Colonialism and the Countryside
• NCERT Chapter Name: Theme Nine – Colonialism and the Countryside: Exploring Official Archives (Themes in Indian History, Part III).
• Central Theme: The chapter examines what colonial rule meant to people in the countryside, through the zamindars of Bengal, the Paharias and Santhals of the Rajmahal hills, and the ryots of the Bombay Deccan. It shows how the English East India Company (E.I.C.) established its raj in the countryside, implemented its revenue policies, and how these policies changed everyday lives.
• It also shows that people were not only subject to laws but resisted them by acting on what they believed to be just, thereby modifying their consequences. It further teaches how to read official archives (revenue records, surveys, journals, enquiry commission reports) critically.
Topic-wise Detailed Summary
Bengal and the Zamindars
An auction in Burdwan (1797)
• Colonial rule was first established in Bengal, where the earliest attempts were made to reorder rural society and set up a new regime of land rights and a new revenue system.
• In 1797, a public auction of several mahals (estates) of the Raja of Burdwan (present-day Bardhaman) was held. The Permanent Settlement had come into operation in 1793, and the Raja had accumulated huge arrears.
• The Collector found that many buyers were the Raja’s servants and agents. Over 95 per cent of the sale was fictitious; the Raja remained in control of his zamindari.
• Over 75 per cent of the zamindaris changed hands after the Permanent Settlement.
The problem of unpaid revenue – the Permanent Settlement
• Background: By the 1770s the rural economy of Bengal was in crisis, with recurrent famines and declining agricultural output.
• Aim: Officials hoped to encourage investment in agriculture by securing rights of property and permanently fixing the rates of revenue demand. This would give the Company a regular flow of revenue, and give entrepreneurs assurance of profit.
• Expected outcome: Emergence of a class of yeomen farmers and rich landowners with capital and enterprise, loyal to the Company.
• Who was settled with: After prolonged debate, the settlement was made with the rajas and taluqdars of Bengal, who were classified as zamindars and paid a revenue fixed in perpetuity. In this definition the zamindar was not a landowner in the village but a revenue Collector of the state.
• A zamindari could have several (sometimes as many as 400) villages. All villages in a zamindari formed one revenue estate. The zamindar collected rent, paid revenue to the Company, and retained the difference. Failure to pay meant auction of the estate.
Why zamindars defaulted on payments
1. Initial demands were very high, pegged high to minimise the anticipated loss of not claiming a share of increased income when prices rose and cultivation expanded.
2. The high demand was imposed in the 1790s when agricultural prices were depressed, making it hard for ryots to pay the zamindar.
3. Revenue was invariable regardless of the harvest and had to be paid punctually. Under the Sunset Law, if payment did not arrive by sunset of the specified date, the zamindari was liable to be auctioned.
4. The Permanent Settlement initially limited the zamindar’s power to collect rent and manage his zamindari. His troops were disbanded, customs duties abolished, and cutcheries (courts) brought under the Collector. Zamindars lost the power to organise local justice and local police; the collectorate emerged as an alternative centre of authority.
• Rent collection was a perennial problem. The zamindar’s officer, usually the amlah, collected rent. Jotedars and mandals (rich ryots and village headmen) were happy to see the zamindar in trouble. Judicial process was long drawn: in Burdwan alone over 30,000 suits for arrears were pending in 1798.
The rise of the Jotedars
• Francis Buchanan’s survey of Dinajpur (North Bengal) describes the jotedars, a class of rich peasants who by the early nineteenth century held vast areas of land (sometimes several thousand acres).
• They controlled local trade and moneylending. Much of their land was cultivated by sharecroppers (adhiyars or bargadars) who brought their own ploughs, laboured in the fields and gave half the produce to the jotedar.
• Why jotedars were more powerful than zamindars in the village: zamindars often lived in urban areas, while jotedars lived in the villages and had direct control over poor villagers. They resisted attempts to increase the jama, obstructed zamindari officials, mobilised dependent ryots and deliberately delayed revenue payments. Jotedars were often purchasers at auctions of zamindari estates.
• Most powerful in North Bengal; elsewhere called haoladars, gantidars or mandals. Their rise weakened zamindari authority.
The zamindars resist
• Fictitious sale (a series of manoeuvres): the Raja of Burdwan first transferred part of his zamindari to his mother, since the Company decreed that women’s property would not be taken over. His agents then manipulated auctions: revenue was deliberately withheld, and the zamindar’s men outbid others but refused to pay the purchase money, so the estate was resold repeatedly, until it was sold at a low price back to the zamindar. The Company rarely recovered unpaid balances.
• Between 1793 and 1801, four big zamindaris including Burdwan made benami purchases yielding as much as Rs 30 lakh. Over 15 per cent of total auction sales were fictitious.
