Colonialism and the Countryside

The East India Company won the diwani (the right to collect revenue) of Bengal in 1765. Land revenue was its main income, so its first big experiments — a new regime of land rights and a new revenue system — began in the Bengal countryside and spread west as its territories grew. The book takes three snapshots: the zamindars of Bengal under the Permanent Settlement (1790s–1800s); the Rajmahal hills, where forest-dwelling Paharias and incoming Santhal settlers met (1770s–1850s); and the Bombay Deccan, where indebted ryots rose against moneylenders in 1875. Its subtitle — Exploring Official Archives — is the second thread: revenue records, survey journals, parliamentary reports and enquiry commissions, each read with its author’s purpose in mind.

• Links in this series: lehs204 (the Mughal countryside — raiyat, zamindars, jama — which this chapter’s colonial order replaced); keec101 (our Economics chapter on the colonial economy — Permanent Settlement, ryotwari and mahalwari in outline, commercialisation and the drain); lehs302 (the revolt of 1857, whose ‘spectre’ haunted officials in 1875); lehs303 (peasant satyagrahas under Gandhi).
• Earlier reading: Class 8 Our Pasts III, ‘Ruling the Countryside’ (Permanent Settlement, mahalwari, ryotwari, indigo) and ‘Tribals, Dikus and the Vision of a Golden Age’ (shifting cultivation, dikus, Birsa Munda).
• UPSC: GS1 modern history — land-revenue settlements, the Santhal rebellion, tribal and peasant movements, commercialisation of agriculture. Prelims has asked about Cornwallis’s settlement (1988, 2011, 2024), ryotwari (1993, 2012), the causes of tribal insurrection (2011), measures after the Santhal uprising (2018), Tebhaga (2013) and the order of 19th-century revolts (1999); Mains asked in 2023 how colonial rule affected tribals and how they responded.

• Bengal: Permanent Settlement 1793 (Cornwallis) with rajas and taluqdars as zamindars; demand fixed for ever; Sunset Law; Burdwan auction 1797 — over 95% of sales fictitious; over 75% of zamindaris changed hands.
• Why defaults: high demand, depressed prices, rigid punctual payment, curbed powers. Survival: benami sales, estates put in women’s names, lathyals, ryots as loyal proja. Jotedars (rich peasants, North Bengal) with adhiyars/bargadars undercut zamindars.
• Fifth Report (submitted 1813, 1,002 pages): invaluable but written to criticise Company misrule — it exaggerated the zamindars’ collapse.
• Rajmahal hills: Paharias (hoe, shifting cultivation, forest, raids and tribute) vs Santhals (plough, settled rice and cotton). 1770s extermination → 1780s Cleveland’s pacification → Damin-i-Koh 1832 → Santhal revolt 1855–56 → Santhal Pargana.
• Bombay Deccan: ryotwari — revenue settled with the ryot, resurveyed every 30 years (Ricardo); 1820s harsh demand, 1832–34 famine, mounting debt; cotton boom 1861–65, then credit dries up and demand rises 50–100%.
• 1875: ryots at Supa (Poona) burn sahukars’ bahi khatas and bonds; customs broken (interest above principal), Limitation Law 1859 turned around; Deccan Riots Commission (report 1878) blamed moneylenders, not revenue.

An auction in Burdwan. In 1797 several mahals (estates) of the Raja of Burdwan (present-day Bardhaman) were publicly auctioned because he had piled up huge arrears. The Permanent Settlement had come into operation in 1793: the Company fixed what each zamindar had to pay and auctioned the estates of defaulters. The Collector then found that many buyers were the raja’s own servants and agents; over 95 per cent of the sale was fictitious, and the raja stayed in control. Burdwan was not alone — over 75 per cent of zamindaris changed hands after the Settlement.

