Ruling the Countryside

Once the Company won the right to collect Bengal's revenue, it faced a new question: how to squeeze the most money out of the land. The answers it tried (a series of land-revenue systems) reshaped the Indian countryside, often with disastrous results for the peasant. Alongside revenue, the Company forced villagers to grow crops it could sell abroad, above all indigo. These systems are heavily tested because they explain why colonial India grew so poor.

The Company ruled the countryside under a legal framework set in London. Parliament worried that a trading company was governing millions of people, so it stepped in repeatedly with Acts that tightened control over the Company and reshaped its government in India.

• Regulating Act (1773): the first parliamentary check on the Company. It created the post of Governor General of Bengal, with Warren Hastings as the first holder, and gave him supervisory power over Bombay and Madras.
• Pitt's India Act (1784): set up a Board of Control in London to oversee the Company's political affairs. This created a system of dual control, the Company and the Crown together.
• Charter Act of 1793: renewed the Company's charter and continued its trade monopoly for twenty more years.
• Charter Act of 1813: ended the Company's monopoly over Indian trade, opening India to all British merchants. The monopoly over tea and the China trade remained.
• Charter Act of 1833: redesignated the Governor General of Bengal as the Governor General of India, centralising all civil, military and revenue authority in one office. Lord William Bentinck was the first Governor General of India. The Act also ended the Company's commercial functions, making it a purely administrative body.
• Charter Act of 1853: the last charter renewal. It separated the legislative and executive functions of the Governor General's council and introduced open competition for the civil services.

For the exam, remember the one-line identity of each Act. The Regulating Act created the Governor General of Bengal. The Charter Act of 1833 turned that office into the Governor General of India.

The first major experiment was the Permanent Settlement, introduced in 1793 by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. It was later extended to Banaras and northern Madras.

Under it, the zamindars (landlords) were made the owners of the land. They were responsible for collecting rent from the peasants and paying a fixed sum to the Company. The key feature, as the name says, was that the revenue was fixed permanently. It would never be raised, no matter how much the harvest grew.

The working rules mattered:

• Zamindar's share: he kept about one-tenth to one-eleventh of the collection and passed the rest to the Company.
• Property rights: he could sell, mortgage or pass on the land.
• Sunset Clause (1794): if he failed to pay by sunset on the due date, his estate was auctioned off.
• Pattas: the cultivators became mere tenants. The zamindar was supposed to issue them written agreements, called pattas, but rarely did.

The settlement failed badly for everyone:

• The fixed demand was set so high that zamindars often could not pay, and their lands were sold off. In years of flood or drought many defaulted under the Sunset Clause.
• Because the demand never rose, the Company lost out when agriculture later expanded.
• The peasants suffered most, paying high rents to the zamindar with no security on the land.
• Absentee landlordism grew as merchants bought up auctioned estates. Hard-pressed zamindars sublet land in small lots (patni taluq), starting a chain of subinfeudation that squeezed the peasant further.
• Zamindars had no incentive to improve the land. They only extracted rent, reducing the peasantry to serfdom.

The settlement changed the legal character of land itself. For the first time, the zamindar held a legally recognised, saleable property right in his estate. Cornwallis paired this with a new structure of civil courts to enforce contracts and property claims. The combination produced a flood of litigation. Zamindars sued ryots over rents and evictions. Buyers and ruined zamindars fought over auctioned estates. Every claim on land could now be contested in court, so disputes multiplied.

The cause of this surge is precisely the point to remember. Litigation rose because the new property rights and the new courts created things to sue over. It did not rise because the settlement made the zamindar stronger against the ryot, or because it made the Company the overlord of the zamindars, or because the courts had become more efficient.

Learning from Bengal, the Company tried different systems elsewhere.

The Ryotwari System, devised by Thomas Munro and Alexander Read, settled the revenue directly with the cultivator, the ryot (peasant). There was no zamindar in between. It began in the Madras Presidency, where Munro became Governor in 1820, and was then extended to Bombay and Assam. Ownership and occupancy rights were vested in the ryot, who could sublet or sell the land. The revenue was revised periodically rather than fixed forever, in settlements of about thirty years, so it could be raised when production rose.

