani Devi Verma

Wife of Manikya Lal Verma, and a figure in her own right. She played a key role in the Bijolia movement, worked to promote women's education, was active in the Praja Mandal movement, and — from a Gandhian commitment — worked on tribal welfare and Dalit upliftment. She was imprisoned in 1944.

With Anjana Devi she did something organisationally specific: the two held separate meetings for women peasants, regularly. That is a method, not a gesture. In a society observing ghoonghat and segregated assembly, a mixed meeting is not a neutral container — it is one most peasant women could not enter. Building a parallel structure was the condition of their participation, not an alternative to it.

The Katarathal women's convention, 1934

The single most examinable thing in this section, and it is missing from most notes.

The board's version is narrower and harder, and the difference matters. It names the Thakur — Man Singh of Sihot — and the village where the misbehaviour happened, Sotia Ka Bas. A convention of ten thousand women assembled over what was done to farmer women in one named village is a far more concrete thing than "a protest against feudal excess", and the specificity is what makes it answerable.

Set that against section 7 and a date jumps out. Katrathal was 25 April 1934. Kudan was 25 April 1935. The same calendar date, one year apart — the women's conference first, the police firing exactly a year later. Both dates were checked separately for this page because the coincidence looked like a copying error, and it is not.

The cause matters as much as the numbers. Section 7 makes the point that the Shekhawati movement ignited over whether a Jat bridegroom might ride a horse — a question of standing rather than of revenue. Katrathal is the same argument from the other side: a conference of ten thousand women called over a Thakur's conduct towards Jat women. Dignity was not a side-issue that the peasant movement occasionally touched. In Shekhawati it was the issue, and the women's assembly and the wedding-procession dispute are two expressions of one grievance.

Nagendra Bala

Granddaughter of Kesari Singh Barhath, whose Chetavani ra Chungatya opens the personalities chapter. She was active in the peasant movements from 1941 to 1947, and after independence became the first woman Zila Pramukh in Rajasthan, at Kota.

She is the bridge between the two halves of this unit — a revolutionary family of the 1910s and the elected local government of the 1950s, in one person.

Rama Devi, of Jaipur

The board carries her and almost no preparation material does.

She was born into Vaidya Ganga Sahay's family in Jaipur. She was married at the age of seven and widowed at eleven. She later remarried the Gandhian leader Laduram Joshi, after which she took to khadi, left her job, and worked with her husband in the Rajasthan Seva Sangh.

In 1931, during the Bijoliya movement, she went to Bijoliya and was arrested. Told to leave, her answer was that she would keep coming until the atrocities on the farmers stopped. She was insulted and beaten, and stood firm. She took part in the Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience movements of 1930 and 1932 and went to jail.

Married at seven, widowed at eleven, remarried, and in jail by 1931. Set that biography against the nineteenth-century chapter's account of the Walter Sabha legislating against child marriage and for widow remarriage, and you have the reform argument and the political one meeting in a single life. That is the connection to make in a Mains answer, and it is available only because the board bothered to record her.

Sourcing note. The core of this section is now the Rajasthan Board's prescribed textbook — Freedom Movement and Gallantry Traditions of Rajasthan — which carries Anjana Devi Chaudhary, Kishori Devi, Rama Devi, Kalibai, Janaki Devi Bajaj and Ratan Shastri as named revolutionaries. Narayani Devi Verma and Nagendra Bala are not in that textbook and remain on secondary and community sources, as does the 25 April date for Katarathal and the naming of Uttama Devi as its main speaker. Sharda Bhargava, Dhapu Devi and Phool Kanwar appear in preparation material and are still not written up, nothing beyond the names being establishable.

One point about the syllabus, since it settles whether this section belongs here. The board textbook's own essay-type exercise reads: "Underline the role of women rebels in Rajasthan during India's independence movement." The examiner sets it directly. A chapter on Rajasthan's movements that contained no women — as this one did until 20 August 2026 — was not merely incomplete as history; it left a candidate unable to answer a question the prescribed book asks in as many words.

9. Marwar: the Hitkarini Sabha

Jodhpur's movement grew from an association rather than from a single jagir.

• 1918 — the Marudhar Hitkarini Sabha is established by Chandmal Surana.
• 1923 — it is reorganised by Jai Narayan Vyas and renamed the Marwar Hitkarini Sabha.

It pioneered peasant-led agitation in Jodhpur. Its opening campaign, in 1923, was against the state's orders permitting the export of female livestock, which struck directly at the peasantry. Vyas asked the Maharaja to repeal the policy; the state responded with violence, and the government finally relented on 15 August 1924.

The Sabha then agitated against the rising price of foodgrains and essential commodities, and pressed the Jodhpur State Council to stop the export of cereals. In 1929 a nine-member committee was formed to rouse cultivators against forced labour and high land revenue, particularly in the jagir lands, where jagirdars and moneylenders operated with little check.

Note the difference in form. Bijolia and Begun were place-based movements against one thikana. Marwar's was an association-based movement operating across a whole state and working partly through petition and the State Council. That second form is what becomes the Praja Mandal in the next chapter, and Jai Narayan Vyas is the man who carries it there.

9b. Marwar from 1938 to 1947: the Lok Parishad, Chandawal and Dabra

Section 9 stops at 1929. The Marwar movement's two most examinable incidents are in the eighteen years after it, and one of them was set as an RPSC Mains short note.

The organisations, and the two pamphlets

The Jodhpur District Gazetteer's account differs from this page's on the founding, and the difference is stated rather than hidden: it records the Marwar Hitkarini Sabha as founded at Jodhpur in or about 1921, to work for the political, social and economic welfare of Marwar while remaining loyal to the ruler. This page has carried 1918, under the name Marudhar Hitkarini Sabha and the founder Chandmal Surana, with a renaming by Vyas in 1923. The two are not reconciled here.

What the gazetteer settles is the literature and the repression.

• Jai Narayan Vyas wrote Marwar Main Jagriti aur Usai Rokne ka Udyog, criticising the State's repressive policy, and was prosecuted in 1925 for wilfully defying the lawful authority of the State.
• He wrote a second pamphlet, Marwar ki Awastha, revealing conditions in the State; he and his associates were arrested on a charge of sedition and given various terms of imprisonment.
• The Sabha's October 1929 State People's Conference at Jodhpur, whose agenda included prohibiting the export of food and fodder, abolition of forced labour, a Legislative Assembly and freedom of speech, press and meeting, was not allowed to be held.
• Its offshoot, the Marwar Youth League, moved into the districts when banned in Jodhpur town and roused cultivators who responded by demanding remission of bigori.
• In 1932 both the Marwar Hitkarini Sabha and the Marwar Youth League were declared unlawful by the State Council; the Marwar Public Society Ordinance of 1934 curtailed civil liberties further; and the Praja Mandal and Civil Liberties Union formed in their place were declared unlawful in 1937.

