Indigo Revolt

Indigo Revolt, rebellion of peasant farmers in 1859–60 in the Bengal region of northeastern India against British indigo planters.

The need for indigo, an important source of indigo dye, to feed the British cotton textile industry—whose tremendous growth had been spurred by the Industrial Revolution—led the British East India Company to pursue an exploitative system of indigo cultivation in Bengal and Bihar. It relied on a system in which Indian peasant farmers (ryots) rented their land from Indian landholders (zamindars) or British plantation managers, known as planters, and received advance payment for cultivating that land. In the 19th century the British planters persuaded or compelled ryots to sign contracts to grow indigo, rather than food crops, on the best portion of their land. They were paid less for indigo, moreover, than what they could earn for growing rice or other crops. The ryots often did not earn enough to pay back the advance payment, and they easily fell into a cycle of debt and exploitation.

The Indigo Revolt began as a nonviolent strike in March 1859, as the ryots of a village in Bengal’s Nadia district all agreed to refuse to grow any more indigo. The movement quickly spread to the other indigo-growing districts of Bengal and initially received some support from many of the zamindars, who had begun to resent that the planters were becoming more powerful than they were. Many educated middle-class Bengalis also supported the cause, and Indian newspaper journalists in Calcutta (now Kolkata) reported on the harshness of the system. The 1860 play Nil Darpan (“Mirror of the Indigo”), by Dina Bandhu Mitra, did much to draw attention in India and Europe to the plight of the indigo growers. It was translated into English, reportedly by Bengali poet and dramatist Michael Madhusudan Dutta.

In March 1860 the British government in Bengal passed the Indigo Act, which enforced the fulfillment of the indigo contracts for one season while creating an Indigo Commission to investigate the indigo cultivation system in Bengal. The commission issued a report in August that was highly critical of the planters’ practices and affirmed that the ryots could not be forced to grow indigo.

The indigo industry quickly declined in Bengal, but it continued in Bihar. In 1917 British indigo planters in Bihar’s Champaran region were the focus of Mahatma Gandhi’s first campaign in India of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha); that campaign was likewise successful in effecting change in policy from the British government.