The tribal communities in south Gujarat who had been shifting cultivators until well into the nineteenth century were receptive to certain features of the Gandhia mission of ‘uplifting’. Although eager to join mainstream society, they refused to become stuck at the tail-end of the Hindu hierarchy. To prevent that happening it was crucial for them not to acquiesce in the loss of their land rights to moneylenders and drink-dealers. This chapter will document how they sought confrontation with these vested interests and strongly opposed their degradation to the status of indebted tenants and sharecroppers of the fields that were once their property. Their militancy would lead to their reinstatement as owner-cultivators in the aftermath of Independence. The kaliparaj peasantry – upgraded by Gandhian missionaries to raniparaj (people of the forests) – gave in to the strong pressure to participate in the Bardoli satyagraha of 1928, but they did so with their own agenda and not in subservience to the ujliparaj. These tribes – split up between Dhodhia, Chodhari, Gamit and Naika – had retained their own habitat in the much-less-populated hinterland of south Gujarat and were somehow able to distance themselves from the invading Hindu culture. The Dublas by contrast, who were the largest community amongst them, had already been made thoroughly landless in the central plain of fertile soil many centuries ago. In their dispossessed predicament they were attached to well-to-do households and lacked physical as well as social space of their own. Forced to work and live in the shadow of their masters, they were ordered around on beck-and-call duty. The chain of servitude prevented them from developing a collective identity and sense of solidarity. For this agrarian underclass the obstacles to asserting themselves and gaining in confidence and self-respect were much greater than in the case of the tribes who, while also subjected to dispossession, were inhabitants of less settled tracts of land and still not totally detached from their ancestral property to which they managed to hang on as tenants or sharecroppers. With the exception of a small minority, these land-poor peasants had not become the bonded servants of the dominating landowners.1