History: Class 12 (Book 3) — Chapter 1: Colonialism and the Countryside

In 1797, a major public auction took place in Burdwan (present-day Bardhaman) to sell estates (mahals) held by the Raja of Burdwan. The Permanent Settlement had come into operation in 1793, under which the East India Company fixed the exact revenue each zamindar had to pay. The estates of those who defaulted were auctioned to recover arrears.

• Fictitious Bidding: The Collector soon discovered that over 95 per cent of the auction sales were entirely fictitious. The buyers were actually servants and agents of the raja who bid on behalf of their master, allowing the raja to retain practical control of his zamindari despite the public sale.
• Raja Title: The term "Raja" (literally king) was used during this era to designate exceptionally powerful zamindars.

By the 1770s, rural Bengal faced an economic crisis marked by famines and declining agricultural output. British officials hoped the Permanent Settlement would encourage investment by securing property rights and fixing revenue rates permanently. They anticipated this would establish a loyal class of yeomen farmers and rich landowners with the capital to improve agriculture.

• The Revenue Role: The settlement was contracted with local rajas and taluqdars (territorial unit holders). They were classified as zamindars, acting not as land owners, but as revenue Collectors for the state.
• The Estate Structure: A single zamindari could contain up to 400 villages, grouped as one revenue estate. The zamindar collected rent from villagers, paid the fixed state demand, and kept the remainder as income. Over 75 per cent of zamindaris changed hands in the years following 1793 due to payment failures.

Zamindars regularly failed to meet the initial revenue demands due to a combination of systemic constraints:

1. High Initial Demand: Because the demand was fixed in perpetuity, the Company pegged it exceptionally high to minimize losses from future expansions in prices or cultivation.
2. Depressed Agricultural Prices: The high demand was imposed in the 1790s when crop prices were low, making it difficult for peasants (ryots) to pay rent to the zamindar.
3. The Sunset Law: The revenue was invariable regardless of the harvest quality. Under the Sunset Law, if payment was not received by sunset of the specified date, the estate was auctioned.
4. Diminished Authority: The Company sought to subdue the zamindars' autonomy. Their troops were disbanded, customs duties abolished, and their courts ("cutcheries") brought under the supervision of a Company-appointed Collector.

Rent collection remained a perennial issue. While the zamindar's officer (the amlah) visited villages, rich peasants and village headmen deliberately delayed payments to see the zamindar in trouble. Legal prosecution was slow; by 1798, Burdwan alone had over 30,000 pending rent suits.

While zamindars faced crises, a class of rich peasants known as jotedars consolidated their position in the villages, as documented in Francis Buchanan's survey of Dinajpur.

• Local Domain Control: Jotedars acquired thousands of acres of land, controlled local trade, and managed village moneylending. They cultivated fields through sharecroppers (adhiyars or bargadars) who provided their own ploughs and gave half the harvest to the jotedar.
• Undermining Zamindars: Unlike absentee zamindars living in towns, jotedars lived in the villages, exercising direct influence over poorer peasants. They actively resisted zamindari rent increases, prevented officials from executing duties, and bought up zamindari estates at public auctions. Depending on the region, they were also known as haoladars, gantidars, or mandals.

Source 1: The jotedars of Dinajpur

"The jotedars who cultivate large portions of lands are very refractory, and know that the zamindars have no power over them... Should the zamindar’s officers... summon them to the cutcherry... they immediately go and complain at the Fouzdarry Thanna (police station) for imprisonment... and instigate the petty ryots not to pay their revenue..." — Francis Buchanan

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Analytical Historical Context & Interpretation: Confirms that jotedars leveraged colonial legal and police infrastructure to actively undermine the traditional revenue authority of the zamindars at the village level.

Zamindars engineered sophisticated survival strategies to safeguard their estates from state auctions:

• Strategic Transfers: The Raja of Burdwan transferred parts of his zamindari to his mother, exploiting a Company decree that exempted women's property from state takeovers.
• Manipulated Auctions: During auctions, the zamindar's agents outbid outsiders but intentionally withheld the purchase money. This forced endless, exhausting cycles of resales until the state was compelled to sell the property back to the zamindar at a heavily reduced rate. Between 1793 and 1801, fictitious benami (anonymous) purchases yielded Rs 30 lakh across four major Bengal zamindaris.
• Physical Force: If an outsider successfully bought an estate, the former zamindar's strongmen (lathyals) attacked the new buyer's agents, while local peasants (proja) resisted entry out of traditional loyalty.

Submitted to the British Parliament in 1813, the Fifth Report ran into 1002 pages, containing appendices with petitions from zamindars and ryots, collectors' reports, and revenue statistical tables.

• Political Function: The report was produced by a Select Committee to regulate and debate the East India Company's monopoly and administrative rule, driven by political factions in Britain who opposed the Company's trade privileges.