The Ryotwari demand was very high. Munro set it at one-third of the gross produce, and in Bombay it stood at 55 per cent of net produce. Faulty surveys led to over-assessment. The Madras Torture Commission Report (1855), an official inquiry, exposed the coercion and torture used to extract the tax. In theory the ryot was a free peasant proprietor. In practice the high, inflexible demand mired him in poverty and debt.

The surveys behind these settlements were not a British invention. Assessing land revenue by soil type and crop quality was an old Indian practice. Rulers such as Sher Shah and the Mughals had long graded fields by the soil and the crop and fixed the demand accordingly. The British surveys merely continued and systematised this older method.

Two related facts often appear in the same trap question. Mobile cannons were already in use in Mughal-era warfare, so they too were no English introduction. And tobacco and red chillies reached India through the Portuguese, not the English. None of these three (soil-based assessment, mobile cannons, tobacco and chillies) was introduced into India by the English.

The Mahalwari System, used in the North-Western Provinces, the Central Provinces and Punjab, settled the revenue with the village as a whole. A mahal was a village or estate (the word means an estate), and the village headman, the lambardar, was responsible for collecting and paying it. The system began with Holt Mackenzie in 1819, was formalised by Regulation VII of 1822, and was simplified under William Bentinck by the Regulation of 1833. Merttins Bird, a revenue official, is regarded as the father of land settlements in northern India. The village community was treated as the owner, and the demand was revised from time to time. The state's share was severe: 66 per cent of the rental value under Bentinck, later cut to 50 per cent. Because the headman acted as the link to the government, though without a zamindar's rights, the system is often called a "modified zamindari".

So the three systems differed mainly in who paid the revenue: the zamindar (Permanent), the individual ryot (Ryotwari), or the village (Mahalwari). By area, Ryotwari covered about 51 per cent of British territory, Mahalwari about 30 per cent, and the Permanent Settlement about 19 per cent.

Whatever the system, the underlying problem was the same: the revenue demand was too high and too rigid. It had to be paid in cash and on time, regardless of whether the harvest had been good or bad. In a bad year the peasant had to borrow from a moneylender to pay the demand. He fell into debt and might lose the land. The relentless drain of revenue left the countryside impoverished and contributed to repeated famines.

The settlements also changed what land itself meant. All three created a new form of private, saleable property in land, but the benefit went to landlords and moneylenders, not the tiller:

• Landlessness: land became saleable and mortgageable, so indebted peasants lost it to their creditors.
• Intermediaries: absentee landlordism and a chain of rent-collecting middlemen grew up between the state and the cultivator.
• Ruined artisans: village artisans lost their old village support and turned to an already overburdened agriculture.
• Unrest: the discontent these systems bred fed directly into popular uprisings, including the revolt of 1857.

Besides revenue, the Company wanted Indian land to produce crops for the world market. The most notorious was indigo, a plant that yielded a rich blue dye in great demand in Europe's textile mills.

Indigo was grown in two ways:

• Nij cultivation: the planter grew indigo on land he directly controlled, using hired labourers.
• Ryoti cultivation: the planter forced the ryots to grow indigo on their own land under a contract. He gave them a small loan at the start of the season. The peasant was trapped: indigo exhausted the soil and left no room for food crops. The debt was never cleared.

The ryoti system was deeply exploitative, and the peasants came to hate it.

In 1859 the indigo ryots of Bengal rose in revolt, an event known as the Blue Rebellion. They refused to grow indigo, attacked the planters' factories, and were supported by some zamindars and by sympathetic intellectuals and newspapers.

The government feared another large uprising so soon after 1857. It set up the Indigo Commission to investigate. The Commission held the planters guilty and told the ryots they could refuse to grow indigo. Indigo cultivation in Bengal collapsed. The planters shifted to Bihar. Decades later, Mahatma Gandhi took up the indigo peasants' cause there in the Champaran satyagraha of 1917.