Why a permanent settlement? By the 1770s Bengal’s rural economy was in crisis — recurrent famines and falling output. Officials reasoned that agriculture, trade and revenue could all grow if investment was encouraged by securing property rights and fixing the revenue demand for ever: the Company would get a regular flow of revenue, and investors could keep the profit from improvements because the state would not raise its claim. They hoped for a class of yeomen farmers and rich landowners with capital and enterprise — a class, nurtured by the British, that would also be loyal to the Company. After long debate the settlement was made with the rajas and taluqdars, now classified as zamindars. Under this definition the zamindar was not a landowner in the village but a revenue collector of the state. A zamindari could cover many villages (sometimes 400), treated as one revenue estate; the zamindar collected rent from the villages, paid the fixed revenue and kept the difference — and faced auction if he failed to pay.

Why zamindars defaulted. Officials expected a fixed demand to give zamindars security and a motive to improve. Instead, in the early decades unpaid balances piled up, for four reasons NCERT lists: (1) the initial demand was very high, because the Company, unable ever to raise it, wanted to cover future price rises and expanding cultivation; (2) it was imposed in the 1790s, when agricultural prices were depressed, so ryots could not pay rent; (3) the revenue was invariable regardless of the harvest and had to be paid punctually — by the Sunset Law, if payment did not arrive by sunset of the due date, the zamindari was liable to auction; (4) the Settlement limited the zamindar’s power: his troops were disbanded, customs duties abolished, his cutcheries (courts) put under a Company Collector; he lost control of local justice and police, and the collectorate became a rival centre of authority. In one case an official was told to ‘destroy all the influence and the authority’ of a defaulting raja.

Collecting rent was a perennial problem. The zamindar’s officer, the amlah, came to the village at rent time, but bad harvests and low prices made payment hard, and ryots sometimes deliberately delayed. Rich ryots and village headmen — jotedars and mandals — were happy to see the zamindar in trouble. The zamindar could prosecute defaulters, but the courts were slow: in Burdwan alone over 30,000 suits for arrears of rent were pending in 1798. (NCERT notes that ‘ryot’ is the British spelling of raiyat, and that Bengal ryots did not always cultivate themselves but leased land to under-ryots.)

The jotedars. Francis Buchanan’s survey of Dinajpur in North Bengal describes a class of rich peasants, the jotedars, who by the early 19th century held vast lands — sometimes several thousand acres — and controlled local trade and moneylending. Much of their land was worked by sharecroppers — adhiyars or bargadars — who brought their own ploughs and handed over half the produce. Unlike zamindars, who often lived in towns, jotedars lived in the villages and directly controlled many poor villagers. They resisted zamindars’ efforts to raise the village jama, obstructed zamindari officials, mobilised dependent ryots and delayed payments; when estates were auctioned, jotedars were often among the buyers. Strongest in North Bengal, such rich peasants and headmen — called haoladars, gantidars or mandals elsewhere — rose across Bengal and weakened zamindari authority.

The zamindars resist. Their authority did not collapse; new pressures produced new strategies. The best known is the fictitious sale. The Burdwan raja first transferred part of his zamindari to his mother, since the Company had decreed that women’s property would not be taken over. Then his agents manipulated the auctions: revenue was withheld, arrears allowed to grow, and when part of the estate came up for sale the raja’s men outbid everyone — and then did not pay, forcing a resale, again and again, until the state and rival bidders were exhausted and the estate went back to the zamindar at a low price. The full demand was never paid, and the arrears were rarely recovered. Between 1793 and 1801, four big zamindaris including Burdwan made benami purchases worth as much as Rs 30 lakh; over 15 per cent of all auction sales were fictitious.

Other defences. Outsiders who bought an estate could not always take possession: their agents were attacked by the old zamindar’s lathyals, and sometimes the ryots themselves resisted, feeling bound to their own zamindar as his proja (subjects) — a sale wounded their sense of identity and pride. From the early 19th century the price depression ended and payment rules became somewhat flexible, so surviving zamindars consolidated their power. Only in the Great Depression of the 1930s did they finally collapse, and the jotedars consolidated their hold on the countryside.

