Bengal and the Zamindars

The story of Bengal under early Company rule is not a simple tale of a new system working as planned. It is a story of conflict, clever resistance, and unintended consequences. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 was meant to create a stable, loyal class of landlords who would improve agriculture and pay a fixed revenue on time. Instead, it set off a struggle between the Company, the zamindars, and a rising class of rich peasants called jotedars.

The Auction That Wasn't Real

In 1797, a public auction was held in Burdwan (present-day Bardhaman). The estates of the Raja of Burdwan, a powerful zamindar, were being sold because he had failed to pay the revenue fixed under the Permanent Settlement. The Company expected outside buyers to step in. But the Collector soon discovered a strange twist: over 95 per cent of the sales were fictitious. The purchasers were servants and agents of the raja himself, who had bought the lands on his behalf. The raja’s estates had been publicly sold, but he remained in control. This single event reveals the deep problems at the heart of the new revenue system.

The Problem of Unpaid Revenue

The Burdwan case was not an exception. In the years after 1793, over 75 per cent of zamindaris in Bengal changed hands at auction. Why was the system failing so badly?

The Company had introduced the Permanent Settlement with clear hopes. By the 1770s, Bengal’s rural economy was in crisis — famines were frequent and agricultural output was falling. Officials believed that if the state’s revenue demand was fixed forever, two things would happen. First, the Company would get a regular, predictable flow of revenue. Second, landowners would feel secure enough to invest in improving agriculture, knowing the state would not later raise its claim and eat away their profits. This, they hoped, would create a class of loyal, prosperous yeomen farmers and rich landowners.

The problem was deciding who these landowners should be. After much debate, the Company settled on the existing rajas and taluqdars of Bengal. They were now officially classified as zamindars. Under the new definition, a zamindar was not a landowner in the village but a revenue collector for the state. Each zamindari — which could contain hundreds of villages — was treated as one revenue estate. The Company fixed the total revenue demand for the entire estate. The zamindar’s job was to collect rent from the villages, pay the fixed sum to the Company, and keep whatever was left over as his income. If he failed to pay on time, his estate could be auctioned.

Why Zamindars Defaulted

Company officials believed a fixed demand would give zamindars security. In reality, they defaulted regularly. There were four main reasons.

First, the initial revenue demand was set very high. The Company knew that if it fixed the demand forever, it would never be able to claim a share of any future increase in income from rising prices or expanded cultivation. To minimise this anticipated loss, it pegged the demand high, arguing that the burden on zamindars would gradually ease as agriculture expanded and prices rose.

Second, this high demand was imposed in the 1790s, a time when agricultural prices were depressed. Ryots (peasants) found it hard to pay their rents to the zamindar. If the zamindar could not collect rent, how could he pay the Company?

Third, the revenue was invariable — it had to be paid in full regardless of whether the harvest was good or bad. And it had to be paid punctually. Under the Sunset Law, if payment did not come in by sunset on the specified date, the zamindari was immediately put up for auction.

Fourth, the Permanent Settlement initially limited the zamindar’s power to collect rent and manage his estate. The Company wanted to control and regulate the zamindars, not empower them. Their troops were disbanded, their customs duties abolished, and their courts (cutcheries) were brought under the supervision of a Company-appointed Collector. Over time, the collectorate became an alternative centre of authority, severely restricting what a zamindar could do. Rent collection itself was a perennial problem. Bad harvests and low prices made payment difficult for ryots. At other times, ryots deliberately delayed payment. Rich ryots and village headmen — jotedars and mandals — were only too happy to see the zamindar in trouble. The zamindar could prosecute defaulters, but the judicial process was long and slow. In Burdwan alone, there were over 30,000 pending suits for arrears of rent in 1798.

The Rise of the Jotedars

While zamindars struggled, a different class was consolidating power in the villages. These were the jotedars — rich peasants. Francis Buchanan’s survey of Dinajpur district in North Bengal gives a vivid description of them.

By the early nineteenth century, jotedars had acquired vast areas of land, sometimes thousands of acres. They controlled local trade and moneylending, exercising immense power over poorer cultivators. A large part of their land was cultivated by sharecroppers (adhiyars or bargadars), who brought their own ploughs, worked the fields, and handed over half the produce to the jotedar after the harvest.

