Bengal, 1920-1947 - V.1: The Land Question

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BENGAL 1920-1947 The Land Qitestion

BENGAL DISTRICTS 1920-1947

GSSSG MONOGRAPH 4

BENGAL 1920-1947 VOLUME

ONE

The Land Question

PARTHA

GHATTERJEE

y

Published for Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

K P BAGCHI & COMPANY

JDS

425 -M l

cwi 9

. . I/./,

K P BAGGHI & COMPANY 286 B. B. Ganguli Street Calcutta 700 012

First Published 1984

more telling example of this process of colonial-capitalist domination and popular resistance than the bizarre contra­ dictions in the agrarian policy pursued by the colonial state in Bengal since the Permanent Settlement. The second domain ? Currently established historiographies do not even recognise its existence. Colonial historiography denies the split by assuming the sovereignty of the colonial state and the real incorporation of the entire colonised people into its legal-political structures. The contradictions, ambigui­ ties, the inherent uncertainties in state policy, it explains as the consequences of the ideological dilemma of a benevolent and paternalistic government faced with the compulsions of maintaining an orderly and sovereign administration. O r else, it explains it in terms of an intricate game of Realpolitik played by astute colonial administrators and a cacophanous tribe of selfish and quarrelsome politicians. On the other hand, nationalist historiography imposes an ideological unity on the processes of politics in late colonial India from the standpoint of the emergent national state. The sovereignty of the colonial state, it asserts, was illegitimate, rejected by an entire people whose political consciousness was gradually awakened in the course of the national movement. The sphere of politics was not split in the colonial period because politics then was the struggle of an entire nation against an illegitimate alien power; it is not split in the post-colonial period because with the removal of that alien power the nation is now fully represented by the national state. Both historiographies therefore reject an autonomous domain of politics where the people confront an expanding domain of state power and resist their incorporation into its legal and political processes. The new historiographical problem, therefore, is: how is one to conceptualise this ‘other* domain of politics ? How do we sort out the historical material on politics in late colonial India in terms of a process in which a modem state and a capitalist economy, linked inseparably xl

Preface with a global structure of capitalist production and exchange and of imperial power, seek to bring under their sway a mass of people who resist, through their own methods and guided by their own distinctive forms of consciousness, this incorpora­ tion into a new structure of domination? One approach has been suggested recently in the series o f writings entitled Subaltern Studies and in some related mono­ graphs. Following Antonio Gramsci’s ideas as set out in his famous ‘Notes on Italian History* (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, tr. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 52-120), it has been suggested that colonial and post-colonial Indian history can be studied in a framework of power relationships in which the elites and the subaltern classes inhabit two distinct and relatively autonomous domains of everyday existence and of consciousness. The task of the new historiography is, first of all, to recover this autonomous history of the subaltern classes, and second, to study in its concreteness the inter­ penetration of the two domains as a process of domination and resistance. The first is primarily a hermeneutic task, for it means not so much the discovery of hitherto unknown or unused sources of historical information (after all, although a few such sources may well exist, it would still remain a fact that written history is overwhelmingly the history of the ruling classes) > but rather the particular reading of the given historical material which record the perceptions and concerns of those who rule in order to infer from it the history of their adversa­ ries, those who are ruled (who will only at certain critical moments like rebellions enter the records as adversaries) ► Some attempts at such a new reading of the historical material have already shown us the immense possibilities of this approach in identifying the modalities of resistance and the elements which constitute the ‘other’ consciousness. Most remarkable in this regard is Ranajit Guha*s Elementary Aspects o f Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford xli

Bengal 1920-1947 University Press, 1983). But the second task, that of studying an evolving process of interpenetration of the two domains of politics, raises other kinds of theoretical issues. Here there is not only the problem of delineating the structure of the ‘other’ domain, its charac­ teristic modalities of political action and the forms of conscious­ ness which inform such action. There is the further problem of studying a process in which one domain seeks to enter into, break down, transform and incorporate the other into its own forms of exercise of domination. Thus the point is not only to study how the other domain resists such incorpora­ tion, but also how, in this process of domination and resistance, it affects the course of evolution of politics in the first domain and is itself transformed by it. Elite /subaltern relations of power thus become articulated into more complex, and rapidly changing, combinatorial forms. Not only can the same group of people be subordinated to another group in one set of power relations and dominate over others in another set, the very forms of domination and subordination are liable to be transformed into new structures of state and class power. In other words, it is precisely the problem of the uneven development of contradictions, a complex order of antagonism and non-antagonism of such contradictions, that one must face. It is the task of politics, or rather of the formally organised class struggle, to identify the nature of this uneven­ ness and to select and aggregate, at a particular historical conjuncture, its diverse forms into a political programme based on a coherent structure of antagonism and non­ antagonism. It is only in this sense - as a political aggregation in a particular conjuncture - that one can have a determinate division of an entire society into elite and subaltern classes. Otherwise, the principal merit of the elite/subaltem frame­ work is precisely its fluidity, its ability to enter into a complex structure of power relations and break it down into its constituent parts; indeed, it is premised on the non-corres­ pondence of a structure of class power derived from a deter­ xlii

