ANCIENT RIGHTS and FUTURE COMFORT Bihar, the Bengal
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LONDON STUDIES ON SOUTH ASIA NO. 13 ANCIENT RIGHTS AND FUTURE COMFORT Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, and British Rule in India P.G. Robb School of Oriental and African Studies, London This book was published in 1997 by Curzon Press, now Routledge, and is reproduced in this repository by permission. The deposited copy is from the author’s final files, and pagination differs slightly from the publisher’s printed version. Therefore the index is not included. © Peter Robb 1997 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form without written permission from the publishers. ISBN 0-7007-0625-9 FOR ELIZABETH Ancient rights and future comfort This book analyses the character of British rule in nineteenth- century India, by focusing on the underlying ideas and the practical repercussions of agrarian policy. It argues that the great rent law debate and the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 helped constitute a revolution in the aims of government and in the colonial ability to interfere in India, but that they did so alongside a continuing weakness of understanding and ineffective local control. In particular, the book considers the importance of notions of historical rights and economic progress to the false categorisations made of agrarian structure. It shows that the Tenancy Act helped create political interests on the land and contributed to a growth of the state, fostering a national or public interest in India. But it also led to widening social disparities in rural Bihar, allowing individual property rights to exaggerate the inequities of a more collective socio-economic system. Note on the author Peter Robb is Professor of the History of India at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. Other books written or edited by him are: The Government of India and Reform, 1916-21 The Emergence of British Policy towards Indian Politics, 1880-1920 Rule Protest Identity (with David Taylor) Rural South Asia: Linkages, Change and Development Rural India: Land, Power and Society under British Rule Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India Institutions and Ideologies (with David Arnold) Britain and India (with K.N. Malik) The Concept of Race in South Asia Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India: Japanese Perspectives (with Kaoru Sugihara & Haruka Yanagisawa) Meanings of Agriculture: Essays in South Asian History and Economics A History of India Empire, Identity, and India: Liberalism, Modernity and the Nation Empire, Identity, and India: Peasants, Political Economy, and Law Contents Preface vii Sources and abbreviations ix Introduction xi 1 Property, classes and the state 1 2 Official will and administrative capacity 36 3 A necessary reform 76 4 The great rent law debate 101 5 Custom and the law 146 6 The magic of property 180 7 The politics of land 214 8 Keeping the record 246 9 Colonial rule and agrarian structure 278 10 Rents and rights 313 11 Peasants, property and nation 342 V Preface Many obligations have been incurred while this work was in prepara- tion. First and last, I must thank my wife, Elizabeth, who gave up her own concerns to work as my research assistant in India for almost a year, greatly increasing the material I was able to collect. Her support over the long period during which the work subsequently evolved was exceeded only by her determination in the final stages that I should finish it off once and for all. Also to Benjamin and Thomas, my two sons, my thanks: this project is about as old as they are. It too (unexpectedly and after last-minute discovery) will turn out to be twins. The work owes a debt to Clive Dewey, for his studies of British agrarian policy and the social and intellectual history of officialdom, and for his keen comments on my own efforts. I am pleased to note also the special contributions of ‘Tom’ Tomlinson, who (with his wife, Caroline) shared a period of research in New Delhi, and of Walter Hauser for invaluable advice on researching in Patna and on other matters. To Binay Chaudhuri’s work too I have had repeatedly to return; once he summed up my own conclusions for me in ways which made me understand them better. In SOAS, K.N. Chaudhuri and John Harrison were always encouraging; more recently Terry Byres’ themes and interests suggested lines of inquiry; at the end David Arnold pointed out some typographical errors and encouraged me to keep to the overall plan of the work. Five who have sadly since died played a part—three close colleagues at SOAS, Kenneth Ballhatchet, Nigel Crook and Burton Stein; Neil Charlesworth for his great ability to think in wider contexts and against current fashion; and Eric Stokes who was an inspiring example though an enigmatic critic. Many other colleagues and students in classes and seminars have helped and criticised my