Raj
Page 24
Railways were a different matter. Their champions agreed that they might, at a stroke, transform India for better and, as in Britain, provide an upsurge in economic growth. According to one lobbyist, railways would inject an ‘entirely new element of civilisation’ into the sub-continent and prove a ‘regenerating influence’ over its entire population.30 Another promised that the rail network would be welcomed by ‘the growing class of intelligent natives’, although they would be condemned by ‘a few, old, antiquated Hindus, who look upon every innovation with a feeling of horror’.31 Their sulking could be discounted. Railways were a blessing and travel would widen Indian horizons and bring caste barriers tumbling down.
The trouble was how to pay for them. In 1845, when Indian railway mania was getting under way, Lord Hardinge hoped that they might be financed by an allocation of £4–5 million of public money.32 The first Sikh war scuppered an idea which, in any case, ran counter to prevailing economic doctrines. These were formally upheld when Parliament insisted that the capital for Indian railways would come from private sources. Nonetheless, the Company was free to lure investors by offering its own funds as a guarantee for a very generous annual return of 5 per cent on all railway stock, irrespective of the company’s profitability. Shareholders were being given the equivalent of gilt-edged stocks, and the Indian railway companies were able to secure the cash needed for the initially heavy outlay on engines, rolling stock and construction. The East India Railway Company, established in 1849 to build the Calcutta–Agra–Delhi line, raised £10 million, and the smaller Great Indian Peninsular Railway Company secured £3.4 million for a network designed to open up the hinterland of Bombay. In the case of the former, the hidden subsidy was paid until 1866, after which the firm could afford to pay the full dividend from its profits.33
An appeal for investment in Indian railways delivered in 1849 by one of General Napier’s aides-de-camp regretted that the Company had made ‘so little progress in the physical improvement of India’.34 He was repeating the complaint made by another railway enthusiast, four years before:
Brilliant as is the prestige which hangs over our Indian empire, it must be confessed that it is still in a state of helpless and discreditable barbarism, many, many, centuries behind the example set by any other nation in civilised history.35
This was a source of national shame, but it was unavoidable.
None of those concerned with the remoulding of India had ever seriously calculated the intensity of popular attachment to familiar habits. They assumed that Indians would bow before superior reason and gladly accept what was for their own good. Nor did they take much account of the resistance to change, or, most important of all, the connection in the Indian mind between innovation and conversion. ‘The bigotry of Mussal-man maulavis [Muslim lawyers and theologians]’ was an obstacle to filling places in English schools in Bengal, where a fear of possible Christian indoctrination often outweighed the urge to learn the language, which would assure a pupil a post in the administration.36 Attempts by the Madras government to introduce agricultural shows of the kind which had so helped British farming foundered in 1856 because some peasants feared their cows’ milk yields might fall as a result of a journey. In one district, the ryots suspected that offers of prizes for the best rice was a government trick, contrived to compel everyone to eat boiled rice, a diet which would somehow lead to mass conversion.37
No doubt the officials who read these reports either sighed or shook with laughter. But Indian credulity was not as far-fetched as it might have seemed, for the eventual dominance of Christianity was widely seen by reformers as an objective which was both inevitable and desirable. As it was, the rehabilitation of India always had to take second place to the mundane but essential duties of the Company, the collection of taxes and the imposition of civil order.
3
Gradual and Mild
Correction: Taxing and
Policing India
I
Thomas Fortescue was a diligent, fair-minded and generous-spirited official attached to the Delhi residency, and a man ideally fitted to discover whether the Company’s system of revenue assessment and collection was working.1 In the late spring of 1819 he left Delhi for a lengthy tour of the villages to the north and west of the city. His employers were acutely conscious that they were the heirs general of the Mughal emperors whose most valuable legacy were the rights to tax their subjects. Their methods were far from perfect, and in many areas exactions were iniquitous. But the system could be improved through the labours of men like Fortescue, whose task was to balance the ability of the peasantry to pay with the needs of the Company.
Aware of the delicacy of his mission, he went to great lengths to put people at their ease, speaking directly and in their own language to zamindars, headmen and peasants. He and his party of servants and sepoys traversed a gently rolling countryside of fertile soil where the predominant ochre is broken by the dark greens of scattered trees, mostly thorn, shrubs and growing crops. Here and there are stretches of close bush, known as jungle, which still harbour game of all kinds and a few tigers. It was an area favoured by Indian and British sportsmen.
Following in his footsteps, one can still share his pleasure at the sight of small towns and villages with well-built houses which, together with the wells, tanks (reservoirs) and aqueducts, he took to be signs of ‘former abundance, population, security and happiness’. Fortescue was greeted by effusive Rajput zamindars full of praise for the ‘all-powerful government’ which, in less than twenty years, had eliminated banditry and the extortions of their former Maratha overlords. This was an overstatement, for Fortescue noticed that the Gujars still divided their time equally between farming and marauding, but believed that ‘gradual and mild correction’ would make them change their ways for the better. He was somewhat over-optimistic; the next generation of revenue officials was ordered to coax the Gujars into good habits by generous assessments and, when necessary, the seizure of the defaulter’s lands.2 Taxation was always a valuable means of social and political control.