Many of these changes were documented in a report submitted to the British Parliament in 1813, the fifth in a series on the Company’s administration — the Fifth Report. It ran to 1,002 pages, over 800 of them appendices: petitions of zamindars and ryots, collectors’ reports, revenue statistics, and officials’ notes on revenue and judicial administration in Bengal and Madras.

Why it was written. From the mid-1760s the Company was closely watched in Britain. Groups opposed its monopoly of trade with India and China and wanted the Royal Charter revoked; private traders wanted a share; industrialists wanted the Indian market opened to British manufactures; politicians argued that the conquest of Bengal benefited only the Company, not the nation. Company greed and corruption were widely publicised. Parliament passed a series of Acts in the late 18th century to regulate Company rule, demanded regular reports and appointed committees. The Fifth Report, produced by a Select Committee, became the basis of intense debate on the nature of Company rule.

How to read it. For over a century and a half the Report shaped how rural Bengal in the late 18th century was understood. Its evidence is invaluable, but researchers working in zamindars’ own archives and district records show that, intent on criticising Company maladministration, it exaggerated the collapse of zamindari power and overestimated how much land zamindars were losing — as the benami buy-backs show, an auction did not always mean a zamindar was displaced.

Moving from the wet, settled plains of Bengal to drier hills, the book follows the expanding frontier of peasant farming as it swallowed pastures and forests in the Rajmahal hills. When Buchanan travelled there in the early 19th century, the hills seemed impenetrable and dangerous; people were hostile, would not talk to officials and often deserted their villages. His journal is a diary of a moment — vivid but limited — so historians turn to late-18th-century revenue records for the longer story.

Life of the Paharias. The revenue records call these hill people Paharias. They lived by forest produce and shifting cultivation: clearing a patch by cutting bushes and burning the undergrowth, sowing pulses and millets in soil enriched by the potash of the ash, scratching the ground lightly with hoes, cultivating a few years, then leaving it fallow and moving on. From the forest they collected mahua flowers for food, silk cocoons and resin for sale, and wood for charcoal; undergrowth and fallow grass fed their cattle. Hunters, shifting cultivators, gatherers, charcoal makers, silkworm rearers — their life was bound to the forest. They lived in hutments among tamarind groves, saw the whole region as their land — the basis of identity and survival — and resisted intruders. Chiefs kept the group united, settled disputes and led battles.

Raids, tribute and a fragile peace. From the hills the Paharias regularly raided the plains: to survive in scarce years, to assert power over settled communities, and to negotiate political relations with outsiders. Plains zamindars often bought peace with a regular tribute to hill chiefs; traders paid a small toll to use passes the Paharias controlled, and were then protected. This negotiated peace broke down in the last decades of the 18th century as the frontier of settled agriculture was aggressively extended: the British encouraged forest clearance, and zamindars and jotedars turned waste into rice fields. For the British, settled farming meant more land revenue, export crops and an ordered society; they associated forests with wildness and forest people with savagery, and wanted forests cleared and forest people ‘tamed’ into plough cultivators. As forests and pastures shrank, Paharia raids grew, carrying off grain and cattle.

Pacification and its effects. Under Cleveland’s scheme in the 1780s, chiefs got an annual allowance and were made responsible for their men’s conduct. Many refused; those who accepted often lost authority, seen as stipendiary chiefs — subordinate employees of the colonial government. The Paharias withdrew deep into the mountains and kept up a war with outsiders. So when Buchanan passed through in the winter of 1810–11, he met suspicion: memories of brutal repression made every white man seem part of a power destroying their life and seizing their forests and lands. By then a new danger had appeared — Santhal settlers clearing and ploughing the lower hills. If the hoe symbolised Paharia life, the settlers stood for the plough: ‘the battle between the hoe and the plough was a long one’.

The view from Gunjuriya. At the end of 1810 Buchanan crossed Ganjuria Pahar and reached a village whose land had been newly cleared. He saw a landscape transformed by ‘proper application of human labour’ and imagined how ‘glorious’ the country could be; the rocky soil was ‘uncommonly fine’ and he had never seen finer tobacco and mustard. The pioneers were the Santhals, who had moved in around 1800, displaced the hill people of the lower slopes and cleared the forest.

