Creating a ruling strategy, 1770–1830

In the previous chapter we considered the way in which the Company established itself in south, central and upper India. We also looked at the way in which Tipu Sultan sought to develop an independent state in Mysore, a state whose goal was to undermine Company hegemony in southern India and create a sovereignty of Tipu’s own. In part, we were interested in not only the rise of Tipu’s centralizing state, but also the extent to which it required individuals who were a part of his military system to discipline themselves on the battlefield. In this chapter, we shall undertake an analysis of the ways the Company set

about to create a set of strategies to govern the populations of India. For instance, we shall try to understand how the Company gradually transformed itself from a mercantile organization to a government on the ground in India. We can well understand, therefore, that it was trying to discover ways to govern a population-one that was extraordinarily diverse and locally articulate. We shall consider how the Company state became embroiled in seeking to locate and even to invoke a “Mughal constitution” as a way of finding whether the land belonged to the Mughal sovereign or to the zamindars of Bengal. To do this we must consider the interaction both within the Company itself and among various elements of the ruling structure of Bengal in the period between 1756 and 1830. To learn how to govern India was a project of gargantuan proportions.

Unlike the relatively easy enterprise of conquest, which was an undertaking of violence and imposition of laws for the sake of establishing sovereignty, governing implied offering individuals and groups a series of incentives to induce them to join in the governing process. This was the economy of India in its broadest sense. In the case of India, this meant an incorporation of millions of individuals who varied according to language, religion and in many other ways. For us to understand this process we must consider the way in which the

employees of the Company in Bengal conceived of their task and how it related to the ownership of the land. Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in the late eighteenth century, like upper India

where Hindi was spoken, had a population of about 22,000,000. When the

Company was appointed the Diwan of the old Mughal subah or province of Bengal, they found that much of the land area of the province was occupied by a small number of zamindars. Partly, their size was a function of the consolidation that was undertaken in the early eighteenth century by Murshid Quli Khan, the Nawab, who sought to reward the zamindars who paid their land revenue promptly and punish those who did not. Partly it was a result of the fact that in the years since Murshid some of these zamindars had been able to enhance his or her property, particularly that of Burdwan, west of the Bhagirathi river in Bengal. What was equally striking was that the 15 largest of these zamindaris in

1757, at the end of Nawabi rule, paid 60% of the land revenue of the entire subah. As an example, Mir Kasim gave Burdwan, a large zamindari with 5,000 villages, to the Company in 1760, before he revolted against the Company. These zamindars, like that of Burdwan, were rajas who brought in the land revenues to the Nawab at Murshidabad and later the Company who centralized the government of Bengal in Calcutta. Zamindars were also an important element in the moral relations among the subordinate “rent” collectors, the village leaders, agriculturalists and still others beneath them, and operated essentially as patrons. Perhaps the most important site where the Nawab and, after him, the

zamindar expressed himself as a patron was at the annual puniya or “holy day” ceremonies at the end of one revenue year and the beginning of another. A ritual to indicate the beginning of the growing season, the puniya was traditionally on the first day of the Bangla or Bengali month of Baisak (AprilMay), after the closing of accounts. In the time of Alivardi Khan in the 1750s, some 400 individuals would gather at Murshidabad, the capital of Mughal Bengal, to reaffirm their ties to their superior and to agree to pay him a portion of their yearly agricultural income. In addition, the Nawab would give out robes or khilats for which the zamindar paid a sum of money. In turn, each zamindar engaged in a similar ritual more locally, where revenue officials would demonstrate their loyalty and commitment to pay what was due. At the village level as well, these same kinds of exchanges took place. In this sense, Nawabi Bengal was built on a model of patron and client. After the British took over Bengal they adopted many of these same rituals and also charged the recipients for the khilats, which were distributed. Although the British abandoned the ritual in 1772 (because they took up the requirements of being the Diwan of Bengal), zamindars continued to employ it among their own dependents for another 100 years. We know that villagers practiced these kinds of rituals even into the 1940s. One way to look at village behavior in Bengal in the eighteenth century is

to consider the religious beliefs of Bangla or Bengali villagers. When the British first got to Bengal, they found that there was hardly any robbery or murder. Luke Scrafton, who held several important Company positions in Calcutta and Murshidabad in the 1750s and 1760s, said that “so free is the country from robbers that I doubt there having been an instance of one in the

