This description is very complimentary to the old village system. We have a picture of an almost idyllic state of affairs. Undoubtedly the amount of local freedom and independence that the villages had was a good thing, and there were other good features also. But we must not lose sight of the defects of the system. To live a self-sufficient village life cut off from the rest of the world was not conducive to progress in anything. Growth and progress consist in co-operation between larger and larger units. The more a person or a group keeps to himself or itself, the more danger there is of him or it becoming self-centred and selfish and narrow-minded. Village folk when compared to town people are often narrow-minded and superstitious. So the village communities, with all their good points, could not be centres of progress. They were rather primitive and backward. Handicrafts and industry flourished mainly in the towns. Of course there were large numbers of weavers spread out in the villages.
The real reason why the village communities lived their separate lives, without much contact with each other, was the lack of means of communication. There were few good roads connecting villages. It was, indeed, this lack of good roads that made it rather difficult for the Central Government of the country to intervene too much in village affairs. Towns and villages on the banks of, or near, good-sized rivers could communicate by boats, but there were not many rivers that could be used in this way. This want of easy communications came in the way of internal trade also.
The East India Company, for a great many years, were only interested in making money and paying dividends to their shareholders. They spent very little on roads, and nothing at all on education and sanitation and hospitals and the like. But later, when the British began to concentrate on buying raw material and selling British machine-goods, a different policy regarding communications was adopted. On the sea coast of India new cities sprang up to serve the growing foreign trade. These cities— like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and later Karachi—collected raw material, such as cotton, etc., for despatch to foreign countries, and received foreign machine-goods, especially from England, for distribution and sale in India. These new cities were very different from the great industrial cities that were growing in the West, like Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham and Sheffield. The European cities were manufacturing centres, with big factories making goods, and ports for the despatch of these goods. The new Indian cities produced nothing. They were just depots for foreign trade, and symbols of foreign rule.
Now, I have told you that owing to British policy India was becoming more and more rural and people were leaving the towns and going to the village and the land. In spite of this, and without affecting this process, these new cities grew up on the seaboard. They grew at the expense of smaller cities and towns, and not at the expense of the villages. The general process of ruralization continued.
These new cities on the seaboard had to be connected with the interior to be able to help in the collection of raw material and the distribution of foreign goods. Some other cities also grew up as capitals or administrative centres of provinces. The need for good communications thus became urgent. Roads were made and later railways. The first railway was built in Bombay in 1853.
The old village communities were hard put to it to adapt themselves to the changing conditions produced by the destruction of Indian industries. But when more good roads and railways came and spread all over the country, the old village system, which had survived for so long, broke up at last and ended. The little village republic could not keep cut off from the world when the world came knocking at its gate. The price of articles in one village immediately affected prices in another, for articles could be sent easily from one village to another. Indeed, as world communications developed, the price of wheat in Canada or the United States of America would affect the price of Indian wheat. Thus the Indian village system was dragged, by the force of events, into the circle of world prices. The old economic order in the village went to pieces and, much to the astonishment of the peasant, a new order was forced on him. Instead of growing food and other stuffs for his village market, he began to grow for the world market. He was caught in the whirlpool of world production and prices, and he sank lower and lower. Previously there had been famines in India when a harvest failed, and there was nothing to fall back upon, and no suitable means of obtaining food from other parts of the country. There were famines of food. But now a strange thing happened. People would starve in the midst of plenty, or when food was available. Even if food were not locally available, it could be brought from elsewhere by train and other swift means. The food was there, but there was no money to buy it. Thus there were famines of money, and not food. And, stranger still, sometimes the very abundance of a harvest brought misery in its train for the peasantry, as we have seen during the last three years of depression.
So the old village system ended, and the panchayat ceased to exist. We need not express any great regret for this, as the system had outlived its day and did not fit in with modern conditions. But here again it broke up without any rebirth of a new village system in accord with these conditions. This work of rebuilding and rebirth still remains to be done by us.
We have so far considered the indirect results of British policy on the land and the peasant. Let us now consider what the actual land policy of the East India Company was—that is, the policy which directly affected the peasant and all connected with the land. This is a complicated affair, and rather dull, I am afraid. But our country is full of those poor cultivators, and we should make some effort to understand what ails them, and how we can serve them and better their lot.
We hear of zamindars and taluqdars and their tenants; and there are many kinds of tenants; and there are sub-tenants—that is, tenants of tenants. I shall not take you into the intricacies of all this. Broadly speaking, the zamindars today are middlemen—that is, they stand between the cultivator and the State. The cultivator is their tenant, and he pays them rent, or a kind of tax, for the use of the land, which is supposed to belong to the zamindar. Out of this rent the zamindar pays a portion as land revenue to the State, as a tax on his land. Thus the produce of the land is divided up into three parts; one part goes to the zamindar, another to the State, and the third remains with the tenant-cultivator. Do not imagine that these parts are equal. The cultivator works on the land, and it is due to his labour, ploughing and sowing and dozens of other activities, that the land produces anything. He is obviously entitled to the fruits of his toil. The State, as representing society as a whole, has important functions to perform in the interests of everybody. Thus it ought to educate all the children, and build good roads and other means of communication, and have hospitals and sanitary services, and parks and museums, and a vast number of other things. For this it requires money, and it is right that it should take a share out of the produce of the land. What that share should be is another question. What the cultivator gives to the State really comes back to him, or ought to come back to him, in the shape of services—roads, education, sanitation, etc. At the present moment the State in India is represented by a foreign government, and so we are apt to dislike the State. But in a properly organized and free country the State is the people.
