Santhals in the promised land of Purnia

The main asphalt road that passes through a part of the corn belt in Purnia district is studded with gold on both sides this time of the year. The maize harvest is over, and the farmers have carpeted sides of the road adjacent to their fields with yellow corn kernels to dry. Nearing Chandwa-Rupaspur Adivasi tola, we see Santhal men and women turning over the grains with a wooden plough-like tool to help the moisture evaporate faster. Somewhere, a chowkidar must be keeping a watch and will soon descend at their doors to collect the share of the landlords, on whose fields the Adivasis have been working for generations as sharecroppers. And to whom they still pay a part of their harvest, years after land rights reforms in the state.

Somewhere a little further from the main road, closer to the village, their ancestors keep a vigil too, from a memorial raised in memory of their death during a five-decade old massacre. A white pillar on a raised platform inside a gated field has a marble plate with names of all the 14 brutally murdered by their landlords on November 22, 1971.

“The whole village looked like a cremation ground. Wails and smoke were rising from every house. People were inconsolable. They [private army of the landlords] had burnt 45 houses to ashes.” Age has not dimmed the memories of a massacre that Shivnarayan witnessed as a teenage boy. Neither has time changed many things for his lot in Bihar.

Even then, “it was a fight over land,” says Shivnarayan Murmu, now 70-year-old. He had lost two of his relatives in the massacre. “The Sun had not set.” He slips into another time as we speak to him on a July evening in 2025. “They had come armed with guns, sticks, axes and had surrounded our settlement from all sides. They set ablaze our Adivasi houses and shot at and burnt alive anyone who came in their way,” he says.

But for Shivnarayan himself the trauma went deeper and further in the past. About seven years before the massacre, when he was hardly 10, his father Lakhan Lal Hembram was murdered. Once again, the cause was the land. “He was educated and used to go to the court to fight for the ownership rights of Santhal Adivasis. Once he went to drop the people from the landlord's side who were visiting him and did not return. Three days later, they found his body, with his throat slit, in the forest some four kilometres away from the house.” No one was convicted.

Shivnarayan thought times were changing when a decade after the massacre in Purnia, a lower court pronounced 20 years of imprisonment for the 25 to 30 landlord convicts in the case.

But he knows only half the story.

“Some 25-30 people were convicted, but later all were acquitted by a different court, and no one was punished,” says Harshvardhan, the 55-year-old grandson of Laxmi Narayan Sudhanshu, a landlord accused in the Chandwa-Rupaspur massacre. “That incident should not have happened,” he says. “I regret that. Because of it an entire generation kept fighting the case for more than 20-30 years and those people could not do anything else.”

Harshvardhan claims that the Santhals were never given the land. “The land belongs to us. We are paying the land tax, but we are not able to do farming. They may have got the land on a sharecropping basis, but ownership rights were never with them.”

The Santhals were brought to Bihar, originally in the 19th Century, by the British, through the East India Company to clear the forest and cultivate the land for revenue. Historian Christopher V. Hill in his book, River of Sorrow documents the migration of Santhal Adivasis to Bihar and their land struggles in detail. He says that the Santhals came to the northern part of the region bordering Nepal and West Bengal, which was under Darbhanga Raj’s largest and richest zamindari system. The Adivasis came in many groups, each headed by a Santhal leader. The heads were then asked to get their people to clear the forest land and later cultivate.

Each Adivasis leader collected the rent from the cultivators and paid it to Darbhanga Raj. The Santhals were turned into bataidars or sharecroppers without any kind of rent receipts. They did everything from ploughing the jungle and marsh, planning the cropping pattern, planting the crop, to harvesting, threshing, and sifting the grain. But finally, they divided the produce in accordance with the terms of the lease and handed over a share to the landlord.

“They remained tenants-at-will. And the middlemen became powerful by getting the land registered in their names,” writes Anand Chakravarti in Report on the Regional Survey and Settlement.

Those Santhal Adivasis who did not give a part of the produce to the owner were evicted from the land. Their struggle for land rights never saw any results, not after 1938 when they submitted a demand letter to the District Magistrate of Purnia, William George Archer; not after 1940s when they refused to give a share to the landlords without rent receipts; and not even after the country’s independence when Bihar Land Reforms act was introduced that abolished the zamindari system in 1950.

These issues of land ownership are not limited to Adivasis in one or two districts. The population of Santhals according to the Bihar Government’s caste survey report - 2023 is around 5.76 lakhs in the state. That is 26.18 percent of the total Adivasi population of 21,99,361 in the state and most of the Santhals from North Bihar are fighting for the ownership rights.

Undivided Bihar had a very large Adivasi population. When Bihar was split in the year 2000, the overwhelming majority of its Adivasis were now in the new Jharkhand state. And so Adivasis in this region are mostly discussed in terms of Jharkhand.

Those remaining in Bihar numbered about 2.2 million, or just 1.68 per cent of the state’s population. Also, they were scattered across more than half a dozen districts. According to government data, tribals are a majority in only around 180 of Bihar’s over 45,000 villages. It means they have nothing like the bargaining power or collective strength of their fellow Adivasis in Jharkhand.