memory of man.”1 Many other Company employees echoed these comments. One explanation of this phenomenon was possibly the way in which the teachings of the Vaishnavite or Krishna-worshipping religious reformer Chaitanya (1486-1533) affected the local population. We know that Chaitanya’s teachings helped to popularize vegetarianism, kept many among the lower classes from drinking alcohol, prevented them from using violence generally, and taught them to abstain from sexual activity outside marriage. One Vaishnava text says that an ideal devotee “will be humble as grass … will be modest, and will honor others. He will be patient as a tree; though he be beaten and cursed, he will say nothing, as a tree says nothing even when it is cut.” British commentators were amazed to see that these same Bangla speakers always demonstrated a great willingness to suffer without complaining. As we have noted in the previous chapter with regard to the conflict at

Plassey or Palashi-as the battle is known in Bengali-the decision to participate in the conspiracy that led to both the battle of Palashi and the murder of Siraj-ud-daulah was undertaken by local Company officials, such as Clive and Admiral Watson, without orders from London. Clive left for England sometime after these transactions. When he was in England, Clive announced that Bengal would provide

£2,000,000 a year to England, which was in the throes of a wide discussion about the weight of the national debt. If we look at the basis of these fears, we can see that, as a result of two European wars (and their imperial expressions), England had become burdened by an enormous national debt, which could only be reduced by taxation-particularly excise taxes on necessitiesof British citizens of what were called the “middling sort.” Ultimately, went this argument, were these groups to demand what later in America would become a clarion call for “no taxation without representation,” it could generate a movement to bring the entire political order into question. Britain would therefore come under enormous pressure to change the way in which people were elected and how taxes were levied. It could engender a kind of bourgeois radicalism. As a result, because the George Grenville government in England badly

needed more money to pay for its looming military-fiscal needs to head off a possible revolution from below, Clive was sent back to Bengal in 1765 from England with a national mandate. It was with these conversations with Grenville and his circle in mind that Clive negotiated the Diwani for the Company. Therefore, Bengal came into the hands of the Company not in a fit of absentmindedness, as the saying goes, but with the specific urging of the British prime minister and those who surrounded him in order to deal with the national debt. However, in the event, Bengal’s revenues did not match Clive’s expecta-

tions. We know from accounts of how much silver bullion the Company had to import that Bengal’s revenues could not pay for the Company’s goods that it sent back to England. In addition, it is clear that revenues from the land in Bengal could also not pay for the Company’s civil and military establishments

in India. In 1769 and 1770, there was a severe famine in Bengal. Contemporary observers tell us that dakaiti or robbery and other forms of collective violence were linked to famine only now and then. Our evidence, however, indicates that depopulation was most severe in north Bengal and in Bihar, moderately severe in central Bengal, and slight in southwest and eastern Bengal. In addition, deaths among the cultivating population were much lower than previous figures, which suggested a loss of one third of the population. Famine mortality in the Burdwan zamindari in central Bengal was not severe and agriculturists who left came back or were replaced. We shall see that, despite the enormous human toll that the Bengal famine of 1769-70 wrought, there were other parts of Bengal’s political economy that expanded considerably in the latter quarter of the eighteenth century. If we are to understand later developments in Bengal we must look at the

way in which the Company dealt with the zamindars. However, to understand the enormous weight and pressure that the Company came under to impose on the resources of Bengal, we must consider the goals that motivated the behavior of Company employees. We can say that, almost without exception, every Company servant who

entered Bengal in the eighteenth century thought that the Mughal emperor and the Nawab of Bengal were Asiatic despots who owned all the land of Bengal and that there was no law other than the mere whim of the Nawab that held sway in Bengal. For instance, we have the account of one of these men named George Vansittart, the younger brother of the governor of Bengal, who came to Bengal in the late 1760s after the Company had been made Diwan. Vansittart was one of those young men who were sent out into rural Bengal as what were called supervisors. Assigned to Midnapur district, Vansittart had to come to terms with the fact that there were zamindars on the ground there who claimed that their zamindaris did not belong to the Nawab but were theirs by virtue of ancient sanads or deeds, which gave the land to their families. Moreover, given the task of raising the tax demand of local zamindars, Vansittart was confronted with the fact that he could not with any right or ease increase the taxes on the zamindars of Midnapur simply to satisfy the enormous hunger of the Company for money to support its voracious army. Local ideas about land ownership were part of a variegated framework of ideas about local rights and privileges that simply did not fit into prevailing British ideas of Asiatic despotism. Moreover, in 1772, when Warren Hastings became governor of Bengal, the

