by Jon Wilson
Judicial officers found the behaviour of Indians in their courts puzzling, often complaining about their ‘litigious’ conduct. Some went further, seeing the courtroom as the setting for the display of the poor ‘general moral character’ of their subjects. The judge of the district of Rangpur in northern Bengal, James Wordsworth, described their character as ‘pusillanimous, ungrateful, and not uncommonly revengeful’. Another judge in Dhaka, J. D. Paterson, thought ‘their minds are totally uncultivated’, and ruled by ‘that low cunning which generally accompanies depravity of heart’. The myth was that British stability would eventually encourage Indians to act more honourably, for the long-term.30
But it was probably the uncertain decision-making within the British system of justice which encouraged people to act in the short-term. The reluctance of British judges to make judgments left decisions in the hands of unaccountable groups of Indian officers, who could easily be cajoled and lobbied by powerful groups outside the court. When they did impose their authority, British judges’ opinions were arbitrary, given for reasons that the judges did not state and probably did not understand and then not efficiently put into practice. When judges made decisions for random reasons litigants who otherwise didn’t have a chance thought it was worth a gamble to go to court. The ‘litigious’ conduct of Indians was perhaps a rational response to the way East India Company’s officers made decisions in court.31
British revenue collectors were similarly often perplexed about how to act in practice. The logic of British power placed revenue collection above secure property rights. Cornwallis’s regulations insisted that estates were sold if landholders did not pay the amount due to the Company. British officers imagined that, where landholders could not pay, collectors would preside over the quick and clinical transfer of an easily defined asset to its more efficient owner. Landholders could ‘guard against the exercise of the collector’s powers by the punctual payment of revenue’ according to the documents they had agreed with the Company. Of course, this was a fantasy.
The arrival of a newly rigid approach to revenue collection in the 1790s coincided with an economic downturn in many parts of India. The price of rice, sugar, silk and other goods fell, so landholders found it hard to collect rent from producers reliant on the prices of these goods and often failed in their revenue payments. The result was the Company’s attempt to dispossess defaulting proprietors. One auction after another was held in the open spaces outside the Collector’s office, a process local lords found humiliating. Worse than the sale itself for many was the compilation of public inventories of their private property and personal circumstances, as officers were sent to inquire into the landlords ‘competence’ to manage an estate. When the Collector of Birbhum criticized the district’s young raja for ‘living in a dissolute manner’ the British officer criticized him for ‘thus aspers[ing] my character to the people’. It was ‘of no consequence’, he argued, if estates were ‘sold agreeably to the regulations to liquidate the balance due to government’. But he could not stand having his lifestyle disgraced in public. These kinds of inquiries and land sales challenged the authority of local landholder-lords, making it harder for them to collect rent, often precipitating the collapse of their principalities. In Birbhum the first sale of land occurred in December 1795, a few months after the Collector’s public challenge to the local landlord. The Company’s intervention undermined the prestige and financial viability of the estate, leading to sixteen auctions in quick succession, so that half the estate was lost in five years and the remainder broken up in ten.32
Nowhere where Cornwallis’s system was put into practice was the old regime replaced by a stable new order of property. In fact, in the years after the East India Company’s new regulations were introduced it became harder to identify who had control of which piece of land. To determine which villages needed to be sold and transferred for non-payment of revenue, each Collector required documents that only landholders possessed. The process of sale involved a struggle over the control of local records and local staff, as landholders and the British state battled to win the allegiance of the Indian officials who knew what was going on locally, and could help them gain or lose money by altering the accounts. Landlords about to be dispossessed only gave up their records ‘with much trouble and delay’, as William Massie, the Collector of Dhaka district, put it. In some case, they burnt down the district record office.