Shivnarayan now tills his 0.9 acre of land which was given to him by the government after 1971. “The landlord still says that this is their land not ours, but we are paying the rent to the sarkar. We want the land disputes to end, otherwise they are rich and can take over any time.” For Shivnarayan his emotional attachment to the land overrides how little it gives him. “We spend 10 rupees to grow each granule of corn, we make no profit, but since we have land, we cultivate. Our forefathers have been farming, so why should we leave it?” he asks.

About 100 kilometres away in Hansa village of Supaul district, 50-year-old Taleshwar Baski is another Santhal Adivasi walking in the footsteps of his father. “Sarkar koi salusan de [Let the government give some solution],” is his refrain as he flips through a thick bundle of papers stapled together. Sitting inside his mud house, he is examining the land documents of 200 Santhal Adivasi families to ensure that the khata number and raqba (area) of land being cultivated are mentioned properly.

He fights a quiet battle with the government, writing applications with the help of social activists in the area, visiting sarkari offices and making demands for those sharecroppers who still don’t have ownership rights. None of them can afford a legal battle. “My father passed away a decade ago, so I am doing this work,” says Baski. “We have taken these papers to the district headquarters many times but haven’t got any reply.”

The last time they submitted an application at the Land Reforms Deputy Collector in Supaul was on March 31, 2025. When they gave the papers to an official, he returned them saying he couldn’t understand what was written there. “So, I asked him, if he couldn't read the papers, then how did he get the job,” says Baski.

The Santhals in Bihar claim that they have been farming on their land decades before the Bihar Land Reforms Act was implemented in the state between 1950-56. The Act should have given the Adivasis clear ownership of the land. But, instead, the middlemen got the lands registered on their names and kept collecting the rent wrongfully.

Lal Soren, 48, a farmer in Hansa village says, “when our ancestors came here, this entire area was a forest. But as the soil was fertile, they cut the forest and made the land cultivable by toiling tirelessly. When the crops started to grow well, the landlord started claiming that this was their land. Then the landlords said, ‘you people grow and give some to us too’. Our ancestors had agreed to this,” he says.

In the last decade and a half the Adivasis have seen an increasing number of cases where their land is being sold without their knowledge. “There is no response from the government. We don’t know what it’s doing. If it can’t be done from here, then tell us, but even that the officials are not telling us. And the landlords are selling our lands,” says Taleshwar. He estimates the landlords have sold 10 acres of land in his village already.

Eight years ago, in 2017, some unknown people had stopped Surat Lal Murmu, 55, of Hansa from reaching his land. “When we went to plough the field, the people already present there said that the land was sold to them and it was not mine anymore. They told us that the land owners had sold it to them. And now they’ve built a house on that land,” he says.

Surat Lal had tried to find the owners of the land but could not find them. There was not one owner, but several. He doesn’t have an idea about the exact number as he only deals with the chowkidar. “Zamindar ne chowkidar rakha hai, jo lathi lekar ghoomta rahta hai. Woh dekhta rahta hai ki kab fasal kata [The landlords have appointed a watchman, who roams around with a stick. He knows when you harvest]. He can even find out who has how much grain and take half of it away,” he says.

Murmu is now left with only 2 acres of land but he fears that even this land will also be sold, and he will be landless. He has been to the Land Reform Collector’s office several times, but hasn’t got a response. He says that the last time, “an officer in black coat asked me whose name was in the khatian [land record document]. I told him that the name was that of my father who is no more. The man bluntly said that when my father is gone, I can’t have any claim over the land. I was angry. I told the officer that if my father is dead, so is the landlord’s. The land doesn’t belong to them either. I asked him why he doesn’t write the land off to the anabad Bihar sarkar [unaccounted land considered government property].”

Vijay Oraon, the president of the Adivasi Parishad in the state, says, “selling of sikmi land (leased out to tenant farmers) by owners without knowledge of the Adivasis is rampant in Bihar. But if a sikmidar (the cultivator) is dead, the contract doesn’t end. His son can claim to be a sikmidar and claim the land.”

Sociologist and writer Tejkar Jha says that the Santhals have a legal right to ownership of the land. “If someone is claiming ownership of their land and selling it, that is completely illegal. The land the Santhals are tilling, they have a right to – and if they go to court, the decision will be in their favor.”

But according to Vijay Oraon it is even simpler. “Adivasis will have to submit an application to the local circle officer for ownership, who will forward it to the Directorate of Land Records of Survey, which will grant them ownership rights.” The process is easy, he says, but the officers never pay attention.

The landlord has secretly sold 0.625 acres of Surat Lal’s land. And from what he grows on the remaining, he continues to pay half to the landlord as agreed by his ancestors. “We mainly grow paddy, maize, and ragi. Farming is a lot of hard work and is very expensive. Our input cost in cultivating one kotha [0.03125 acres] of land is 1,500 rupees. We do everything and then the landlord takes half of the produce,” he says.

“We are worried that our entire land will be taken away. If jamabandi [land records] are cleared and the government starts giving the rent receipts to us, we will be relieved,” he says.

In the meanwhile, his now grown-up children aged 20 and 27 have migrated to work in a factory in Tamil Nadu. He too migrates to work in brick kilns in the neighbouring districts and sometimes even to far off places in Punjab and Delhi, while his wife Anjula Devi takes care of the house. “How will the family survive if we continue to give half of our farm produce to them?” Surat Lal asks.

This story is published under the Takshila-PARI Senior Fellowship 2025.