Bigori is the Marwar term to carry, and it belongs beside lata, kunta and lag-bag from the administration chapter. It is the portion of land revenue reckoned per bigha, and the first concrete demand the Youth League's rural work produced was its remission. A movement of town lawyers and pamphleteers became a peasant movement at the moment it acquired a named tax to attack.

The Marwar Lok Parishad

The 1941 municipal result is the hinge. A body that had been an unlawful society thirteen months earlier won the capital's municipal board, and its president then took its organisers into the thikanas. That is the sequence that produced the two incidents below: the jagirdars were not reacting to a peasant grievance, they were reacting to an elected town party arriving in their villages.

Chandawal, 28 March 1942

Set as a Mains short note by RPSC in 2024, and absent from most notes in any spelling.

The Jodhpur gazetteer records the year in general terms: "In 1942 serious incidents occurred at various places where workers of the Lok Parishad and jagirdars came into clash with each other." The specific incident is on the record of the Ministry of Culture's Digital District Repository, in its entry for Mangilal Trivedi 'Alishan'.

Chandawal is in Jodhpur State, in what is now Pali district. The Ministry of Culture files the record under Jodhpur, which is the princely state; the Pali gazetteer lists Chandawal Nagar and Chandawal Station among the district's places.

The fast is the part to carry, because it dates the confrontation. Mangilal was already twenty days into a hunger strike against the Thakur before the meeting was attacked. The attack of 28 March 1942 was not the opening of a dispute; it was a thikana's answer to a man it had failed to starve out.

What is not established here. The other leaders named in preparation material for Chandawal, the description of the gathering as an observance of a responsible-government day, Gandhi's condemnation of the incident, and a land-settlement announcement of 2 December 1943 are not confirmed by either the Ministry record or the Jodhpur gazetteer, and are not asserted.

Dabra, 13 March 1947

The terminal incident of the Rajasthan peasant movement, and it is on the record of the Nagaur District Gazetteer.

"A mass meeting was called at Dabra, now in Didwana tahsil, on the 13th of March, 1947 by the leaders of the Lok Parishad and the Kisan Sabha. However, before the meeting could be held, an engagement took place between the followers of the jagirdars and the cultivators, resulting in fatal casualties on both the sides."

Three things in that sentence are worth separating.

First, the meeting never happened. The killing took place before the conference could be held, which is why "the Dabra conference" is a misdescription that survives in most notes.

Second, the casualties were on both sides. This is the only firing in the chapter of which a government record says so. It was not a police firing on a gathering; it was an engagement between the jagirdars' followers and the cultivators, and the cultivators killed as well as died. That is why Dabra ends the movement where Neemuchana and Mangarh did not: the balance of force in a Marwar village in March 1947 was no longer what it had been in Alwar in 1925.

Third, no toll is given. Figures of five and six dead circulate. The gazetteer counts nobody, and neither does this page.

The context the gazetteer supplies around it. The Lok Parishad and the Kisan Sabha had launched several agitations in Jodhpur State against begar and oppressive cesses, and in October 1946 the Lok Parishad began a campaign in the rural areas against the jagirdars' repressive policy, after which untoward events occurred at many places. Maharaja Umaid Singh died in June 1947, three months after Dabra, and was succeeded by Hanwant Singh; a popular ministry under Jai Narayan Vyas followed; and Jodhpur merged into the United State of Greater Rajasthan in 1949.

MCQ WATCH — Marwar after 1938

Formed: Marwar Lok Parishad, May 1938, aim responsible government under the aegis of the ruler.

Banned: 28 March 1940, by notification in the Jodhpur Government Gazette.

First representative session: July 1940, Jodhpur; Jai Narayan Vyas elected President; business was begar and lag-bag.

Municipal: June 1941, largest party in the Jodhpur board; Vyas its President.

Chandawal: 28 March 1942 — Mangilal Trivedi 'Alishan' and others attacked by jagir men at a meeting; he had already fasted 20 days against the Chandawal Thakur.

Dabra: 13 March 1947, now in Didwana tahsil, Nagaur — meeting called by the Lok Parishad and the Kisan Sabha; the clash happened before the meeting could be held; fatal casualties on both sides; no official toll.

Pamphlets: Vyas, Marwar Main Jagriti aur Usai Rokne ka Udyog (prosecuted 1925) and Marwar ki Awastha (arrested for sedition).

Term: bigori, the per-bigha share of land revenue, whose remission the Marwar Youth League's rural work first demanded.

10. The Meena movement

The Meena struggle is different in kind from the others: not against a revenue demand but against a criminal classification.

The movement was centred on Jaipur, Alwar, Kota and Bundi.

The 1946 resignation is the act to remember. Twenty-six thousand men giving up the office of village watchman at once is a strike by a whole community against the role the state had assigned it — and the chowkidar post was precisely the mechanism by which a "criminal tribe" was made to police itself under supervision. Refusing the office was refusing the classification.

11. Statement-based questions: the fault lines

Type A — Movement, wrong place or leader

Type B — The three massacres

Type C — Mangarh's present status

Type D — Numbers that are not verified

• Casualty totals at Mangarh, Neemuchana and the Eki firings all circulate and none is confirmed here.
• 84 taxes at Bijolia is the figure in the accounts used, and is given as such.
• Answer on dates, places and named individuals, which are secure.

Type E — The women, and the two 25 Aprils

Type F — The five added movements

Type G — The Mers and the early Bhil risings

Type H — The corps, the Minas and Tejawat

Type I — Agreement read as victory

• The Eki movement's 18 of 21 demands were agreed and then not implemented. Agreement is not the same as settlement.
• Begun's first agreement was rejected by the British Resident as a "Bolshevik settlement" before the December 1923 one took effect.

12. Writing this in Mains

Open by explaining the target. These movements were directed at jagirdars and princely states because the 1818 treaties left internal revenue and justice with the states. An answer that begins by locating the grievance in the thikana rather than in the Raj is already doing better than a chronological list.

Connect the tactic to the assessment method. Where revenue is taken as a share of the crop, refusing to cultivate is the most powerful weapon available: a fallow field yields the jagirdar nothing at all. Bijolia's 1913-14 fallow and Begun's no-rent campaign are the same insight applied twice.

Use the Eki movement to make the argument about implementation. Eighteen of twenty-one demands conceded, and then not carried out. The failure was administrative, not political, and it shows what unchecked internal authority looked like in practice.

Refuse the tribal-versus-peasant division. Govind Guru's charter of 33 demands is about begar and taxation; the Eki demands include forest rights and begar. These are agrarian movements among tribal populations, not a separate category, and treating them as one continuous struggle against the same fiscal machinery is both more accurate and more interesting.

Be honest about the numbers. The casualty figures for Mangarh and Neemuchana are contested and come from narrative rather than counted sources. Saying so, while naming the dates, places and the men who were killed, is stronger than repeating a total.

