On the morning of January 4, 1947, the air in Talpukur village, within the Chirirbandar tract of Dinajpur district, was cold. Shivram Majhi, a Santal peasant of the Hasda clan, and Samir Uddin, a landless agricultural worker, stood in a dirt farmyard. Around them were stacks of freshly cut paddy. They were not waiting to load the grain onto the bullock carts of the local jotedar, the landlord who held legal title to the fields they tilled.
Instead, they were stacking the grain in the sharecropper’s own yard.
This simple act was a rebellion. For generations, the custom of Bengal’s countryside dictated that the harvest be taken directly to the landlord’s khamar—his private granary. There, under the landlord’s eyes and the threats of his hired guards, the crop would be divided. The landlord took half.
But on this winter morning, the peasants of Talpukur were acting on a new rule: Nij khamare dhan tolo—bring the paddy to your own granary.
When a police contingent arrived in the village to arrest the peasant organizers who had encouraged this defiance, they did not find submissive subjects. They found a crowd of villagers who refused to let the organizers be taken. The police opened fire. Samir Uddin and Shivram Majhi died on the dry earth of the farmyard. They were the first martyrs of the Tebhaga movement.
Their deaths did not stop the defiance. They accelerated it.
The Arithmetic of Exploitation
The conflict in Bengal’s fields was built on an unequal economic contract. The sharecroppers, known as bargadars or adhiars, did all the physical work. They tilled the land, provided the bullocks, bought the seeds, and harvested the crop. The landlord provided nothing but the permission to use the soil.
Yet, under the prevailing barga system, the landlord took 50 percent of the gross harvest.
In reality, the landlord took far more. Once the grain was inside the landlord’s granary, the deductions began. There was mangan, a tax to feed the landlord’s guests. There was hishabi, a fee for the landlord’s accountant. There was bari, the repayment of grain borrowed for food during the lean months, charged at interest rates that often exceeded 100 percent. If a sharecropper objected, he faced eviction. By the time the accounts were closed, the bargadar was lucky to walk away with a third of the crop he had grown.
The Bengal Famine of 1943 made this system lethal. Three million people died of starvation in the villages, while the granaries of the jotedars and grain merchants in Calcutta remained full. The landlords hoarded the grain, selling it at wartime black-market prices. For the sharecroppers, the lesson was clear: to yield control of the grain was to choose hunger.
The Unread Report
The legal justification for the sharecroppers’ demand came from an official government document. In 1938, the British administration appointed the Bengal Land Revenue Commission, chaired by Sir Francis Floud, to examine the state of land relations.
In 1940, the Floud Commission submitted its report. It was unequivocal: the sharecropping system was economically inefficient and socially unjust. The commission recommended that the landlord’s share be reduced to one-third, leaving two-thirds for the bargadar who performed the labor and bore the cost of cultivation.
For six years, the Bengal administration did nothing with the report. It remained in the offices of the secretariat in Calcutta.
But the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha, the peasant wing of the Communist Party of India, did not forget it. The Kisan Sabha organizers translated the commission’s findings into a simple demand: Tebhaga—three shares. Two shares for the tiller, one share for the landlord.
The Floud Commission’s report gave the peasants a moral and legal handle. They were not demanding something lawless; they were demanding the implementation of the government’s own recommendations.
Communes of the Fields
By late 1946, the agitation spread across nineteen districts of Bengal, from Dinajpur and Rangpur in the north to Kakdwip and Midnapore in the south.
It was a movement that crossed religious and ethnic divides. While Calcutta and Noakhali were consumed by communal violence in 1946, the sharecroppers’ committees in the villages remained unified. Hindu Rajbanshis, Muslim peasants, and Santal tribals tilled the fields together and defended the grain together.
The organization was decentralized. In hundreds of villages, peasants formed Tebhaga committees. These committees functioned as local administrations. They sat in judgment over land disputes, decided the division of crops, and organized the defense of the village.
Women played a significant role. They formed the Nari Bahini (women’s defense squads), armed with kitchen utensils, broomsticks, and scythes. When the police or the landlord’s thugs entered a village, the women blew conch shells and beat brass plates to alert neighboring hamlets. They blocked the paths, allowing the peasant organizers to escape. Bimala Maji, a leader of the peasant women in Midnapore, organized thousands of women to stand guard at the threshing floors.
The Firing at Khanpur
The landlords did not surrender their privileges easily. They turned to the police.
In February 1947, in the village of Khanpur in Dinajpur district, the police entered at night to arrest local Kisan Sabha leaders. The villagers sounded the alarm. Hundreds of sharecroppers, armed with lathis, bows, and arrows, gathered to block the police vehicle.
The police opened fire, discharging 119 rounds into the crowd. Twenty-two peasants were killed, including two women, Jashoda Rajbanshi and Chashi Ma.
In response to the growing unrest, the provincial Muslim League ministry, led by H. S. Suhrawardy, introduced the Bengal Bargadars Temporary Regulation Bill in the legislative assembly in early 1947. The bill promised to limit the landlord’s share to one-third.
But the jotedars held significant influence over both the Muslim League and the Congress. They lobbied the political leadership, warning that the bill would destroy the social order. The Suhrawardy ministry backed down. The bill was quietly shelved, and the police repression continued.
Partition and the Double Edge of Repression
August 1947 split Bengal in two, and with it, the Tebhaga movement.
The new borders divided the peasant organizations. In East Bengal, which became part of Pakistan, the Muslim League administration treated the communist-led peasant movement as a conspiracy directed from India. Muslim peasant organizers were arrested, and Hindu leaders were forced to flee across the border. In West Bengal, the new Congress administration under Bidhan Chandra Roy was equally hostile. They viewed the militant peasant committees as threats to property rights and public order.
In the Sundarbans of Kakdwip, the struggle continued in isolation until 1950. The police set up camps in the villages, burning huts, torturing families, and arresting hundreds. The peasant communes were dismantled, and the landlords were restored to their estates.
The Unfinished Legacy
The immediate uprising was suppressed, but the agrarian structure of Bengal was permanently altered. The memory of the red flags in the farmyards remained.
In West Bengal, the Congress government passed the Land Reforms Act of 1955, which legally recognized the sharecropper’s right to a larger share of the crop. But the law was easily bypassed. Landlords transferred their estates to relatives under false names—benami land—and continued to evict tenants at will.
It took another three decades for the demands of Tebhaga to be realized. In 1978, the Left Front government launched "Operation Barga." Under the leadership of peasant leaders like Hare Krishna Konar and Benoy Choudhury, government teams went into the villages to record the names of the sharecroppers. Over 1.4 million bargadars were registered, securing their tenancy rights and protecting them from arbitrary eviction.
The law finally mandated what Samir Uddin and Shivram Majhi had demanded in 1947: the sharecropper received 75 percent of the harvest if they provided the inputs, and 50 percent if the landlord provided them.
Today, in Talpukur, a small concrete monument stands near the fields. It lists the names of Samir Uddin and Shivram Majhi. The farmyard where they died is now part of another country’s borderland. But the crop that grows in those fields is no longer divided at the landlord’s gate. The sharecroppers keep the grain in their own yards.