Describe the revenue settlements established in the 18th and 19th centuries with specific reference to the Ryotwari and Permanent Settlements?
R.E Frykenberg, in the introduction of his edited volume, “Land Control and Social Structure In Indian History”, describes the many problems with understanding land revenue systems within India including the “veritable jungle of overlapping terminologies” and the manner in which they were later reinterpreted within British India. He later suggests methods to simplify the analysis of these systems and suggests the need for “better terms and concepts which more accurately approximate the phenomenon and conditions being described”, a refined use of Indian terminology.
While such goals, in terms of comprehension lie beyond undergraduate cognition, the present essay makes an attempt to describe briefly the chief features of the Ryotwari and Permanent Revenue Settlements introduced by the British.
The three revenue settlements introduced in the 18th century included the Ryotwari, Mahalwari an Permanent Settlement. The quotidian understanding of these settlements sees them as being evils that ravaged the Indian countryside and exercised excessive pressure on small portions of land and destroyed the handicrafts industry. Even within contemporary colonial circles the revenue policies of the british came under criticism. James Mill and W.W Hunter (1882) from within the government establishment were critical of british revenue settlement. Enquiries were instituted into the causes for Indian poverty. William Digby and Naoroji all spoke of how British Revenue settlement sought to magnify poverty within India.
Such ideas have been critiqued by Cambridge School Historians like BB Chaudhary who critiqued nationalist ideas and reinforced Cornwallis’ claim; Cornwallis appreared to believe that permanently fixing revenue would revitalize agriculturein Bengal thus creating surplus for investment.
Burton Stein maps the arguments of Munroe, Neils Charlesworth and David Washbrooke, all three of whom identified a section of affluent peasantry in Bengal, Maharashtra and Madras respectively who survived in pre-colonial times through kinship ties. These communities as pointed out by Burton Stein continued to be entrenched within British administration, as the the British did not make effects to displace them. Though the company did disempowered the class politically, the peasants continued to maintain land.
It was believed that rich cultivators would encourage capitalist development of agriculture. The landlords only leased out land- the cultivators were the ones with maximum potential for the cpatialist development of agriculture.
Thus varied administrative policies were introduced as casual codes (given the minimal board of control subjection). There were three kinds of revenue systems established: Permanent Settlment; where Zamindars were established as owners of the land and the money and settlement was introduced permanently in Bihar and Bengal, Ryotwari Settlement; where the revenue was reassessed every 30 years in Madras, Sindh and Assam and the Mahalwari Settlement; which recognized communal claim over land and revenue responsibilities were negociated with joint communal proprietors. The structure of revenue officials then emerged was dependant on the time-space context. The british colonial mind in India, following the structure of its own capital development was convinced that the rich peasantry in India would emerge as an equivalent to the capitalist farmer in England.
Introduced in Bengal in 1793 the decennial settlement , eventually came to be called the permanent settlement. It was a significant subject of discussion even at the time of its introduction. The study of Permanent settlement still remains an issue of much historiographical debate. This policy is seen often as the extension of British agrarian control through a landed aristocracy and gentry in which the Zamindars of Bengal were treated by the systems promulgator, Lord Cornwallis as chosen British landlords and squires. The settlement was thus seen as a means for providing incentive to the Zamindar.
Eric Stokes and Ranajit Guha emphasize the ideological roots of British agrarian policy. The Bengal system of 1793 was argued by Guha as being the product of French physiocratic doctrine. It is not however as if these works reflect no awareness of the interrelationship between intellectual ideas and the British experience in the subcontinent and of the influence of the later in Shaping the former. Yet, as subsequent studies have shown, Stokes and Guha clearly underestimated the influence of social reality within India, in shaping agrarian policy.
Other scholars have seen the British agrarian policy within the broader processes of socio-economic change. A similar emphasis on local influence and compulsions of the traditional social structure as ebing determined by british policy is found in Ratnalekha Ray’s study of Permanent Settlement. The promulgators of this policy according to her were not out to create new social divisions. Their aim was to shape the existing situation in a manner which would favour the East India Company.The permanent settlement was introduced to confirm by law, the undefined priveleges that the zamindars enjoyed by custom.
