The rise of the jotedars

While zamindars struggled under the weight of rising revenue demands at the end of the eighteenth century, a different class was quietly strengthening its hold inside the villages. These were the jotedars — rich peasants who, by the early nineteenth century, had become the real power in the Bengal countryside.

Francis Buchanan’s survey of the Dinajpur district in North Bengal gives us a vivid picture of this class. Jotedars had acquired vast estates, sometimes running into several thousand acres. They did not just farm; they controlled local trade and moneylending, and exercised immense power over poorer cultivators. A large part of their land was cultivated by sharecroppers (called adhiyars or bargadars), who brought their own ploughs, worked the fields, and handed over half the produce to the jotedar after harvest.

Within the village, the jotedar’s power was more effective than the zamindar’s. Zamindars often lived in towns or cities, far from the land they controlled. Jotedars, by contrast, lived right in the village and exercised direct, day-to-day control over a considerable section of the poor. This proximity gave them a decisive edge.

Jotedars fiercely resisted any attempt by zamindars to increase the jama (the assessed revenue) of the village. They would:

• Prevent zamindari officials from carrying out their duties
• Mobilise the dependent ryots (peasants) against the zamindar
• Deliberately delay revenue payments to the zamindar

When zamindars failed to pay revenue and their estates were auctioned, jotedars were often among the buyers. In this way, they steadily chipped away at zamindari authority.

The jotedars were most powerful in North Bengal, but similar figures were emerging across Bengal under different local names:

These village headmen and rich peasants, whatever they were called, all shared one effect: their rise inevitably weakened zamindari authority.