South Konkan · Western Coastal Strip
This coast's largest contribution to the freedom movement is people it could not keep. Bal Gangadhar Tilak was born at Ratnagiri, Gopal Krishna Gokhale at Kotluk in Guhagar taluka, B. G. Kher at Ratnagiri, Sane Guruji at Palgad near Dapoli, and Ambedkar's family came from Ambadawe in Mandangad taluka; every one of them did their political work in Pune or Bombay, because a district of laterite plateau and tree crops could not support them at home. What happened on the ground here was smaller and less organised than that record suggests: civil disobedience on the coast in 1930, Quit India in the towns in 1942, and a long argument about khoti tenure that was about land rather than about the empire. Ratnagiri was also used by the government as a place of confinement, which is why the last king of Burma and V. D. Savarkar both spent years here.
Risings and revolts
The salt and forest laws were broken along this coast during the civil disobedience movement of 1930. A coast of small salt pans and villages dependent on plateau grazing and firewood made both laws immediate rather than symbolic here.
Outcome: Volunteers were arrested and prosecuted through the district courts; the campaign brought Congress organisation into the coastal towns for the first time.
A sustained tenants' agitation against the khoti system, under which a revenue farmer stood between the cultivator and the state and took a share of a crop that was already marginal. In 1937 a bill to abolish khoti was introduced in the Bombay Legislative Assembly by B. R. Ambedkar.
Outcome: The bill did not become law; khoti tenure was ended only by legislation passed after 1947, and the migration it had driven continued regardless.
Processions, strikes and attacks on communications followed the Quit India call in Ratnagiri, Chiplun, Malvan and the other coastal towns, and the district organisation was arrested.
Outcome: Large numbers were imprisoned; among Konkan-born leaders arrested in the same month was B. G. Kher, the former premier of Bombay, held until July 1944.
People
| Name | Years | Movement | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bal Gangadhar TilakBorn at Ratnagiri; worked at Pune | 1856–1920 | Congress; Home Rule League | Founded the New English School in 1880, the Deccan Education Society in 1884 and Fergusson College in 1885, edited Kesari and the Mahratta, and founded the Home Rule League in 1916. His conviction for sedition in 1908 produced the first political general strike in Bombay.Imprisoned at Mandalay from 1908 until his release on 16 June 1914; died on 1 August 1920. |
| Gopal Krishna GokhaleBorn at Kotluk in Guhagar taluka; worked at Pune | 1866–1915 | Congress; Servants of India Society | Presided over the Congress in 1905 and founded the Servants of India Society in the same year, to train men for full-time public work on a subsistence wage. He argued the constitutional case in the legislative council and was the model for a generation of moderate politics.Died at Bombay on 19 February 1915. |
| Balasaheb Gangadhar KherBorn at Ratnagiri; worked at Bombay | 1888–1957 | Congress; civil disobedience; Quit India | Secretary of the Bombay branch of the Swaraj Party from 1922, and premier of Bombay Province from 1937 to November 1939, when the Congress ministries resigned.Imprisoned in 1930 for eight months, in 1932 for two years, again in 1940, and from August 1942 until 14 July 1944. |
| Sane Guruji (Pandurang Sadashiv Sane)Born at Palgad near Dapoli; taught at Amalner in Khandesh | 1899–1950 | Civil disobedience; Quit India | Resigned his teaching post in 1930 to join the civil disobedience movement and was arrested on eight occasions between 1930 and 1947. He wrote in Marathi throughout, largely in prison, and the writing reached a rural readership that political prose did not.Fasted at Pandharpur from 1 to 11 May 1947 until the Vitthal temple was opened to all castes. |
| Bhimrao Ramji AmbedkarFamily of Ambadawe in Mandangad taluka; worked at Bombay | 1891–1956 | Depressed classes movement; Independent Labour Party | Led the Mahad satyagraha in the Konkan in March 1927 for the right to draw water from a public tank, founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936, introduced a bill to abolish khoti tenure in the Bombay Legislative Assembly in 1937, and served as labour member of the Viceroy's Executive Council from 1942 to 1946.The Bombay High Court upheld the right of access to the Mahad tank in December 1937, ten years after the satyagraha. |
| Vinayak Damodar SavarkarBorn at Bhagur in Nashik district; confined to Ratnagiri district from 1924 to 1937 | 1883–1966 | Revolutionary; later social reform in Ratnagiri | Arrested in London on 13 March 1910 and transported to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans in 1911 after the Nashik conspiracy case. Released on condition on 6 January 1924 and restricted to Ratnagiri district, where the campaigns of his internment years, including temple entry, were local rather than national.The restrictions were lifted in 1937. |
People from South Konkan who resisted colonial rule, and the regional risings and revolts that shaped that resistance. (9)