Court of Directors told him to assume the other functions of the Diwan of Bengal. Starting in 1765, when the Company was granted the Diwani, they began to manage the tax-gathering apparatus of Nawabi Bengal right away. Management of the courts, on the other hand, still remained in the hands of Nawabi officials. It was to this task that Hastings and others began to address themselves. When the Company was granted the Diwani of Bengal, legal decisions

were issued by a number of different agencies, not all of them under the

direction of the Nawabi officials. At that time Nawabi judicial apparatus lived side by side with village assemblies, local leaders named dalapatis and rajbari or zamindari courts, all of which operated as judicial agents in the countryside. One of the main goals of the reforms under Hastings and his colleagues was to remove the judicial apparatus from Murshidabad and centralize the main law courts in the Indo-British city of Calcutta. Equally important was to differentiate the civil courts from criminal courts at the same time as the Company officials sought to make a clear division between civil affairs on the one hand and legal administration on the other. In the end the Company established a civil and criminal court in each district. At the same time the Company law courts privileged the use of specific Sanskrit and Arabic texts. We shall recall that in Chapter 1 we discussed the way in which the shari’a

or Muslim law operated in early eighteenth-century western India. We noted at that time that various elements of the population, such as women, knew how to manipulate the shari’a in their favor. Here, in later eighteenth-century Bengal, three quarters of a century after, we note that the use of that same shari’a law became much more rigid and narrow in its application because of the way in which texts were employed by colonial authorities in the local law courts. We can therefore conclude that one of the main outcomes of the British structuring of law courts and the law that was practiced there was not only to centralize Indian tradition but also to use this process to enhance a unitary sovereignty of Britain in India. After these reforms, there was no longer any shared sovereignty in Bengal. Part of the dismantling of the shared sovereignty of the Diwani undertaken

by Hastings after 1772 was hotly contested discussions between Hastings himself and an antagonist named Philip Francis, who was also a member of the Supreme Council in Calcutta. Aside from the heat of these disputes, Francis sought to show that Hastings had destroyed the wealth of Bengal by his mishandling of the zamindars. Francis’s very creative and constructivist thinking came to center on whe-

ther or not the zamindars actually owned their land according to the “Mughal constitution.” As discussions in the Council moved forward, employing ideas from both British country politics and French physiocratic notions, Francis argued that zamindars owned their land and that, by taxing them so heavily year after year, Hastings was destroying their productivity. It was Francis’s contribution to the “discovery” of the Mughal constitution that the zamindars should be given permanent title to their lands but, at the same time, that if they defaulted on their tax payments their lands should be sold for arrears. By 1776, Francis had essentially indigenized French and English ideas about land ownership in a faceoff with Company monied interests. Initially, when the Company began to deal with the problems posed by

Bengal’s land system, it sought to introduce uniformity and regularity into what was a very uneven and various historical product. This fact defeated Company efforts to bring about order through regulations, laws and other

rules. By this mechanism it was trying to reduce a localized, interactive moral economy based on personal discretion into a naked money-producing agrarian system. A major result of Company attempts to regularize and increase demands for revenue was seemingly to distort greatly a previously functional traditional system into one where much more force and violence was required than was previously the case. British officials of the Company said that they saw no way to collect the land taxes in Bengal without the detentions and beatings that were used traditionally to undertake this task. When Lord Cornwallis, of Yorktown fame, arrived in Bengal in 1786,

