Chapter 9 — Colonialism and the Countryside

The Permanent Settlement came into operation in 1793 in Bengal. The East India Company fixed the revenue that each zamindar had to pay in perpetuity. Zamindars collected rent from villages within their estate, paid the fixed revenue to the Company, and retained the difference as income. Failure to pay by the Sunset Law deadline meant the estate could be auctioned.

The Sunset Law required zamindars to pay their revenue to the Company by sunset on a specified date. If payment did not arrive by that deadline, the zamindari was liable to be auctioned. This rigid rule, combined with the high initial revenue demand and depressed agricultural prices in the 1790s, caused widespread defaults among Bengal zamindars.

Four main reasons are given in the chapter: the initial revenue demand was set very high; it was imposed in the 1790s when agricultural prices were depressed, making it hard for ryots to pay rent to the zamindar; the demand was fixed regardless of harvest and had to be paid punctually; and the Permanent Settlement restricted the zamindar's power to coerce tenants and manage his estate, as the Company simultaneously disbanded zamindari troops and brought zamindari courts under Company-appointed Collectors.

Jotedars were rich peasants described in Francis Buchanan's survey of Dinajpur in North Bengal. By the early nineteenth century they had acquired vast areas of land — sometimes several thousand acres — and controlled local trade and moneylending. Unlike zamindars who often lived in urban areas, jotedars lived in villages and exercised direct control over poor cultivators. They cultivated much of their land through sharecroppers called adhiyars or bargadars, and resisted zamindari authority by delaying revenue payments and buying zamindari estates at auction when they were put up for sale.

The Fifth Report was submitted to the British Parliament in 1813. It was the fifth in a series of reports on the activities of the East India Company and ran to 1002 pages, of which over 800 were appendices reproducing petitions of zamindars and ryots, collector reports, and statistical tables. Recent research indicates that the report exaggerated the collapse of traditional zamindari power and overestimated the scale on which zamindars were losing their land, because its authors were intent on criticising Company maladministration.

When estates were auctioned for non-payment of revenue, zamindars arranged for their own agents to buy the property. The agents then refused to pay the purchase money, forcing the estate to be resold repeatedly until it was eventually sold back to the zamindar at a low price. Between 1793 and 1801, four big zamindaris of Bengal including Burdwan made benami purchases collectively yielding Rs 30 lakh, and over 15% of total sales at auctions were fictitious.

The Paharias lived around the Rajmahal hills, subsisting on forest produce and practising shifting cultivation. They cleared patches of forest by cutting and burning, grew pulses and millets on the ash-enriched soil with hoes, and after a few years left the land fallow to recover its fertility before moving to a new patch. From forests they collected mahua for food, silk cocoons and resin for sale, and wood for charcoal. They considered the entire region their land, and their chiefs maintained group unity and led battles with outsiders.

In the 1770s the British pursued a brutal policy of extermination, hunting and killing the Paharias. By the 1780s, Augustus Cleveland, Collector of Bhagalpur, proposed a policy of pacification: Paharia chiefs were given annual allowances and made responsible for the conduct of their people. Many chiefs refused the allowances; those who accepted often lost authority within their community, being seen as employees of the colonial government. The Paharias eventually withdrew deep into the mountains, and when Buchanan travelled through the region in winter 1810–11 they were hostile and suspicious of outsiders.

By 1832 a large area of land in the Rajmahal foothills was demarcated as Damin-i-Koh and declared to be the land of the Santhals, who were expected to practise plough agriculture there. The land grant required at least one-tenth of the area to be cleared and cultivated within the first ten years. After demarcation, Santhal settlements expanded rapidly: from 40 villages in 1838 to 1,473 villages by 1851, and the Santhal population grew from about 3,000 to over 82,000 in the same period.

By the 1850s the Santhals found that the land they had cleared was slipping away. The state levied heavy taxes on the land, moneylenders (dikus) charged high interest rates and took over land when debts were unpaid, and zamindars were asserting control over the Damin area. The Santhals rebelled to create an ideal world where they would rule. After the Santhal Revolt of 1855–56 was suppressed, the colonial state created the Santhal Pargana — 5,500 square miles carved out of the districts of Bhagalpur and Birbhum — and imposed special laws within it to conciliate the Santhals.

In the ryotwari settlement introduced in the Bombay Deccan, revenue was settled directly with the ryot (peasant) rather than with zamindars. The average income from different types of soil was estimated, the revenue-paying capacity of the ryot was assessed, and a proportion was fixed as the state's share. Unlike the Permanent Settlement, the revenue demand was not fixed in perpetuity: lands were resurveyed every 30 years and revenue rates were increased. The first revenue settlement in the Bombay Deccan was made in the 1820s.

Before the 1860s, three-fourths of raw cotton imports into Britain came from America. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, cotton imports from America fell from over 2,000,000 bales to 55,000 bales by 1862 — less than three per cent of normal. Export merchants in Bombay advanced credit to sahukars who extended loans to rural moneylenders, who in turn gave ryots Rs 100 as advance for every acre planted with cotton. Between 1860 and 1864 cotton acreage in the Bombay Deccan doubled, and by 1862 over 90% of cotton imports into Britain were coming from India.

When the American Civil War ended in 1865, Indian cotton exports declined and credit dried up, while revenue demand increased dramatically — from 50 to 100 per cent in the new settlement. Moneylenders refused further loans. Ryots were angered not just by debt but by moneylenders' violations of customary norms (for instance, charging over Rs 2,000 interest on a Rs 100 loan, when custom held interest should not exceed principal). On 12 May 1875, ryots from villages around Supa in Poona district attacked shopkeepers and moneylenders, burning bahi khatas and debt bonds. The revolt spread over 6,500 sq km affecting more than thirty villages; 951 people were arrested. The Deccan Riots Commission report was presented to Parliament in 1878.

The Limitation Law stated that loan bonds between moneylenders and ryots would have legal validity for only three years — intended to limit the accumulation of interest. Moneylenders responded by forcing ryots to sign a new bond every three years, entering the unpaid balance (original principal plus all accumulated interest) as the new principal on which fresh interest was charged. A petition to the Deccan Riots Commission shows that a loan of Rs 100 could generate interest of Rs 2,028 over twelve years through this process.

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