ideas. For the middle phases of the work, I remember particularly warmly discussions with three of my research students—Sanjay Nigam, Bindeshwar Ram and I.G. Khan—whose interests lay closest to those of this book, and also with Chitta Panda while he was carrying out his research at Oxford, and with Rajat Datta on his many visits to SOAS from King’s College London. More recently, while the appearance of this work was delayed because of my chairmanship of the SOAS Centre of South Asian Studies and other research and publishing projects, I had the chance to benefit from exchanges of views with another generation of my students, namely Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Andrew Grout, Shompa Lahiri, Alex McKay, Pragati Mohapatra, Subhajyoti Ray, and Sanjay Sharma. Very late in the day, Suhit Sen helped by embarking on a project which at first looked quite akin to this one, on zamindari abolition. The recent period saw an expansion of some of the concerns of this project, particularly a stronger orientation towards the study of policy in the broader context of the growth and development of the state. It is thus related to other work, on law, labour and identity, which preoccupied me during this interval. Personal or intellectual debts should also be noticed to the published work and contributions in seminars and/or private discussions of others too numerous to list; but most of them are included among the partici- pants, of whom mention must be made, in the conferences in London in 1980 on the ‘external dimension’ in South Asia, the workshop on ‘arrested development in India’ under Dietmar Rothermund and Clive Dewey in Heidelberg in 1984, the ‘peasant consciousness’ conference at Bellagio organised by Majid Siddiqi in 1987, and the three associated workshops at SOAS on agriculture and economic organisation, organised by me, Kaoru Sugihara, Utsa Patnaik, Burton Stein, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, in July 1992. In the late stages of writing I have benefited particularly from editing two books from these workshops, on Indian agriculture, where I found methodologies congenial to my own, and (jointly) of Japanese contributions to South Asian rural studies, where contrasting perspectives helped clarify my thinking. For similar reasons, I am indebted also to the London third- world economic history group, and especially to a long, fruitful series of informal three-man seminars held with David Anderson and Ian Brown on peasants in the colonial world. Versions of parts of the present volume or its counterpart were read at several venues in SOAS, and also at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, at the Imperial History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London, at the British Association of South Asian Studies’ meeting in Sussex, at the Economic History Society’s conference at Exeter, at an informal seminar on ‘stratification’ at Leicester, at the Canadian conference on India and the National Congress in Montreal, at Professor Ravinder Kumar’s seminar at the Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, at the Department of History and the British Council in Calcutta, at Osaka City University, and at the New Zealand Asian Studies conference in Auckland. All these occasions produced helpful comments. The editors and readers of several journals and collections of essays have commen- ted on articles which foreshadowed or have been incorporated in parts of the book.1 One article has been revised for inclusion in chapter ten. It is ‘In search of dominant peasants. Notes on the implementation in Bihar of the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885’ in Clive Dewey (ed.), Arres- ted Development in India. The historical dimension (Manohar Publi- cations, New Delhi 1988), pp. 188-222. Some shorter extracts or para- phrases, cited in footnotes, have also been included, notably from ‘Law and agrarian society in India. The case of Bihar and the nineteenth- century tenancy debate’, Modern Asian Studies 22, 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 319-54, and ‘Ideas in agrarian history. Some observations on the British and nineteenth-century Bihar’, Professor Eric Stokes Memorial Lecture (May 1989), Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1990), pp.17-43. I have depended greatly on the riches of the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the India Office Library and Records (now the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library), the manuscripts and reading rooms of the British Library, the National Archives of India, the Bihar State Record Office, Patna, and the Bod- leian Library, Oxford. Janet Marks, formerly executive officer in the SOAS Centre of South Asian Studies, helped with the preparation of the manuscript. Finally, I have received financial assistance on more than one occasion from the Research Committee at the School of Oriental and African Studies.