13. Nowadays

Covering 1 January to 27 August 2026. This section is updated every month until Prelims and Mains. Everything in it is dated, because a current-affairs fact without a date is worse than no fact at all.

Mangarh's status was settled in this window, and settled against the claim that circulates. On 4 August 2026, answering Nagaur MP Hanuman Beniwal in the Lok Sabha, Union Minister of Culture and Tourism Gajendra Singh Shekhawat stated that representations to declare Mangarh Dham a Monument of National Importance had been received, but that a site inspection found substantial modern development and construction, so the site no longer retains the archaeological character, authenticity and integrity required under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958. The answer is no, and the reason is the memorial itself. Building at the site to commemorate the dead is what disqualified it from protection as an ancient monument, which is a genuine and rather bleak irony worth carrying into an interview. Reported on 4 August 2026 by Rajasthan Patrika, Amar Ujala and the Free Press Journal; the precise date of the written reply is not settled across those reports, though all three carry it on 4 August.

Commemoration continued, and commemoration is not status. Govind Guru and the Mangarh dead remain a fixture of the state's public calendar, and the anniversary falls on 17 November, outside this window in both directions. Nothing observed between January and August 2026 altered the site's protection.

What has not changed. The dates and figures in this chapter stand. Bijolia still runs 1897 to 1941, Begun's settlement is still 1923, and the Neemuchana firing remains 14 May 1925. The 1,500 killed at Mangarh remains what it was: a figure asserted by a Union Minister in a PIB release of 6 July 2022, with no source, enumeration or method given, which raises its standing without supplying its evidence.

Important for RAS

Prelims Focus

• Rebellion answered by recruitment — Mers to the Merwara Battalion (1822, Beawar); Bhils to the Mewar Bhil Corps (April 1841, HQ Khairwada, cantonments Khairwada and Kotra); Minas to the 42nd Deoli Regiment / Mina Battalion (Deoli). The board says the Bhil plan was made on the method of Merwara Battalion. Beawar, Khairwada and Deoli are three of the six 1857 cantonments

• Bhil risings — 1844 Banswara · 1846 boosted by Kunwar Jive Vasavo in Gujarat · 1850 crushed, Banswara's lawyer Kothari Kesari Singh having sought British help · December 1855 Kalibas · 1 November 1856 army under Mehta Sawai Singh · 1861 Khairwada · 1863 Kotra · 1867 Devalpal · 1873-74 Chilkari and Shergarh, spreading to Salana and Jhabua

• In 1857 the Bhils did not rise — the board says they were unaware of the national revolution

• Mina Rebellion, 1851-1860 — Jahajpur pargana of Udaipur; against the new land and revenue system; the Minas accepted only the symbolic power of Mewar, per Colonel Tod; they were well acquainted with the suppression of the Mers in 1820-21

• Tejawat after Eki — underground after January 1924; Udaipur, Sirohi and Eider offer rewards; 1927 Adivasi Panchs settle with Sirohi; arrested at Khedbrahm by Eider police on 3 June 1929; jailed to 1936; released 3 April 1936 on conditions with Rs 30 a month; re-imprisoned January 1945 over the Bhomut area; released February 1947

• The board's opening claim — the alliance of local feudalism and British imperialism was first opposed by the Mer, Mina and Bhil tribes

• Mers, pre-history — 1195-96 against Qutubuddin Aibak with help from Anhilwada, his commander killed and Aibak sheltering in Ajmer fort, recorded by Hasan Nizami in the Tajul Masir; 1311 Adsi Mer against Alauddin Khilji at Jalor; 1616 the Mers loot Jahangir's camp at Ajmer; praised by Colonel Tod

• Mer rebellion — 1818 agreement with Jhak under Superintendent F. Wilder; March 1819 Wilder attacks Merwara with troops from Nasirabad; early 1820 revolt against the police posts; November 1820 massacre of British police at Jhak; suppressed by three British battalions plus Mewar and Marwar by end of January 1821; 1822 the Merwara Battalion raised from the Mers, headquarters Beawar

• Bhil Rebellion, 1818-1860 — four causes: taxes, the suppression policy, James Tod's takeover of Udaipur's internal administration after the Subsidiary Alliance, and the disbanding of the native armies after the Treaty of 1818, which had employed Bhils

• Bharatpur, 1931 — conditions good, 95% of land under direct state control; five castes Brahmin, Jat, Gurjar, Ahir, Meo; the 1931 settlement raised revenue; lumberdars protested; 23 November 1931, 500 farmers under Bhoji Lumberdar; his arrest ended it

• Meo movement, 1932 — Mohammad Hadi founds the Anjuman Khadim ul Islam in the Alwar-Bharatpur region; Alwar's Meos led by Chaudhary Yasin Khan of Gurgaon; kharif rent withheld; Khan Bahadur Kazi Azizuddin Bilgrami put on the state council; 1937 Bilgrami committee brings remissions

• Alwar, 1921-25 — began over wild pigs the state forbade killing; 1923-24 Maharaja Jai Singh raised rents; 14 May 1925, about 800 farmers gathered at Neemuchana, machine-gun fire, hundreds killed; Gandhi: more disgusting than Jallianwala Bagh, Dyeredom

• Bundi — about 25 taxes; Barad region, April 1922, led by Nainuram of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh; 2 April 1923 Dabi firing kills Nanak Bhil and Devlal Gurjar; 5 October 1938, 500 representatives of Gurjar-Mina farmers from 90 villages at Hudeshwar Mahadev temple, Hindoli

• Jaipur State — centres Shekhawati, Toravati, Sambhar, Sikar, Khetri; 1922 Raoraja Kalyan Singh raises land tax 25-50%; ijafa of two annas per bigha on the small zarib; October 1925 Jat Sabha at Bagad; 1932 Jhunjhunu ceremony, 60,000 Jat farmers; September 1933 Palsana; January 1934 Mahayagya, Chandrabhan arrested

• Bikaner — 2,917 villages, 1,393 in jagir; 37 taxes; Jat Mahayagya at Sikar, 20-26 January 1934; 1937 Udarasar, Jeevan Chaudhary; Dudhwakhara near Churu, Hanuman Singh arrested at Ratangarh, June 1945, five years for treason, freed 10 August 1945, refused 100 murabba, finally free 4 January 1948; Raisinghnagar meeting 30 June-1 July 1946

• Katrathal Mahila Sammelan — 25 April 1934, Katrathal, Sikar; called by Kishori Devi, wife of Sardar Harlal Singh; against the Thakur of Sihot's conduct towards Jat women; about 10,000 Jat women; main speaker Uttama Devi, wife of Thakur Deshraj, the first Jat historian; reported as the first Jat Mahila Sammelan in Rajasthan

• The two 25 Aprils — Katrathal 25 April 1934, Kudan 25 April 1935. Same date, one year apart

