How do we know that ordinary people too contributed to the freedom movement?

In the chapter ‘Indigo’ Louis Fischer writes of how a small farmer Rajkumar Shukla from a small district, Champaran, helps bring about a very prominent change. Likewise, many other peasants from the villages fought courageously and contributed in their own way to the movement. Their cumulative effort eventually resulted in their winning the battle of Champaran and to finally free themselves of the sharecropping arrangement.