Abstract
The introduction of the Permanent Settlement in 1793 sparked intense debates in London and Calcutta on colonial governance and revenue management. For the next two centuries, from the work of contemporary figures such as James Mill and Ram Mohun Roy, these debates seem to have informed two strands of historiography of colonial Bengal. On the one hand, a large number of studies — looking at their subject from a variety of points of view: Marxist, nationalist and imperialist — trace the Permanent Settlement’s mechanism, operation and impact on agrarian society and economy. On the other hand, a smaller number of works critically examine the ideological origin of the settlement within the context of the East India Company’s governance ideas and practices.1 Between the ‘idea’ of the Permanent Settlement and its perceived practical operations, there has been little focus on its limits in spatial terms. This lack of appreciation of the practical limits of the Permanent Settlement is less a result of the orthodoxy of certain historical approaches than the outcome of their inability to put ecology in its proper, long-term perspective. This chapter examines the ways in which the ecology of East Bengal thwarted, modified or muted the state’s own standard mechanism for land revenue management, and the resultant impact on the access and entitlement of the peasantry to the region’s agro-ecological resources.
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Notes
Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: an Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris, 1963); V.K. Gidwani, ‘“Waste” and the Permanent Settlement in Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27(4) (1992): 39–46.
R.H. Hollingbery, The Zemindary Settlement of Bengal, vol. 1 (Delhi, 1985), p. 363 (first published Calcutta, 1879). Also note this comment: ‘One of the principle causes of the change of opinion regarding the permanent settlement and of their order that no intermediate landed proprietors should be established between their European collectors and the ryots, is the desire to obtain all the revenue from the waste lands which may hereafter be brought into cultivation which is their declared intention “not to abandon”’ (‘Permanent Settlement of the Indian Land Revenue’, Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany (1929): 171).
James Mill, The History of British India, vol. 5 (London, 1826), pp. 545–6. See also Henry Leland Harrison, The Bengal Embankment Manual Containing an Account of the Action of the Government in Dealing with Embankments and Water Courses since the Permanent Settlement: Discussion of the Principles of Act of 1873 (Calcutta, 1909), p. 18.
Sulekh Chandra Gupta, ‘Retreat from Permanent Settlement and Shift Towards a New Land Revenue Policy’, in Burton Stein (ed.), The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India 1770–1900 (Delhi, 1992), p. 66.
Henry Beveridge, The District of Bakarganj: its History and Statistics (London, 1876), p. 160.
F.E. Pargiter, A Revenue History of the Sunderbans from 1765 to 1870 (Calcutta, 1885), p. 22; for a note on the zamindars’ claim over the tracts of the Sundarbans that adjoined their permanently settled states and the government’s negative response to such claims, see James Westland, A Report on the District of Jessore: its Antiquities, its History, and its Commerce, 2nd edn (Calcutta, 1874), pp. 107–10.
Pargiter, A Revenue History of the Sunderbans, p. 12; for a discussion of colonial revenue management in the Sundarbans, see John F. Richards and Elizabeth P. Flint, ‘Long-term Transformations in the Sundarbans’, Agriculture and Human Values, 7(2) (1990): 17–33.
J.B. Kindersley, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Chittagong 1923–33 (Alipore, 1938), p. 49.
F.H.B. Skrine, Offg Collector, Tipperah to W.W. Hunter, Director General of Statistics to GoI, 25 Jul 1885, in Movements of the People and Land Reclamation Schemes (Calcutta, 1885), p. 5.
For a discussion on the process of land formation, see J.C. Jack, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operation in the Bakarganj District, 1900–1908 (Calcutta, 1915), pp. 1–11, 109, 114. See also, Richards and Flint, ‘Long-term Transformations in the Sundarbans’, 17–33.
J.E. Webster, EBDG: Tippera (Allahabad, 1910), p. 86.
Quoted in Ratan Lal Chakraborty and Haruo Noma (eds), ‘Selected Records on Agriculture and Economy of Comilla District, 1782–1867’, Joint Study on Agriculture and Rural Development (JSARD) Working Paper, no. 13 (Dhaka, 1989), p. 95.
For instance, the decennial assessment of 1790, which was made permanently fixed in 1793, was very high and unequal in distribution. In the context of the total number of 14,500 zamindary estates of the Dhaka district, about one-third of the zamindars, paying about one-fourth of the total revenue demand, refused to accept the Permanent Settlement. The government brought these estates under its khas (direct) management. The same development took place in Tippera (Comilla) district. See Sirajul Islam, Permanent Settlement in Bengal 1790–1819 (Dhaka, 1979), pp. 25–6. Sirajul Islam does not clarify what happened to these wastelands. But given the government’s attitude towards the Permanent Settlement, it may be assumed that these were never returned to the zamindars.
‘A Lover of Justice’, Permanent Settlement Imperilled or, Act X of 1859 in its True Colors (Calcutta, 1865), pp. 4–12.
F.D. Ascoli, A Revenue History of the Sundarbans from 1870–1920 (Calcutta, 1921), p. 7.
B.R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India 1860–1970 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 44–5.
James Rennell, ‘Journal of Major James Rennell’, T.H.D. La Touche (ed.), in Bengal Asiatic Society Memoirs III (1910–14); Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: the Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997); Michael Mann, ‘Mapping the Country: European Geography and the Cartographical Construction of India, 1760–90’, Science Technology & Society, 8 (March 2003): 25–46.
Secy to BoR, Lower Provinces, to Offg Secy to GoB, 21 Oct 1859, in Papers Relating to Culturable Wastelands at the Disposal of Government (Calcutta, 1860), p. 57.
W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol.1 (London, 1875), p. 322; Westland remarked: ‘So great is the evil fertility of the soil, the reclaimed land neglected for single year will present to the next year’s cultivator a forest of reed (nal)’ (Westland, District of Jessore, p. 178).
J.W. Webster, EBDG: Noakhali, p. 82; For a detailed study of the Bengal land tenure sytem, see Sirajul Islam, Bengal Land Tenure: the Origin and Growth of Intermediate Interests in the 19th Century (Calcutta, 1988).
See George Campbell, Memoirs of my Indian Career, vol. II (London, 1893), pp. 215, 295.
A. Manson, Collector of Chittagong to Hunter, in Movements of People, p. 14. For an important narrative of similar circumstances by the turn of the nineteenth century, see Jon E. Wilson, ‘“A Thousand Countries to go to”: Peasants and Rulers in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, Past & Present, 189 (2005): 81–109.
IOR, V/27/314/23: P.M. Basu, Survey and Settlement of the Dakhin Shahbazpur Estates in the District of Backergunge, 1889–1895 (Calcutta, 1896).
Sirajul Islam, Rent and Raiyat: Society and Economy of Eastern Bengal, 1859–1928 (Dhaka, 1989); Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital. Rural Bengal since 1770 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 120.
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Iqbal, I. (2010). Ecology and Agrarian Relations in the Nineteenth Century. In: The Bengal Delta. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289819_2
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