Preface minate set of production relations with a structure of state power which gives a determinate legal-political form to the relations between the rulers and the ruled. The elite/subaltern framework then is not based on a theoretical conceptualisation of the social relations of produc­ tion. It is not an alternative to the concept of class. Rather, it provides a methodological means of access into the uneven development of contradictions between the different structures of a social formation. It is necessary, therefore, to carefully select, in terms of the available historical material and the existing historiographical traditions, the strategic levels of analysis from which this unevenness can be captured. In our case, we proceed from an analysis, first, of the agrarian structure. We seek to identify the changing forms of agrarian property, of labour and of the appropriation of surplus from agricultural production. We identify, in other words, a changing structure of production relations in agriculture, in time as well as in its geographical variations. We then relate to this a changing structure of politics. Here we confront the two domains of politics. In one, politics is structured in accordance with the legalpolitical forms of state power. Politics centres around the making of laws, their administration and adjudication. Thus, politics takes the form of legislative action, of lobbying, resolu­ tions, deputations, the mobilisation of ‘public opinion’ and electoral support and the formation of legislative parties. It also takes the form of influencing administrative action, by seeking the support of the bureaucracy and the police or by pressurising them, and of enforcing legal rights by recourse to the courts of law. But there is also the other domain of politics where class power is exercised - and resisted - outside the legal-political processes of the state. It often exists with the connivance of the state machinery; sometimes the state is ignorant of it; at other times it is exercised in clear violation of the law's of the state. In our case, we notice the existence of such forms of xliii

Bengal 1920-1947 class power in the relations of dominance and subordination prevailing in the Bengal countryside in the late colonial period. We find landlords exercising various kinds of sovereign power in their estates, intervening in disputes, maintaining private aimies, imposing fines and punishment, dispensing* justice, extracting rents in cash, kind and labour at levels far higher than and in forms at variance with those permitted to them by the agrarian laws promulgated by the state. The Bakarganj landlord who made the following entry in his diary while on a tour of his estates in 1913 clearly saw himself in a relationship with his tenants - and with the divine power - i n which the colonial state was at most only an external constraint, in no way organic to the real relations of dominance and subordination: Last night passed order th at no M uham m adan (whether m ridha or peon of any fdsya) shall be able to go and sit a t the houses of Naxnasudras o r other H indu tenants, and the H indus are forbidden to allow the M uham m a­ dans to sit a t their houses. If any of them found in disobeying will be fined Rs. 25 w ithout any evidence. There is a charge against Ishan H aidar that he is in love w ith his own mother-in-law. Ishan denies the charge and has given muchlika of Rs. 50 to be paid if the charge is brought home against h im .. . . The witnesses are matbors and reliable persons and when they all say it to be true, I also believe them and order that the muchlika of Rs. 50 be realized from Ishan H a id a r .. . . Gave him a le tter to Tehsildar to warn tenants not to depose against him in the case filed by Ahmed Biswas.. Got Rs. 100 as nazar a t K arap u r; still all the tenants did not come. Miscellaneous - Rs. 33 o n ly .. . . O rdered R ahim uddi to shoe-beat H azari K han as all the tenants suspect him to be the thief, but he does not confess his g u ilt.. .. R etired for the night. God save me from all troubles in the night and bless me for the next morning so th at I may realize money in abundance as miscellaneous receipt.

This was the kind of class power exercised in the second domain of politics. Not surprisingly, the resistance to such domination also took forms that had little to do with the processes of politics in a capitalist state system. In our case too, we find such resistance displaying, in varying degrees, all the characteristic modalities of peasant insurgency. Thus we notice the signs of negation - plunder, burning, physical xliv

Preface destruction, a reversal of the signs of authority; of liminality - revolt as a liberating act of collective justice but bound by fixed limits in time; of the transmission of the message of revolt in characteristic insurgent forms such as rumour; of the territorial definition of revolt in an ethnic space; and underlying all these modalities, of the solidarity of revolt as bound by the ideological forms of a peasant community. As soon as we are prepared to ask the question about the split between two domains of politics, an empirical definition of some of the characteristics of the two domains becomes feasible even in terms of the given historical material. In the present volume, I have identified the split between the two domains as the disjuncture between an ‘organised* and an ‘unorganised* domain of politics. This is, however, only an empirical description. A theoretical conceptualisation of the two domains, and its implications for a theory of transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism and onward to the struggle against capitalism, are only implicit in my arrangement of the historical material. I have in fact deliberately chosen to restrict my account to the given terms of historical discourse as it exists today, to stretch and bend those terms to fit the material, to identify the points where this discourse is unable to accommodate within its terms the new questions which may be asked of that material. I have tried as far as possible to avoid the explicit insertion into this account of fragments from a different - a theoretical - discourse. But even on those terms, our task cannot end simply by identifying some of the characteristics of the two domains of politics in late colonial Bengal. We have the further and more complex problem of describing a process of interpenetration o f the two domains. The split itself we can relate to the working of the colonial economy and government and the cumulative impact, by the second half of the nineteenth century, on Bengal’s cultural formation of colonial policy as well as elitesponsored ‘social reform’. But the period between the two World Wars is principally the story of a much more accelerated xlv