• Anjana Devi Choudhary — wife of Ram Narayan Choudhary; reported as the first woman of Rajasthan arrested and exiled, 1924, in Bijolia and Begun; organised women in Shekhawati, Mewar and Bundi; Quit India 1942, imprisoned with her six-month-old son

• Narayani Devi Verma — wife of Manikya Lal Verma; Bijolia; women's education; Praja Mandal; tribal and Dalit work; imprisoned 1944. With Anjana Devi she held separate meetings for women peasants

• Nagendra Bala — granddaughter of Kesari Singh Barhath; peasant movements 1941-47; first woman Zila Pramukh in Rajasthan, at Kota

• Anjana Devi Chaudhary, board version — born 1897, Agarwal family, Sri Madhopur, Sikar; married Ramnarayan Chaudhary 1911; gave up pardah at twenty; 1921-24 among the women of Mewar and Bundi; the first woman arrested in the princely states

• Katarathal, 1934 — chaired by Kishori Devi; against Thakur Man Singh of Sihot's misbehaviour with farmer women at Sotia Ka Bas; around 10,000 women

• Rama Devi, Jaipur — of Vaidya Ganga Sahay's family; married at 7, widowed at 11; remarried Laduram Joshi; Rajasthan Seva Sangh; arrested at Bijoliya in 1931, and said she would keep coming until the atrocities on farmers stopped; Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience, 1930 and 1932

• Mangarh's present status — 6 July 2022: the National Monuments Authority, chairman Tarun Vijay, submitted a report recommending that the Mangarh hillock be declared a Monument of National Importance, to MoS Culture Arjun Ram Meghwal at the IGNCA. 1 November 2022: the Prime Minister attended Mangarh Dham ki Gaurav Gatha. NO DECLARING NOTIFICATION IS ON RECORD — under the AMASR Act, 1958 the Central Government declares by notification, and the NMA only recommends

• Mangarh as shared heritage — the PM's phrase names Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat; the site is on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border, in Banswara district; Govind Guru spent his last years on the Gujarat side and his death anniversary is 30 October

• The 1,500 figure — asserted by a Union Minister in a PIB release of 6 July 2022; an official assertion, not a counted record

• Bijolia, 1897-1941, in the Bijolia jagir of Mewar against jagirdar Rao Krishna Singh; about 84 taxes including chanwari and talwar bandhai; phases 1897-1915 (spontaneous, local), 1915-1923 (national-standard leadership), to 1941; leaders in order Fateh Karan Charan → Sadhu Sitaram Das → Vijay Singh Pathik → Manikya Lal Verma; March 1913, about 1,000 peasants before the palace; lands left fallow 1913-14

• Begun — 1921 meeting at Bherukund near Menal; 1922 no-rent campaign; agreement at Ajmer through Pathik, rejected by the British Resident of Mewar as a "Bolshevik settlement"; June 1923 commission under G. C. Trench, boycotted, peasants insisting on Raita; 13 July 1923 firing, Roopa and Kripa ji killed; December 1923 settlement — tax rates fixed, taxes withdrawn, begar abolished; Ram Narayan Chaudhary leads after Pathik's arrest, 10 September 1923

• Mangarh — 17 November 1913, Mangarh Hill on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border; Bhils under Govind Guru; fired on by British and princely-state forces

• Govind Guru — born 1858, Dungarpur; founded the Bhagat movement (against superstition, for moral discipline, abstinence from alcohol and meat); active among Bhils from the early 1890s; 33 demands before the British by 1910 on begar, taxes and harassment; death sentence commuted to 20 years; died 30 October 1931

• Eki / Bhomat Bhil movement — Motilal Tejawat (1885-1963), uniting Bhil and Garasia on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border in the 1920s; 21 demands, Mewar ki Pukar; the Maharana agreed to 18 of 21, refusing forest rights, begar and killing of wild pigs, and the eighteen were not implemented; 7 March 1922 firing by the Mewar Bhil Corps under Major H. G. Sutton; 8 May 1922 at Bhula and Balohiya; movement collapsed by end-1922

• Dabi — 2 April 1923, Bundi; Nanak Bhil shot while hoisting a flag; police under S. P. Ikram Hussain

• Neemuchana — 14 May 1925, Alwar; Kisan Sabha against increased exactions; Gandhi in Young India: "Dyerism double distilled", worse than Jallianwala Bagh

• Meena movement — Criminal Tribes Act applied in Rajputana 1924 and in Jaipur 1930; Meena Kshatriya Mahasabha, 1933; 1944 conference under Jain Muni Magan Sagar and the Jaipur State Meena Reform Committee; 28 October 1946, Bagawas, 26,000 Meenas resign as chowkidars; restrictions withdrawn 1952. Centred on Jaipur, Alwar, Kota, Bundi

Interview and Mains Angles

• Where revenue is a share of the crop, the strongest weapon a cultivator has is to grow nothing. Does that explain why Rajasthan's peasant movements took the form of fallow fields and no-rent campaigns rather than riots?
• The Maharana of Mewar conceded eighteen of Tejawat's twenty-one demands and his officers implemented none. Is non-implementation a more effective form of refusal than refusal itself?
• A settlement between a jagirdar and his peasants was rejected by the British Resident as "Bolshevik". What does that tell us about the limits of the internal autonomy the 1818 treaties supposedly guaranteed?
• Twenty-six thousand Meenas resigned the post of chowkidar in a single day in 1946. What does it mean to refuse an office in order to refuse an identity?

Practice

• Practice: Peasant and Tribal Movements — 81 questions built from this chapter: 70 MCQs, 7 assertion-reason and 4 match-the-following, plus flashcards and one-liners. No question is set on a casualty figure, because none is verified.

More in This Series

• Political and Social Conditions in the 18th and 19th Centuries — why these movements were aimed at the states and not at the British
• Administrative and Revenue Systems in Medieval Rajasthan — lata, kunta, lag-bag and begar, the machinery being resisted
• Caution for Readers — the claims that are genuinely unsettled

Aggregator Watch

Unresolved claims from this box are collected, with what was checked, on the Caution for Readers page.

Sources & Verification

Checked as of 19 August 2026.

