The Santhals: pioneer settlers of Damin-i-Koh

Detail

Who the Santhals were and why they came

• The Santhals began entering Bengal around the 1780s. They moved in groups, cleared forest, and started farming.
• Two forces pulled them in:
• Zamindars hired them to reclaim land — that is, to turn forest and waste into farmland so rent income would rise.

• British officials invited them into the Jangal Mahals (the "forest estates" on the edge of the Bengal plains).

• The Santhals speak a language of the Munda family and their homeland today is the Chota Nagpur–Rajmahal belt; their uprising of 1855 is remembered as the Santhal (Santal) rebellion [2].

Why the British wanted Santhals and not Paharias

• The British had first tried to turn the Paharias (hill people of the Rajmahal hills) into settled farmers. It failed.
• The Paharias refused to cut forests or touch the plough. Forest was their life — they used the hoe, not the plough, and shifted their plots.
• So the British saw the Santhals as ideal settlers:
• They cleared forest with vigour.
• They ploughed deep and produced a surplus.
• A settled ploughman pays a fixed revenue every year; a shifting hoe-cultivator does not.

Damin-i-Koh — the "skirts of the hills"

• By 1832 a large block of the Rajmahal foothills was demarcated as Santhal land. The name Damin-i-Koh means "skirts of the hills" — the belt of land at the foot of the Rajmahal Hills [2].
• What demarcation meant in practice:
• The land was surveyed and mapped.
• It was enclosed with boundary pillars — stone markers on the ground.

• It was kept separate from the plains farmers below and from the Paharias above.

• It was held as a government estate, and to attract the Santhals the Company offered land leases at low rent paid straight to the Company, not to a zamindar [2].

• Condition of the grant: at least one-tenth of the area had to be cleared and cultivated within the first ten years.

Explosive growth, 1838–1851

	1838	1851
Santhal villages in the Damin	40	1,473
Santhal population	3,000	82,000+

• Villages grew about 37 times and people about 27 times in just 13 years.
• Revenue flowed into Company coffers as cultivation spread.
• External figures match this: population rose from about 3,000 in 1838 to about 83,000 by 1851, while the Company raised tax rates and revenue from the estate rose roughly 600 per cent in the same period [2].

Note: the scaffold gives 82,000+ for 1851; Britannica says "about 83,000" [2]. Use the NCERT figure (82,000+) in the exam.

A wandering people who finally stopped

• Santhal myths and songs remember a past of continuous mobility — "a tireless search for a place to settle".
• That search, in their own memory, ended at the Damin.
• Once settled, they changed how they farmed:
• They grew commercial crops for the market, not only food for the family.

• This put them in daily contact with traders and moneylenders — the link that later turned into debt and anger.

• Francis Buchanan, the Company surveyor, admired the cleared landscape: "what a glorious country this might be made". But he also wrote the Santhals "are very clever in clearing new lands, but live meanly" — meaning they worked hard yet lived poorly.

The Paharia cost — hoe versus plough

• Pushed uphill. As the Damin filled with Santhal villages, the Paharias lost the lower slopes and were confined to the dry, barren, rocky upper hills.
• Why that killed their farming.
• Shifting cultivation (clear a patch, burn it, crop it a few years, then leave it to recover) needs a steady supply of fresh fertile land.
• The best soils were now inside the Damin, fenced off by pillars.

• With no new land to rotate to, the system broke down.

• Hunting withered too, because the forests they hunted in had been cut for fields.

• Result: the Paharias were impoverished in the long term — a slow ruin, not a single blow.

Where this leads (link forward)

• The same Damin settlement produced the revolt. On 30 June 1855 the brothers Sidhu and Kanhu addressed a gathering of about 10,000 Santhals in the heart of Damin-i-Koh, saying Thakur Bonga (the great spirit) had told them to drive out the outsiders [2].
• The leadership is officially remembered as Sido–Kanhu, Chand–Bhairav and the sisters Phulo–Jhano [3].
• The British first underrated the rising, then used the army, declared martial law, and captured Sidhu and Kanhu. Afterwards they carved out a new district, the Santhal Parganas, with special rules giving Santhals some protection from outsiders [2].
• 30 June is marked in India as Hul Diwas in memory of the rising [3].

Prelims Hooks

• Damin-i-Koh means "skirts of the hills"; it lay in the Rajmahal Hills foothills [2].
• The Damin was demarcated as Santhal land in 1832, marked out with boundary pillars.
• Grant condition: one-tenth of the area to be cleared and cultivated in the first ten years.
• Santhal villages in the Damin: 40 (1838) → 1,473 (1851).
• Santhal population in the Damin: 3,000 (1838) → 82,000+ (1851).
• The Damin was a government estate; rent was paid directly to the Company, bypassing zamindars [2].
• Revenue from the Damin estate rose about 600 per cent between 1838 and 1851 [2].
• Paharias refused to cut forests or use the plough; they practised shifting cultivation with the hoe.
• Francis Buchanan on the Santhals: "very clever in clearing new lands, but live meanly."
• The 1855 rising began on 30 June 1855 under Sidhu and Kanhu, who invoked Thakur Bonga; after it, the Santhal Parganas district was created [2]. Hul Diwas is observed on this date [3].

Mains Points

• Colonial land policy picked its farmer. The British did not want any cultivator — they wanted a plough-using, settled, revenue-paying one. Choosing Santhals over Paharias shows that "development of agriculture" under the Company really meant maximising assessable revenue, and that state preference could remake the social map of a whole region in one generation.
• One community's gain was built on another's ruin. The Damin boundary pillars were a zero-sum line: Santhals got the fertile foothills, Paharias were pushed onto rocky upper slopes where shifting cultivation could not work. Useful as a case study of colonialism creating conflict between tribal groups, not only between tribe and state.
• Settlement produced revolt. Fixed land, rising tax demand [2], commercial cropping and dependence on traders and moneylenders turned the "model settlers" of 1832 into the rebels of 1855 (Hul). The link runs: sedentarisation → debt and dispossession → armed resistance → the Santhal Parganas protective regime [2] — the same arc later seen in Birsa Munda's Ulgulan and the Chhota Nagpur Tenancy Act, 1908 [3].
• Memory versus record. Santhal songs remember the Damin as the end of a long wandering; Company records remember it as a revenue estate. Comparing the two is a ready answer point on using oral tradition alongside colonial documents as history sources.