The Farmers of Bardoli Refused a 22 Per Cent Land-Revenue Rise in 1928, Won an Inquiry That Cut the Extra Demand From Rs 1,87,492 to Rs 48,648, and Vallabhbhai Patel Became Sardar

In May 1929 a two-man government inquiry reported that the extra land revenue demanded from the Bardoli and Chorasi talukas (sub-districts) of Surat, Gujarat, should fall from Rs 1,87,492 to Rs 48,648, about three quarters less, and the Bombay Government accepted the report. The inquiry existed because the farmers of Bardoli had spent six months of 1928 refusing to pay a reassessment of about 22 per cent, under the leadership of Vallabhbhai Patel. Patel came out of that campaign with the title Sardar, meaning leader.

Sushila Nayar, in the sixth volume of her biography of Gandhi, calls Bardoli one of the most successful examples of non-violent mass action involving a whole peasantry. Gandhi had chosen this same taluka in 1922 to launch mass civil disobedience and called it off after Chauri Chaura. This piece follows the figures, because the sources give more than one set of them.

A thirty-year reassessment with three percentages

The Bombay Presidency did not fix land revenue for good. Each taluka was reassessed about every thirty years, and Bardoli’s last settlement was in 1896, so a new one fell due in 1926. The taluka had 137 villages and about 87,000 people, a figure Nayar and the historian Sumit Sarkar both give. The Under-Secretary of State for India told the House of Commons on 9 July 1928 that the population was “some 80,000”.

The officer sent to assess it, Deputy Collector M. S. Jayakar, proposed a 25 per cent rise in the rates and moved 23 villages into a higher category. Nayar writes that together these raised the demand by about 30 per cent, from Rs 5,14,762 to Rs 6,72,275. The Settlement Commissioner, F. G. H. Anderson, put the rise at 29.03 per cent. A Government order of 19 July 1927 settled on 21.97 per cent, which Nayar rounds to 22. Sarkar and the Swarthmore database also give 22 per cent. The Under-Secretary of State for India, Earl Winterton, called it “an average enhancement of 20 per cent”. Mahadev Desai records that regrouping had pushed the rates in some villages up by 50 and 60 per cent.

Farmers in the taluka disputed the numbers behind the rise. Desai and Nayar both describe a committee of the Taluka Congress, chaired by Narhari Parikh, that toured the villages, and Nayar adds that Parikh published the counter-figures in a series of articles in Navajivan. Anderson’s own 1926 report, which Nayar quotes, noted that Bardoli was perhaps almost the only taluka in the Presidency where for about thirty years no coercion had been needed to collect the revenue.

The pledge of 12 February

Members of the Bombay Legislative Council from the taluka took the objections to the Governor and were turned down, and the farmers then asked Patel to lead them. He was reluctant at first, Nayar writes, and sent workers to ask the villages whether they would accept the hardship a refusal would bring. They came back after eight to ten days and said yes.

On 4 February 1928 Patel presided over a conference at which, by Nayar’s count, at least 79 or 80 villages were represented. On 6 February he wrote to the Governor asking for the collection to be postponed and for an impartial tribunal. He had no substantive reply. At a conference on 12 February the farmers resolved to refuse the revised assessment until the Government accepted the old amount in full settlement or appointed such a tribunal. Nayar and Bipan Chandra’s group of historians both place the resolution on that date, and Nayar notes that Patel took no part in the discussion.

Gandhi advised the delegation to withhold the whole assessment, not only the increase, until the enhancement was cancelled. Patel asked him not to come to Bardoli yet and to see what the men he had trained could do by themselves.

Drums, conch shells and locked doors

Camps ran the campaign. Nayar lists existing centres at Bardoli, Sarbhon, Madhi and Vedchhi, and new ones opened at Valod, Buhari, Vankaner, Varad and Bamni. A publicity office put out a daily bulletin that began at 5,000 copies and rose to 10,000, and Sarkar gives editions of 10,000 for the Satyagraha Patrika.

When revenue staff came to attach property, volunteers sounded the alarm on drums and conch shells, and families locked their houses and went to the fields. Women were central to it. Nayar quotes Patel’s own record that the movement could not have been run without their active cooperation, and Chandra’s group names Mithuben Petit and Bhaktiba, the wife of Darbar Gopaldas, among the women workers. About 60 village headmen (Patels) met at Bardoli and resolved not to help with attachments, and Nayar reports that many Patels and village accountants (Talatis) resigned their posts to join the satyagraha.

During the campaign the Government tried a concession, moving 22 villages down a category, and Nayar reports that it changed nothing. It was in these months that Patel began to be hailed as Sardar. Nayar says this was the first time the word was used for him, and Chandra’s group credit the women of Bardoli with giving it.

The settlement of 6 August

Bardoli became an all-India cause. Seven members of the Bombay Legislative Council resigned in protest, and two more followed, according to Nayar. On 23 July the Governor, Sir Leslie Wilson, told the Council that the writ of the King-Emperor had to run in Bardoli and gave the members for Surat a fortnight to accept his conditions for an inquiry. Gandhi, who had stayed away at Patel’s request, reached Bardoli on 2 August.