Bengal 1920-1947 tendency of the state domain of politics to penetrate into, transform and incorporate the other domain into its own forms of power. On the one hand, the colonial state, seeking to expand the bases of colonial appropriation and to counteract the attempts to mobilise peasant masses into organised political movements of nationalism, itself tries to intervene directly into the structure of agrarian relations, the process of agricultural production and the evolving class struggles in the countryside. It does this by altering the laws of agrarian property, by strengthening a class of primary appropriators at the expense of the older zamindari classes, and by deepening the state machinery and its associated political processes in the rural areas in the form of an expanded suffrage and elected local self-governing bodies. On the other hand, a nationalist move­ ment emerges in strength in the same period, seeking to mobilise mass support against the colonial state and to create a permanent country-wide political organisation aimed at replacing the colonial order with a new structure of state power. There are many points at which these two apparently antagonistic tendencies merge into a single process. For even at this analytical level, it is clear that nationalism operates both within and outside the political processes instituted by the colonial state. In as much as it remains a bourgeois political movement, it shares with the colonial power the same conception of the legal-political structure of the state and participates in the same processes of the making, adminis­ tering and adjudication of laws. On the other hand, the political necessity of mobilising the ‘people’ into an opposi­ tional movement against the colonial state and of establishing a position of leadership over the ‘nation’ forces nationalism to penetrate into and appropriate for its purposes the popular forms of collective political action which characterise the other domain of politics. This necessarily creates within nationalism, on the one hand a whole series of ambiguities in its ideological positions, and on the other a series of contra­ xlvi

Preface dictions in its evolving organisational structures. Moreover, the relationship between nationalism and colonialism is itself marked by a complex set of contradictions, some antagonistic, others non-antagonistic. It is not surprising that both these tendencies emanating from within the state domain of politics, in seeking to penetrate into and incorporate the other domain into its own forms of state power, should have, at least potentially, a transforming effect on the other domain. Less often noticed are the ways in which, in this process of interaction, the second domain affects the course of developments in the first. It will be a major task of this volume to point this out. With respect to the colonial state, the effects of the second domain on the first can be seen, for instance, in the numerous ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions in the legal framework of agrarian property as it evolves in the last hundred years of colonial rule. Formally based on bourgeois conceptions of property and freedom of contract, these agrarian laws made by the colonial state are increasingly afflicted, through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by contradictory principles: proprietary rights and freedom of contract have to be qualified by a host of rights safeguarding the occupation by the tenant of his plot of land and protecting the bases of small-peasant cultivation. This process can hardly be under­ stood as one merely imposed on the peasantry by the colonial state; the contradictions can only be explained within a process in which the peasantry is seen to actively resist this imposition. Take another example : the period when the colonial state is trying to combat nationalist attempts to mobilise the peasant masses into a broad oppositional movement. The mobilisation of the peasantry does not follow from a prior transformation of the second domain into the organisational forms of the first. Rather, peasant opposition to domination continues to adopt the forms of resistance characteristic of the second domain. Nationalist leaders and organisations, by establishing xlvii

Bengal 1920-1947 linkages with these popular movements of resistance, try to appropriate their consequences in the first domain by strengthening their claims to an alternative national organisa­ tion of state power. In the specific configuration of contradic­ tions which prevailed in the districts of eastern Bengal at this time, these movements of peasant resistance could take on, as we will see, a ‘communal5 character. Several possibilities were then opened for the appropriation of the consequences o f those movements in eastern Bengal by organisations and leaders in the first domain. What occurred was the develop­ ment and consolidation of a split in the nationalist bloc between a Hindu Swarajist and a Muslim ‘communalist’ leadership. This then opened up new grounds for manoeuvre by the colonial state: it could prevent the consolidation of a broad oppositional movement against its authority by playing upon the ‘communal’ division in both domains. If we do not recognise the relative autonomy of the two domains and study the political events leading up to the partition of the province in 1947 as located within a complex process of interaction between the two domains, then we can hardly avoid landing ourselves with an explanation, as in colonial historiography, based on the innate sectarianism and adhe­ rence to primordial loyalties of nationalist politicians or, as in nationalist historiography, accusing ‘communalist* politi­ cians of treachery to the cause of national unity.

The above example also leads us to our final methodological point. This has to do with the relation between structures and events, between the historical process and the historical moment. There is a story about an anthropologist on field­ work in a remote tribal village in Brazil. During his stay in this village, an incident occurred in which a villager, resting in the shade of an elevated wooden structure which served as a granary, was killed when the ramshackle framework suddenly collapsed on him. The village elders immediately xlviii

Preface concluded that this was the deed of a certain evil spirit who, by some totemic association established through a complicated series of mythical events, had been placed in a relation of irreconcilable enmity with the victim. They then proceeded to peiform the rituals to propitiate the spirit. The anthropolo­ gist, trying his best not to appear to scoff at the villagers* religious beliefs, attempted to point out that the wooden structure had been eaten into by insect* and that its collapse was more likely the result of its extreme state of decay rather than of the vengeful intentions of the evil spirit. His suggestion was met with a polite smile. It was obvious, the elders said, that the structure was unstable and that it was likely to collapse, but that could hardly explain why it should have collapsed exactly at the moment when the unfortunate victim decided to take a nap under it! The villagers* explanation is, of course, typical of the mythical mode of thought in which events are fully explained by other events within what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls the structure of a ‘science of the concrete*. It is a completely determined system, universal and total. Curiously, one often finds historical reasoning tending towards this mythical mode of thought when it resolutely seeks the complete explanation of ‘the historical event*, concretely located in time and space, in terms of other events, also concretely located in time and space. The essential characteristics of scientific thought which tries to preserve an open structure, to discriminate between several levels of determination, to specify appropriate levels and ranges of explanation, all of these seem to lose their significance in the face of the totalising explanatory mission of the so-called ‘scientific* history. History-writing cannot confine itself to the analysis of social structures, for that is the special field of the various theoretical disciplines in the social sciences. It cannot also be the simple narration of events because that, as historians quickly dis­ covered in the post-Enlightenment age, was the work of chroniclers, not of historians, and in any case there was no xlix iv