Zamindari flattery turned to evasiveness and concealment of records whenever Fortescue or any other official attempted to obtain exact definitions of who held what and how much they owed the government. When the region’s revenue obligations had first been estimated eleven years before, the assessors found themselves stumbling through a maze of ancient tenures, obligations, usages and immunities. Everywhere, there was an understandable unwillingness to tell the truth, for to do so would burden a community with a tax liability for the next few years, or, in some regions, for ever. Alexander Read relied on a translator when he made his enquiries in the northern part of Kanara in 1800, but was certain that its inhabitants ‘play tricks and make a false settlement’. His colleague, Thomas Munro, was of like mind, and relied on spies to collect precise information.3
Often in exasperation, tax surveyors were driven to rely on the advice of local men of substance, landowners or village headmen. This was both a dangerous and a naïve expedient, for such men inevitably looked to their own interests and misled investigators. As an official guide to tax assessment of 1844 put it: ‘There is a great tendency amongst natives especially, to assess heavily the poor and industrious classes of cultivators and be more lenient to the powerful.’4 Quite so; and the results were calamitous for the ryots. Disparities abounded in many areas and came to light once the system was in operation. In one extreme case it was discovered in 1894 that the charge per acre for rice-growing lands in Malabar varied between less than one (8p) and 40 rupees (£3.20) an acre. This was not surprising since the original assessment of Malabar had been undertaken a hundred years before with the assistance of local landlords, whom the Company’s agents considered worth cultivating because of their influence. This made political sense, but the cost of such alliances of convenience was born by the Malabar peasantry whose holdings were highly taxed. Wealthier men, self-assessed, as it were, paid less and sometimes appeared to have exempted them
selves from all liability.5
The most formidable barrier between tax assessor and tax payer was the difference between British and Indian legal and philosophical perceptions of the rights of property. Like everyone else engaged in this field, Fortescue’s mind was filled with peculiarly British concepts of proprietary rights and obligations. In many respects his and his colleagues’ enquiries can be compared to those undertaken for that earlier, exhaustive catalogue of national resources, the Domesday Book. But there was one, highly significant difference. When William the Conqueror’s agents asked their questions, they did so in the knowledge that they and the Saxons shared many common ideas about the nature of land ownership.
No meeting of minds occurred between the Company’s inquisitors and Indians; instead there was confusion and mutual misunderstanding. Merely occupying and tilling land gave an Indian peasant a legitimate right to it, something which was unthinkable in Britain. Moreover, at this period, it was common for entire communities to migrate and set up new villages on unbroken land. And then there was the barrier of language. What, for instance, did Fortescue understand by a ‘bigha’, a unit of land he encountered many times during his journey. It could not be measured, nor could its owner’s title be defined in terms comprehensible to any British jurist. But an Indian understood what the word conveyed: it was an allocation of land whose produce could support a family, according to the needs of its caste.6 Likewise, Fortescue would have been puzzled by the frequent absence of the paraphernalia of deeds and tenancy agreements which were essential for anyone who occupied land in Britain. Indians could manage without them, but they had an elaborate language of land occupation; there were 162 different words and phrases classifying tenure in Bengal alone.7
Where earlier, Mughal tax returns existed, they were frequently found to have been mislaid, often deliberately. In 1850, bundles of old tax assessments were found being used for firework manufacture in Poona. In this area, Company officials endeavouring to find out exactly the tax burden on the deposed peshwa’s lands resorted to raids on the homes of landowners to uncover hidden files. Doggedness paid dividends: in 1848 the Bombay presidency could proudly claim that over £6,000 spent on fiscal sleuthing was yielding £20,000 a year.8 Not everyone was so patient and painstaking. The pressure on surveyors to reach a settlement was always strong, for the Company had to meet bills for conquest and administration and justify the argument that aggressive wars eventually paid for themselves in tax dividends. It was, therefore, easy for assessment officers to succumb to frustration and fall back either on the dubious advice of local landowners or cut through the tangle of unintelligible terms and customs.
Misunderstanding was common, and injustice inevitably followed. Nevertheless, experience taught men like Fortescue to be flexible. Faced with 400 or so villages which had sprung up in the past few years, he reported to his superiors that, despite the absence of title deeds, it was ‘pretty well understood’ that the newly cultivated lands belonged to the families who were farming them. Above all, he knew that the Company needed to foster what he called ‘the small Republics’ in their self-sufficiency and productiveness. The commissioner was enchanted by their inhabitants, who entertained him with songs and stories of past triumphs and independence. He believed that the tax settlement was to their ultimate advantage and rather hoped that the coming of British rule would mark a revival of the peace and plenty they had known long ago. He urged the Company to use these people kindly and, remembering that he was a civil servant, added that their prosperity would ensure a handsome tax return.
II
Past and present analysts of the various settlements made across India agree that their consequences were far-reaching and, by and large, hurtful to millions of the poorest classes. There were winners and losers, and in many instances what was hoped to be an equitable system of raising revenue had unlooked-for and unwanted consequences. This gap between intention and result was most glaring wherever the Bengal Settlement was adopted.
