Daily Quiz: UPSC Prelims Marathon (History, Art & Culture) – August 3, 2020

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.

About 30 British portrait painters trained in oil paintings and 28 miniaturists travelled to India between 1770 and 1825 in search of commissions.

• Amongst the earliest European artists who visited India were John Zoffany, William Hodges, Tilly Kettle, William and Thomas Daniells, Emily Eden and others.
• From around 1760 till the mid 19th century, these itinerant artist-travelers toured India working for local patrons making paintings and prints of monuments, landscapes as well as portraits.
• The artists worked in oils on canvas utilizing the western technique of academic realism with its emphasis on linear perspective.
• These European artists recorded the new colony in prints and paintings that explored the vast landscapes, the numerous historical edifices and monuments and the many communities that inhabited the land.
• Filtered through the ‘orientalist’ lens, these works imaged India as an exotic and mysterious land in paintings depicting the ghats of Benaras, dancing girls in princely courts, colourful caste costumes, portraits of local rulers and their courtiers, different native occupations and the local flora and fauna.

The life of the Paharias – as hunters, shifting cultivators, food gatherers, charcoal producers, silkworm rearers – was thus intimately connected to the forest.

• They lived in hutments within tamarind groves, and rested in the shade of mango trees. They considered the entire region as their land, the basis of their identity as well as survival; and they resisted the intrusion of outsiders.
• Their chiefs maintained the unity of the group, settled disputes, and led the tribe in battles with other tribes and plainspeople.
• With their base in the hills, the Paharias regularly raided the plains where settled agriculturists lived. These raids were necessary for survival, particularly in years of scarcity; they were a way of asserting power over settled communities; and they were a means of negotiating political relations with outsiders.
• The zamindars on the plains had to often purchase peace by paying a regular tribute to the hill chiefs.
• Traders similarly gave a small amount to the hill folk for permission to use the passes controlled by them.
• Once the toll was paid, the Paharia chiefs protected the traders, ensuring that their goods were not plundered by anyone.

The Santhals had begun to come into Bengal around the 1780s. Zamindars hired them to reclaim land and expand cultivation, and British officials invited them to settle in the Jangal Mahals.

• Having failed to subdue the Paharias and transform them into settled agriculturists, the British turned to the Santhals. The Paharias refused to cut forests, resisted touching the plough, and continued to be turbulent.
• The Santhals, by contrast, appeared to be ideal settlers, clearing forests and ploughing the land with vigour. The Santhals were given land and persuaded to settle in the foothills of Rajmahal.
• By 1832 a large area of land was demarcated as Damin-i-Koh. This was declared to be the land of the Santhals. They were to live within it, practise plough agriculture, and become settled peasants.
• The land grant to the Santhals stipulated that at least one-tenth of the area was to be cleared and cultivated within the first ten years. The territory was surveyed and mapped.
• Enclosed with boundary pillars, it was separated from both the world of the settled agriculturists of the plains and the Paharias of the hills.

Vishvanath Narayan Mandlik (8 March 1833 – 9 May 1899) was an eminent Bombay citizen, lawyer, author and a legal expert on Hindu law.

• Although a conservative when dealing in several cases involving Hindu traditions (where he opposed state intervention), he supported some reforms such as education for women.
• He also translated several English classics and law books into Marathi.
• He also wrote several works on Hindu Law in English, including translations of Yajnyawalkya’s Smriti, the Manu Smriti and Nilakantha’s Vywahara-mayukha.

He founded a bi-weekly in English called the Native Opinion in 1864 to which he was the sole contributor in the early years.

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 Berlin Committee for Indian Independence was established in 1915 by Virendranath Chattopadhyay, Bhupendranath Dutta, Lala Hardayal and others with the help of the German foreign office under ‘Zimmerman Plan’.

• These revolutionaries aimed to mobilize the Indian settlers abroad to send volunteers and arms to India to incite rebellion among Indian troops there and to even organize an armed invasion of British India to liberate the country.
• The Indian revolutionaries in Europe sent missions to Baghdad, Persia, Turkey and Kabul to work among Indian troops and the Indian prisoners of war (POWs) and to incite anti-British feelings among the people of these countries.

The Faraizi movement, also called the Fara’idi Movement because of its emphasis on the Islamic pillars of faith, was founded by Haji Shariatullah in 1818.

• Its scene of action was East Bengal, and it aimed at the eradication of social innovations or un-Islamic practices current among the Muslims of the region and draws their attention to their duties as Muslims.
• Under the leadership of Haji’s son, Dudu Mian, the movement became revolutionary from 1840 onwards.
• He gave the movement an organisational system from the village to the provincial level with a khalifa or authorised deputy at every level.
• The Fara’idis organised a paramilitary force armed with clubs to fight the zamindars who were mostly Hindu, though there were some Muslim landlords too, besides the indigo planters. Dudu Mian asked his followers not to pay rent.
• The organisation even established its own Law courts. Dudu Mian was arrested several times, and his arrest in 1847 finally weakened the movement.
• The movement survived merely as a religious movement without political overtones after the death of Dudu Mian in 1862.