Bengal 1920-1947 such thing as a ‘simple* narration of events. The study of history, properly speaking, must concern itself with the ceaseless process by which structures are transformed into events and events into structures. Historical discourse is constituted on that constantly shifting, tension-ridden, in­ herently polemical terrain of knowledge. To admit this, however, is to acknowledge that the historian must for ever keep moving between two entirely different analytical planes. One is the plane which depicts the evolution o f structures; the other consists of the identification and classification of events. The historian’s material exists entirely o n the latter plane. Just as a language is only expressed in concrete acts of speech - there is no way in which the structure o f a language can be immediately identified except through the analysis of concrete speech acts - so also are the structures of society approachable only through the study of concrete -events. The discovery of structures within a confusing mass of events necessarily involves an act of theoretical abstraction. This is where the theoretical mode of thought of science •distinguishes itself from the mythical consciousness which unifies ‘the science of the concrete*. And this precisely is the task of the different theoretical disciplines in the social sciences. But the historian’s task, unfortunately, cannot end there. He has the further responsibility of depicting a process of changing structures, as expressed in a chain of connected events. And here the practice of historiography has increasingly shown, as we noted earlier, the impossibility of describing the historical process as a linear evolution. Rather, the development must be seen as being interrupted, with sudden shifts in levels, in the pace of change, even retrogressions. In other words: the uneven development of contradictions, a varying order of antagonism and non-antagonism, and a large zone of theoreti­ cal indeterminacy. The concreteness o f the historical event can never be fully -expressed as a mere moment in the evolution of social struc­ tures. It is precisely in this zone of theoretical indeterminacy 1

Prejace that real history becomes the battlefield of active human agents, consciously striving to change the given structure o f social relations. And in the scientific field of the study o f society, that is the special province of the historian : the study of social structures in the process of transition. Unlike the formulation of concepts which can give us the combinatorial forms of determinate states of the structure, such as the concept of the mode of production, the historian’s work consists in trying to understand the modes of transition. Here there can be no final instance of structural determination. On the contrary, if in the mode of production the economic is determinant in the last instance, in the mode of transition it is the political practice of class struggle which is determinant in the last instance. That, of course, is not a theoretical resolution of the problem of indeterminacy; it is simply a restatement of the problem. The task before the historian, therefore, is to work not only with a theory of the historical evolution of social struc­ tures, but to study this evolution in the historical situation. One must study not only the historical process, but also its interruptions, in the historical conjunctures. It is in the study of the conjunctures that the historian is likely to find the best means of access into the uneven development of con­ tradictions, their order of antagonism and non-antagonism, their ‘real* resolution in the pob'tical battlefield of class struggle, and hence into that problematical terrain of practice and of consciousness in which men make their own history. It is in the matter of the study of transition that our theoretical tools are the least developed. But precisely because of this relatively uncharted field that has now been opened up, there exists an excellent opportunity to reexamine in the light of these new questions the available historical material, and perhaps to suggest new strategic routes for our theoretical investigations. It has become possible at this juncture for historical discourse to extract itself from the state of being a field for the ‘application* of this or that social theory, to stop li

Bengal 1920-1947 acting as a drawing board for an /objectifying consciousness that has already grasped date world in its theoretical unity, and genuinely to assert its claim as an autonomous and valid field of scientific investigation. Let me illustrate this point by referring once again to the question of ‘communalism’. Progressive historians in India have in the last two decades regarded this as a major problem for historical study. Indeed k has been seen as a ‘problem’ in a .quite special sense. It is an abnormality, a disease in the body politic, recognisable by its symptoms and in need o f a cure. But in what sense is ‘communalism’ a historical event? In what framework of political knowledge can it be given a definition ? In the Indian case, ‘communalism’ is a conception o f the bourgeois-liberal ideology. More specifically, it is a notion which derives from the self-definition o f the Indian state an d is inseparably tied with its counterpart, viz. ‘secularism’. How can we recognise an event of ‘communalism’? Many will reply that although there may be some instances where it is enmeshed in other social and economic processes, in most cases its identification is quite straight­ forward: it is a given ‘fact’ o f Indian political life. W hat is the historian’s task? To explain its social origins, uncover the real content which lies enclosed within a religious form and to fight the disease with an ideology of ‘secularism’. It is a profoundly liberal enterprise. It is also a measure of the ideological success of the Indian state leadership that it has been able to ingrain this aspect of its self-definition in the minds of many who would otherwise proclaim vehement opposition to its policies. In this volume, we will not accept the self-definition of the Indian state. Hence we will not regard ‘communalism’ as a problem and ‘secularism’ as the answer. We will not seek to find the ‘social roots of communalism’ for that would be to accept the givenness of ‘communalism’ as a fact and to look for its ‘causes’ on the same analytical plane. Instead we will lii

Preface proceed by breaking up an ‘obvious’ évent of ‘communalism’ into several constituent events and locate each of them on a different analytical plane. We will then be able to study it in a complex and uneven process of the development of con­ tradictions. In the case of the so-called mobilisation of the peasant masses into ‘communalist’ politics, we will show that in the second domain of politics, peasant actions of this kind were neither ‘communal’ nor ‘secular’, nor were they the expressions of ‘secular’ demands in a ‘communal’ form, for those categories were quite irrelevant to the political world of the second domain. We will, on the contrary, show that what happened in the second domain created entirely new possibilities by which its consequences could be appro­ priated in a variety of forms in the first domain : these included forms o f‘communalist’ appropriation just as they also included the forms of a ‘secular* appropriation. The task for a Marxist historian of India is not, as Harbans Mukhia believes, to ‘make history-writing profoundly secular’, for that is necessarily to participate in writing the auto­ biography of the Indian state. The task is to break up and supersede the liberal problematic of communalism/secularism. Only then will we be able to ask: what are the specific processes and forms of domination which the Indian state embodies which require it to identify ‘communalism’ as a disease and ‘secularism’ as the cure?

