Colonialism and the Countryside (Exploring Official Archives)

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XII (Themes in Indian History Part III), Chapter 9.

An auction where the buyers were the seller's own men

In 1797 a huge crowd gathered in Burdwan, in Bengal, for the auction of the estates of the Raja of Burdwan, who had failed to pay his revenue to the Company. Many bidders raised their hands and the prices climbed. When the hammer fell, the winning bidders turned out to be agents of the Raja himself. Over 95 per cent of the sale was fictitious.

How could a Company that fixed the rules be fooled so openly? The answer lies in how colonial rule changed the countryside. This chapter follows that change through three regions and three systems, and ends by asking how a historian should read the official records that survive.

The big idea: one Company, three experiments

The Company wanted steady revenue from the land, and it tried different arrangements in different places. Each arrangement created winners and losers, and each produced its own kind of resistance.

Why Bengal came first: the Permanent Settlement

Bengal was the first region where the Company ruled over a large agrarian society, so it was where the first attempts were made to reorder rural life. In the 1770s the Bengal economy was in crisis, with repeated famines (including the great famine of 1770) and falling cultivation. Company officials believed that fixing the revenue would give the Company a regular income and would also encourage investment in land, producing improving landlords and prosperous farmers.

The Permanent Settlement of 1793 was made with the rajas and taluqdars of Bengal, who were classed as zamindars. A zamindar was not a landowner in the village. He was a revenue collector of the state, who paid a sum fixed in perpetuity and collected rent from the ryots.

Why the demand was set so high. Because the revenue was fixed forever, Company officials feared losing out if prices rose and cultivation expanded later. To reduce that future loss, they set the initial demand high. This one decision explains much of what followed.

Why zamindars defaulted. Four pressures worked together.

The Company also disbanded the zamindars' troops, abolished their customs duties and placed their cutcheries (courts) under a Collector. A zamindar's amlah (rent-collecting officer) often could not force payment from ryots, and the Company would not wait.

The result. Estates were auctioned in large numbers, and over 75 per cent of the zamindaris changed hands in the early decades after the Settlement.

Pause and predict: After about 1810 prices of agricultural produce rose and cultivation expanded. Who gained from this under the Permanent Settlement, and what would a Company official conclude?

Check your answer: The zamindars gained, because their payment to the Company stayed fixed while their income from ryots grew. The state lost its share of the rise. For this reason the Permanent Settlement was rarely extended beyond Bengal, and newer territories were given temporary settlements that could be revised.

How zamindars fought back

The old zamindars did not accept their fall quietly. They found ways to keep their estates.

Between 1793 and 1801 four of the biggest zamindaris of Bengal made benami purchases amounting to about Rs 30 lakh. The power of the zamindars was finally broken only in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, when prices collapsed and the system was no longer viable.

The rise of the jotedars

While zamindars struggled, another group grew stronger inside the villages. Francis Buchanan's survey of Dinajpur describes the jotedars: rich peasants who by the early nineteenth century had acquired vast areas of land, sometimes several thousand acres. They controlled local trade and moneylending and had a hold over poorer cultivators.

Jotedars lived in the villages, unlike the zamindars who often lived in towns. They got their land cultivated by sharecroppers called adhiyars or bargadars, who handed over half the produce. Jotedars resisted the zamindars' attempts to raise rent, mobilised the ryots who depended on them, and delayed payment of revenue, so that when an estate was auctioned they were often among the buyers. They were strongest in North Bengal.

Why it matters. The Permanent Settlement was meant to create a class of loyal landlords. In practice it also made room for rich peasants who undermined them from below.

Reading the Fifth Report

The Fifth Report was submitted to the British Parliament in 1813. It was the fifth in a series of reports on the Company's administration, ran to 1,002 pages, and included more than 800 pages of appendices: petitions of zamindars and ryots, reports of Collectors, revenue statistics and notes on revenue and judicial administration. It became the basis for parliamentary debates on Company rule, as the Company's trading monopoly came under attack in Britain.

Two views. For the exam: the Fifth Report is a key source on Bengal, but it must be read with care, because its authors wanted to show the Company's rule as a failure of order. Another reading: later research shows that the Report exaggerated the collapse of the old zamindars. Many zamindars survived the auctions through benami sales and other methods, so the picture of complete ruin does not fit the evidence.

Hoe and plough: Paharias and Santhals

The next case moves to the Rajmahal hills, in the east of present day Jharkhand. Two communities appear here, with two ways of using land.

The Paharias. In the 1770s the British followed a brutal policy of extermination against the Paharias. In the 1780s Augustus Cleveland, Collector of Bhagalpur, proposed a policy of pacification: Paharia chiefs were given an annual allowance and made responsible for the good conduct of their people. Many chiefs refused, and those who accepted lost authority among their own people. The Paharias retreated deeper into the hills, and their world became poorer and more isolated.