The Bengal Settlement was introduced in 1793 and eventually extended to the north-western provinces, the Punjab, Awadh, some southern districts and various parts of the former Maratha territories in the Deccan. It presumed the existence of a landowning class, which would serve as collectors of revenue from the peasantry on their lands and repay official recognition of their titles with loyalty. Those who framed and applied this system imagined that it would accelerate the creation of a stable stratum of landowners who, in the British fashion, would combine support for the government with the economic development of their estates. The zamindars and taluqdars (landowners) of northern India would, in time, become the counterparts of the English squire and Scottish laird – a benevolent, improving landlord with a stake in the country.
Things did not turn out as expected. To start with, the newly elevated zamindars of Bengal were a mixed bunch of varying wealth and status, ranging from rajas with sizeable territories to revenue farmers and tax collectors whose connections with the lands they happened to occupy when the settlement was being drawn up were tenuous. Collectively, this artificial Indian squirearchy did not behave as predicted. Deprived of any judicial powers over their tenants, they saw themselves merely as cogs in the Company’s tax-gathering machine and free to squeeze as much profit from their lands as possible. They were helped by a government which, having created a hierarchy, found itself obliged to back it. Between 1799 and 1812 ordinances were issued which whittled away the remaining rights of the ryots and empowered the zamindars to raise rents as they pleased. Land was transformed into a highly lucrative source of investment which was swiftly exploited by those with spare capital. Among those who did well from the settlement was Rammothan Ray, a Calcutta businessman who, between 1799 and 1810, purchased four zamindar’s estates worth £1,000 a year.9 He was not one of those whom the settlement had been designed to benefit; nor were the speculators who used the profits of banking and rural money-lending to purchase estates, often of tax defaulters, in the Benares (Varanasi) region.10
Indian folklore commonly portrays the zamindar as an oppressive figure, and he is second only to the Raj in the demonology of the mainly Marxist historians of India’s peasantry. In most instances, the zamindars’ worst crime was to protect their property, rights and interests with the same determination as the ryots, and usually with greater success. In the collection, as well as the assessment of taxation, they were certainly capable of deceit, often on a large scale. In the Sherpur district, close to the present-day border between India and Bangladesh, local zamindars were alleged in 1820 to have collected 20,000 rupees from an area assessed at 12,000.11
This is creditable, if not credible, and it was certainly not new. There is nothing to suggest that fraud was not commonplace under the Mughals. The Company also found itself the embarrassed inheritor of severe Mughal methods of tax extraction which were still being employed in the middle of the century. Herbert Edwardes noticed how Punjabi tax gatherers ‘screwed’ the zamindars and ryots on the North-West Frontier in 1847, something he hoped would cease as British law was established. It did not; a Parliamentary report of 1855 revealed that ryots who could not or would not pay their dues were sometimes tortured by zamindars’ servants. Torments included beatings, starvation, thumb-screws and inserting chillies or peppers into the eyes and genitalia of victims.12 Between 1871 and 1873 there were several incidents in which the Raja of Baroda’s police thrashed and abused alleged defaulters, of whom four died from their injuries.13
Superficially, the ryotwari system of revenue collection appeared less likely to be a source of oppression. It was seen as an extension of Mughal custom, and was widely adopted in the annexed districts of the Madras presidency at the turn of the eighteenth century. Assessments of each village were made, first on a three-year and then a ten-year basis, and the taxes were paid by an agent, usually the patel (headman). Despite considerable efforts, the rate of taxation was as variable as that under the zamindar system.
This unevenness was,
perhaps, the worst feature of the Company’s revenue system. Under the Mughals, an average of between 40 and 50 per cent of a ryot’s produce was taken from him, but the proportion was occasionally as high as 65 to 80 per cent.14 There was no uniform rate under the Company, with as much as 83 per cent being extracted in Orissa, an amount which was progressively lowered to 60 per cent by 1840. At this time, a two-thirds deduction was considered as an equitable mean and exactions of 50 to 60 per cent were widespread.15 In the Madras presidency, the ryot’s annual income was officially broken down as follows: 40 per cent for costs of cultivation, including seed for the next year’s sowing, and 14 per cent for the sustenance of his family, which left 46 per cent for the government. This estimate, which made no provision for the vagaries of climate, condemned the ryot and his descendants to exist perpetually at a subsistence level without the opportunity to save or acquire additional land.
Official arithmetic took no account of the human tragedies brought about by a system which, at its most generous, demanded half a family’s income every year. Complaints were plentiful, especially in times of drought. In 1819 a petition from the peasantry of Malabar described the bodies of destitute men and women lying by the roadsides where they had fallen, overcome by starvation as they moved away from areas of severe taxation.16 The view from the top was often as grim. In 1853 the collectors of Trichinopoly, Bellary and Tanjore reported that the ryots were compelled to accept the lowest prices for their produce just to meet their tax demands.17 This also occurred in the Punjab during the early 1850s when, for the same reason, farmers were forced to sell their crops when the market was glutted and prices were dropping. Matters here were made worse by an excessive assessment, based upon abstracts drawn up by Ranjit Singh’s Treasury officials which bore no relation to the actual sums collected in the countryside.18