Facts verified for this chapter include: the Bijolia movement's span of 1897 to 1941 in the Bijolia jagir of Mewar, its origin in excessive land revenue and arbitrary cesses under jagirdar Rao Krishna Singh, the payment of about 84 kinds of tax including the chanwari and talwar bandhai, the division into three phases with the first from 1897 to 1915 under spontaneous local leadership and the second from 1915 to 1923 under leaders of national standing, the assembly of nearly a thousand peasants before the jagirdar's palace under Sadhu Sitaram Das in March 1913 and the decision to leave the lands fallow in 1913-14, and the succession of leadership through Fateh Karan Charan, Sadhu Sitaram Das, Vijay Singh Pathik and Manikyalal Verma; the Begun movement's meeting at Bherukund near Menal in 1921, the no-rent campaign of 1922, the agreement reached at Ajmer through Pathik and its rejection by the British Resident of Mewar as a "Bolshevik settlement", the commission under G. C. Trench appointed by Udaipur State in June 1923 and the peasants' boycott of it in favour of Raita, the firing of 13 July 1923 in which Roopa and Kripa ji were killed, the settlement beginning in December 1923 that fixed tax rates, withdrew many taxes and abolished begar, the joint leadership of Vijay Singh Pathik and Ram Narayan Chaudhary, and Pathik's arrest on 10 September 1923; the Mangarh massacre of 17 November 1913 on Mangarh Hill at the Rajasthan-Gujarat border, where British and princely-state forces fired on a peaceful gathering of Bhils led by Govind Guru; Govind Guru's birth in 1858 at Dungarpur, his founding of the Bhagat movement with its programme against superstition and for moral discipline and abstinence, his work among the Bhils from the early 1890s, the charter of 33 demands placed before the British by 1910 concerning forced labour, taxation and harassment by the princely states, the commutation of his death sentence to twenty years' imprisonment, and his death on 30 October 1931; Motilal Tejawat's dates of 1885 to 1963, his leadership of the Eki or Bhomat Bhil movement uniting Bhil and Garasia communities in the 1920s, the 21 demands known as Mewar ki Pukar, the Maharana's acceptance of 18 of the 21 with refusal on forest rights, begar and the killing of wild pigs, the officers' failure to implement the agreed eighteen, the firing of 7 March 1922 by the Mewar Bhil Corps under Major H. G. Sutton, the events at Bhula and Balohiya on 8 May 1922, and the movement's collapse by the end of 1922; the Dabi incident of 2 April 1923 in Bundi, in which Nanak Bhil was shot while hoisting a flag by police under S. P. Ikram Hussain; the Neemuchana massacre of 14 May 1925 in Alwar, at a Kisan Sabha protesting increased exactions, and Gandhi's description of it in Young India as "Dyerism double distilled" and worse than Jallianwala Bagh; and, for the Meena movement, the application of the Criminal Tribes Act in Rajputana in 1924 and in Jaipur state in 1930, the establishment of the Meena Kshatriya Mahasabha in 1933, the 1944 general conference under Jain Muni Magan Sagar and the founding of the Jaipur State Meena Reform Committee, the resignation of 26,000 Meenas from the post of chowkidar at Bagawas on 28 October 1946, the withdrawal of restrictions in 1952, and the movement's concentration in Jaipur, Alwar, Kota and Bundi.

Added in the enrichment pass of 19 August 2026, and verified before writing: Vijay Singh Pathik's birth name Bhoop Singh Gurjar, his origin in Guthawali village, Bulandshahr district, his connection with Rash Behari Bose's revolutionary network, his implication in the Lahore conspiracy case of 1915 and the change of name that followed, and his entry into the Bijolia estate in 1916; the founding of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh at Wardha in 1919 with Arjun Lal Sethi and Kesari Singh Barhath, and the transfer of its headquarters to Ajmer in 1920; Govind Guru's birth at Bedsa, also given as Bansia, in Dungarpur, into a Banjara family; the founding of the Samp Sabha in 1883, reported as established in Sirohi, and the Bhagat panth's programme of abstention from alcohol, meat and gambling, the tending of a dhuni and hoisting of a nishan, its borrowing from the Shaivite Dashanami Panth, its growth across Banswara, Dungarpur, Sirohi and Mewar, and its demands by 1913 for tax relief from the Maharawals of Banswara and Dungarpur, the abolition of begar and a new social code; the gathering of about 1,500 Bhil Bhagats on Mangarh Hill on 17 November 1913 for Govind Guru's annual meeting; the Shekhawati movement in Sikar and Jhunjhunu, the formation of Jat Panchayats and Kisan Sabhas and of the Sikar Jat Kisan Panchayat, the refusal of the lags, and the sequence of 27 March 1935 at Khuri over whether a Jat bridegroom might ride a horse, 22 April 1935 at Bhaironpura, and 25 April 1935 at Kudan, where Sikar police killed four Jats and arrested 104; and the establishment of the Marudhar Hitkarini Sabha in 1918 by Chandmal Surana, its reorganisation and renaming as the Marwar Hitkarini Sabha by Jai Narayan Vyas in 1923, its 1923 campaign against the export of female livestock and the state's relenting on 15 August 1924, its agitation over foodgrain prices and its pressure on the Jodhpur State Council, and the 1929 nine-member committee against forced labour and high land revenue in the jagir lands.

One flag was resolved by this pass, and one was added. The Samp Sabha's 1883 founding, previously listed as unverified, is now confirmed and has moved into the body. Against that, the figure of about 1,500 at Mangarh is now shown to attach, in the sources used, to the size of the gathering rather than to the dead, so the widely-quoted death toll may be that same number transferred from crowd to casualties, and the page says so.

Every casualty figure in this topic is flagged rather than asserted. Totals circulate for Mangarh, Neemuchana and both Eki firings, and they derive from tribal narrative, contemporary journalism and later accounts rather than from counted records. This page carries the dates, the places, the forces involved and the named dead, all of which are secure, and states the totals as contested.

One terminological conflict is stated rather than resolved. The Begun settlement is commonly said to have ended "lata-kutan", glossed in circulating summaries as physical punishment. That conflicts with lata and kunta as crop-share assessment methods established in this site's administration chapter, and with kutna meaning to pound or thresh. The most plausible reading is a share taken after threshing, but this page asserts neither and flags the divergence.

Added on 20 August 2026, from the Press Information Bureau. Two PIB releases were read directly. Release 1839658 of 6 July 2022 records that a team from the National Monuments Authority led by chairman Tarun Vijay submitted a report on declaring the Mangarh hillock a monument of National Importance to Minister of State for Culture Arjun Ram Meghwal at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, that the report carries recommendations by the NMA, that the minister said "we will positively take forward the report", that he stated 1500 Bhil tribal freedom fighters were brutally killed by the British army on 17th November 1913, that Mangarh hillock is in Banswara District, Rajasthan, and that local Bhil tribals had been demanding the declaration. Release 1872742 of 1 November 2022 records that the Prime Minister attended Mangarh Dham ki Gaurav Gatha, performed Dhuni Darshan, paid floral tributes at the statue of Govind Guru, said that "Mangarh is a shared heritage of the people of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat", noted that Govind Guru's death anniversary fell on 30 October and that he spent the last years of his life in the part of the region lying in Gujarat, and remembered the massacre of 17th November 1913.

