Swami Sahajanand Saraswati (1889–1950), born in a Bhumihar Brahmin family of Ghazipur of Uttar Pradesh state of India, was an ascetic (Dandi Sanyasi) of Dashnami Order (Dasanami Sannyasi order) of Adi Shankara Sampradaya (a monastic post which onlyBrahmins can hold) as well as a nationalist and peasant leader of India. Although he was born in Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), his social and political activities centered mostly in Bihar in the initial days, and gradually spread to the rest of India with the formation of All India Kisan Sabha. He had set-up an ashram at Bihta, near Patna and carried out most of his work in the later part of his life from there. He was an intellectual, prolific writer, social reformer and revolutionary.
The Kisan Sabha movement started in Bihar under the leadership of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati who had formed in 1929 the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (BPKS) in order to mobilise peasant grievances against the zamindari attacks on their occupancy rights, and thus sparking the Farmers' movement in India
Gradually the peasant movement intensified and spread across the rest of India. All these radical developments on the peasant front culminated in the formation of the All India Kisan Sabha(AIKS) at the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress in April 1936 with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati elected as its first President and it involved prominent leaders like N.G. Ranga,E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Pandit Karyanand Sharma, Pandit Yamuna Karjee, Pandit Yadunandan (Jadunandan) Sharma, Rahul Sankrityayan, P. Sundarayya, Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev and Bankim Mukerji. The Kisan Manifesto released in August 1936, demanded abolition of zamindari system and cancellation of rural debts, and in October 1937, it adopted red flag as its banner. Soon, its leaders became increasingly distant with Congress, and repeatedly came in confrontation with Congress governments, in Bihar and United Province.
On hearing of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati's arrest during Quit India Movement, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and All India Forward Bloc immediately decided to observe 28 April as an All-India Swami Sahajanand Day for the purpose of protesting against his incarceration as a fitting reply to the British Government.
Biography
Sahajanand Saraswati was born in Deva, Dullahpur, Ghazipur district in eastern Uttar Pradesh in 1889 to a family of Brahmins of the Bhumihar clan. He was the last of six sons and was then called Naurang Rai. His mother died when he was a child and he was raised by an aunt. His father, Beni Rai, was a cultivator and knew little about religion.
The family held a small zamindari, income but as the family grew and the land was partitioned, prosperity dwindled and tenant cultivation became their main occupation. There was sufficient income to allow the young Saraswati to be schooled: he did very well both in the primary grades and in the German Mission high school where he studied English. Even at an early age, however, Naurang showed signs of brilliance and scepticism of conventional populist religious practices.
Independence movement
He became involved in Indian National Congress politics, and then in the peasant movement in Patna, then Bihar and, finally, all over India.
Saraswati learned about politics in the Indian National Congress, headed by Mohandas Gandhi. He started in Congress as a devoted Gandhian, admiring Gandhi's fusion of tradition, religion and politics. By 1920, he was involved in the nationalist movement as directed by Gandhi but then became disgusted with the petty, comfort-seeking hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed Gandhians, especially in jail, and, within 15 years he was disillusioned with Gandhi's own ambiguity and devious pro-propertied attitudes.
The final break came in 1934, when Bihar suffered an earthquake. During the relief operations, in which Saraswati was involved, he came across many cases where, in spite of the destruction caused by the calamity, he found the suffering of the people to be less on account of the earthquake than as the result of the cruelty of the landlords in rent collection. When Saraswati found no way of tackling this situation, he sought advice from Gandhi, who was in Patna Saraswati later said that Gandhi told him, "the zamindars will remove the difficulties of the peasants. Their managers are Congressmen. So they will definitely help the poor".
In spite of this, the oppression of the peasantry by the zamindari machinery including Congressmen managers' continued. These platitudes of Gandhi disgusted Saraswati and he broke off his 14 year association with the Mahatma. After that, he consistently saw the Mahatma as a wily politician who, in order to defend the propertied classes, took recourse in pseudo-spiritualism, professions of non-violence and religious hocus-pocus.
After his break with Gandhi, Saraswati kept out of party politics (though he continued to be a member of the Congress) and turned his energies into mobilising the peasants. By the end of the decade, he emerged as the foremost kisan leader in India. In this task of organising the peasants, at different times his political impetuosity took him close to different individuals, parties and groups. He first joined hands with the Congress Socialists for the formation of the All India Kisan Sabha; then with Subhas Chandra Bose organised the Anti-Compromise Conference against theBritish and the Congress, then worked with the Communist Party of India during the Second World War [Das, 1981]; and finally broke from them, too, to form an `independent' Kisan Sabha.
In spite of these political forays, however, Saraswati remained essentially a non-party man and his loyalty was only to the peasants for whom he was the most articulate spokesman and forthright leader. As a peasant leader, Hauser considers that "by standards of speech and action, he was unsurpassed". He achieved that status by a remarkable ability to speak to and for the peasants of Bihar; he could communicate with them and articulate their feelings in terms whose meaning neither peasant nor politicians could mistake. `He was relentlessly determined to improve the peasants' condition and pursued that objective with such force and energy that he was almost universally loved by the peasants, and almost equally both respect and feared by the landlords, Congressmen and officials.
Saraswati was a militant agitator; he sought to expose the condition of agrarian society and to organise the peasants to achieve change. He did this through countless meetings and rallies which he organised and which he addressed. He was a powerful speaker, who used the language of the peasants.
Sahajanand was a Dandi Sanyasi and always carried a long bamboo staff (danda). In the course of the movement, this staff became the symbol of peasant resistance. They cry of "Danda Mera Zindabad" (Long live my staff), was thus taken to mean "Long live the danda (lathi) of the Kisans" and it became the watchword of the Bihar peasant movement. The inevitable response by the masses of peasants was "Swamiji ki Jai" (Victory to Swamiji). "Kaise Logey Malguzari, Latth Hamara Zindabad" (How will you collect rent as long as our sticks are powerful?) became the battle cry of the peasants.
This was the manner in which a common communication was achieved. And it was vastly enhanced by the fact that Sahajanand was a Swami, which gave him a tremendous charisma. In 1937, he was reported to have said that as religious robes had long exploited the peasants, now he would exploit those robes on behalf of the peasants'. When landlords raised the question as to how a sanyasi (mendicant) was taking part in temporal problems of the poor, Sahajanand quoted the scriptures at them:
Prayen deva munayah swavimukti kama
Maunam charanti vijane na pararthnsihthah
Naitan vihaya kripnan vimumuksha eko
Nanyattwadasya sharanam bhramato nupashye
(Mendicants are selfish, living away from society, they try for their own salvation without caring for others. I cannot do that, I do not want my own salvation apart from that of the many destitutes. I will stay with them, live with them and die with them)[Sahajanand, 1952:171].
Saraswati died on 26 June 1950.[Sudhakar, 1973: