RAS question
The Shekhawati region witnessed a significant farmers' movement. The main issue was:
Correct answer: (A) High land revenue and forced labour (begar).
The Shekhawati farmers' movement was mainly directed against high land revenue, multiple feudal taxes and forced unpaid labour under the Jagirdari system.
Explanation
The Shekhawati agitation was an agrarian movement against jagirdari and feudal oppression, not a single local quarrel. The cited account describes early twentieth-century Sikar and Shekhawati as areas where jagirdars controlled land administration, fixed land revenue arbitrarily and could raise demands at will. Peasants also faced many other taxes, including levies linked to animals, natural resources, water use, pasture and movement of goods. Alongside this fiscal burden, they had to provide unpaid labour services, described in the source as bag and in the exam explanation as begar. The movement that began in the 1920s therefore targeted the core pressures of the jagirdari order: excessive revenue, extra taxes, unpaid labour and social oppression.
Why the other options are wrong
- (B) Religious conversion does not fit the cited account, which frames the Shekhawati struggle as a peasant movement against jagirdari revenue demands, taxes, unpaid labour and social restrictions.
- (C) Mining disputes are not the issue identified in the source or the explanation; the grievance was centred on land administration, revenue extraction and forced labour under jagirdars.
- (D) Water-use levies formed part of the wider tax burden, but the movement was not primarily a water-rights dispute; its main target was feudal agrarian oppression, especially high revenue and begar.
Concept
This tests the RAS history theme of peasant movements in Rajasthan's princely states. Shekhawati recurs because it links jagirdari oppression, agrarian mobilisation and later land-reform politics in Rajasthan.