In the winter of 1810-11, Company physician and surveyor Francis Buchanan explored the Rajmahal hills, describing them as an impenetrable, hostile zone. The local hill folk, known as Paharias, lived on forest produce and practiced shifting agriculture.

• Subsistence Economy: They cleared forest patches by burning undergrowth, using the ash's potash to grow pulses and millets. They scratched the ground lightly with hoes, gathered mahua flowers for food, collected resin, and reared silkworms.
• Conflicts with the Plains: The Paharias regularly raided settled plains for survival, especially during scarcities. Zamindars paid them regular tributes to purchase peace, and traders paid tolls to navigate mountain passes safely.
• Pacification and Recess: In the 1770s, the British pursued a brutal policy of extermination. By the 1780s, Collector Augustus Cleveland introduced a pacification policy offering annual allowances to chiefs. Those who accepted lost community respect, forcing the Paharias to withdraw deeper into the dry, rocky upper hills.

Around 1800, the Santhals moved into the lower Rajmahal slopes, clearing forests and expanding settled agriculture with the plough. Having failed to turn the Paharias into settled peasants, British officials and zamindars invited the Santhals to reclaim land.

• Damin-i-Koh (1832): A large territory was formally demarcated as the Damin-i-Koh, declared as the land of the Santhals to practice plough agriculture. Settlements boomed from 40 villages in 1838 to 1,473 villages by 1851, expanding Company land revenues.
• The Santhal Revolt (1855-56): The Santhals soon found their land slipping away due to heavy state taxes, high moneylender (dikus) interest rates, and zamindari encroachments. Led by Sidhu Manjhi, they rose in a violent rebellion. After crushing the revolt, the colonial state created the Santhal Pargana (5,500 square miles) under special conciliation laws.

As a formal employee of the East India Company, Buchanan's scientific observations were explicitly linked to commercial exploitation and state resource control.

• Resource Outlook: He tracked soil layers, rocks, minerals, iron ore, and saltpetre to assess their commercial viability. His records were shaped by Western notions of progress, actively advocating for clearing forests to maximize agricultural land revenue.

On 12 May 1875, a major peasant uprising began at Supa, a large market village in the Poona district populated by shopkeepers and moneylenders.

• Rebellion Pattern: *Ryots* gathered from the countryside, attacking moneylenders (sahukars) to demand their account books (bahi khatas) and debt bonds. They publicly burned the records, looted grain shops, and set fire to houses, causing sahukars to flee. The revolt spread across 6,500 square kilometers, affecting over thirty villages before British troops established order and arrested 951 people.

The Permanent Settlement was rarely extended beyond Bengal because fixed demands prevented the state from claiming a share of rising agricultural prices after 1810. Influenced by David Ricardo's economic theories, officials argued that surplus land income over "average rent" should be taxed to prevent cultivators from becoming non-productive rentiers.

• Direct Settlement: The resulting ryotwari settlement in the Bombay Deccan assessed revenue capacity directly with the *ryot* based on soil types. Lands were resurveyed every 30 years, making the revenue demand temporary and subject to regular increases.

The initial 1820s settlements demanded high revenue, leading peasants to desert villages. Collectors extracted payments severely, seizing crops and fining entire villages.

• Famine and Debt: Conditions worsened after 1832 when crop prices crashed and a devastating famine (1832-34) killed half the human population and one-third of the cattle. To pay taxes, peasants borrowed from sahukars, entering cycles of mounting indebtedness.

British manufacturers sought to reduce their raw cotton dependence on America, forming the Cotton Supply Association (187) and Manchester Cotton Company (1859) to encourage alternative global production.

• The Supply Shock: When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, raw imports to Britain plummeted below three per cent. Bombay merchants extended vast credit advances to rural moneylenders to secure Indian cotton. *Ryots* received advances of Rs 100 per acre, causing cotton acreage to double between 1860 and 1864, though long-term debt increased for most cultivators.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, American cotton exports revived, causing Indian exports to drop. Sahukars closed operations, refused new loans, and demanded immediate repayment of debts. Simultaneously, the state revised land settlements, increasing revenue demands by 50 to 100 per cent.

• Breach of Customary Norms: Peasants were enraged when moneylenders violated traditional norms, such as the rule that interest could not exceed the principal. Under colonial rule, interest charges reached up to Rs 2,000 on a Rs 100 loan.
• Limitation Law (1859): The British passed a law restricting loan bond validity to three years to stop long-term interest accumulation. Moneylenders circumvented this by forcing *ryots* to sign a new bond every three years, compounding the unpaid interest directly into the principal. Desperate peasants signed deeds of hire, surrendering their own carts and bullocks to creditors and paying rent to use them.