Author:

Swagatam Khan
Independent Scholar
Bhopal, India

Email: swagatam91@gmail.com

Abstract: The expansion of indigo cultivation in nineteenth-century Bengal constituted a significant episode in the transformation of colonial agrarian relations. Although the Indigo Revolt of 1859-60 has generally been remembered as a major confrontation between European planters and Bengali peasants, this article argues that the conflict should be understood more fundamentally as a crisis within a system of dependent agrarian commercialization. The article examines how the interaction of credit, contracts, land rights and planter authority produced an unequal political economy in which the formal language of contract coexisted with substantial disparities in bargaining power. It further examines the collective refusal of indigo cultivation in 1859-60, the role of rural society in sustaining resistance, and the colonial state’s response through the Indigo Commission of 1860. Drawing upon the Commission’s evidence, Government of Bengal papers, parliamentary proceedings, contemporary literary representation and modern historiography, the article argues that the Indigo Revolt represented not a rejection of commercialization as such but a collective challenge to a particular mode of organizing commercialization. The episode demonstrated both the reach and the limitations of colonial agrarian capitalism: European commercial capital could penetrate rural society, but it could not permanently secure control over peasant land and labour without the cooperation of cultivators.

Key Words: Agrarian Capitalism, Colonialism, Indigo Revolt, Peasants, Zamindars etc.