So we have disposed of two parts of the produce of the land—one going to the cultivator and the other to the State. A third part, as we have seen, goes to the zamindar or middle-man. What does he do to get it or deserve it? Nothing at all, or practically nothing. He just takes a big share in the produce—his rent—without helping in any way in the work of production. He thus becomes a fifth wheel in the coach—not only unnecessary, but an actual encumbrance, and a burden on the land. And naturally the person who suffers most from this unnecessary burden is the cultivator, who has to give part of his earnings to him. It is for this reason that many people think that the zamindar or taluqdar is a wholly unnecessary middle-man, and that the zamindari system is bad and ought to be changed so that the middle-man disappears. At present we have this zamindari system chie
fly in three provinces in India—Bengal, Bihar, and the United Provinces.
In the other provinces the peasant cultivators usually pay their land revenue direct to the State and there are no middlemen. These people are sometimes called peasant proprietors; sometimes, as in the Punjab, they are called zamindars, but they are different from the big zamindars of the United Provinces and Bengal and Bihar.
After this long explanation I want to tell you that this zamindari system which flourishes in Bengal, Bihar, and the United Provinces, and about which we hear so much nowadays, is quite a new thing in India. It is a creation of the British. It did not exist before they came.
In the old times there were no such zamindars or land-holders or middle-men. The cultivators gave a part of their produce direct to the State. Sometimes the village panchayat acted on behalf of all the cultivators of the village. In Akbar’s time, his famous Finance Minister, Raja Todar Mal, had a very careful survey of the land made. The government or State took one-third of the produce from the cultivator, who could, if he so chose, pay in cash. Taxes were on the whole not heavy, and they increased very gradually. Then came the collapse of the Moghal Empire. The Central Government weakened and could not collect their taxes properly. A new way of collection then arose. Tax collectors were appointed, not on salary, but as agents who could keep one-tenth of the collections for themselves. They were called revenue-farmers, or sometimes zamindars or taluqdars, but remember that these words did not mean what they mean today.
As the Central Government decayed, the system became worse and worse. It even came to this, that auctions were held for the revenue-farming of an area, and the highest bidder got it. This meant that the man who got the job had a free hand to extort as much as he could from the unhappy cultivator, and he used this freedom to the full. Gradually these revenue-farmers tended to become hereditary as the government was too weak to remove them.
As a matter of fact, the first so-called legal title of the East India Company in Bengal was that of revenue-farmer on behalf of the Moghal Emperor. This was the grant of the Diwani to the Company in 1765. The Company thus became a kind of Diwan of the Moghal Emperor at Delhi. But all this was fiction. After Plassey, in 1757, the British were predominant in Bengal, and the poor Moghal Emperor had little or no power anywhere.
The East India Company and its officers were terribly greedy. As I have told you, they emptied the treasury of Bengal and laid violent hands on money wherever they could find it. They tried to squeeze Bengal and Bihar and extract the maximum of land revenue. They created smaller revenue-farmers and they increased the revenue demand on them most exorbitantly. The land revenue was doubled in a short space and collected pitilessly, anyone not paying up punctually being turned out. The revenue-farmers, in their turn, were cruel and rapacious to the cultivators, who were rack-rented and ejected from their holdings. Within twelve years of Plassey, within four years of the grant of the Diwani, the policy of the East India Company, added to want of rain, brought about a terrible famine in Bengal and Bihar, when one-third of the whole population perished. I have referred to this famine of 1769-70 in a previous letter to you, and told you that, in spite of it, the East India Company collected the full amount of revenue. The officers of the Company deserve special mention for their remarkable efficiency. Men and women and children died by tens of millions, but they were able to extort money even out of the corpses, so that big dividends might be paid to wealthy men in England.
So matters went on for another twenty years or more, and, despite the famine, the East India Company continued to extort money, and the fair province of Bengal was brought to ruin. Even the big revenue-farmers were reduced to beggary, and from this one can imagine what the state of the miserable cultivator was. Things were so bad that the East India Company woke up and made an attempt to remedy them. The Governor-General of the day, Lord Cornwallis, himself a big landlord in England, wanted to create landlords after the British fashion in India. The revenue-farmers for some time past had been behaving like landlords. Cornwallis came to a settlement with them and treated them as such. The result was that for the first time India got this new type of middleman, and the cultivators were reduced to the position of mere tenants. The British dealt with these land-holders or zamindars directly, and left them to do what they liked with their tenantry. There was no protection of any kind for the poor tenant from the rapacity of the landlord.
