‘Hul! Hul!’: Santhal rebellion of 1855, with all its facets

Salil Misra

THE rebellious Santhal of 1855 has lived two different lives in history. One is his own life as it was lived during the six momentous months during the rebellion of 1855, the central theme of Peter Stanley’s ‘Hul! Hul!: The Suppression of the Santal Rebellion in Bengal, 1855’.

His second life was reconstructed in government records, newspapers both British and Indian, memoirs, accounts by Christian missionaries and books of history and anthropology. In these reconstructions, he was variously a docile and compliant tribal, ferocious and brutal, inherently rebellious, hateful savage against outsiders, a quintessential peasant, an anti-British freedom fighter, a revolutionary and a subaltern insurgent. The book tells the story of the multiple reconstructions of the Santhal, and tries to see him as he was, shorn of all the external labels.

Tribes indeed were different from the rest of the “civilised people”. They stored their records in their songs and memories, not in written texts. They did not follow the rules of private property and believed that nature with its vast resources belonged to them, just as they belonged to it. Their religious life consisted of rituals rather than any grand doctrine. They were often suspicious of outsiders who would encroach upon their habitat and impose their own rules of taxation, private ownership, proselytisation and a general bureaucratisation of economic-political life. The tribals resented these encroachments and often rebelled against them. This admirable book tells the story of one such rebellion, by the Santhals of Santhal Pargana in present-day Jharkhand, during the six-month period of June-December 1855. Nearly 3,000 Santhals were killed before the rebellion could be brought under control.

The rebellion (hul) was fought against outsiders. But for a Santhali tribal, the list of outsiders was indeed long and varied. Bengalis and British, moneylenders, landlords, indigo planters, railway builders, bureaucrats, police and the army — all were outsiders and he rebelled against all of them. The British entry among the tribes in India was different from their entry among the African tribes in one crucial respect. In India, they created a significant feudal crust — landlords, moneylenders and petty officials that really stood as a buffer between them and the tribals. But, unlike in other parts of the non-European world, this crust consisted almost entirely of outsiders, mostly upper caste Bengalis in this case. So, often for a tribal, there was a simple binary of conflict between him and all outsiders. The intermediary was as much of an alien as the British at the top. This factor really defined the nature of the Santhali rebellion.

The British saw the rebellion partly as a protest against feudal oppression and partly as a spontaneous, traditional reaction against attempts at modernisation. But it is clear that a lot more was at stake for the Santhals. A written petition-cum-manifesto was submitted by an old Santhali woman to the magistrate, just before the rebellion. The manifesto asked the British to “quit this part of the country”. It “condemned the mahajans’ exactions and oppression, called for rents to be based on a family’s capacity to pay and the productivity of their plot, and asserted the Santals’ dream of freedom: ‘the land does not belong to the sahebs’…” Quite clearly, the tribal discontent was much larger than purely religious or economic.

The rebellion lasted intermittently for around six months and was suppressed by the end of 1855. It was a great rebellion whose importance in history was probably overshadowed by the rebellion of 1857. Had 1857 not happened, the Santhal rebellion would certainly occupy much greater space in the histories of rebellions in modern India. Interestingly, the Santhal rebellion was connected to 1857 in yet another way.

The rebellion was suppressed by the sepoys of the Bengal army who in turn became rebels against their masters and fought a fierce battle against the British Raj in 1857. It seems the lesson of rebellion worked like an infection. Those who fought to suppress the Santhal struggle were infected by the virus, so much in the air, that within two years, they found themselves in the camp of the rebels against the Raj. Santhals may not have directly fought against the British, but they certainly motivated many others to do so.

The book is extremely rich in data and details. Surprisingly, however, it refrains from offering conclusive formulations. Quite often, the data and formulations proceed in different directions in a somewhat unconnected manner. This facet does take away something from the readability of the book but not from its great merit as probably the most authoritative historical account of the Santhal rebellion of 1855.