• Outside buyers could not always take possession: their agents were attacked by the former zamindar’s lathyals, and ryots themselves resisted, as they saw the zamindar as an authority and themselves as his proja (subjects).
• By the early nineteenth century the price depression was over, revenue rules were made somewhat flexible, and zamindars’ power over villages strengthened. Zamindari power finally collapsed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when jotedars consolidated their power.
The Fifth Report
• Submitted to the British Parliament in 1813; the fifth of a series of reports on the administration and activities of the E.I.C. It ran to 1002 pages, of which over 800 were appendices (petitions of zamindars and ryots, collectors’ reports, statistical tables on revenue returns, notes on revenue and judicial administration of Bengal and Madras).
• Context: Groups in Britain opposed the Company’s monopoly over trade with India and China and wanted revocation of the Royal Charter. Private traders and British industrialists wanted access to the Indian market. A series of Acts were passed to regulate Company rule, and a Select Committee produced the Fifth Report.
• Historiographical caution: Intent on criticising the Company’s maladministration, the Fifth Report exaggerated the collapse of traditional zamindari power and overestimated the scale on which zamindars were losing land. Official reports must be read carefully, asking who wrote them and why.
The Hoe and the Plough – The Paharias and the Santhals
Focus shifts from the wetlands of Bengal to the drier zones of the Rajmahal hills, where shifting agriculture was practised and the frontier of the peasant economy was expanding.
In the hills of Rajmahal – the Paharias
• Buchanan travelled in the early nineteenth century (winter of 1810-11). The hills seemed impenetrable; people were hostile, apprehensive of officials, and often deserted villages.
• Paharias lived around the Rajmahal hills, subsisting on forest produce and shifting cultivation. They cleared patches by cutting bushes and burning undergrowth, enriched by potash, grew pulses and millets, scratched the ground with hoes, then left it fallow and moved on.
• From forests they collected mahua (food), silk cocoons and resin (sale), and wood for charcoal. Their life was bound to the forest; they considered the entire region their land, the basis of identity and survival.
• Raids on the plains: Paharias raided settled agriculturists to survive in scarce years, to assert power, and to negotiate political relations. Zamindars paid tribute to hill chiefs; traders paid a toll to use the passes and were then protected. This negotiated peace was fragile.
• Colonial attitude: The British encouraged forest clearance; zamindars and jotedars turned uncultivated land into rice fields. The British wanted to enlarge land revenue, produce export crops and set up a settled, ordered society. They saw forest people as savage, unruly, primitive.
• Policy: 1770s – a brutal policy of extermination. 1780s – Augustus Cleveland, Collector of Bhagalpur, proposed pacification: chiefs got an annual allowance and were responsible for the conduct of their men. Many refused; those who accepted lost authority and were seen as stipendiary chiefs.
• The Paharias withdrew deep into the mountains. Santhals then poured in; the hoe symbolised Paharia life, the plough the settlers. “The battle between the hoe and the plough was a long one.”
The Santhals: Pioneer settlers
• Santhals came into Bengal around the 1780s. Zamindars hired them to reclaim land and British officials invited them to settle in the Jangal Mahals. Having failed to settle the Paharias, the British saw Santhals as ideal settlers. Buchanan found Santhals had moved into Gunjuriya around 1800.
• By 1832, a large area was demarcated as Damin-i-Koh, declared the land of the Santhals. At least one-tenth was to be cleared and cultivated within ten years. It was surveyed, mapped and enclosed with boundary pillars.
• Growth: Santhal villages rose from 40 (1838) to 1,473 (1851); population from 3,000 to over 82,000.
• Effect on Paharias: confined to dry, rocky upper hills; shifting agriculture and hunting were severely affected, causing long-term impoverishment.
• Santhal grievances: the state levied heavy taxes, moneylenders (dikus) charged high interest and seized land, and zamindars asserted control over Damin. By the 1850s the Santhals rebelled against zamindars, moneylenders and the colonial state to create an ideal world where they would rule. Sidhu Manjhi was a leader.
• After the Santhal Revolt (1855-56), Santhal Pargana was created, carving out 5,500 square miles from Bhagalpur and Birbhum, with special laws to conciliate the Santhals.
The accounts of Buchanan
• Buchanan was an employee of the E.I.C., travelled with draughtsmen, surveyors, palanquin bearers and coolies at Company expense, and had specific instructions about what to record. He was perceived as an agent of the sarkar.
• He obsessively recorded rocks, strata, minerals (iron ore, mica, granite, saltpetre), and salt-making and iron-ore-mining. He described landscapes in terms of how they could be made more productive, shaped by the Company’s commercial concerns and modern Western notions of progress. He was critical of forest dwellers’ lifestyles and felt forests had to become agricultural lands.
A Revolt in the Countryside– The Bombay Deccan
NCERT uses a peasant revolt as a lens because rebels express anger at perceived injustice, and states enquire into causes, producing records historians can explore.
