India under East India Company

The Permanent Settlement, also known as the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, was an agreement between the East India Company and Bengali landlords to fix revenues to be raised from land.

 After a prolonged debate amongst Company officials, the Permanent Settlement was made with the rajas and taluqdars of Bengal.

 They were now classified as zamindars, and they had to pay the revenue demand that was fixed in perpetuity.

 In terms of this definition, the zamindar was not a landowner in the village, but a revenue Collector of the state.

 The Permanent Settlement had the features that state demand was fixed at 89% of the rent and 11% was to be retained by the zamindar.

 The state demand could not be increased but payment should be made on the due date, before sunset, so it was also known as the ‘Sunset Law’. Failure to pay led to the sale of land to the highest bidder.

 Faced with an exorbitantly high revenue demand and possible auction of their estates, they devised ways of surviving the pressures. New contexts produced new strategies. Fictitious sale was one such strategy.

 Between 1793 and 1801 four big zamindaris of Bengal, including Burdwan, made benami purchases that collectively yielded as much as Rs 30 lakh. Of the total sales at the auctions, over 15 per cent were fictitious.

The jotedars were most powerful in North Bengal, although rich peasants and village headmen were emerging as commanding figures in the countryside in other parts of Bengal as well.

 In some places they were called haoladars, elsewhere they were known as gantidars or mandals.

 Their rise inevitably weakened zamindari authority.

The Fifth Report was submitted to the British Parliament in 1813.

 It was the fifth of a series of reports on the administration and activities of the East India Company in India.

 Often referred to as the Fifth Report, it ran into 1002 pages, of which over 800 pages were appendices that reproduced petitions of zamindars and ryots, reports of collectors from different districts, statistical tables on revenue returns, and notes on the revenue and judicial administration of Bengal and Madras (present-day Tamil Nadu) written by officials.

As British rule expanded from Bengal to other parts of India, new systems of revenue were imposed.

 The Permanent Settlement was rarely extended to any region beyond Bengal. Why was this so?

 One reason was that after 1810, agricultural prices rose, increasing the value of harvest produce, and enlarging the income of the Bengal zamindars.

 Since the revenue demand was fixed under the Permanent Settlement, the colonial state could not claim any share of this enhanced income. Keen on expanding its financial resources, the colonial government had to think of ways to maximise its land revenue.

 When officials devise policies, their thinking is deeply shaped by economic theories they are familiar with. By the 1820s, the economist David Ricardo was a celebrated figure in England. Colonial officials had learnt Ricardian ideas during their college years.

 According to Ricardian ideas, a landowner should have a claim only to the “average rent” that prevailed at a given time. When the land yielded more than this “average rent”, the landowner had a surplus that the state needed to tax.

 If tax was not levied, cultivators were likely to turn into rentiers, and their surplus income was unlikely to be productively invested in the improvement of the land.

 Many British officials in India thought that the history of Bengal confirmed Ricardo’s theory. There the zamindars seemed to have turned into rentiers, leasing out land and living on the rental incomes.

 It was therefore necessary, the British officials now felt, to have a different system.

The ryots came to see the moneylender as devious and deceitful.

 They complained of moneylenders manipulating laws and forging accounts.

 In 1859 the British passed a Limitation Law that stated that the loan bonds signed between moneylenders and ryots would have validity for only three years.

 This law was meant to check the accumulation of interest over time.

when the Company’s rule was m ore securely established, the view gained ground that the State would benefit more from periodical settlements.

 Further, in certain parts of the Company’s territories, viz., the U.P. (now Uttar Pradesh) and the Punjab, there were well organised village communities and, barring a portion of the U.P., there were no local chieftains or large farmers of land in this area.

 These areas thus presented a different problem, and settlement was concluded with village communities and the villagers were held jointly and severally responsible for the payment of revenue. This came to be known as the Mahalwari system of land revenue, as the land revenue was assessed on the ‘mahal’.

 In some parts of Madras, the land revenue was directly settled with individual ryots in view of, the difficulty of making settlements with the whole villages. This initiated the ryotwari system which was later introduced in Bombay and other neighboring provinces.

 Both these systems—mahalwari and ryotwari involved detailed surveys of fields and classification of lands according to soil. The assessments were fixed not in perpetuity but for a definite period.

Under Lord Hastings (Governor General from 1813 to 1823) a new policy of “paramountcy” was initiated.

 Now the Company claimed that its authority was paramount or supreme, hence its power was greater than that of Indian states.

 In order to protect its interests it was justified in annexing or threatening to annex any Indian kingdom.

 This view continued to guide later British policies as well.

• Abolition of Sati: Sati, also spelled as Suttee, is a practice among Hindu

communities where a recently widowed woman, either voluntarily or by force,

immolates herself on her deceased husband’s pyre.

• The Bengal Sati Regulation which banned the Sati practice in all jurisdictions

of British India was passed on December 4, 1829 by the then Governor-

General Lord William Bentinck.

• The Religious Disabilities Act: The Religious Disabilities Act of 1850 was a law

passed in British India under East India Company rule that abolished all laws

affecting the rights of persons converting to another religion or caste.

• The new Act allowed Indians who converted from one religion to other religion equal

rights under no law, especially in the case of inheritance.

• The General Service Enlistment Act: The General Service Enlistment

Act passed in the year 1856 contained the provision that mandated soldiers or

recruits of the Bengal Army to serve within or outside India when ordered. It meant

that they were too sent overseas and sea voyages to serve.

Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 and a cause was

inserted in the Charter Act of 1833 requiring the Governor-General-in-Council to abolish

slavery in India as soon as it could be safely and conveniently carried out. Act V of 1843

declared slavery illegal in India and all existing slaves were emancipated without any

compensation to the slave-owners.

Cornwallis (governor-general, 1786-93) was the first to bring into existence

and organise the civil services. He tried to check corruption through—

• raising the civil servants’ salary,
• strict enforcement of rules against private trade,
• debarring civil servants from taking presents, bribes etc.,
• Enforcing promotions through seniority.

Early in the 19th century, the British were enjoying significant power in the India subcontinent, working with and often against the scattered royal kingdoms that ruled over patches of land, small and large.

 They had grown from just traders at the ports of southern India to a military power with influence all the way up to the plains fed by the great Ganges.

 But Tibet, located beyond the towering Himalayas, was still a mystic land for them. That’s when they recruited three brothers: Dolpa, Mani Singh and Nain Singh Rawat.

 Three brothers (mainly Nain Singh) explored the Himalayan region for the British. He received a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society in the year 1876 for his contributions.