8/1/2023 0 Comments Indigo meaning banglaThe zamindars were also targets of the rebellious peasants. Many planters fled to avoid being caught. Some indigo planters were given a public trial and executed. Gopal Mandal, a peasant leader, with his resolute band of a hundred and fifty peasants attacked and beat back the lathials whom the planter Larmour had sent down to intimidate peasants into accepting advances for cultivating indigo. Mondal published a magazine named "Mrittika" and wrote about oppressions of the Indigo planters and plights of the peasants. In Kalna, Burdwan Shyamal Mondal led the revolt. It spread rapidly in Murshidabad, Birbhum, Burdwan, Pabna, Khulna and Jessore. The revolt started in Chougacha village near Krishnanagar, Nadia district, where Bishnucharan Biswas and Digambar Biswas first led the rebellion against the planters in Bengal, 1859. However the articles were overshadowed by Dinabandhu Mitra, who depicted the situation in his play Nil Darpan.His play created a huge controversy which was later banned by the Company authorities to control the agitation among the Indians. Bengali intellectual Harish Chandra Mukherjee described the plight of the poor farmer in his newspaper The Hindu Patriot. The Bengali middle class were unanimous in their support of the peasants. Under these conditions, the farmers resorted to revolt. The zamindars, who also stood to benefit from indigo cultivation, sided with the planters. By an act in 1833, the planters were granted a free hand to deal with the peasants. The farmers were totally unprotected from the indigo planters, who resorted to mortgages or destruction of their property if they were unwilling to obey them. The farmers could make no profit growing indigo. The price paid by the planters was meagre, only 2.5% of the market price. Once a farmer took such loans he remained in debt for his whole life before passing it to his successors. They provided loans, called dadon, at a very high interest. The indigo planters forced the peasants to plant indigo instead of food crops on their own lands. It was introduced in large parts of Burdwan, Bankura, Birbhum, North 24 Parganas, Nadia Jessore and Pabna, and by 1830 there were more than a thousand indigo factories throughout Bengal. With the Nawabs of Bengal under Company rule, indigo planting became more and more commercially profitable because of the demand for blue dye in Europe. He became the first indigo planter in Bengal, starting to cultivate the crop at Taldanga and Goalpara near Hooghly. Indigo planting in Bengal dates back to 1777, when Louis Bonnaud, a Frenchman, introduced it to the Indian subcontinent. The revolt ended after the formation of Indigo commission in 1860 which offered reforms of the system, which was inherently exploitative. Emerging in the Nadia district, the revolt spread to in the different districts of Bengal in the 1860s and indigo factories and planters faced violent attacks in many places. In the summer of 1859 in Bengal when thousands of ryots (peasants) refused to grow indigo for the European planters with a show of rage and undying resolve, it became one of the most remarkable peasant movements in Indian history. Sometimes disgruntled former employees of European planters - 'gomashta' or 'diwan' of the Indigo factories, took the lead to mobilise the peasants against the Indigo planters. The village headmen (Mandals) and substantial ryots were the most active and numerous groups who led the peasants. The Indigo revolt (or Nil bidroha Bengali: নীল বিদ্রোহ) was a peasant movement and subsequent uprising of indigo farmers against the indigo planters, that arose in Bengal in 1859, and continued for over a year.
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