In the forest hamlet of Zari, a village in the Western Ghats of what was then Thana district, Maya Dhangar lived as a tenant on land his family once owned. He was a Warli. By 1945, Adivasis owned barely 8 percent of the land in Talasari taluka. The rest belonged to outside landlords—Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims—who had accumulated the hills and paddy fields through usury and the assistance of British revenue officials. For Warlis, the land was no longer theirs. They worked the best fields for nothing, carted grass to Bombay for nothing, and saw their family members beaten, tortured, or sexually abused if they refused the landlord’s demands.
The exploitation was economic, legal, and physical. Under the system of vetti (forced unpaid labor), landlords compelled Warlis to cultivate fields, cut timber, and clean latrines without pay. Landlords also ran the forest contracts, keeping the timber profits while paying the workers nothing. The system was enforced by violence. A second system, lagnagadi (marriage slavery), turned a small loan of a few rupees for a wedding into a hereditary debt. The borrower became a debt slave. The debt was never paid off. It descended from father to son, binding entire generations to work the landlord’s estate. The landlord’s guests were entertained with Warli women, a practice treated by the landlords as a traditional right.
The official response to this misery was patronizing. The Adivasi Seva Mandal, established around 1940 under Congress auspices and backed by Bombay’s Chief Minister B. G. Kher, approached the Adivasis with welfare and moral reform. They organized Ganapati pujas to combat superstition, ran literacy classes, and lectured the Warlis on the evils of drinking toddy. They did not touch the land. The Mandal sought to end serfdom by appealing to the hearts of the landlords. Communist organizers later described this strategy as trying to melt the Himalayas with a match, or taming wild tigers by playing a flute. The Warlis remained landless, bonded, and hungry.
In December 1944, Shamrao (“Bhai”) Parulekar, a leader of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), stood before three hundred Warlis at Dingari village in Talasari. He did not lecture them on their habits. He explained their poverty as a product of exploitation. The Warlis told him that they had been blamed for their own misery for generations, but now, for the first time, someone was telling them the truth. They agreed to attend the Maharashtra Rajya Kisan Sabha conference at Titwala on January 7, 1945. They had one condition: a Kisan Sabha worker must stay in their hills to help them organize.
Fifteen Warlis from Talasari attended the Titwala conference. They saw seven thousand peasants gathered under red flags. Maya Dhangar, who had spent his life bowing to landlords, stood on the stage. He volunteered to speak on a resolution against forced labor. He told the crowd that the Warlis would end serfdom. When the fifteen delegates returned to their villages, they carried red flags. They went from hamlet to hamlet, preaching the end of vetti. The deferential peasant was gone.
On May 23, 1945, five thousand Adivasis, including five hundred women, gathered at Zari village. The convention, organized under the red flag, marked the formal beginning of the Warli Adivasi Revolt. Shamrao Parulekar and Godavari Parulekar addressed the assembly, calling for the overthrow of a century of forced labor (veth-bigar) and marriage slavery. Godavari, whom the Warlis called “Godutai” (elder sister), spoke of ending both economic bondage and the sexual exploitation of Adivasi women.
This was the moment the struggle moved from scattered resentment to an organized revolt. The convention did not wait for the Bombay legislature or the benevolence of landlords. It passed a resolution declaring the immediate abolition of serfdom. In a single mass act, Warlis walked out of the landlords’ houses and fields. They refused to continue unpaid work. They resolved five rules:
- Do not cultivate landlords’ fields unless paid one rupee and twelve annas a day.
- Render no free service.
- Resist if assaulted.
- Meet landlords only in groups.
- Stand united.
The Zari convention re-ordered the power dynamics of the Western Ghats. Within three weeks, vetti was dead in Talasari. The system, though centuries old, was structurally hollow once the fear was removed. Landlords who had routinely beaten their tenants found that their threats no longer worked. When the monsoon arrived in June 1945, the Warlis refused to sow the fields without the agreed wage. The struggle spread south to Dahanu taluka, and later through Nashik, Nandurbar, and Pune. By September 1945, Dahanu Warlis were holding meetings of ten thousand people. They formed processions with sickles and sticks, marching from estate to estate to free debt slaves. In three days, they liberated one thousand bonded laborers, breaking the landlords’ hold on their families.
In October, the grass-cutting season began. The grasslands of Thane were highly profitable; landlords harvested fodder and shipped it to the dairy markets of Bombay. The Kisan Sabha demanded a wage of two rupees and fifty paise for cutting five hundred pounds of grass. The landlords refused. They cut off the khavati—the traditional grain advance that kept families from starving during the lean months. They filed false police complaints. The Warlis responded with a strike. No grass was cut.
On October 10, 1945, landlords’ agents spread a rumor through the jungle that Godavari Parulekar had called a meeting at Talwada. They told the Warlis to bring their sickles and sticks to protect the red flag. Godavari was actually ill in Kalyan, miles away. As thousands of Warlis gathered at Talwada, the landlords informed the administration that an armed Adivasi mob was preparing to slaughter them. Armed police were dispatched.
Between the night of October 10 and the afternoon of October 11, police fired on the peaceful assembly from moving vans. They killed five Warlis, including a twelve-year-old boy. The crowd did not run. They stood for fifteen hours under fire, believing they were protecting the red flag with their bodies. They dispersed only when Kamalakar Ranadive, a Kisan Sabha worker, arrived and asked them to leave. The government justified the firing as a response to a riot. But a confidential, internal inquiry by the police department later concluded that the firing was “unjustifiable and unnecessary.” The report was kept secret.
The state responded with emergency powers. The Bombay Congress ministry banned assemblies of more than five people in Dahanu and Talasari. On October 14, they externed S.V. Parulekar, Godavari Parulekar, V.M. Bhave, and Sunil Janah, the CPI weekly photographer. Police raided hamlets at night, arresting over a thousand Warlis. Landlords brought in hired gang members to beat striking workers. Yet, the strike held.
By November 1946, the landlords and forest contractors capitulated. Wage rates were raised. Rents were reduced. Illegal exactions were stopped. In the hamlets, Warlis established their own committees and sentries, running a parallel network of decision-making that made it impossible for landlords to re-establish their old authority.
The political consequences of those three years endure. The Dahanu legislative seat has been won by the CPI(M) in nine out of ten assembly elections up to 2019. The red flag remains a fixture in the Western Ghats. In the decades since, the struggle has shifted from landlords to forest rights, land regularisation, and resistance against corporate acquisition of Adivasi lands. The CPI(M) records sixty-one martyrs killed in Thane-Palghar under British, Congress, and BJP administrations alike.
In national history textbooks, the Warli revolt is absent, eclipsed by the mainstream narratives of the transfer of power in 1947. The state archives hold the papers of B.G. Kher’s administration, documenting the suppression of the Adivasis. But in the hamlets of Talasari and Dahanu, the memory is preserved in oral histories. Every year on May 23 and October 10, red flags are raised on the roofs of small mud houses. The story is told to the children. They are reminded of Maya Dhangar, who stood up in Titwala and refused to be a slave.