Account books are burnt (1875)
• The movement began at Supa, a large market village in Poona (Pune) district, on 12 May 1875. Ryots attacked shopkeepers, demanded bahi khatas (account books) and debt bonds, burnt the khatas, looted grain shops and burnt some houses of sahukars.
• It spread to Ahmednagar and over two months to an area of 6,500 sq km, affecting over thirty villages. The pattern was constant: sahukars attacked, account books burnt, bonds destroyed; sahukars fled.
• Officials saw the spectre of 1857. Police posts were set up, troops called in, 951 people were arrested, and it took several months to restore control.
A new revenue system – Ryotwari
• The Permanent Settlement was rarely extended beyond Bengal. After 1810, agricultural prices rose, enlarging zamindars’ income, but the fixed demand meant the state could not claim a share. So temporary revenue settlements were made in territories annexed in the nineteenth century.
• Ricardian ideas: Officials in the 1820s were influenced by David Ricardo. A landowner should receive only the “average rent”; the surplus above it should be taxed by the state, otherwise cultivators would become rentiers. Officials thought Bengal confirmed this theory.
• Ryotwari settlement in the Bombay Deccan: revenue was settled directly with the ryot; the average income of different soils was estimated, the ryot’s revenue-paying capacity assessed, and a proportion fixed as the state’s share. Lands were resurveyed every 30 years and rates increased, so the demand was not permanent.
Revenue demand and peasant debt
• The first settlement in the 1820s was so high that peasants deserted villages. Collectors, keen to show efficiency, were severe: crops seized and fines imposed on the whole village.
• Prices fell sharply after 1832 and did not recover for over fifteen years. A famine in 1832-34 killed one-third of the cattle and half the human population of the Deccan. Unpaid balances mounted.
• Peasants borrowed to pay revenue and meet consumption and production needs; by the 1840s officials found alarming peasant indebtedness.
• By the mid-1840s, the demand was moderated, prices recovered after 1845, and cultivation expanded. Peasants again needed loans for ploughs, cattle, seeds and land.
Then came the cotton boom
• Before the 1860s, three-fourths of Britain’s raw cotton imports came from America. Britain founded the Cotton Supply Association (1857) and the Manchester Cotton Company (1859) to encourage cotton production worldwide. India had suitable soil, favourable climate and cheap labour.
• American Civil War (1861): imports from America fell from over 2,000,000 bales (400 lbs each) in 1861 to 55,000 bales in 1862. Bombay export merchants gave advances to urban sahukars, who extended credit to rural moneylenders.
• Ryots received Rs 100 advance per acre of cotton. Between 1860 and 1864 cotton acreage doubled; by 1862 over 90 per cent of Britain’s cotton imports came from India. Some rich peasants gained, but most were pushed into heavier debt.
Credit dries up
• The Bombay Gazette editor (1861) asked what could prevent India from supplanting the Slave States as the feeder of Lancashire. By 1865 the dream was over as American cotton revived and Indian exports declined.
• Merchants and sahukars restricted advances and demanded repayment. Meanwhile the new revenue settlement raised the demand by 50 to 100 per cent. Moneylenders refused loans.
The experience of injustice
• Ryots were enraged not just by debt but by moneylenders’ insensitivity, as they violated customary norms. A key norm was that interest could not be more than the principal. The Deccan Riots Commission found a case with over Rs 2,000 interest on a loan of Rs 100.
• Deeds of hire: indebted peasants gave up land, carts and animals, then hired back their own animals, signing a deed that stated they no longer owned them.
• Limitation Law of 1859: loan bonds valid for only three years, intended to check accumulation of interest. Moneylenders forced ryots to sign a new bond every three years, with the unpaid balance (loan plus interest) entered as the new principal.
• Moneylenders refused receipts, entered fictitious figures, acquired harvests at low prices and ultimately took peasants’ property. Deeds and bonds became symbols of the oppressive system. The British distrusted informal understandings and held that transactions must be clearly stated in legally enforceable contracts. Peasants feared the written word.
The Deccan Riots Commission
• The Government of Bombay initially did not take the revolt seriously, but the Government of India, worried by the memory of 1857, pressed it to set up a commission of enquiry. The Deccan Riots Report was presented to the British Parliament in 1878.
• The commission held enquiries in affected districts, recorded statements of ryots, sahukars and eyewitnesses, compiled statistics on revenue rates, prices and interest rates, and collated collectors’ reports.
• It was asked to judge whether the revenue demand caused the revolt, and concluded that government demand was not the cause; moneylenders were to blame. NCERT notes this reflects a persistent reluctance of the colonial government to admit that popular discontent arose from government action.
• Lesson on sources: Official reports are invaluable but must be read with care and juxtaposed with newspapers, unofficial accounts, legal records and, where possible, oral sources.
