A. INTRODUCTION
The First Amendment to the Constitution of India, passed by the Parliament in 1951 soon after the Constitution came into force in 1950, made changes to Article 19 of the Constitution, so as to enable state legislatures to pass laws that would effect the redistribution of land in their territories, through the abolition of the Zamindari system. The socialist faction within the Congress Party, led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, recognised that massive land reforms would have to be effected so as to permit a comprehensive socio-economic development of marginalised sections in a largely agricultural nation. This belief emanated out of an understanding that how land is held in a society, is crucial in determining the manner in which the society shall function and evolve. It was also in recognition that the landholding system established and consolidated in India under the British rule had been crucial in the widespread degradation of cultivators in the country, and that they constituted a large proportion of the entire population of the country meant that the issue occupied a central place in the policy objectives of the government. As such, the government of the new independent nation chose to prioritise this policy goal.
In 1786, Lord Cornwallis arrived in India, to take over as the Governor General of Bengal. A rampant colonialist, thoroughly loyal to the East India Company, he espoused a desire to establish and solidify Company administration in the subcontinent based on freedom, and the rule of law. His object was to increase the general levels at which wealth was created, but this was with the purpose of sending such surplus wealth to Britain. With an ideology laced with the ‘civilising mission’, and tempered with structural exclusion of natives from political and judicial institutions, Cornwallis implemented the Permanent Settlement system in the province of Bengal in the year 1973. This covered also areas that form the modern-day Bihar and Orissa.
The Permanent Settlement is arguably the single most important change implemented by the British rule in East India. Its effects, were by no means, limited to only a change in the nature land ownership, but it extended to the way in which social economic development of the people of these regions occurred, how the politics of Bengal was shaped, and even the manner in which communities in society perceived and interacted with each other.
In a system of administration where forced cultivation of certain crops by factory officials were the norm, and the forced taking of credit was vastly leading cultivators into indebtedness and impoverishment, the Permanent Settlement system was seen by Cornwallis as not only being in furtherance of the rule of law, but also an effective way to establish strong administrative control of the company. The primary objective however, was to delegate revenue collections to local landowners at a rate fixed in perpetuity, thereby ensuring that the revenue coffers of the Company were always taken care of.
This paper seeks to explore the wide-ranging impact of the Permanent Settlement of Bihar and Bengal from a socio-economic perspective so as to further an argument that the prevailing nature of land holding in a certain area has a fundamental role to play in the functioning and evolution of the society in that area. The effect arising thereof will be analysed, with keeping in mind the acute plight on individual cultivators that was caused by the Permanent Settlement.
B. THE PERMANENT SETTLEMENT
In the pre-Colonial era, Mughal rulers would in several instances confer large landholdings upon loyal subjects and those that had requited their beneficence. Such landholders were conferred with several titles along with the lands, and were obligated to collect revenue on behalf of the royal treasury.
With the coming of the British, it was recognised by the new administration that the primary source of revenue for the Company coffers would have to be sourced from land revenue, and as such methods to effectively raise this revenue with prolonged stability had to be established. The answer to their dilemma was provided by Lord Cornwallis in the Permanent Settlement of 1793, whereby landholdings were transferred to local zamindars, with absolute property rights over the same. The attached obligation therein would be to regularly pay the authorities revenue, which was fixed at a rate for perpetuity. It was imagined that since the rate of revenue would be fixed, regular revenue would be assuredly generated for the Company. The revenue to be paid, it was rightly imagined, would be raised by the Zamindars from the local cultivators in the region under his control. Moreover, it was hoped that absolute control of the lands would incentives landholders to invest in the same, with the objective of increasing productivity, thereby generating surplus wealth that could be used for goods manufactured in Britain. The landholders thus created, were meted out treatment by the British authorities on the basis of their ability to fulfil the obligations of revenue and their demonstration of loyalty during wars. This shows us that great emphasis was placed upon timely payment of revenue. As a consequence, the Zamindars began to extract high rates of revenue from the cultivators in their region, the ryots, which meant their further impoverishment. The high rates of revenues upon the revenues can be understood given the fact that the surplus revenue left, after having paid its obligation to the British revenue authority, would be left with the Zamindars. Moreover, the Permanent Settlements failed to incentivise the Zamindars into increasing productivity as was hoped.