Landholder-lords sometimes won the struggle to retain authority over local resources, at least in the short term. With long-standing connections to the neighbourhood, landholders had far more local knowledge and power than the Company’s district officers. They could exploit their relationship with local peasants and officials to stop anyone bidding for land, or prevent people who had paid good money getting near their land. For example, in the southern delta of Bengal, the Paniotty brothers, Greek merchants who made money on the silk route to Assam and China, tried to buy the old principality of Chandradwip (‘moon island’), but found it impossible to break the bonds connecting the young raja with local society. The Chandradwip raja presided over civic bodies such as the region’s Brahmin caste council. He was central to local networks of patronage, funding the Hindu temples which are still scattered through the countryside, mosques and a Portuguese church. The Paniotty brothers failed to collect rent, and failed to persuade the Company to send more than a handful of troops. ‘We do not’, they complained, ‘purchase the Zumeendaree for after years, that it might be of use after our deaths.’ The old landholder regained control and the Paniotty brothers abandoned their brief, unsuccessful foray into the land market, returning to trade.33
In the twenty years that followed the arrival of the new system in 1793 most of the great lords of Bengal, Bihar and the northern Coromandel coast lost their land. They were not for the most part replaced by merchants like the Paniottys, but by bureaucrats, clerks and revenue collectors who worked for the local lord or the Company. These men used a range of tactics to expand their portfolios. In Dinajpur, in northern Bengal, a group of Indian officials employed by the local principality misappropriated money due to the Company, causing large parts of the estate to be put on the market which they then bought.34 Near Allahabad, the senior Indian revenue officer in the district spread the word that ‘the collector was like a tiger’ whose ‘fearful presence’ should be shunned, and the estate was sold when arrears built up. These were men who knew the countryside and the new system of British management and could use their knowledge to benefit from chaos.35
The new men did not purchase land ‘for after years’, as the Paniottys put it, but as a short-term investment in an increasingly unstable economic environment. They kept control of their assets by doing exactly the same as the East India Company did with theirs, by trying to secure a fixed return, ensuring they received the same sum of money month in, month out, irrespective of the condition of the land or its tenants. Risk was reduced as landholders outsourced the job of collecting revenue from peasants to middlemen. The only large principality to survive in Bengal, Burdwan, did so by introducing its own permanent settlement, in which revenue collectors were asked to pay a fixed amount of rent to the raja. If they could not they were summarily dispossessed.36
The consequences varied from region to region. In some places, where land was plentiful and the climate and ecology allowed peasants to farm without support from political authorities, the economy remained buoyant. Until the end of the nineteenth century there were still thousands of miles of jungle in the eastern districts of Bengal. Similarly, where the East India Company was fighting wars nearby, the economy flourished as revenue collected from other regions was funnelled to markets buying goods for soldiers. The region around Kanpur, a rapidly growing cantonment which supplied British armies throughout north and central India, was an island of wealth amid the depressed and anarchic condition of much of the rest of northern India. Even here, the East India Company’s tax collection system broke down for a short while in 180
7.37
Elsewhere the collapse of eastern India’s old principalities together with the colonial regime’s new insistence on the rigidity of its revenue demand had a bad, sometimes catastrophic impact on local livelihoods. Lords did not have the money to invest in the infrastructure needed to maintain local prosperity. As a result irrigation canals silted up, roads fell into disrepair, ferry men went out of business and markets declined. Production shrank in western Bengal and Bihar. But the greatest crisis took place on the northern Coromandel coast, the once wealthy tract of land which included Polavaram, where Mangapati Reddy had lost his estate. There, the effort of a succession of new landholders to extract from their tenants ‘the utmost possible amount of present revenue’ had stripped the land of resources. The region’s infrastructure fell apart. To give one example, a few miles south-east of Rajahmundry, on the road to the old port city of Machilipatnam, the raja of the small village of Challipatam had cleared the jungle and erected inns, shops and places of worship, ‘for the reception of travellers of all nations’, planting ‘coconut and other fruit gardens to render the place populous and comfortable’. The Company had insisted on a fixed revenue demand but was unable to protect the coconut glades from neighbouring landholders, so the road-stop fell into ruin, and the quality of the road itself started to deteriorate, too.38
As the institutions which sustained good living conditions collapsed in places like these, peasants fled to neighbouring areas even where there was much poorer soil, from the region around Challipatam to the lands governed by the Nizam of Hyderabad, for example. Local manufacturing collapsed: the weaving villages around Rajahmundry, where Benjamin Branfill had once been posted, had more than 7,000 looms in the 1780s, less than half that number fifty years later. A few years of low prices and bad harvests pushed the district over the edge into famine. In the same area, a fifth of the district’s 740,000 population was lost to migration and death in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century.39
Cornwallis’s ‘new system’ was intended to introduce financial stability and moral rectitude to the East India Company’s government of its Indian territories for the first time. Later imperial ideologues imagined it did both. But Cornwallis’s rules upheld the British sense of their virtue by diminishing the power and capacity for independent judgement of British officers, giving them little incentive and even less time to monitor the conduct of their Indian subordinates. The new regime still relied on corruption and violence, but it was pushed down, out of the sight of the enclaves where the Company’s British covenanted servants lived; corruption was increasingly identified as a peculiar trait of Indian society. Unsurprisingly, Britons stationed in the countryside were prickly, defensive and profoundly protective of their status.