Company relations with the zamindars was a major priority. As a result, it was probably true that, until the 1793 Reforms under Lord Cornwallis, local agriculturalists did not see much difference between how they were treated in the traditional system and the way in which Company personnel handled them. We shall recall that in 1780 the demands from the Madras governor for money to pay troops in the War of 1780 against Hyder Ali had put Hastings and the tax-gathering system in Awadh under enormous pressure. In the same way, when these demands confronted Company authorities in Calcutta, they decided to enhance tax demands on zamindars in Bengal, particularly the Burdwan zamindari in what we would today call West Bengal. However, in 1789 Company strategies in dealing with zamindars whose

revenue collections were in arrears began to alter. In that year, the Company for the first time sold portions of a zamindari to pay for the arrears. In addition, between 1790 and 1793, all zamindaris were first given ten-year tax assessments and in 1793 these assessments were in turn made permanent. Therefore, what was innovative about these assessments was not only that they were permanent but also the way that zamindars in arrears were subject to the sale of their lands. In this one move, with the goal of creating a group of improving landlords, the Company abandoned any increase in taxes in perpetuity. In the ten years following these reforms-called the permanent settlement or permanent tax assessment-65% of land in Bengal was sold for arrears. However, we also know that these sales were mostly to relatives and other connections of the zamindars so that in the end the land generally circulated among the people whose lands were sold and, with the exception of Nadia, was not taken over by monied people from Calcutta. One further development in Bengal’s land system in the eighteenth century

deserves our attention. In the years following this permanent assessment or land settlement, zamindars leased out their lands in small parcels to people called patnidars. In due course, these patnidars leased out portions of their own land to still others in a series of leasing arrangements whose main effect was to perpetuate the zamindars and their lessees as rentiers not at all as improving landlords. We can therefore note that the original intentions of this goal by the Company state to abandon increases in taxes as a way to give the benefits of the rise in the values of land to enable landlords to reinvest that wealth in the land was never accomplished. We shall see that, at the time of Independence in 1947, what was then called the province of Bengal proved

the most poverty stricken of all the provinces of India because of the way in which the state had abandoned increases in taxes to these zamindars a century and a half earlier. We have noted that another effect of the Company attaining sovereignty in

Bengal was the development of a new idea of the body. Although this process was not apparent immediately, there is much to suggest that by the beginning of the nineteenth century both the bodies of the Indians and those of the English began to have a new meaning. We have seen how in local society at the time of the British arrival there was hardly any robbery. We can say that, as a result of the working of Vaishnavism, local Banglas were what we can describe as moral subjects. By moral subjects we mean persons who are not slaves to their appetites and have the opportunity to consider the need to be reflexive about their own behavior by virtue of their engagement in Vaishnava (or Krishna worship) belief. On the basis of reports from an English resident named Barlow, we also know that in the late eighteenth century in Banaras, a sacred city farther northwest from Bengal, there was also little or no robbery. However, in both these environments the East India Company introduced a new kind of juridical or coercive power. In the case of Banaras the Company sought with respect only to itself to seize and undermine these sites where for many years in early modern India trade had been regulated. Now this new kind of juridical behavior privileged these new traders with hats and gunsthat is to say, the British. In the case of Bengal, we have much evidence about the way in which the Company used corporal violence against weavers to force these artisans to work for them and supply cotton cloth at rates well below those paid by the Dutch and French East India Companies and the English private traders. Despite this constant disciplining of the artisan labor force in Bengal, the amount of cloth produced by the Company for export rose enormously. In the 1760s, for instance, the English Company exported an average of £400,000 worth of cloth every year, whereas during the 1770s and 1780s the Company exported cloth worth £1,000,000 or more every year. Amazingly enough, despite the use of violence on the weaver population, cloth production increased. One example of violence in the Bengal countryside concerned the increase

in dakaiti, a form of violent group robbery. As we have noted, one outcome of what came to be called the permanent settlement in Bengal was that a substantial amount of zamindari land in Bengal was sold by auction. Another element of these reforms brought forward by Lord Cornwallis was that zamindars, in 1793, were deprived of their police powers. Perhaps equally important is the fact that, prior to these Cornwallis reforms, zamindars were able to provide their dependents with tax-free lands sufficient both for their subsistence and to enable them to lead ritually satisfying lives. Pre-Reform zamindars also had much discretion in giving out charity and in dispensing justice. Not only were economic bonds broken between zamindars and those dependent on them, but these broken bonds and nonverbal agreements broke moral relationships as well.