This settlement that Cornwallis made with the zamindars of Bengal and Bihar in 1793 is called the “Permanent Settlement”. The word “settlement” means the fixing of the amount of land revenue to be paid by each zamindar to the Government. For Bengal and Bihar this was fixed permanently. There was to be no change. Later on, as British rule spread in the north-west to Oudh and Agra, the British policy was changed. They had temporary settlements with zamindars, not permanent as in Bengal. Each temporary settlement was revised periodically, usually every thirty years, and the sum to be paid as land revenue was fixed afresh. Usually it was enhanced at every settlement.
In the south, in Madras and round about, the zamindari system did not prevail. There was peasant proprietorship there, and so the East India Company settled directly with the peasants. But there, and everywhere, an insatiable greed made the Company’s officers fix the land revenue at a very high figure, and this was cruelly extorted. For non-payment there was immediate ejection, but where was the poor man to go to? Owing to the over-pressure on land there was always a demand for it; there were always starving people who were willing to accept it on any conditions. Frequently there were troubles and agrarian riots when even the long-suffering peasant could bear no more.
About the middle of the nineteenth century another tyranny arose in Bengal. Certain English people established themselves as landlords in order to carry on trade in indigo. They made very hard terms with their tenants about the cultivation of the indigo plant. The tenants were compelled to grow the indigo plant in a certain part of their holdings, and then had to sell this at a fixed rate to the English landlords or planters, as they were called. This system is called the plantation system. The conditions forced on the tenants were so hard that it was very difficult for them to fulfil them. The British Government then came to the help of the planters, and passed special laws to force the poor tenants to cultivate indigo according to those conditions. By these laws, with their punishments, the tenants of those plantations became serfs and slaves of the planters in some respects. They were terrorized over by the agents of the indigo factories, for these English or Indian agents felt quite secure with the protection of the government. Often, when the price of indigo fell, it was far more profitable for the cultivator to grow something else, such as rice, but he was not permitted to do so. There was a great deal of trouble and misery for the cultivator, and at last, exasperated beyond measure, the worm turned. The peasantry rose against the planters and sacked a factory. They were crushed back into submission.
I have tried in this letter to give you—at some length, I am afraid— a picture of agrarian conditions in the nineteenth century. I have tried to explain how the lot of the Indian peasant grew steadily worse; how he was exploited by everyone who came in contact with him, by tax-gatherer, and landlord, and bania, and the planter and his agent, and by the biggest bania of all, the British Government, acting either through the East India Company or directly. For at the basis of all this exploitation lay the policy deliberately pursued by the British in India. The destruction of cottage-industries with no effort to replace them by other kinds of industry; the driving of the unemployed artisan to the village and the consequent overpressure on land; landlordism; the plantation system; heavy taxation on land resulting in exorbitant rent, cruelly collected; the forcing of the peasant to the bania money-lender, from whose iron grip he never escaped; innumerable ejections from the land for inability to pay rent or revenue in time; and, above all, the perpetual terrorism of policeman and tax-gatherer and landlord’s agent and factory agent, which almost destroyed all
spirit and soul that he possessed. What could be the result of all this but inevitable tragedy and frightful catastrophe?
Terrible famines occurred which wiped off millions of the population. And, strange to say, even when food was lacking and people were starving for the want of it, wheat and other food-grains were exported to foreign countries for the profit of the rich traders. But the real tragedy was not the lack of food, for food could be brought by railway train from other parts of the country, but the lack of means to buy it. In 1861 there was a great famine in North India, especially in our province, and it is stated that over 8½ per cent, of the population of the affected area died. Fifteen years later, in 1876, and for two years, there was another terrible famine in North and Central India as well as in South India. The United Provinces were again the worst sufferers, and also the Central Provinces and part of the Punjab. About 10,000,000 people died! Again, twenty years later, in 1896, more or less in this same unhappy area, there was another famine, more terrible than any other known in Indian history. This frightful visitation laid North and Central India low and crushed it utterly. In 1900 there was still another famine.
In a brief paragraph I have told you of four mighty famines in the course of forty years. I cannot tell you, and you cannot realize, the terrible suffering and horror that are contained in this grim story. Indeed, I am not sure that I want you to realize it, for with this realization would come anger and great bitterness, and I do not want you to be bitter at your age.
You have heard of Florence Nightingale, the brave Englishwoman who first organized efficient nursing of those wounded in war. As long ago as 1878, she wrote: “The saddest sight to be seen in the East—nay, probably in the world—is the peasant of our Eastern Empire.” She referred to the “consequences of our laws” producing in “the most fertile country in the world, a grinding, chronic semi-starvation in many places where what is called famine does not exist”.
Glimpses of World History Page 63