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 Chapter Five Custom and the law We may conclude from chapter four, unsurprisingly, that the 1885 Act originated in colonial perceptions. Noteworthy in the debate was the paucity of direct justification for the favourable prognosis—the future comfort—which was promised as a result of the reforms. Instead, alongside the cases made for historical legitimacy and present poverty and oppression, an adverse trajectory was presented: the fate of tenants since the permanent settlement. This appeared as a professedly factual account, but contained an implied counterfactual (what would have happened if tenant rights had been preserved by law), which reduced the need to verify either the past ruin and its causes, or the future pro- mise and its means. At issue, instead, was the subject of this chapter, the role of law and custom—as explanations or as remedies for present conditions, and in relation to a goal of improvement. By considering these questions, which appeared in several guises, this chapter will trace the impulse to legislate, as the outcome of colonial perceptions. The reality of past or future conditions did not matter deeply to the tenancy debate; what was vital was that tenants were perceived to be poor and oppressed, and their fate linked to legal rights and structures. Though (as discussed in chapter two) it was unlikely that conditions were changed solely or directly by government policy, there were indi- cations that the tenants’ position was worsening. These were seized upon by the reformers, who concentrated on the damage to subordinate rights over the nineteenth century. An empirical gap was left for the landlords to allege that the material prosperity of the peasantry of Ben- gal was increasing and that zamindars treated them well. Characteris- tically the method was again to present the ‘evidence’ of official reports —of price rises in rice ahead of rent increases in Presidency Division (1876), of improvements in houses and consumption in Dhaka and Patna divisions (1877 and 1882), on the liberality and public spirit of zamindars (in the famine of 1873-4), and the growing knowledge of their rights amongst raiyats (1878). Ashutosh Mookerjea quoted the Calcutta Review of 1853 on the favourable condition of the Bengal raiyat in comparison with the Scottish and Irish peasantry, and referred to the evidence of expansion of cultivation and then of population, the second following from the first (in accordance with Thorold Rogers’ 146 Custom and the law 147 Political Economy) and thus not forcing people on to inferior land.1 But the better of the argument was had by those who stressed that the law was a dead letter (Bihar, 1870s), that raiyats had widespread debt (Nadia, 1876) and that the majority of landlords were grasping and oppressive (Tirhut, 1873). It was perhaps significant that in Dhaka the condition of ‘raiyats’ was ‘excellent’ in 1873/4 but that they paid ‘low wages’.2 About the same time, C.H.T. Crosthwaite was writing of Awadh that the cultivators ‘as a body [had] suffered from our Govern- ment more poverty and oppression than fell to their lot under the Nawabi’. The British had ‘changed or destroyed the conditions which protected them, without supplying any other safeguards in their place’; this was not ‘a mere question of the just treatment of one class by ano- ther’, he added: ‘It concerns the welfare of the Empire.’3 For Bengal the reformers also asserted that tenants had been in a more advantageous position in the eighteenth-century. A story of the decline of the tenantry derived from or shadowed the narrative of raiyats’ rights. Whether or not the decline was new depended on the situation before 1793. What was the administrative or socio-economic mechan- ism whereby the ‘rights’ of the raiyats would have been protected? What capacity had the laws of the East India Company to create changes in practice? Instead of considering such questions, Field argued that the lack of evidence of enhancement in locally-established rent-rates, by contract, showed that enhancement was illegal in the eighteenth century. His was a circular argument derived from the defin- ition of abwabs; it should be set against the certainty that actual demands did increase, and that measures of coercion were taken to keep cultivators on the land. On the other hand, economic strategies were sometimes used to attract tenants, especially short-term 1 A. Mookerjea, The Annals of British Land-Revenue Administration in Ben- gal from 1698 to 1793 (Calcutta, 1883). The reference was to J.E.T. Rogers, A Manual of Political Economy for Schools and Colleges (Oxford 1868). Rogers, formerly and later professor of political economy at Oxford, was at this time Radical MP for Southwark, notable for his editions of Bright and Cobden, and for works on agricultural prices and on wages. 2 Tarini Das Bannerji, The Zemindar and the Ryot in Bengal (Calcutta, 1883). 3 Crosthwaite note, 15 June 1882, Add.Mss.43584. Interestingly for the dis- cussions elsewhere in this book, Crosthwaite argued that the near-starvation of large numbers of tenants-at-will was ‘a matter of grave national importance’ (emphasis added), and that the answer was not direct state intervention but laws to ensure rights so that people could protect themselves. 148 Ancient rights and future comfort favourable rent-rates and even grants or loans for productive purposes. Some of these and many other practices seem to have persisted through the later nineteenth century—including ‘proper’ shares of the harvest for landlords and village officers and servants, and differences in rent- rates for different castes. It is interesting that, even well into the twentieth century, land tenanted by ‘industrious’ castes was sold at a premium, even though generally, by then, population pressure had shifted the advantage to the landlords. The result was multiple not standard rent-rates, and no guarantee that rents would be stable. Though, over time, there were of course real changes in agrarian conditions, there is an element of farce in trying to decipher them from descriptions by eighteenth-century East India Company servants filter- ed through the partisanship of late nineteenth-century polemicists. But perhaps we may assume that parts of the terminology and hence of the concepts of British agrarian analysis, for the 1790s and beyond, were derived from Indian practice. There must have been some indigenous notions of appropriate rates of rent and revenue, and of inappropriate demands. There were possibly even fixed principles of rent-rates, for example entitlements to a proportion of the product, say one-sixth for the landlord as in the code of Manu, though such rates were probably always controversial, or if not always, then by the later nineteenth century. In Dhaka district, landlords contested the idea that they should take only one-fifth, and inquiries concluded that in practice they were extracting anything from one fortieth to one half.4 Similar disputes continued well into the twentieth century. Conversely, the exceptional persistence of known rates, or indeed rights and status, but not neces- sarily of actual payments, or practices, generally bedeviled assessments of rents, wages and social conditions in India. Given a variety of conditions, the existence of ideas of proper or prevailing rates need never have implied that actual payments conform- ed over whole districts; no doubt, in practice abwabs greatly enlarged the amounts of rent actually paid even before 1793. Yet it was Field’s contention that customary rates had become shadowy and that they declined in importance during the nineteenth century. He might have made (though, like the Zemindary Settlement, he did not) the point 4 Field’s Digest, pp.245-50, discusses this in the context of suggestions that rents ought to be related by law to gross produce, as proposed by Ricketts in 1859. This plan was also ruled out, in his view, by the variety of crops, and by the variety of the rates (influenced, Field thought, by the number of rent- receiving intermediaries). See chapters three and four for the full references for such sources. Custom and the law 149 suggested by Nuffer Chandra Bhatta, a sub-judge of the 24-Parganas, that the very heavy revenue assessment (one of the motives for giving ownership to the zamindars in 1793) had forced rent increases which had ‘obliterated’ the pargana rate before 1812, in favour of competition and contract rents.5 Field did note that, as early as 1812, Colebrooke was calling for written declarations and records of the rates at which leases might be renewed, and suggesting (as provided in Regulation I of that year) that the rent-rates on new leases, replacing those abrogated at a revenue sale, should relate to what was paid on similar or adjacent land (or to previous rents paid on the land in question). Field took the view that this alternative was the origin of the ‘prevailing rate’ which recurred, much refined, in the Act of 1859 (whereupon it vanished for impracticality and disuse). The need for it in 1812 implied that it was then already difficult, at least in some cases, to identify a pargana rate and that rents were under upward pressure.