How the Santhals came. They had begun entering Bengal around the 1780s. Zamindars hired them to reclaim land; British officials invited them to settle in the Jangal Mahals. Having failed to turn the Paharias — who would not cut forests or touch the plough — into settled farmers, the British turned to the Santhals, who seemed ideal settlers. They were given land at the foot of the hills, and by 1832 a large area was demarcated as the Damin-i-Koh, declared the land of the Santhals, where they were to live as settled plough cultivators. The grant required at least one-tenth of the area to be cleared and cultivated within the first ten years. The territory was surveyed and mapped and enclosed with boundary pillars, separating it from both the plains and the Paharias’ hills.

Expansion. Santhal villages grew from 40 in 1838 to 1,473 by 1851; their population from about 3,000 to over 82,000 — and more revenue flowed to the Company. Santhal myths and songs of the 19th century tell of a long history of travel, a tireless search for a place to settle; in the Damin that journey seemed to end. The Paharias, cut off from the lower hills and valleys, were confined to the dry, barren, rocky upper hills. Shifting cultivation needs fresh land and naturally fertile soil, so with the best soils now inside the Damin they could not sustain it, and forest clearing hurt the hunters — a long-term impoverishment. The Santhals, by contrast, gave up mobility, grew commercial crops and dealt with traders and moneylenders.

Land slipping away — and revolt. Soon the Santhals found the land they had cleared slipping from their hands: the state levied heavy taxes, moneylenders — dikus — charged high interest and seized land for unpaid debts, and zamindars asserted control over the Damin. By the 1850s the Santhals felt the time had come to rebel against zamindars, moneylenders and the colonial state, to create an ideal world where they would rule. After the Santhal Revolt (1855–56), the Santhal Pargana was created, carving 5,500 square miles out of Bhagalpur and Birbhum districts; the state hoped that a new territory with some special laws would conciliate the Santhals.

Buchanan was a Company employee. He travelled with a large retinue — draughtsmen, surveyors, palanquin bearers, coolies — at the Company’s expense, because it needed the information; he had specific instructions on what to look for and record, and villagers saw him as an agent of the sarkar. As the Company consolidated power and expanded commerce, it searched for resources to control and exploit, sending geologists, geographers, botanists and medical men. Buchanan obsessively studied rocks, strata and soils, looked for commercially valuable minerals — iron ore, mica, granite, saltpetre — and watched local salt-making and iron-mining. When he described a landscape, he described how it could be transformed and made more productive: which crops, which trees to cut, which to plant. His idea of what was necessary came from the Company’s commercial concerns and modern Western notions of progress, so he was inevitably critical of forest dwellers’ ways and wanted forests turned into farmland.

Why not a permanent settlement again? As British rule spread beyond Bengal, the Permanent Settlement was rarely extended. After 1810 agricultural prices rose, swelling Bengal zamindars’ incomes while the state’s demand stayed fixed; keen to maximise land revenue, the government made temporary settlements in territories annexed in the 19th century. Ideas mattered too. By the 1820s the economist David Ricardo was celebrated in England, and officials had learnt his ideas at college. On a Ricardian view, a landowner should claim only the ‘average rent’ of the time; any surplus above it should be taxed, or cultivators would turn into rentiers who did not invest in the land. Many officials thought Bengal proved the point — its zamindars seemed to have become rentiers living on leases.

The ryotwari settlement. In the Bombay Deccan, revenue was settled directly with the ryot. The average income from different types of soil 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 raised, so the demand was no longer permanent.

Revenue demand and peasant debt. The first settlement, in the 1820s, demanded so much that in many places peasants deserted their villages, especially where soils were poor and rainfall uncertain. Collectors eager to impress superiors extracted payment with utmost severity: a defaulter’s crops were seized and the whole village fined. In the 1830s things worsened: prices fell sharply after 1832 and stayed low for over fifteen years, and the famine of 1832–34 killed one-third of the Deccan’s cattle and, NCERT says, half the human population. Survivors had no stocks; arrears mounted. To pay revenue, eat, buy ploughs and cattle or marry their children, ryots borrowed — and once in debt found it hard to get out, needing loans even for daily needs and production. By the 1840s officials found alarming indebtedness everywhere. From the mid-1840s, admitting that the 1820s settlements had been harsh and rigid, officials moderated the demand; after 1845 prices recovered, and peasants extended cultivation into pasture — but needed more ploughs, cattle, seed and land, so they turned again to the moneylender.