A status claim examined and declined, which is the point of this addition. Preparation material in wide circulation states that Mangarh has been declared a Monument of National Importance, and some of it credits the NMA with declaring it. Neither survives the record. What the PIB shows is a report with recommendations submitted in July 2022 and a commemorative programme held in November 2022; no notification of declaration was located in this pass. Under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, a monument is declared of national importance by the Central Government by notification — the National Monuments Authority recommends, and has no power to declare — so the common headline is wrong both about the act and about the actor. A recommendation is not a declaration and an anniversary programme is not a legal status, which is the same rule this site applies to award announcements and conferrals.

On the 1,500 figure, a change of standing rather than of proof. This chapter has carried the Mangarh casualty figure as unverified, resting on tribal narratives and later accounts. It is now also asserted by a Union Minister in an official PIB release, which raises its standing without supplying its evidence: the release gives no source, no enumeration and no method. The figure is therefore recorded as the one the Government of India uses, and still not as a counted record. The date, the place and the circumstances remain secure and are unaffected.

The women of the peasant movements, in a topic where women organised, were imprisoned and were killed. Anjana Devi Choudhary, wife of Ram Narayan Choudhary, reported as the first woman of Rajasthan arrested and exiled in the freedom movement in 1924 during the Bijolia and Begun movements, an organiser of women in Shekhawati, Mewar and Bundi, imprisoned during Quit India in 1942 along with her six-month-old son; Narayani Devi Verma, wife of Manikya Lal Verma, active in Bijolia, in women's education, in the Praja Mandal and in tribal and Dalit work, imprisoned in 1944, who with Anjana Devi held regular separate meetings for women peasants; the Katrathal Mahila Sammelan of 25 April 1934 at Katrathal in Sikar, called by Kishori Devi, wife of Sardar Harlal Singh, in protest at the Thakur of Sihot's conduct towards Jat women, attended by about 10,000 Jat women, with Uttama Devi, wife of the first Jat historian Thakur Deshraj, as main speaker and Durga Devi Sharma, Phulan Devi and Rama Devi Joshi among those present, and reported as the first Jat Mahila Sammelan in Rajasthan's history; and Nagendra Bala, granddaughter of Kesari Singh Barhath, active in the peasant movements from 1941 to 1947 and afterwards the first woman Zila Pramukh in Rajasthan, at Kota.

A coincidence checked rather than assumed. Katrathal falls on 25 April 1934 and the Kudan firing on 25 April 1935 — the same calendar date one year apart. That pattern is exactly what a copying error looks like, so the two dates were verified from separate sources before either was published. Both hold.

On the omission itself, since it is the more useful lesson. None of these women is obscure. Each is attached to a man this chapter already named — Ram Narayan Choudhary, Manikya Lal Verma, Sardar Harlal Singh, Kesari Singh Barhath — and each was left out anyway. A movement history that lists the husbands and omits the wives is not recording a scarcity of women; it is reproducing the filing habits of the sources it was built from, and this page was doing so until it was pointed out.

Sourcing stated plainly, because it is weaker here than elsewhere in this chapter. The chapter's core is built on Mathur's monograph and contemporary records. The material in section 8 is not: it rests on encyclopaedia entries, regional histories and preparation material, and the monograph was searched for these names without result. The superlative that Anjana Devi was the first woman of Rajasthan arrested is given as reported and is not asserted — a first-ever claim on secondary authority is precisely what this site declines elsewhere. Sharda Bhargava, Dhapu Devi and Phool Kanwar are named in preparation material and are not written up, because nothing beyond the names could be established.

Flagged rather than asserted: (a) all casualty totals; (b) the meaning of "lata-kutan"; (c) the founding year of the Samp Sabha, commonly given as 1883 and not confirmed by the sources used; (d) full enumerated lists of Bijolia's 84 taxes; (e) the founding year of the Meena Kshatriya Mahasabha, given here as 1933 against a circulating 1924 that appears to conflate it with the Criminal Tribes Act's application; and (f) the detailed chronology of the Shekhawati Jat kisan movements, referred to in the sources consulted but without dates firm enough to publish.

Added on 28 August 2026, with the source for each.

Added in the enrichment pass of 27 August 2026. Every item below was read in the document named, not in a summary of it.

1. Bijolia's origin, taxes and organisation. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Bhilwara, Government of Rajasthan, chapter II, History, pp. 74-80. Read in full for the 1897 Girdharpura petition to the Maharana and the gazetteer's description of it as the first agrarian agitation in the region; the 1903 chanwari protest and the attempted migration to Gwalior; talwar bandhai as the one-lakh investiture due owed by the Rao to the Mewar Durbar and the 1913 objection to an extra tax raised to meet it; the 1913 non-cultivation and the withdrawal of six taxes out of eighty-four; the Panchayat Board at Bairisal and the Uparmal Sewa Samiti; the Vidya Pracharini Sabha, the school and Umaji Ka Khera; the newspaper Uparmal Ka Danka; and the four enquiries, with the members of the Bhattacharya, Malviya and Bhawani Dayal bodies. https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.3372 (HTTP 200).

2. Bijolia's national connections. Same gazetteer, pp. 75-76. The publicity given by the Pratap of Kanpur, Abhyudaya of Allahabad, Bharat Mitra of Calcutta and Maratha of Poona; the seven Bijolia delegates at the Thirty-third Congress at Delhi in 1918 and their arrest without warrant on return; Mahadev Desai's 1918 visit and Gandhi's willingness to lead; and the Amritsar session of 1919, at which Tilak moved a resolution on Bijolia, Kelkar seconded it, and it was dropped on Madan Mohan Malaviya's assurance that he would personally press the Maharana. The gazetteer's own footnote records the assurance, which is why this page no longer states that Malaviya and Gandhi simply opposed the resolution.

3. The talks of February 1922, corrected. Same gazetteer, p. 77, citing Home Department Political Branch files in the National Archives. The meeting of Holland, Ogilvie, Wilkinson, Prabhash Chandra Chatterji, Bihari Lal, Kamdar Hira Lal, Fauzdar Tej Singh and Master Zalim Singh with Ram Narain Chaudhary, Manikya Lal Verma, Sarpanch Moti Chand and Secretary Narain Patel took place on 5 February 1922, and an agreement was prepared in May. The widely repeated "agreement of 11 February 1922" is not what the state record shows, and the figure of 35 taxes waived is not in it.

4. Begun and Govindpura. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Chittaurgarh, Government of Rajasthan, chapter II, History, pp. 50-51: Trench as Revenue Commissioner of Mewar and a member of the commission; the commission's halt at Begun from 13 June to 13 July 1923; the Panchas' refusal of its findings; the action against Govindpura village on 13 July; 485 Dhakars arrested from 45 villages; Pathik's five-year sentence, prosecution at Udaipur and Bundi, release in 1928 and externment. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.08623 (HTTP 200). Cross-read with Bhilwara, p. 78, which names the village Semlia Govindpura and records the troops killing one man, Rupa Dhakar of Jainagar.