Despite the wide-ranging ill effects arising out of the Permanent Settlement, especially in regards to the severely degraded conditions of the ryots, the Permanent Settlement still occupied a place of reverence amongst the Bengali intelligentsia. While most prominent members of the Bengali intellectual class simply failed to notice the plight of the ryots, even those that did make such notice, often depicted either flimsy antipathy, or worse still, a flawed understanding of the relationship that existed between the apparent poverty of the cultivator class and the Permanent Settlement induced nature of landholding.
C. ANALYSING THE SOCIETY CREATED BY THE PERMANENT SETTLEMENT
1. Creation of a New Middle Class
The increase in wealth of the landholders enabled them to acquire influence and power in society. They increasingly began to diversify their interests into other institutions of administration such as bureaucracy and the law. Interestingly, those individuals that were engaged in professional occupations also demonstrated a desire to buy Zamindari landholdings because of their sheer profitability. This meant that a new middle class was created in the Bengali society, which was loyal to the British, and was seeking to quickly occupy places in the British administrative system. This class of individuals were distinctly visible as a social force.
Surplus wealth at the disposition of this class, when coupled with the crushingly high rates of revenue for the cultivators led to the creation of a class of moneylenders. Since no investments were in reality put into agriculture by the landholders as was hoped, financial burden upon the cultivators were on the rise. This forced them into resorting to taking loans from local moneylenders that charged them exorbitant interests. As a consequence, the cultivators found themselves engulfed in debt traps. The rise of the class of moneylenders therefore, were also linked to the nature of landholding.
2. Social Indifference
The Hindu educated elite was only peripheral in its concern for the ryots. According to Amlendu De, there exists a substantial catena of academic writing by class comprising of the Hindu bhadralok, and there is a general perception that arises that they did possess awareness of the plight of the cultivator class. Nevertheless, distinctions between ‘good zamindars’ and ‘bad zamindars’ were often created so as to deflect criticism against the structural problem of landholding. De points out attitudes that prevailed in the minds of several leading scholars such as Raja Rammohun Roy, Iswar Chandra Deb, and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who in their writings have been pleased to shower praises on the Permanent Settlement. Moreover, even Nolim Kristo Bose, who did recognise the need to confer proprietorship upon cultivators, would fall short of advocating a system where absolute property rights could be conferred upon cultivators.
3. Political Antipathy
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, the Bengali bhadralok asserted their political and social rights boldly. Political writings and participation in consolidation of interests was taking place at a great degree. Several political parties became participants in the social sphere, such as the Congress Party, the Muslim League, and the Swaraj Party. These parties did adopt anti-British stances in their discourse, and were, in varying degrees, critical of the government on several issues. While it was hoped that such increased politicisation of the Indian classes would lead to the development of great class consciousness, it was not to be. This can be attributed to the fact that both the Congress Party and the Muslim League were heavily influenced by Zamindars themselves, and were dependent upon them for their funding. As such, political programmes towards the structural reformation of landholding was not taken up with zealousness. Moreover, while the Swaraj Party, socialist in its ideology, and run together by Motilal Nehru and Chitta Ranjan Das, did attempt to develop a political issue out of balancing property rights of the ryots and that of the landholder, it could not come to any real fruition. This was probably because of the limited social base and political legitimacy that the party enjoyed, and also because of the pre-mature death of Das. It is clear that there was a greater emphasis on political emancipation as opposed to socio-economic emancipation.
Moreover, when the legislative assembly discussed the Rent Control Bill in 1886, which was purportedly being proposed to control the high rates revenue extractions by the zamindars upon the ryots, the Zamindar class had nominated individuals with high social standing to present their case before the legislature. On the other hand, there was not an individual to speak in furtherance of the interests of the cultivators. It was therefore only predictable that the resultant law eventually passed by the legislature was tilted more towards the interests of the Zamindar.