On 5 August, Nayar reports, the Viceroy’s office told the Home Department it did not feel enough confidence in the Bombay Government’s judgment to accept its plan for action against the leaders. Sarkar writes that plans to send armed police and troops to Bardoli were reversed in the first week of August, and cites a letter of 7 August in which Wilson said his police officers were practically certain that Communists would call a strike on the railways if the Government acted.

A letter dated 6 August 1928 from the Surat members of the Council provided the way out. Drafted with the help of the Finance Member, Chunilal Mehta, it said that the Governor’s conditions would be fulfilled, and Nayar and Chandra’s group both describe it as a form of words that let the Government avoid looking as though it had climbed down. Patel was uneasy about the wording, because the farmers had not agreed to pay.

An inquiry by a revenue officer and a judicial officer was announced, with the judicial officer’s view to prevail and the farmers free to lead and test evidence through legal advisers. On 7 August the Revenue Member agreed to release the satyagrahi prisoners, restore the forfeited land and reinstate the Talatis and Patels. Patel then told the farmers to pay the old assessment, and Nayar says no arrears were left within about a month. Gandhi’s comment in Young India was “All’s well that ends well.”

What the inquiry found

R. S. Broomfield, a judge, and R. M. Maxwell, a revenue officer, formed the committee. Broomfield, Nayar notes, was the judge who had sentenced Gandhi to six years in March 1922. Bhulabhai Desai argued the farmers’ case from 5 November 1928, and the committee visited 49 villages in Bardoli and, in January, 21 in Chorasi.

Their conclusion, quoted in Gandhi’s Young India article of 13 June 1929, was that the rental and sale statistics were “completely unreliable” and that the existing settlement “cannot be allowed to stand in either of the two taluks”. Nayar adds that they blamed the Talatis, who compiled the appendices, for the weakness of the data. The committee did not recommend leaving the old rates alone. Nayar dates the report 7 May 1929 and writes that it brought the extra demand for the two talukas from Rs 1,87,492 to Rs 48,648, a saving of nearly Rs 1,39,000. Desai and Sarkar print the same two figures.

5.7 or 6.03 per cent

Before the inquiry the rise stood at 21.97 per cent by the Government order and 20 per cent in the Commons statement. After it, the figure depends on which source is read.

Gandhi wrote on 13 June 1929 that the commissioners had rejected “the Government rate of 22 per cent increase as excessive” and proposed an increase of 5.7 per cent, which he said meant Rs 48,648 instead of Rs 1,87,492. Nayar repeats 5.7. Chandra’s group give 6.03 per cent and name no base for it.

The rupee figures allow a check. Rs 48,648 is 25.9 per cent of Rs 1,87,492. If the larger sum was a 22 per cent rise, the two talukas’ old assessment together was about Rs 8.5 lakh (1,87,492 divided by 0.22 gives roughly Rs 8,52,000), and Rs 48,648 is 5.7 per cent of that. For 6.03 per cent the old assessment would have to be about Rs 8.07 lakh, which would make the original rise 23.2 per cent, not 22. That Rs 8.5 lakh is tuput’s inference, because none of the sources prints a combined old assessment, and the check assumes the same 22 per cent on both talukas, while a Government notice of 31 May 1928 reproduced by Desai says Chorasi’s revised rates were higher than Bardoli’s. tuput could not open the report itself, which is held in a Gokhale Institute digital library. On the published figures 5.7 is the one that fits, and 6.03 may come from a table in the report that uses a different base.

What spread, and what stayed disputed

The title Sardar stayed with him, and his later work on the princely states has its own article. The Press Information Bureau’s backgrounder from the Ministry of Home Affairs says it was at Bardoli in 1928 that Patel earned it, and Britannica Kids says the same. Patel was born on 31 October 1875, and the Government marks that date as National Unity Day.

Effects of the inquiry went beyond the two talukas. Nayar and Desai both say remissions of revenue worth lakhs of rupees followed in Punjab and that liberal suspensions of recovery were allowed in the Central Provinces. In August 1929 the Bombay Legislative Council passed a resolution moved by Pataskar for a committee on the Bardoli model to look at four talukas of Ratnagiri district. Sarkar writes that on 16 July 1929 the Bombay Government dropped revenue revisions until the current round of constitutional reforms was complete.

Gandhi and Patel both thought the amount was still too high. Gandhi, whose wider story is told elsewhere on this site, called the committee’s finding on the amount “faulty” and wrote that the commissioners should have heard the farmers’ representatives before fixing the rise. Patel wrote to the Government on 24 June 1929 that their proposals were “by no means warranted by the evidence”. The Revenue Member said the Government accepted the report to close the matter, and Gandhi wrote that there was “no grace or dignity about the acceptance”.

The campaign had also cost the farmers. Nayar and Desai both record that 58 head of cattle were driven away from one village and that one of the impounded buffaloes died, and that of 19 men tried at Vankaner, 11 were sentenced to six months in prison. They also record that after the settlement officials asked farmers whose property had been attached to pay a 25 per cent penalty, and Nayar says Patel objected and won the point.

On 14 August 1929 Patel wrote to the Government that if new land-revenue legislation benefited other talukas, he would press for it to apply to Bardoli and Chorasi retrospectively, even at the risk of reviving the satyagraha.