Structure, process, conjuncture, class struggle : those are the elements of my history of Bengal. It is a tentative argument. I have not attem pted to gloss over the rough texture of my narrative. Some parts of the text of this volume have been circulated earlier in the form of articles. Many readers have claimed to find in them a particular determinate explanation of the history I deal with and have commended or criticised me accordingly. Some have alleged that I tend towards an liii

Bengal 1920-1947 ecological determinism; others have seen them as unsuccessful attempts to fit the historical ‘facts’ into a preconceived frame­ work of theory. One critic noticed a ‘dangerous tendency* towards an ahistoric idealisation of ‘the peasantry*. Several have complained of a lack of awareness on my part of the ‘totality’ of history, since I have obviously failed to ‘mention’ many important facts of the period. Still others have identified the state of differentiation of the peasantry as the crucial explanatory variable in my argument, for I am supposed to have argued that it was the relative lack of differentiation in eastern Bengal which made the peasant movements there ‘communalist* while the relatively advanced state of differen­ tiation elsewhere in the province prevented such a develop­ ment. Now that I have stated in this volume my full argument and the elements of my method, I can only hope to persuade my readers that no single one of these ‘factors’ have a determinate explanatory status, nor are they to be seen as variables in a linear regression model, and above all, contrary to what some French historians and their imitators have preached, that there is no easy route to a ‘total history’ of a people. Some critics have also alleged that mine is a work of ‘populist’ history. It is hard for me to persuade these com­ pulsive label-stickers that it is precisely populism which is the subject of my enquiry and that if there is one central statement of purpose which guides my research, it is the urge to combat by all possible means the vast array of strategic and ideological resources which the ruling classes in countries like India make available to themselves under the rubric of that ideology.

I must end these prefatory comments with a somewhat long list of acknowledgements. I thank Ujjalkanti Das and M adhumati D atta for their assistance in collecting much of the material used here. My greatest debt is to Hitesranjan Sanyal who in the years liv

Preface 1974 and 1975, in course of many weeks of trekking through the villages of Hooghly, Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia, first introduced me to the complexities of nationalist politics in Bengal. Asok Sen has been a constant source of ideas and encouragement and an astute reader of every draft of this text. Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Guha have been, in conversation and correspondence, friendly, critical and active contributors to many of the ideas that have gone into this book. I am also grateful to Javeed Alam, Barun De, Sanjeeb Mukherjee, Saugata Mukherji, Gyan Pandey and all my other colleagues at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences with whom I have discussed most parts of this book in about half a dozen staff seminars and a few hundred of those improptu sessions that have become so much a part of the work-style at Jadunath Bhavan. Among others who have read and commented on various earlier drafts are Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Gautam Bhadra, Sugata Bose, Ranajit Dasgupta, Anjan Ghosh, Omkar Goswami, David Hardiman, Sudipta Kaviraj, Arup Mallik, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Abhijit Sen and Alan Smalley: I have profited immensely from my discussions with them. I am particularly grateful to Ashok M itra and Sumit Sarkar for reading the entire manuscript and offering detailed and perceptive comments. I had the opportunity of discussing parts of this book in seminars at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester, the Past and Present Conference on ‘Agrarian Unrest in British India and British and French Africa’ in Oxford, and St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. My thanks to all the participants in these seminars. I am also grateful to the Nuffield Foundation, London, for a travelling fellowship which enabled me to spend the academic year 1981-82 at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, during which period I was able to consult some relevant documents at the India Office Records and Library, London, and also to complete a full draft of this book. lv

Bengal 1920-1947 Thanks to Gouri Bandyopadhyay for a superbly efficient job of typing out a press copy from a very shoddy manuscript. I am also grateful to Anjusri Chakravarti for drawing the maps. Thanks also to the staff of the West Bengal State Archives, the Secretariat Library and the National Library in Calcutta, the National Archives and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, the India Office Records and Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. I am especially grateful to Somnath Hore for his kindness in allowing me to use a drawing from his remarkable diary on the Tebhaga movement. My thanks to Nirmalya Acharya, Pinaki Barua, Gouri Chatterjee, Ravi Dwivedi, Arun Ghosh, Susanta Ghosh, Sunil Munsi, Ashit Paul, Messrs. K. P. Bagchi and Company and the staff of Eka Press for their help in the production of this book. 14 July 1984

P. C.

THE LAND QUESTION

The Land Question

The owl suddenly p u t on a very serious face and said, ‘Silence, everyone! I will now pronounce my judgment.* And he turned to the rabbit with a pen stuck behind his ear and ordered, ‘Write this down. Case of libel no. 24. Plaintiff. . . the porcupine. A ccused.. .wait! Where’s the accused?* Suddenly everyone said, ‘Oh hell! We don’t have an accused!’ Some people quickly persuaded Nera to become the accused. Nera was simple-minded, and thought that the accused would also be paid some money. So he agreed. Nera was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and seven days’ death by hanging.