4. Strengthening of Feudalistic Administration of Landholding and Revenue Collection
It is also true that the Permanent Settlement system of revenue collection further endorsed feudal relationships between the landlords and the cultivators by basing the obligation of revenue collection upon landlords over areas that traditionally were under their social influence. Certain zamindar families rode on immense local social privilege on the basis of their caste position, and the historically leading role they exercised. By further enforcing the obligation of revenue collection, the Permanent Settlement system solidified such feudal relations by giving it a legal basis.
Moreover, scholars have pointed out the British trend of preferring those families to confer zamindari rights upon that already had influence in the area. This was considered to be in furtherance of efficient and effective revenue collection. There had also been instances in Bihar wherein prominent zamindar families were stripped of their lands, only to be reinstated later.
5. The Role of the Wahhabi Movement
The Wahhabi Movement was an Islamic movement geared towards the theological purification of Islam, and had swept of most of North India. It's influence was especially remarkable in Bihar and Bengal, and most of the movement’s activities were coordinated out of Patna. While being a cultural and theological movement focusing on the aim of removing from Islamic life, the ills introduced by the colonial influence, it also contained within itself certain socio-political shades of colour. A fundamental ideology of the movement pertained to the exploitation of the ryots in Bengal, especially because most cultivators in central and eastern portions of the province were Mohammedans.
The movement raised calls for the complete demolition of the zamindari system, and vehemently was critical of the British system of revenue collection. They advocated for greater proprietary rights of the ryots, and this emanated out of their Islamic conception of the world as being given by God for all to enjoy and live upon. In pursuance of their beliefs against the prevailing system of landholding, members of the movement often led violent attacks against revenue collectors and zamindars. It would not be unfair to say that, therefore, they did manage to present the only full-fledged criticism of the Zamindari system, and the British policy of Permanent Settlement, and thereby did manage to cause an upheaval in the land relations of Bengal and Bihar. However, the movement had a relatively short-lived history, and it largely failed in making substantial alterations to the nature of landholdings.
6. Rise of Communal Disharmony
Scholars have also attempted to link the land holding relations that existed in Bengal to the emergence of communal disharmony in the province. As was mentioned above, a substantial proportion of the cultivator class were Mohammedans, whereas the majority of zamindars were upper caste Hindu families. It was this disjunct that the Wahhabis had focused upon, and several Muslim educated elite members of society had pointed towards. It was argued by De that the rise of communalism can be sourced to the antipathy that arose in the 19th Century because of mistreatment by zamindars of another religion. It is also noted by scholars that loyalty came to be understood on lines drawn along community boundaries. Thus, narratives that were laced communal rhetoric and feelings of mistreatment and oppression of members of one community at the hands of the other, came to acquire space in the social thought processes.
D. CONCLUSION
It is now safe to conclude that the nature of land relations that exist in a social setting have fundamental and wide-ranging impact on the social relations prevailing therein, the nature of politics, and the manner and trajectory of sociological development. Such a perspective of analysis was also propounded by Frederick Engels as well. In the context of the Permanent Settlement of Bengal in 1793, the effects have been stark, and have had the effect of being a watershed moment in the history of region. Given the prominence and recognised importance of the province of Bengal in British India, it has had effects beyond the geographical boundaries of the province itself. Indeed, it was on the lines of the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, that the Ryotwari System was established in the Bombay province, which had again seen similar problems and issues cropping up.
It must not be presumed however that the Permanent Settlement was never subjected to criticism from members of the British class itself. Indeed, it had been pointed out by many that the fixed rate of revenue would mean the stagnation of the revenue generating capacity of the Company in the long run. Moreover, some also pointed out that such strengthening of feudal land holdings would mean a possibility of an effective consolidated zamindari opposition to the British rule.
It is even surprising to note that the Constitution of India does not contain provisions that purport to represent the interest of the long-oppressed cultivator classes. In fact, this was deliberately not included in the Constitution by the Constituent Assembly since a large section within the Assembly sought to represent the Zamindari interests. It was finally through the means of the First Amendment that the Nehru-led government could create the necessary avenues for the structural reorganisation of land relations in the country. Albeit, while the statutory necessities were fulfilled through several land abolition and land ceiling legislations, it was never implemented effectively. This meant that the degree of social reorganisation of land that Nehru had hoped for, was never really realised. Nehru had dreamt of land relations of an order where oppression had no place. This dream is distant still.