Within the villages, the jotedars’ power was more effective than that of the zamindars. Unlike zamindars, who often lived in towns, jotedars lived in the villages and had direct control over a large section of poor villagers. They fiercely resisted zamindars’ efforts to increase the village revenue demand (jama), prevented zamindari officials from doing their work, mobilised dependent ryots, and deliberately delayed revenue payments to the zamindar. When zamindars’ estates were auctioned, jotedars were often among the purchasers.

Jotedars were most powerful in North Bengal, but rich peasants and village headmen were emerging as commanding figures in other parts of Bengal too. In some places they were called haoladars, elsewhere gantidars or mandals. Their rise inevitably weakened zamindari authority.

How Zamindars Resisted

The authority of zamindars did not simply collapse. Faced with high revenue demands and the threat of auction, they devised survival strategies. New pressures produced new tactics.

Fictitious sale was one such strategy. The Raja of Burdwan used a series of manoeuvres. First, he transferred some of his zamindari to his mother, because the Company had decreed that women’s property would not be taken over. Then his agents manipulated the auctions. The revenue demand was deliberately withheld, and unpaid balances were allowed to accumulate. When a part of the estate was auctioned, the zamindar’s men bought it, outbidding other purchasers. They then refused to pay the purchase money, forcing a resale. The process was repeated endlessly, exhausting the state and other bidders. Eventually, the estate was sold back to the zamindar at a low price. The zamindar never paid the full revenue demand, and the Company rarely recovered the unpaid balances. Such transactions happened on a grand scale. Between 1793 and 1801, four big zamindaris of Bengal, including Burdwan, made benami (anonymous) purchases that collectively yielded as much as Rs 30 lakh. Over 15 per cent of all sales at auctions were fictitious.

There were other methods too. When outsiders bought an estate at auction, they could not always take possession. Sometimes their agents were attacked by the former zamindar’s lathyals (strongmen armed with sticks). At other times, the ryots themselves resisted the entry of outsiders. They felt a sense of loyalty to their own zamindar, seeing him as a figure of authority and themselves as his proja (subjects). The sale of the zamindari disturbed their sense of identity and pride.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the depression in prices was over. Those zamindars who had survived the troubles of the 1790s consolidated their power. The rules for revenue payment were also made somewhat more flexible. As a result, the zamindar’s power over the villages was strengthened. It was only during the Great Depression of the 1930s that they finally collapsed, and the jotedars consolidated their power in the countryside.

The Fifth Report

Many of these changes were documented in a report submitted to the British Parliament in 1813. It was the fifth in a series of reports on the East India Company’s administration in India, and is often referred to simply as the Fifth Report. It ran to 1002 pages, of which over 800 were appendices containing petitions from zamindars and ryots, reports from district collectors, statistical tables on revenue returns, and notes on the revenue and judicial administration of Bengal and Madras.

The report was produced in a charged political context. From the time the Company established its rule in Bengal in the mid-1760s, its activities were closely watched and debated in England. Many groups opposed the Company’s monopoly over trade with India and China. Private traders wanted a share of the India trade, and British industrialists wanted to open up the Indian market for their manufactures. Political groups argued that the conquest of Bengal was benefiting only the Company, not the British nation. Stories of Company misrule, greed, and corruption were widely publicised. The British Parliament passed a series of Acts in the late eighteenth century to regulate Company rule, forcing it to produce regular reports. The Fifth Report was one such report, produced by a Select Committee, and it became the basis of intense parliamentary debates.

For over a century and a half, the Fifth Report shaped our understanding of what happened in rural Bengal. Its evidence is invaluable. But official reports like this must be read carefully. We need to know who wrote them and why. Recent research shows that the arguments and evidence of the Fifth Report cannot be accepted uncritically. Intent on criticising the Company’s maladministration, the report exaggerated the collapse of traditional zamindari power and overestimated the scale on which zamindars were losing their land. As we have seen, even when zamindaris were auctioned, zamindars were not always displaced. They used ingenious methods to retain their estates.