5. Begun's women and the deposition of its Rao. Bhilwara, p. 78: the June 1922 rising against the Rao and the Thakurs of Rawarda, Semlia and Charchha; the beating of Ratni Bhilni and Udi Malini at Rawarda and their release after a dharna by more than a hundred cultivators; and the deposition of the Rao of Begun with his estate placed under the Court of Wards after the Resident cancelled his agreement as a "Bolshevik Agreement".

6. Anjana Devi Chaudhary, independently corroborated. Bhilwara, p. 79, citing Home Department Political Branch File No. 18 of 1922: after Ram Narain Chaudhary's arrest at Kuakhera in August 1922, "His wife Anjana Devi, with some other agitators, visited Amargarh and Bijolia." Section 8 of this page previously rested on encyclopaedia entries and preparation material and said so. It now has a Rajasthan government gazetteer placing her in the movement, by name, in a dated month.

7. Mangarh, from the state's own district record. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Banswara, Government of Rajasthan, chapter II, History, pp. 33-34: the seizure of Sunth sepoys, the attack on the fort of Partabgarh and the looting of Bhamri; the requisitioning of troops of the Mewar Bhil Corps; the deputation of 12 November 1913 whose negotiations did not take place; the attack of 17 November, after which "several Bhils died" and Govindgiri and Punja with 900 others were captured. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.08620 (HTTP 200).

8. A correction to this page on Govind Guru's sentence. Same gazetteer, p. 34. This page has stated that the death sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment on an isolated island. That is withdrawn. The record is: thirty prisoners tried by a special tribunal at Ahmedabad, five acquitted, Govindgiri sentenced to be hanged, Punja to transportation for life and the other twenty-three to three years' rigorous imprisonment; on appeal to the High Court, Govindgiri and Punja were given transportation for life and the twenty-three six months' rigorous imprisonment. The gazetteer adds that Govindgiri "is said to have died in jail", which conflicts with PIB release 1872742 of 1 November 2022. No release year is asserted, and the conflict is stated in the body.

9. Govind Guru's formation. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Dungarpur, Government of Rajasthan, pp. 51-52: Govindgiri Gopalia, a Banjara, earlier Govinda; the loss of his wife and children in the famine of Samvat 1956; his move to Gujarat and second marriage; his meeting there with Rajgiri Gosain; his return, the dhuni on Chhani Dungari at Bedasa and the planting of his neji; and his full teaching programme, including digging wells and opposition to the kidnapping of women and to dapa, bride-price. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.08625 (HTTP 200).

10. A second correction to this page, on the Samp Sabha. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Sirohi, Government of Rajasthan, p. 80: "A sanyasi, named Govind set up a 'Samp-Sabha' about 1905 A.D.", its object local self-government, with Bhils, Minas and others rallying to him and intoxicating drugs and foreign articles boycotted, and an uprising he led against the Maharao suppressed in 1908. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.08633 (HTTP 200). The 1883 founding, which the pass of 19 August 2026 moved into the body as confirmed, is withdrawn from that status: the Sirohi gazetteer is the evident origin of this page's "established in Sirohi", and it gives about 1905, a date the Dungarpur chronology independently supports.

11. The Sirohi phase of the Eki movement, and the 1,800 figure. Sirohi, p. 80 and pp. 413-414: Tejawat's 1922 organisation of the Bhils and Girasias as the first political agitation in Sirohi; the May 1922 uprising in Rohera tahsil, crushed with British assistance, of which the gazetteer says "It is said that even women and children were shot dead, 1,800 men were killed and 600 houses burned and razed to the ground"; and the burning by the jagirdars of four villages, Bhula, Valoria and Siwaya among them, all later resettled. The 1,800 figure has moved from coaching material to a state gazetteer without becoming a counted record, and the gazetteer's own "it is said" is why it is still not asserted. Siyawa is confirmed as one of the burnt villages.

12. Tejawat's imprisonment. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Udaipur, Government of Rajasthan, pp. 58-59: the Bijolia and Begun agitations named as landmarks in the region's agrarian movements, and "the leader of this agitation, Shri Motilal Tejawat was detained in central jail Udaipur (1929-36)." https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.146827 (HTTP 200). This confirms the span this page carries. It does not settle whether he was arrested or surrendered at Khedbrahma, and that question is left open.

13. Bolai and Rakhwali, and the 1818 causes. Vishal Singh Bhadauriya, Anuradha Singh and Rituparna Bhattacharyya, "Resisting colonial and feudal oppression: the Bhil revolts in British Raj Rajasthan and their impact on India's freedom movement", Discover Global Society 3:96 (2025), DOI 10.1007/s44282-025-00245-x, open access. The pal, gameti and naik structure and the kulki alarm cry; rakhwali and bolai as taxes the Bhils levied on neighbouring villages; Tod's abolition of both as a significant impetus for the 1818 revolts; and the British prohibition of rakhwali as the precipitating cause of the 1844 Banswara rising and the attack on Mokheri. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-025-00245-x (HTTP 200).

14. The 1881-82 rising. Same article, section 4: the eleven Nizamats of 1878; the new taxes and the distillation ban; the Vilayati Pathan moneylenders; the famines of 1868-69 and 1877-78; Pandit Raghunath Rao; the suppression of dakan and the state's takeover of the Rikhabdeo temple; the 1881 census rumours; Thanedar Sunder Lal and the Gametis Rupa and Kuvera; the attack on the Barapal police station; the leaders Neema Gameti, Khema and Joyta; Shyamaldas's negotiation and the April 1881 agreement; and the renewed revolt of March 1882.

15. The Jahazpur Meenas. Same article, section 2: the rising of January 1860, the force under Chand Singh sent on 29 January against Gadoli and Luhori, the looting and burning of those villages, the arrests, the six men executed by cannon fire, and the requirement that the Meenas attend police stations regularly thereafter.

16. Shekhawati, with two dates in conflict. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Sikar, Government of Rajasthan, pp. 44-45: the 1924 new taxes, the 1925 compromise on jakat in proportion to harvest, the 1927 refusal to pay enhanced revenue, the 1935 flare-up with the Jat Mahayagya at Sikar, hundreds arrested, leaders externed and police firing on cultivators with casualties; and Capt. Webb, Senior Officer of Sikar Thikana, whose name "became a synonym of repression". Also the 1932 Wills enquiry into the status of the Thikanedars of Panchpana Singhana (including Khetri), Sikar, Khandela, Udaipurwati, Patao and Uniara. https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.3334 (HTTP 200). The gazetteer's 1924 and 1935 conflict with this page's 1922 and January 1934, and both are carried.

17. The Sikar rebellion of 1938. Same gazetteer, p. 44: the breakdown between Jaipur and the Sikar thikana over Kunwar Hardayal Singh; the July 1938 firing on a train by Jaipur police; the Rao Raja declared a "lunatic" and removed to Ajmer with his estate placed under the Court of Wards; the Col. Gillan commission and its boycott; the Sikar Public Committee; and Seth Jamnalal Bajaj's two interventions, including after Jaipur's 48-hour notice to the town.