Sukumar Ray, Ha-ja-ba-ra-la

1 with a study of land relations. That is to say, we look at landed property, relations of production in agriculture, forms of labour, the spread of a market economy into rural areas. We then proceed to study the connections between this changing structure of agrarian relations and political developments in Bengal in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. For facility of presentation, I adopt the device of concentrating on the making of the Tenancy Act Amendment by the Bengal Legislative Council in 1928 which touched upon some of the most controversial issues relating to the agrarian economy and served to bring together in one organi­ sed forum the various proprietary and agrarian interests. It thus becomes a good occasion to study the connections between agrarian relations and the sphere of organised politics. There were three important issues involved in the Tenancy Act Amendment Bill introduced in the Bengal Legislative Council in 1928. In the first place, it brought up the question of the rights of sharecroppers: whether or not they should be recognised as tenants. Second, there was the matter of the status of underraiyats. And third, the law had to come to grips with the problem of transferability of holdings. On the first question, the existing Act did not make any distinction between money and produce rent, and in many individual cases in different districts, settlement officers as well as courts of law had recognised sharecroppers as tenants. John K err’s Committee of 1923 had decided on the principle

W

e b e g in

Bengal 1920-1947 that produce-paying cultivators who supplied their own seeds and cattle and themselves chose their crops should be treated as tenants. John K err’s recommendations, however, created a great stir ‘among the jotdars and other middle class tenureholders who thought that the Committee wanted to give the status of tenants to persons who did not possess it. This led many landlords to eject their bargadars, with the result that a considerable proportion of the land remained uncultivated for some time. It was apprehended by the landlords that if these produce-payers were given the status of tenants they would succeed in getting their produce rent converted into money rent.’1 Several representations were made on behalf of those who employed sharecroppers. Typical of these was the one by Babu Debi Das Sanyal who, on behalf of a ‘protest meeting’ at Salap in Pabna, argued, in the English language of course, that these provisions were ‘sure to bring about the annihila­ tion of the middle-class as also of the widows and orphans who earn their livelihood with great difficulties by the income of bhag-chas and cause a terrible social revolution as a logical corollary.’ He reminded the ‘benign Government’ which had always been ‘putting down Bolshevism’ that it was now ‘but helping a social revolution like the one witnessed in Russia by the spread of Bolshevik ideas consequent on the enactment of the said two clauses.’2 Indeed, the expected opposition to this particular provision regarding sharecroppers was potentially so formidable that the Government first issued a communiqué disclaiming all intentions of giving bargadars any rights which they did not already possess, and then dropped all provisions regarding bargadars from the Tenancy Bill introduced in the Council in 1925. The Bill went into Select Committee, and the committee­ men, still not reassured, wrote into it a definite statement declaring that cultivators who paid in produce, whether a fixed proportion or a fixed quantity, were not tenants.3 The Government, in any case, did not proceed with the matter 2

The Land Question any further and withdrew the Bill. The Special Committee which drafted the new Bill of 1928 accepted the position that sharecroppers who paid a fixed proportion of the produce (the usual terms under which a bhagchasi, bargadar or adhiar cultivated the land) were not tenants. However, those who paid a fixed quantity of produce as rent were, according to the Bill, to be regarded as tenants. And bargadars or adhiars who had been admitted in a document by their landlords, or had been held by a civil court, to be tenants would also be similarly recognised as raiyats or underraiyats. However, the commutation of produce rents to money rent was prohibited, since commutations would strengthen the claims of a sharecropper to the status of tenant. The second problem, regarding the status of the underraiyat, derived from the fact that the existing law, while permitting him to acquire occupancy rights by custom, did not provide any definite safeguards except that his rent could not exceed that paid by his superior raiyat by 25 per cent. The Bill proposed that underraiyats who had homesteads on their lands and had held them for twenty years, or who had been admitted in a document by their landlord to have a perma­ nent and heritable right, would not be evicted from their holdings. They would also have the right to claim recognition, on the payment of a salami, when their immediate landlord abandoned their holdings. Moreover, even other underraiyats, who were not thus protected, could only be evicted if their superior landlords could prove that they wanted the land for their own cultivation. Cultivation by bargadars would not, for this purpose, count as cultivation by the landlord himself. The question of transferability of the holdings of raiyats was really one of legally recognising a phenomenon which was widespread. The landlords’ argument against allowing free transferability was that the land would then pass through the usual channel of mortgage and debt to non-agriculturists, and tenants would be reduced to day-labourers. W hat they wanted, therefore, were sufficient safeguards to prevent this 3

BengaL-1920-1947 ‘catastrophe*. The Bill attempted to provide these. Indeed, the Bill as drafted sought to strike a very delicate balance between the interests of landlords, tenants and undertenants. While the general political climate in the province and the apprehended dangers of incipient agrarian movements made it necessary that certain rights be given to tenants as well as undertenants, it was also well known that there would be severe opposition in the Council to all attempts at curtailing the rights of landlords. As soon as the Bill was introduced in the Council, the East Bengal landholders under the presidentship of Nawab Habibullah of Dacca protested against it on the ground that it took away the rights of zamindars.4 A few days later, a Landholders’ Conference, presided over by M aharaja Pradyot Coomar Tagore, sent a memorandum to the Viceroy, the Governor of Bengal, the Secretary of State for India, Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald and Opposition Leader Lloyd George, expressing its concern at the proposal to give tenants the right of trans­ ferring their holdings. Safeguards have been to a certain extent provided in the Bill for the fractional protection of the interests of landlords in providing a 25 per cent transfer fee, and the preem ption right of landlords, exercisable in cases of fraudulent transfers. An attem pt is now being made to force the hands o f the Government to do away even w ith these safeguards. .. .the landholders humbly beg to point out th at more than 4,600,000 o u t o f 4,700,000 tenureholders, who are also regarded as landlords under the Act, are far poorer than even most o f the raiyats who are not in all cases actual tillers of the soil. T he inevitable effect of the Bill, if passed, w ill be to create a new class of middlemen from among moneylenders an d other outsiders who are not likely to have sympathy or community o f feeling with the actual tillers o f the soil.

