Rents and rights

Into a milieu of variety and contingency were cast the hard categories of Western law and government, and a range of external economic forces associated with the internationalisation of trade and production. It is the extent to which these forces changed the balance of the agrarian structure which we have to consider. In particular, we are concerned with the increased oppression of the raiyats, as shown for example in greater insecurity of land-rights. The case for a deterioration (as explained already) rested largely on a supposed increase in the burden of rent after 1793. Emotionally, as we have seen, its basis was that raiyats had been deprived of property, expressed particularly as the privilege of paying rent at a rate which the landlord could not change at will and which was not affected by competition and contract. For some scholars this seemed enough. ¹ Empirically, however, an absolute change of this nature was insupportable. There were customary ideas about rates of rent, some of which were still evident at the end of the nineteenth century. But each agricultural plot was subject to a recognised 'field rate' which varied from one plot to another whenever zamindari management was sufficiently close. (On large estates it tended to be merely the average of the rate for an entire holding.) ² The tendency of custom, as this information shows, was towards specific rather than general rates of rent—rents which changed in accordance with status, soil, crop, and supply and demand too. Average rent rates certainly differed from place to place and, less dramatically, between the different categories applied by the British; but the greatest variations were from village to village and holding to holding. As already discussed, there was no 'pargana rate' at the end of the nineteenth century, nor was anyone able to demonstrate one in existence at any previous period. Theory and even state dictat may have called for it, but investigators repeatedly failed to find it. To consider that custom reinforced it, is, moreover, a gross misunderstanding of the nature and effect of Indian social norms.