The Santhals. Santhals began arriving in the region from around the 1780s, and zamindars and Company officials welcomed them as cultivators who cleared forest and ploughed the land. In 1832 a large area was demarcated as Damin-i-Koh and declared the land of the Santhals. They were asked to clear a part of it (a tenth in the first ten years) and settle as cultivators. Santhal villages grew from 40 in 1838 to 1,473 by 1851, and their population rose from about 3,000 to over 82,000.

Cause to effect. The state's tax demand on Santhal land rose, moneylenders (whom Santhals called dikus, or outsiders) charged high interest and took their land, and zamindars asserted control over the Damin. The Santhals saw that the land meant to be theirs was slipping away.

After the revolt was suppressed, the Santhal Pargana was created, carving out 5,500 square miles from the districts of Bhagalpur and Birbhum, where Santhals were given special protection. Do not confuse the two: Damin-i-Koh (1832) came before the revolt, Santhal Pargana came after.

Pause and predict: A colonial surveyor travels through the Rajmahal hills in the early nineteenth century and writes about the forest and the hill people. Would he describe the forest as valuable in itself, or as land waiting to be cleared?

Check your answer: As land waiting to be cleared. Francis Buchanan, a physician of the Bengal Medical Service from 1794 to 1815 who conducted surveys for the Company, saw the world through the Company's commercial interests. He saw forests as wasteful and favoured cultivated fields, which tells us how a source's purpose shapes what it records.

The Bombay Deccan: ryotwari, cotton and debt

In the Bombay Deccan the Company used the ryotwari system. Revenue was settled directly with the ryot rather than with a zamindar. Soils were classified, the revenue paying capacity of each plot was assessed, and the land was resurveyed every 30 years, with revenue raised each time.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the ryotwari system was influenced by the ideas of David Ricardo, whose theory of rent said that the surplus a landowner earns above the average profit of the land is "rent", which the state may claim. In reality: historians such as Eric Stokes (The English Utilitarians and India, 1959) argued that British economic thinking of this kind shaped revenue policy in India, with officials trained in these ideas seeing the state as the rightful claimant of the land's surplus. This explains why the demand was set on the land's productive power rather than on what the peasant could actually pay.

The first settlement in the 1820s set the demand so high that many peasants deserted their villages. Later, from 1832 to 1834, famine devastated the Deccan. Agricultural prices fell and did not recover for years, and peasants borrowed to pay the revenue. They borrowed from the sahukar, a person who acted both as a moneylender and a trader.

The cotton chain. The next table is the heart of the chapter, and CUET likes to test its order.

During the boom, many ryots were persuaded that high prices would last forever and borrowed freely. After it ended, they found they could not repay.

The debt trap. The old custom that the interest charged could not exceed the principal broke down. The Deccan Riots Commission found a case where Rs 2,000 interest was charged on a loan of Rs 100. The Limitation Law of 1859 made a loan bond between a moneylender and a ryot valid for only three years, but moneylenders got around it by forcing ryots to sign a new bond every three years, adding the unpaid sum to the new principal.

Pause and predict: After 1865, ryots could not repay their loans and sahukars stopped lending. Who would the ryots blame, and what would they do with the evidence of debt?

Check your answer: They blamed the sahukars, and they destroyed the evidence. On 12 May 1875 at Supa, a large village of Poona district, ryots gathered and attacked shopkeepers and moneylenders, demanding and burning their bahi khatas (account books) and debt bonds, and looting grain shops. The revolt spread over some 6,500 square km and to more than 30 villages.

Official archives: how to read them

Much of what we know about this chapter comes from official records, so the chapter also teaches a method. Reports are produced by people with a purpose, and a historian must ask who wrote them, why and for whom.

After the revolt the government set up the Deccan Riots Commission, which collected evidence from the districts. Its report was presented to the British Parliament in 1878. The Commission was asked to judge whether the government's revenue demand had caused the revolt, and it concluded that the moneylenders, and not the government, were to blame.

Two views. For the exam: the Commission's report is a valuable source, with details of debt, interest rates and bonds, but its conclusion shows the colonial reluctance to admit that popular anger might be directed at government action. Another reading: later historians looking at the same evidence point to the high revenue demand, the fall in cotton prices after the boom and the pressure to borrow. They argue that the revolt cannot be explained by the moneylenders alone, and use the Commission's own records to make the case.

Why it matters. Official records are indispensable and also biased. The skill CUET tests is to read them against other evidence such as petitions, newspapers, private papers and oral memory, and to ask what is missing.

Key people, places and terms

Timeline

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Before this: Peasants, Zamindars and the State shows the Mughal zamindar and village, a useful contrast with the colonial zamindar.
• Next: Rebels and the Raj shows how land and revenue grievances, such as those of the taluqdars of Awadh, fed the revolt of 1857.
• Also read: An Imperial Capital for another side of colonial rule, as seen in towns.