The memorandum then went on to add: . .. t h e present occasion is most unsuitable to disturb the peace of a most influential c la ss...a n y such serious change of a settled policy is likely to be followed at no distant period b y general discontent among a

4

The Land Question m ost loyal class of His Majesty’s subjects which is undesirable for good government in India and is likely to hasten an agrarian revolution. A gitation regarding this is being worked up by certain self-seeking agitators for political purposes as none of these agitators is an actual cultivator.5

5

2 look a little more carefully at the agrarian scene in twentieth-century Bengal. The primary and abiding interest of the colonial govern­ ment in the agriculture of Bengal, or for that matter anywhere else in India, was the extraction of a part of the surplus in the form of land revenue. In Bengal, after much debate and several experiments, it went into an arrangement to this end with a class of Indians who were designated ‘proprietors’ and assigned the task of collecting the revenue. This remained throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the basic institutional form through which revenue was collected in the Permanent Settlement areas. At the same time, there was an equally abiding concern in official th i n k in g to protect as far as possible the predominant organisational form of agricultural production, viz. smallpeasant farming. Well into the nineteenth century, Bengal’s agriculture was a subsistence economy where, as Benoy Ghowdhury describes it, ‘peasants owned the means o f production. Most peasants had land, whatever the legal or customary nature of its tide, though it did not always suffice for their sustenance. The family labour supplemented at times by the co-operative communal labour and by a small quantity of paid labour was the usual size of the labour force employed in the cultivation of individual peasant’s holdings. His small surplus, ploughs and cattle, and loans from the village moneylenders and graindealers constituted the e t us n o w

L

The Land Question necessary capital of a peasant.*6 This small-peasant subsistence economy official policy in Bengal was predisposed to disturb as little as possible. There may have been several reasons for this. One certainly was the pragmatic political consideration of causing as little disloca­ tion as possible to the basic production organisation of the economy: this would ensure a steady, if inelastic, source of revenue, and leave unimpaired the majority of the customary rights of peasants. This latter dictum British revenue and settlement officers were particularly careful to observe. Even in the making of land laws, if it was felt necessary to give proprietors some additional powers for the regular and sufficient collection of rent (thus ensuring a regular and sufficient collection of revenue), this was always balanced by an express declaration to protect such customary rights as the tenants were believed to possess. The likelihood of largescale eviction of tenants by proprietors was a spectre that haunted official minds in nineteenth-century Bengal; so did the possibility of extortionate rents, excessive illegal exactions and physical intimidation. Since the economy permitted little by way of alternative occupations, conditions likely to lead to the eviction from the land of any sizable section of the peasantry could only be looked upon by a colonial state as a . major law-and-order problem, which it was seriously con­ cerned to avoid. These rough and ready policies for achieving the twin objectives of steady revenue and agrarian peace were rationalised into ‘a faith in the capacity of small peasants. ..to evolve the most efficient organisation of production, given a security of tenure and a reasonably moderate rent.’7 The state, in other words, was interested in securing the conditions for an expanded process of colonial appropriation in a period of growing international trade, specifically in the form of a reasonable level of production of commercial crops, and was even prepared to tamper with the presumed sanctity of zamindari property rights. But it was entirely unprepared 7

Bengal 1920-1947 to accept the risks entailed in a thoroughgoing capitalist reorganisation of agricultural production. It even turned the force of its legal and administrative machinery against British entrepreneurs (the indigo planters, for instance) when their activities posed too much of a threat to the stability of smallpeasant agriculture.8 This contradiction in the land policy pursued by a colonial power - formal establishment of private property in land and commercialisation of agriculture, on the one hand, and the legal and bureaucratic protection of small-peasant production, on the o th e r-w a s of crucial importance in shaping the processes of change operating in Bengali society. For instead of acting as a transforming force in the agrarian economy, increased production of commercial crops further pushed down the levels of subsistence in an economy that remained fundamentally stagnant. Instead of facilitating a more intensive exploitation of the land and of labour, the laws of property and tenancy only opened up more lucrative avenues of wealth-making in rackrenting and usury, thus accentuating the processes of subinfeudation and extensive rent exploitation. On the whole, the structure of small-peasant cultivation' showed remarkable resilience and, within its constraints, even adaptability. Throughout the nineteenth century, the destruc­ tion of indigenous manufacturing had thrown a vast popula­ tion into total dependence on the products of the soil.9 Yet, Bengal’s agriculture had obviously been able to accommodate this undoubtedly large influx without any substantial modifi­ cations in technique or structure. There were migrations of population, mainly from west to east, and except in certain epidemic-stricken districts such as Hooghly and Burdwan, large tracts of new land were brought under cultivation. Since there were no improvements in the techniques of cultivation, this was virtually the only way a growing popula­ tion could be sustained. There is, however, a natural limit to the extension of cultivation in this manner : by all accounts, it appears that, given existing physical conditions and 8

