ABSTRACT
In considering the introduction and implementation of chapter X of the Bengal Tenancy Act, one purpose will be to explore how it was that officialdom was persuaded to go further down the road to intervention; another to assess the limits. The very inclusion of survey and settlement proceedings in the Act was remarkable—partly because in Bengal there had been no tradition of survey work of this kind and for such purposes. It was remarkable also because the tide of opinion, at least in London, was strongly against the cost of the full reports which had marked the second generation of settlements in the Punjab and north India. The work was, administratively, a logical deployment of the skills developed in an earlier generation. Officials as Goldsmid and Wingate had set up separate and hence specialist teams of map and assessment makers, to effect economic change by relating demand, according to principles of political economy, precisely to the character and ability to pay of holdings, villages and districts. The later Bengal tenancy reformers shared their view (still often heard in the later nineteenth century, though it contradicted some of the protective and paternalist impulses of the same colonial officials who espoused it), to the effect that thrift and enterprise would be encouraged by high, definite, appropriate and stable rates of revenue and rent. However, (as said) the intention in Bengal was to record and entrench rights. Appropriate taxation was but one ground for a renewed search for information: an attempt to tap concealed wealth (an old motive) led on to the use of fiscal policy to achieve economic ends (a rather newer one). Thus survey and settlement work, and the keeping of records of land rights, reflected a practical impulse for reform, in a region where lack of information had repeatedly been identified as an impediment to government. From famine relief to taxation, from social equity to economic efficiency, Bengal and Bihar were allegedly impeded by official ignorance.