Social reality and ideological considerations should not be seen as two opposing irreconcilable factors. The actual relationship between state policies and ‘social reality’ was far more dialectical: the inital ideas and policies, then based on abstract doctrines, had to be changed in the very process of their implementation. Yet it was not merely a process f adaptation and the policy inevitably included changes. So the social reality in which the state reacted was a changing one.
The colonial policy was influenced by a number of contradictions: on the one hand it needed to augment its revenue and enhance financial resources and on the other it required to maintain the purchasing power of the peasant in order to expand the market for british manufactures and at the time of its introduction, Cornwallis saw permanent settlement as an ideal resolution of both these aims. A permanent fixation of revenue should have promoted capitalist agriculture and this according to the analougous events in Britain should have enhanced the purchasing power of the peasant.The improving agriculture could provide food grain and raw material which could feed the commercial and industrial economy of the british. Moreover the permanent settlement would ensure a stable revenue for the East India company.However the object of the emerging colonial state was not merely economic exploitation but also the establishment of political stability. So the permanent settlemet was also intended to create political allies, a need which argues great urgency in the last quarter of the eighteenth century following a number of political revolts in Bengal. So the settlement aims of creating a wealthy and a privelged class of landlords who would own their loyalties to the British.
The Zamindars got proprietary and not ownership rights over the land. Neeladri Bhatacharya points out that while the regulations of 1793 had granted hereditary property rights to the Zamindar and fixed the revenue in perpetuity. These were various clauses defining the limits of their rights and priveleges. The land of the zamindar had to be sold in case of default on revenue payment, no remissions were granted inc case of famine, scarcity and natural calamity, coercive power over the raiyats and tenure holders was derived; pattas (lease agreements) were to be granted by the zamindar to the raiyat and the judicial and administrative powers of the zamindar were withdrawn.
The paradox which emerges out of the settlement of that the conditions moved to prevent the landlords from becoming extremely powerful and prevented the realisation of the basic aims of the policy. Ratna Ray points out that the Permanent Settlement could give the village landlords a right to revenue collection, as the government only possessed that right. The land was occupied by rich farmers in the village and the perpetual assignment of the right to collect revenue did not mean that the rights of land were extinguished. Consequently the interests of the zamindar could not be in improving agriculture but lay in steadily increasing rents, which caused impoverishment of the landless labourer.
Tapan Raychaudhuri talks about the multiplicity of land tenures and subtenures created by the permanent settlement in the Bakarganj District, in East Bengal. Such was the confusion among both landlord and tenant that : “the settlement camps were indeed regarded as lost property offices where landlords came to find their lands, and tenants came find their landlord.” Raychaudhuri says that there is no economic reason to understand why there are so many tenures and subtenures. Zamindars it seems were never in charge of a single piece of land, the land was generally co-shared. Bakarganj also saw absentee landlords who did not have enough money to buy a house in Calcutta but went to Borishal (district headquarters) instead. The leased land was in fact run by managers. Each Zamindar had a bureaucracy of his own called the Kacheri.
In South and South West India the establishment of British rule brought new problems with regards to land revenue settlement. The officials new that in these regions there were no zamindars with large estates through whom settlement of land revenue could be made and that the introduction of the zamindar system would upset the existing state of affaris. Many Madras officials like Munroe thus suggested that the settlement should be made directly with the cultivator. He also pointed out that under permanent settlement the company was financially dependant on the Zamindars as they had to share part of the revenue with the zamindars and could not gain of the growing income from the land. Moreover the cultivator was left at the mercy of the Zamindar who could oppress him at will. Thus under the newly developed Ryotwari system the cultivator was seen as the owner of his land and as the one directly responsible to the government for the payment of revenue. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Ryotwari system was introduced into all parts of Bombay and Madras residency.
The ryotwari settlement was not a permanent one. Revenue assessments were to be revised every 20 to 30 years. The system was a feild assessment system wherein the tax payable on each feild by a government officer through a survey of the land and an estimate of its usual produce.After 1870, however, the system was extended to many areas and often the revenue came to be fixed in an arbitrary manner. The share of percentage of harvest realized by the government each year varied little since soil valuation remained fixed. Only floods, drought or locust to coerce the government into forgoing it fixed demands.
