Analyse the achievements of Baba Ramchandra as a Peasant Leader.

Who he was, on the UP map

• Born Shridhar Balwant Jodhpurkar in Maharashtra, he returned from indenture in Fiji and settled among Awadh cultivators, taking the name Baba Ramchandra and the idiom of a wandering katha reciter.
• The theatre is eastern Awadh in today’s Uttar Pradesh—Pratapgarh as the first dense base, then Rae Bareli, Sultanpur, and Faizabad—not Bundelkhand or western Jat tracts.

Achievements as peasant leader

• He built the Pratapgarh Kisan Sabha and then the Awadh Kisan Sabha (1920), turning scattered tenant anger into a named organisation with meetings, oaths, and a charter of demands.
• Demands were concrete: stop illegal eviction (bedakhli), cut nazarana and rasad, end begar, and restrain taluqdari enhancement of rent—the living grievances of occupancy and non-occupancy tenants under Awadh taluqdars.
• He used Ramkatha and village fairs so that illiterate cultivators could enter politics without English Congress speech; that cultural method is itself an achievement of leadership.
• The 1920–21 wave drew Jawaharlal Nehru and the provincial Congress into Awadh villages; peasant India entered the national calendar through this UP belt.
• Mass pressure in Rae Bareli–Pratapgarh, including the tense Munshiganj–Fursatganj moment of 1921, showed that taluqdari could be publicly challenged, even when the Congress later pulled back from violence.

Limits of the achievement

• He did not abolish taluqdari; that waited for post-Independence zamindari law. Achievement is organisation and agenda, not a completed land Act.
• Congress–Khilafat leadership used then contained the movement after 1921; Ramchandra was sidelined as a local baba, not made the lasting face of UP Congress agrarianism.
• Do not merge him with the Eka movement of Madari Pasi in Hardoi–Bahraich (1921–22); that is a neighbouring Awadh–Rohilkhand peasant stream, not his organisation.

Analytical verdict

• As a peasant leader his durable success is that Awadh tenants gained a sabha, a demand list, and a method of katha-politics that later kisan work in UP could remember.