The new rules did not create a regime able to guarantee its own financial security. The collapse of the old principalities and the decline in the region’s agrarian society meant the Company’s collectors could rarely collect the revenue they demanded from landholders. The Company only survived because of a kind of accounting ‘magic’. The cash collected from purchasers at land auctions was not separated from ordinary revenue collection in each district’s accounts. The shortfall in revenue was made up from the proceeds of land sales. In Bengal, 9 per cent of the Company’s land revenue came from the sale of land.40 In Godavari district, where Mangapati Reddy was ousted as zamindar, 11 per cent was ‘derived from the capital of strangers’, as the official Henry Montgomery put it, rather than the capacity of landholders to collect revenue from each district’s agrarian production. The Company’s economic survival was dependent on the continual resale of an asset whose price was far higher than its real value.41
Eventually, though, land prices collapsed. In Bengal, the increase in cultivation of new crops for exports like indigo and opium kept land prices high in the short term, but the land market was glutted and collapsed in 1830. By then, financial institutions had started to invest in land, so the crash in the value of land in 1830 had catastrophic consequences for Calcutta’s commercial economy, as banks went to the wall and agency houses collapsed. The East India Company only survived by borrowing money in Britain, by making massive cuts in its expenditure and by increasing its sale of narcotics, opium especially, to China.42
Meanwhile, new landholders had started to lobby the British to adjust their rules to help them hold onto their lands. Constantly harassed by the old lords they had replaced or by peasants and village leaders who refused to submit and pay revenue to their new masters, the new men needed strong backing from the East India Company if they had any chance of supplying the British with a stable stream of revenue. Time after time, British officers in the districts were faced with a quandary: whether to augment the power of a landholder in extracting cash from his tenants, or back the challenge by poorer inhabitants knowing this would curtail the Company’s capacity to collect cash. Unsurprisingly, the tendency was to back the new local elite.43
Throughout the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the Company eliminated the checks and balances that had prevented landed elites from oppressing their subjects. Changes in the regulations made it far harder for peasants to use the Company’s courts to limit landholders’ ability to extract rent. The East India Company’s violence was used more to protect landholders from their tenants. In Saran district in Bihar in 1842, for example, British officers called in the infantry to suppress a revolt by peasants who felt their rights were being trampled on by the local Raja of Hathwa. The incident created a bitter argument between British officers. The magistrate supported the tenants and the Collector backed the landholder. In this case, the local police commissioner waded in to the dispute and forced the magistrate to be investigated and then sacked. Incidents like these led to the corrosion of the idea of a justice system able to keep a check on the collection of revenue. By the 1850s, the functions of judge and collector had begun to be merged into a single officer whose interest it was to put order and revenue before any attempt to ensure the local balance of power. For their part, the threat of Company violence lifted pressure on landholders to gain the consent of local society, and removed the necessity of negotiating with peasants and members of the local gentry.44
One with the Englishmen
In Edmund Burke’s tirade against Warren Hastings in the House of Lords, the most grotesque tale of brutality came from a story about events in the small Bengali town of Rangpur. Describing the actions of a revenue farmer called Raja Devi Singh who was appointed by Hastings, Burke spoke about wedges being driven into the joints of fingers, children being beaten and the houses of peasants burnt down. He culled these from official reports and added shocking (but entirely fictitious) accounts of sexual violence. The aim of Burke’s catalogue of cruelty was to ‘work up the popular senses’ against Hastings, arousing the base ‘mobbish’ (as he put it) feelings of his audience. According to the trial reporter, Burke’s descriptions of events in Rangpur were ‘more vivid, more harrowing, and more horrific, than human utterance on either fact or fancy, perhaps, ever formed before’. The horrified response in London about events in Rangpur contributed to a dramatic change in the way this district of northern Bengal itself was ruled. But those changes transformed Rangpur in a way that would have horrified even Burke.45
With a population of perhaps half a million, located fifty miles south of the foothills of the Himalayas, Rangpur district was a prosperous area, a vital marketplace on the eastern silk route, trading goods between India, Bhutan and China. In Rangpur authority had been exercised by a handful of principalities originally created by officers of the Mughal state in the late seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century these officers laid out markets and built courts, creating seats of local power under the distant surveillance of the Mughal capital at Murshidabad, a hundred miles southwest, turning themselves into princes and rajas. Their descendants lived in brick forts in modest splendour. These landholder-kings spent most of their time going back and forth negotiating w
ith peasants, weavers and traders, ensuring the continued prosperity of the region. Peasants’ ‘frequent migration from one village to another’ meant landholders needed to attract them with low rents, and financial support for local civic institutions. It was the ‘custom of the country’ for peasants only to pay rent on crops they cut and sold, for example. British district officers were bemused by all the coming and going, imagining, wrongly, that prosperity only came with permanence. But the economic life of the district was enough to support the region’s own currency, the narayani rupee, and this made an appointment to Rangpur one of the Company’s most lucrative postings for British officers.46