Then came the cotton boom. Before the 1860s, three-fourths of Britain’s raw cotton imports came from America, a dependence that worried British manufacturers. The Cotton Supply Association was founded in 1857 and the Manchester Cotton Company in 1859 to encourage cotton growing wherever it would grow; India — with suitable soil, climate and cheap labour — was the obvious alternative supplier for Lancashire. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, American imports fell to under 3 per cent of normal — from over 2,000,000 bales (of 400 lb) in 1861 to 55,000 in 1862. Bombay merchants toured the cotton districts; export merchants gave advances to urban sahukars, who lent to rural moneylenders who promised to deliver the crop. In a boom, credit flows easily. Deccan ryots were offered Rs 100 advance per acre planted with cotton and long-term loans; cotton acreage doubled between 1860 and 1864, and by 1862 over 90 per cent of Britain’s cotton imports came from India. But only some rich peasants gained; for most, cotton meant heavier debt.

Credit dries up. Indian merchants dreamt of permanently displacing America — the Bombay Gazette asked in 1861 what could stop India supplanting the ‘Slave States’ as Lancashire’s supplier. By 1865 the dream was over: the war ended, American production revived and Indian exports declined. Merchants and sahukars stopped long-term credit, restricted advances and demanded repayment. At the same time the next revenue settlement fell due — and raised the demand dramatically, by 50 to 100 per cent. With prices falling and cotton fields disappearing, ryots turned once more to the moneylender, who now refused loans, doubting their ability to repay.

Account books are burnt. The movement began at Supa, a large market village in Poona (Pune) district where many shopkeepers and moneylenders lived. On 12 May 1875 ryots from the surrounding area attacked shopkeepers, demanded their bahi khatas (account books) and debt bonds, burnt them, looted grain shops and sometimes set fire to sahukars’ houses. The revolt spread to Ahmednagar and over the next two months across about 6,500 sq km and more than 30 villages, always with the same pattern; terrified sahukars fled, leaving their property. Officials saw ‘the spectre of 1857’; police posts were set up in villages, troops called in, 951 people arrested and many convicted, but control took several months.

The experience of injustice. What enraged ryots was not only debt and dependence but the moneylenders’ insensitivity — the breach of customary norms. Moneylending was old, and moneylenders were powerful, but custom regulated them; one general norm was that interest could not exceed the principal — the meaning of ‘fair interest’. Under colonial rule this broke down: in one case the Commission investigated, a moneylender had charged over Rs 2,000 interest on a loan of Rs 100. Ryots complained, petition after petition, of such exactions and of moneylenders manipulating laws and forging accounts.

Bonds and the Limitation Law. In 1859 the British passed a Limitation Law making loan bonds valid for only three years, to check the build-up of interest. Moneylenders turned it around: they made ryots sign a new bond every three years, entering the unpaid balance — original loan plus accumulated interest — as the new principal, on which fresh interest ran. They also refused receipts, entered fictitious figures, bought harvests cheap and finally took over peasants’ property. Deeds and bonds became symbols of the new oppression. They had been rare before; the British distrusted informal understandings and wanted every transaction stated clearly in a contract enforceable by law. Peasants signed and thumb-printed documents they could not read, feared the written word, yet had no choice — lenders would not lend without legal bonds.