The ryotwari system differed from the Zamindari and Mahalwari settlements. As we have seen before in the Zamindari system proprietary rights were given permanently to some individuals as long as they paid the revenue whereas in the Mahalwari system the government collected, a fixed amount, a joint rent from each village and in the ryotwari system too there were no non-governmental agents between the government and the village.
The ryotwari settlement was first tried in the Madras presidency in the 1790s but due to opposition was abandoned in favour of permanent settlement in 1802. In the 1870s the British were forced to restore a revised Ryotwari settlement.
In South India, the british were looking for political stability and thus had to take into account traditional rights such as the Mirasi rights, Inam rights and rights over forests. In 1792 they started the Royatwari system after surveying individual fields and collecting revenue directly. The essential procedures of the system was the each feild had to be surveyed and its output determined. Each feild was under a ryot. Initially the revenue rates were 50% on dry lands and 3/5th on wet lands but later changed to 33% and 50 % respectively. But since the settlement was fixed for 20-30 years, the prolonged fall in prices in the 20s and the 30s may have increased the burden of the peasantry.
The revenue was demanded in cash and according to some this forced the peasantry to go to the market and sell his crop. However even before the British land revenue was collected in cash and as long as the cash rates were the exact equivalents of the rates in India, the surplus extracted would be the same. A last point to note is that unlike the earlier government, the British did not pay their soldiers and officials in grain or store this grain.
In the Bombay Presidency area, initially the British allowed, the old system to continue but a number of the officials were radical in outlook and hence the Ryotwari system was introduced. Initially the British took the highest rates of revenue under the Maratha period as their standard rate and thus had a number of repercussions- crop failure, fall in prices, desertion of land and increase in waste lands.Also the British system led to a decline in the prestige of the moneylender. But since it was realized that the revenue burden would have to be reduced, a new system of survey, the Bombay system, was introduced in 1835 and this formally introduced Rytowari.
The settlement officer fixed the assessment for the whole region taking into account, what it had paid in the recent past, expecting increases in prices and output over 30 years during which the rates would remain fixed, irrigation and soil type. This total was then subdivided among the villages. The assessment would be revised every thirty years, no additional taxes would be levied for improvement made by the occupant but he would forfeit his lands if he did not pay land revenue. Land could be freely alienated and transferred till 1835. The prestige and social status of hereditary officials was lowered due to cutting down of the prerequisites and functions.
There is a lot of disagreement as to the actual extent of the Ryotwari settlement and its consequences. According to the conventional line of argument this policy swept away the village elite groups and eliminated their roles and intermediaries. However, recent research has shown that the word, ryot which has been identified with the landless labourer should be identified with the high caste elite of the village, both rich and poor.
Initially the revenue collectors were a critical part of the patils and the other village leaders but soon on remedial measures were taken after 1819 and the collectors were enjoined to guard against the infractions of established land holdings in each district.
Another force was caste and the company was forced to recognize caste priveleges . Read allowed remissions of revenue to Brahmins and even employed them in administration. Munro was against this policy initially but later realized that the high castes were very important and thus the policy of recognizing caste privelges was continued. Thus the ryotwari settlement from 1792 onwards did not really change the social fabric- thr ryots right to cultivate the land was established but to what extent he was liberated from the influence of the headman was doubtful.
The ryotwari settlement did not bring into existence the system of private ownership as the number of zamindars were replaced by one big zamindar- the state. Also, the land revenue was exhorbitant and the government had the right to enhance the revenue at will and the ryot had to pay reveneue even if the procedure was destroyed by drought or flood.
The ryotwari settlement as an agreement made directly between the government and the ryots needs to be examined while distinguishing between labourers, lower ryots, upper ryots and also remembering that the old rights and priveleges of the headsmen and other officials and of Brahmins were maintained. Moreover the government itself was a beureacracy , a complex hierarchy with a complex strata of officials who came from many communities and help varied aspirations. There thus remained as many intermediaries as before.
By 1855 there was an urgent need for reform as the old system of high assessments and frequent revisions had a very harmful effect. It was held that cultivators be oppressed, fraud be encouraged and excessive interference by government officials led to the rise of pauper ryots.
Bibliography
Ranajit Guha, A rule of property in Bengal
T.R Metcalf, Land Landlord and the British Raj
R.E Frykenberg, Land control and social structure in Indian History
Burton Stein, The making of agrarian policy in british India