From forests to fields: How India's earliest rebels fought colonial exploitation before 1857

Naxalism of the 1960s has been qualified as the most serious internal security threat to the Republic of India. Rooted in far-left Maoist ideology, the movement used armed insurgency to hinder vital infrastructure and socio-economic development in remote, tribal-dominated regions. Today, the word Naxal is used casually by politicians and businessmen to demonize anyone protesting against exploitation as anti-national. This does not bode well for a country where a large proportion of the youth are unemployed and risk a bleak future with the rise of AI.

Stripped of its dark and terrifying anti-national political ideology, Naxalism was, in essence, the rage of the dispossessed peasant-labourer. This rage began producing resistance from the moment the East India Company turned land into revenue. Forest fighters of Chotanagpur, Santhals of Bengal's frontier, Bhils of the Western Ghats and Polygars of Tamil country existed long before Marx appeared on the scene. Their struggles revealed the grammar of class conflict: dispossession, debt, loss of forest rights, coercive taxation and rebellion against a distant authority that functioned like a corporation.

The Great Revolt of 1857 is remembered as the first major uprising against British rule. Mangal Pandey at Barrackpore, sepoys at Meerut, Bahadur Shah Zafar declared emperor and figures like the Rani of Jhansi, Nana Saheb and Tatya Tope dominate the narrative. But this was an elite revolt: soldiers, princes and dispossessed aristocrats.


Long before them, the peasant had already resisted - scattered, local and brutally suppressed. Resistance did not begin in 1857. It began earlier, in fields, forests and hills, where the first battles of class struggle were fought without recognition.

After Plassey in 1757, Company revenue policies hit cultivators hardest. Permanent Settlement of 1793 converted zamindars into private landowners, stripping peasants of customary rights. Ryotwari in the south and Mahalwari in the north offered no relief. Taxes were demanded in cash, on time, regardless of crop failure or famine. Land slipped away. Debt deepened. What emerged was not just colonial rule, but an economic system that converted land into profit and labour into liability.

At the same time, many upper-caste martial communities did not resist. They enlisted. Bhumihars, Rajputs and Brahmins from Awadh, Bihar and the Doab filled the Bengal Army. They received wages, pensions and status unavailable under Indian rulers. Sikhs after 1849, Pathans, Marathas and Pahari Rajputs followed. The irony was stark. The army that crushed peasant uprisings was staffed by the sons of the same social elite who benefited from Company patronage. The cultivator funded the system; the elite enforced it.

Earliest revolts, therefore, came from those barely recorded. Sannyasi and Fakir Rebellion in Bengal during the 1760s and 1770s saw ascetics, peasants and displaced soldiers raid Company centres. Chuar uprisings, Halba revolt in Bastar and Polygar wars in Tamil country reflected similar resistance. These were not ideological revolutions; they were survival struggles.

Adivasi uprisings intensified the pattern. Bhils rose in 1818 and again in 1820s. Kol insurrection of 1831 expelled the British from large parts of Chotanagpur. Santhal Hool of 1855, led by Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu, mobilised tens of thousands against moneylenders, zamindars and officials who encroached on forest land. This was not a sepoy mutiny. It was a peasant war. And soldiers sent to crush it were Indian.

Religious movements followed similar lines. Faraizi movement under Haji Shariatullah and Dudu Miyan organised Muslim peasants against indigo planters and oppressive landlords. Titu Mir's Wahhabi rebellion culminated in the bamboo fort of Narkelberia in 1831. Indigo Rebellion of 1859-60 exposed the violence of forced cultivation. Religion here was not theology; it was mobilisation against exploitation.

East India Company was not merely a colonial power; it was a capitalist enterprise. It extracted land revenue, monopolised trade, sold opium and financed plantations. Its success depended on collaboration. Zamindars collected revenue. Bankers funded expansion. Upper-caste sepoys maintained order. Princes aligned with it.

By the time Mangal Pandey, a Bhumiar Brahmin, fired his shot in 1857, the countryside had already been in revolt for decades. The elite joined late, when realisation dawned that their employers were enslavers. The peasant had fought first, longest, and with the least recognition.

Rage of the sexploited peasant-laborer has been the recurring figure of Indian history: the cultivator or forest-dweller who turned to violence when the state and its allies became indistinguishable from the system that consumed his labour and land. The language changed - from forest rebellion to class struggle to Maoist insurgency - but the conflict remained the same. As politicians demonise Marxists and casually use words like Naxals against those speaking against oppression, we must remind ourselves that before the Great 1857 Uprising, it was these people who rose up against the East India Company, mothership of modern capitalism. They fought for Bharat Mata before it became fashionable.