The Deccan Riots Commission. The Government of Bombay at first did not take the revolt seriously, but the Government of India, worried by the memory of 1857, pressed it to appoint a commission of enquiry. Its report — the Deccan Riots Report — was presented to Parliament in 1878. The commission held enquiries in the affected districts, recorded statements of ryots, sahukars and eyewitnesses, compiled statistics on revenue rates, prices and interest, and collated collectors’ reports — a rich archive. But it reflects official concerns. Asked specifically to judge whether the government’s revenue demand caused the revolt, it concluded that it did not: the moneylenders were to blame. NCERT reads this as part of a pattern in colonial records — a persistent reluctance to admit that popular discontent could arise from government action. Official reports are invaluable but must be set beside newspapers, unofficial accounts, legal records and oral sources.

Q1–5: 100–150 words. Q6–9: short essays of 250–300 words. Try each first.

Numbers

One-liners

• Permanent Settlement: revenue fixed for ever with zamindars, who became the state’s revenue collectors.
• Four reasons for default: high demand, low prices, Sunset Law rigidity, curtailed powers.
• Zamindars survived by benami sales, women’s property, lathyals and their ryots’ loyalty.
• Jotedars — rich, village-based peasant-traders-moneylenders — undercut zamindars, strongest in North Bengal.
• The Fifth Report is invaluable but exaggerated the zamindars’ collapse.
• Hoe vs plough: Paharias pushed uphill; Santhals settled in the Damin-i-Koh, then revolted in 1855–56.
• Buchanan saw landscapes through the Company’s commercial eyes: forests as future fields.
• Ryotwari: settled with the ryot, resurveyed every 30 years — Ricardo against rentiers.
• Cotton boom of the Civil War brought easy credit; its end brought refusal, higher revenue and the 1875 riots.
• The Deccan Riots Commission blamed moneylenders, not revenue — read official sources with care.

Traps to avoid

• Over 95% fictitious = the 1797 Burdwan auction; over 15% = all auction sales 1793–1801.
• Sunset Law: miss the date → auction; ryotwari gave no remission for bad harvests (UPSC 2024).
• Jotedars were rich peasants, not zamindars; bargadars were their sharecroppers paying half the crop.
• Damin-i-Koh 1832 came before the revolt; the Santhal Pargana came after it.
• Santhals were plough settlers; Paharias were the shifting cultivators of the hoe.
• Deccan riots targeted sahukars’ bonds and account books, not the British.
• The Commission said revenue demand was not the cause — NCERT treats that as an official bias.
• Timeline says 1818 for the first Deccan settlement; the text says the 1820s (1818 = annexation).
• Source 10’s ‘Rs 1000’ is a slip — the figures fit a Rs 100 loan.
• The Fifth Report: NCERT says 1813; most references say 1812.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Permanent Settlement: Cornwallis and a loyal landed class (1988), litigation after 1793 (2011), the Sunset-Law auction (2024). Keep the four default reasons and the survival tactics ready for statement questions.
• Ryotwari: Madras and Bombay Presidencies (1993); direct payment, pattas, survey and assessment (2012); no remission for bad harvests (2024).
• Tribal and peasant risings: middlemen as the common factor in tribal insurrections (2011); measures after the Santhal uprising (2018); chronology Santhal → 1857 → indigo → Deccan riots (1999); sharecroppers and Tebhaga (2013).
• Build a terms table: zamindar, taluqdar, jotedar, bargadar, lathyal, benami, proja, Damin-i-Koh, diku, ryotwari, sahukar, Limitation Law.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 2023 asked how colonial rule affected tribals and how they responded: use Paharias (extermination, pacification, retreat) and Santhals (invited settlers → dikus → Hul → Santhal Pargana) as the core case, then widen to later movements (lehs302 and beyond).
• Frame for agrarian questions: policy design (fixed vs periodic demand; zamindar vs ryot) → market shocks (1790s slump, 1832 fall, 1861–65 cotton) → credit and law (bonds, courts, Limitation Law) → resistance (benami, jotedars, Hul, 1875 riots) → official response (Fifth Report, Commission, special laws).
• Sources questions: the chapter is a model answer on reading official archives — author, purpose, bias, cross-checking with newspapers, petitions and oral sources. Attribute verdicts (the Commission, the Fifth Report) rather than stating them as fact.

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