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He devoted his life to peasants Sir Chhotu Ram: Peasantry in Colonial India
Ed Ranbir Singh, Kushal Pal;
Edited by two eminent scholars from Haryana, Sir Chhotu Ram: Peasantry in Colonial India has been published by the Haryana Academy of History and Culture. It brings to the modern reader the lot of the peasants as it existed during the colonial era. For those unfamiliar with the agrarian history of Punjab before Partition, of which Haryana too was a part, the picture drawn resembles more with the peasantry of Munshi Prem Chand and is difficult for the modern man to imagine the conditions. The peasantry then was routinely at the mercy of the all-pervasive presence of usurers, revenue officials, the police and the judicial system. It goes to the credit of Sir Chhotu Ram that he devoted his life to exposing the exploitative, unjust and inhuman system that kept the peasants in thralldom and destroyed their dignity and lives. But he did not confine himself to the intellectual exposure in order to awaken the conscience of the liberal world. He devoted himself to organising the peasants into a force to reckon with. Through the Zamindara League and then the Unionist Party, he pursued the twin goals of rallying the peasants to their cause and then prevailing upon others to legislate for the wellbeing of the farmers. He succeeded in both and the agrarian world as it exists today owes much to Sir Chhotu Ram, both as a political force as well as a system where farmers get institutional credit on more just and practical terms.
To appreciate Sir Chhotu Ram, one needs to remember the backwardness of the region. To awaken such a region, to inspire it to cast off the yoke he needed to paint in garish colours and as an easily identifiable villain. This explains the unreasonable prejudice against the urban class. On page 111, he writes: "A college helps in only intellectual development, a hospital just alleviates the sufferings of the patients,`85." It is his missionary zeal that is responsible for such a state of mind and his need to project himself as the only saviour inhibits him from acknowledging that the princely states of Jammu and Kashmir and Travancore had already given the kind of relief to their farmers that he was demanding in Punjab. But then he was pushing for a political space for himself. The book, nevertheless, has great value for the scholars of North Indian peasantry.
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There
are few personalities that evoke so much of gratitude and reverence as
Sir Chhotu Ram does in North India in general and Haryana in
particular. No narration of peasantry is complete without paying a
tribute to the messiah of the farmers and no effort is spared by the
politicians to appropriate his legacy. Not surprisingly successive
generation of scholars too is drawn to this iconic figure.
However,
the Foreword, Prologue, the main body of Sir Chhotu Ram's writing as
well as the Epilogue make it amply clear to an objective reader that
the word "peasant" represents a particular class and caste
and as there is little room for those dependent upon farm related
labour in the villages. While alive and even after his death, Sir
Chhotu Ram has been accused of collaborating with the British rulers
and the modern reader will find little to dispel the criticism.
Beginning with page 57, his fascination for the British bureaucracy is
all too apparent and he blames everyone except the "Mai-baap
culture of bureaucracy." In fact, he laments its absence!