INTRODUCTION

The period between the Mughal grant of the diwāni of Bengal to the East India Company in 1765 and the promulgation of the so-called Permanent Settlement of the land revenue in 1793 is among the most intensely studied in the historiography of India. The interest of West- minster in Indian affairs during these years and the force of Burke’s convictions as set out by him during the impeachment of Warren Hastings, continue to fascinate historians, especially, as is natural, those in Britain. The same is true with respect to the Company’s search during those decades for a viable and ideologically defensible method to manage the fiscal and judicial business of Bengal. In contrast, the years that followed these discussions appeared much less exciting. The administrative paradigm of the Cornwallis Code of 1793 that resulted from the search for a way forward, would hold captive the population as well as the internal administration of North India for more than thirty-five years. Yet, it has not been regarded as requiring historical analysis. With respect to the post-1793 period, historians have admit- tedly addressed the question of the success or failure of Cornwallis’s agrarian settlement in Bengal. On the whole, however, interest shifted from the regulation of the interior affairs of Bengal to the military campaigns on the Company’s frontiers. The decades since the promul- gation of the new code were seen foremost as those of the Bonapartist attacks of Lords Wellesley and Hastings on the Indian princely states, that is as a period of imperialist achievement, during which the Com- pany acquired its unassailable position of political dominance on the subcontinent. As to the revenue affairs of India, the idea was that this was an intermediate period characterised by a tedious and unfruitful groping for the reform of an as yet inefficient and unpractical system of agrarian fiscal management, especially with respect to Madras and the Upper Provinces of the Bengal Presidency. Only the measures of Lord William Bentinck (Governor General 1828–35), according to this view, ended the impasse and marked the starting point of the period of classical imperialist rule, which was what British India was really about. Thus, both the pre-1793 and the post-1830 periods were brought into historiographical focus. They were interpreted in terms of British 2 introduction colonial efforts that significantly gave shape to the British Empire of later years. As to the almost four intervening decades, the impression created was one of stagnation. Administratively speaking, they seemed to have been a waste of time. It is true that Eric Stokes’s study The English Utilitarians and India traced the intellectual origins of the new idioms that would penetrate the official vocabulary during the post- 1830 period to the pre-Bentinck years.1 Stokes was clearly aware of the fact that these years, in many respects, represent the formative period of the modern colonial state. More recently, Douglas Peers has shown how, during this period, many of the British in India, both soldiers and civilians, came to understand their situation as that of a ‘beleaguered garrison’ and British India itself as a ‘garrison state’ that would retain its credibility as long as it would project an image of military omnipotence. British rule in India, in other words, was in the last analysis an “empire of opinion” that could maintain itself only if a great deal of attention and money was “directed at promoting an image of British superiority to reinforce those conclusions the British had convinced themselves that the Indians had reached about British strength and character.”2 Such a self-analysis of the British position in India served the interest of the large numbers of army personnel employed by the Company. But, as we will see, on the civil side of government, the British purpose in India and the question of the foun- dation of its future stability as a part of the empire was for several decades interpreted in a different, and perhaps complementary, idiom. Moreover, the self-image as well as the daily concerns and motives of most of the British and Indian civil servants who, on the judicial and the revenue side, ran the Cornwallis system in the pre-1830 years, were derived neither from metropolitan interests nor from military- fiscalist logic. So, as the implications in the districts of the Company’s executive measures and generally the degree to which the regulations of 1793 impinged upon the lives of the population subjected to them, remain a blank in the text of Indian history, they deserve a narrative of their own. An evaluation of the origin and significance of the 1793 code seems to me best suited to begin telling the story.

1 Oxford 1959. The attempts at land revenue reform, however, are well studied; see Asiya Siddiqi, Agrarian Change in a Northern Indian State: Uttar Pradesh 1819–1833, Oxford 1973. 2 Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India 1819–1835, London and New York 1995, 1, 9.