Page:A General Biography of Bengal Celebrities Vol 1.djvu/87

 78 LIFE OF HURISH CHUNDBR HUKHEBJEB. quite sick of it. Rank oppressions on the part of the* majority of Indigo planters and its menial and factory servants exasperated the people and led them to rise in revolt. The Reverend Alexander Duff, the Prince of Missionaries in India, in his memorable letter to the President of the Indigo Commis- . sion said " that such discontent, as the natural re- sult of oppression, did exist long previously, is surely the conclusion which every candid and impartial mind must deduce from the tout-ensemble of the miscellane- ous evidence given before the Commission." (vide p. 4 Appendix No. III. I. C. R.) The cultivation of indigo became unremunerative, and the ryots refused to have anything to do with it A dispute thus arose between- the vast body of agricultural and land-holding classes in Bengal and the great influential planting English community having prestige and power of its own. Some 20 lacs of popr ryots of the districts of Nuddea,. Jessore, Rajshaye, Pubna and* the 24-Purgunnahs combined and resolved, even at the sacrifice of their hearth and home, nay of their lives, not to culti- vate their lands with - indigo, nor to enter into any fresh contract with the planters for the same. And they stuck to their resolution even to the bitterest end. Such a gigantic combination of the tillers of the soil, men inured to all sorts of hardships but less prone to grumble and grudge, steeped in deep ignorance but free from the European vice of drunkenness and dis- orderliness, has no parallel in the history of India ex? cept the disastrous Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Burke in his famous speech has very rightly said that all such popular risings must have their origin in oppression ; and the ryots of. Lower Bengal goaded by the un- bearable tyranny of the White Planters of Bengal rose entnass* against them and threatened them with utter extinction and ruin. The ruin was tantamount to a loss of enormous British capital invested in the numberless Indigo concerns studded over the country ; it meant