18. Alwar, the Meos and the revenue outcome. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Alwar, Government of Rajasthan, p. 77 for the Anjuman-i-Khadimul-Islam set up in the State in 1923 for Muslim education; pp. 79-83 for the demonstrations of March and April 1932, the Jama Masjid meeting of 22 April 1932 with 18 demands, the Durjan Singh commission and its boycott after the Ferozepur Jhirka resolution, the durbar of 12 December 1932 with a Rs 3,10,000 remission, the Govindgarh confrontation with about 30,000 Meos, and the Government of India troops, special Commissioner and martial law in the four Meo Nizamats; and pp. 446-447 for Sir Francis Wyllie's appointment as Prime Minister in 1933 and his reduction of the state demand to Rs 21.6 lakh, with rates announced in 1934. https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.2940 (HTTP 200). The 1932 founding date for the Anjuman that this page carried from the board text is corrected to 1923.

19. Neemuchana's consequence. Same gazetteer, p. 75: "Bad finances of the State coupled with Meo agitation and the Neemuchana trouble, gave the British authorities opportunity to interfere in his administration and he was in 1933, ultimately asked to leave the State." Maharaja Jai Singh died in Paris on 19 May 1937 leaving no lineal or adopted son. The officer who ordered the firing, the enquiry that followed it and the 156-dead figure are not in the gazetteer and are not asserted.

20. Bundi, and a conflict this page cannot close. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Bundi, Government of Rajasthan, p. 59: the movement against begar and charai begun in 1926 under Manikya Lal Verma of Udaipur and Nanu Ram of Kota, in which Nanakji Bhil was shot dead by the State Police and became the first martyr in the history of Bundi's fight for freedom; the killing of Ram Nath Kudal on the ruler's order and the nine-day hartal with police firing; and the reorganisation of the Praja Mandal as the Lok Parishad on 9 July 1944 under Hari Mohan Mathur and Pt. Brij Sunder Sharma, with concessions from Maharao Raja Bahadur Singh on 24 October 1946. https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.3295 (HTTP 200). This page carries 2 April 1923 at Dabi from other accounts, supported by the Bhilwara gazetteer's record of State troops at Dabi and Barrad in mid-1922. The two datings are irreconcilable and both are printed.

21. Bikaner's two districts. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Ganganagar, Government of Rajasthan, pp. 47-48, and Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Churu, pp. 37-38: Mangha Ram Vaid's Praja Parishad branch at Ganganagar in 1944; the first Kisan procession in Bikaner's history; the arrests of 6 June 1945 and the fast unto death; the lathi-charge on the Kisans of Dudhwa Khara, in Rajgarh tehsil of Churu district, with no medical aid provided; the first Bikaner political conference at Raisinghnagar, 30 June to 1 July 1946, where the lathi-charge was followed by firing "resulting in one death"; and the Maharaja's proclamation of 31 August 1946. https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.3351 and https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.08624 (both HTTP 200). The Ganganagar gazetteer separately lists the "Birbal Singh Shaheed fair" at Raisinghnagar among the district's important local fairs, which is the state's own commemoration of the man and is reported here as that.

22. Marwar's organisations and literature. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Jodhpur, Government of Rajasthan, pp. 62-66: the Marwar Hitkarini Sabha founded at Jodhpur "in or about 1921"; Jai Narayan Vyas's pamphlets Marwar Main Jagriti aur Usai Rokne ka Udyog and Marwar ki Awastha, and his prosecutions of 1925 and after; the Marwar Youth League and the cultivators' demand for remission of bigori; the bans of 1932 and 1937 and the Marwar Public Society Ordinance of 1934; the formation of the Marwar Lok Parishad in May 1938 after Subhas Chandra Bose's stop at Jodhpur; the ban of 28 March 1940 by notification in the Jodhpur Government Gazette, Extraordinary, Vol. 75, No. 33, p. 969; the July 1940 first representative session at which begar and lag-bag were the business and Vyas was elected President; registration under the Jodhpur Public Societies Act, 1940; and the June 1941 municipal victory. https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.3288 (HTTP 200). The gazetteer's 1921 founding conflicts with the 1918 and the name Marudhar Hitkarini Sabha this page carries, and the conflict is stated rather than resolved.

23. Chandawal, 28 March 1942. Ministry of Culture, Government of India, Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, Digital District Repository, entry for Mangilal Trivedi, Jodhpur, Rajasthan: his birth in 1900 at Chandawal Nagar into a Shrimali Brahmin family; the Swadeshi vow of 1920; the losses of 1921; Congress membership in 1924 and the donation of his property in 1930; the anti-liquor arrests of 1931, the nine months in Badhali jail in 1932 and the year from February 1933; the three-month sentence in 1940 during the Lok Parishad's anti-jagiri movement; the twenty-day fast unto death against the Chandawal Thakur's atrocities, ended on the Lok Parishad's mediation; and, on 28 March 1942, the attack on Mangilal Trivedi 'Alishan' and fellow activists by jagir goons during a meeting. https://amritkaal.nic.in/district-reopsitory-detail.htm?29418= (HTTP 200). Corroborated in general terms by Jodhpur, p. 64: "In 1942 serious incidents occurred at various places where workers of the Lok Parishad and jagirdars came into clash with each other."

24. Dabra, 13 March 1947. Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Nagaur, Government of Rajasthan, chapter II, History, pp. 34-35: "A mass meeting was called at Dabra, now in Didwana tahsil, on the 13th of March, 1947 by the leaders of the Lok Parishad and the Kisan Sabha. However, before the meeting could be held, an engagement took place between the followers of the jagirdars and the cultivators, resulting in fatal casualties on both the sides." https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.3398 (HTTP 200). The gazetteer gives no death toll, and the figures of five and six that circulate are not asserted. It further records Umaid Singh's death in June 1947, the accession of Hanwant Singh, and the installation of a popular ministry.

25. What changed about this page in this pass, stated plainly. Two claims previously carried in the body are withdrawn: Govind Guru's "twenty years' imprisonment on an isolated island", replaced by the record of a death sentence reduced on appeal to transportation for life; and the Samp Sabha's founding in 1883 as confirmed, replaced by the Sirohi gazetteer's about 1905 with the 1883 date recorded as contested. Two dates in the body are now shown to be in conflict with a state gazetteer and are printed as such: the Marudhar Hitkarini Sabha's 1918 founding against Jodhpur's 1921, and Nanak Bhil's death at Dabi on 2 April 1923 against Bundi's 1926. One casualty figure has changed standing without changing status: the 1,800 at the Sirohi firings, which is printed, hedged, in the Sirohi gazetteer, exactly as the 1,500 at Mangarh is asserted, unsourced, in a PIB release. Neither is a counted record, and this page continues to carry dates, places and named individuals rather than totals.