The Land Question methods of cultivation, there was by the turn of the century very little cultivable land in Bengal which was not already fully employed.10 At the same time, this small-peasant economy adopted jute as its principal commercial crop. Popular mainly in the districts of northern and eastern Bengal, jute could be grown on small plots of land mainly with family labour and did not call for any special inputs not naturally available in the region. The cultivation of jute, therefore, did not require any struc­ tural modification in the organisation of production. It did not, at the same time, result in any dynamic resurgence of the agrarian economy as a whole, nor did it lead to any general improvement of the economic position of the mass of the peasantry. For peasants who chose to grow jute, it reduced somewhat their sole dependence on rice, which in east Bengal was subject to the hazards of floods and the markets for which were still relatively undeveloped. However, the limits of jute cultivation were set by the demand in the world market; it could not be extended indefinitely. Further, the jute market fluctuated a great deal and it was the jute growers who were always the hardest hit. The biggest attraction of jute for peasants was the availability of advances at the time of the year when their food stocks from the previous rice harvest had almost come to an end. Whatever cash was obtained after the jute harvest went to pay off rents and interests on loans. Jute, therefore, only helped keep the peasants at subsistence level. Neither through the extension of cultivation, nor through the introduction of jute as a commercial crop, could a long­ term solution to the problem of supporting an increasing population be found within the structural limits of smallpeasant cultivation. It should also not come as a surprise to discover that the problem was compounded by the laws of tenancy enacted by a colonial state. In its zeal to protect the ‘customary’ rights of peasants, rights which they were believed to possess as a matter of 9

Bengal 1920-1947 ‘tradition’, official policy was not unexpectedly led into identifying such rights in continuous tenancy that had received the sanctity of time. The Rent Act of 1859 defined for the first time three distinct kinds of raiyats. Those who had held land at a rate unchanged for 20 years before rent suits were brought against them were declared to be raiyats atfixed rent, whose rents could not be enhanced. Occupancy raiyats were those who had held or cultivated the same plot of land for 12 years continuously: in their cases, rents could be enhanced if new land was brought under cultivation, or if their rents were lower than the customary pargana rate, or if the value of the produce had increased. In the third group were the non-occupancy raiyats who were given no legal protec­ tion. As such, the Act, by permitting the enhancement of rent according to the value of the produce, was not un­ favourable to zamindars, although they did have some difficulty in pressing their claims in court since no definite criterion could be found to establish the value of the produce. On the other hand, by seeking to define the section of raiyats who needed to be protected from unreasonable ejectment by their zamindars, the Act laid down a principle which only required continuous holding for a certain period of time and did not in any way tie the occupancy right to actual cultivation. These absurdly anomalous legal principles defined the formal politico-legal framework which was to shape and constrain agrarian change in Bengal for at least the next hundred years and was, in the end, to threaten the viability of small-peasant cultivation even as an arrangement for sub­ sistence production. To describe this process, we need to study, separately and in their inter-connection, the two kinds of rights in land that were recognised by the colonial state in Bengal: one a right of proprietorship, the other of occupation.

The landed proprietors in early nireteenth-century Bengal, even those who came in as purchasers after the partition and 10

The Land Question sale of many of the biggest estates immediately after the Permanent Settlement, were still big zamindars with large estates. By the middle of the century, however, there had begun a distinct process of differentiation within the class of landed proprietors. One reason for this was the splitting of estates through inheritance. But this was not all. The initial pressure of a high revenue demand forced proprietors to increase the rental of their estates by organising an extension of the cultivated area. A common method was to farm out jungle lands and other cultivable wastes on tenurial leases to enter­ prising men whose business it then became to clear the land and settle it with tenant cultivators. As a result, there was by the 1840s a considerable increase in both the cultivated area and the total quantum of rent. By the middle of the century, most cultivable lands in Bengal were settled; however, the sizable gap which had been created by then between the fixed revenue that was payable to the government and the total rent that could be extracted from the actual cultivators facilitated the emergence of a vast structure of rentier interests in Bengal’s agrarian economy. The Permanent Setdement had envisaged that of the total rental 90 per cent would go to the treasury, the zamindar keeping 10 per cent. An estimate of 1918-19, however, indicates that proprietors and inter­ mediate tenureholders intercepted as much as 76.7 per cent of the gross rental of Rs 12.85 crores, only Rs 2.99 crores being collected as land revenue.11 This gap between rent and revenue served as the basis of assets into which flowed the savings of the Bengali ‘middle class’ - savings acquired through inheritance, dowry, profits from petty trade or commerce, or from professional incomes. Left with few other profitable areas of investment, these people bought proprietary or intermediary rights in land which guaranteed a small but nevertheless secure rent income. A simple method was the straight purchase of the whole or part of an estate. Another was to buy a tenureholding right 11

Bengal 1920-1947 from a proprietor who was unable to manage successfully the collection of rent in a large and scattered estate, or even more commonly, from one who preferred to capitalise his assets by creating subordinate tenures at a high rate of salami.12 In still other cases, shares of whole estates were sold by zamindars in order to save the rest of the property, thus bringing in the new purchasers as coparcenaries - a method very common in Dacca.13 As long as the gap between revenue and extractable rent was sufficient, this process could operate even below the rank of proprietor or first-grade tenureholder. There were cases, for instance, most numerous in Bakarganj, where haoladars, given tenurial rights at low rents for the express purpose of bringing forest or waste lands under cultivation, later subleased all but a small portion of their property for a sum recoverable from rent.14 The result of this process of subdivision and diffusion of the rentier interest was the creation in the later nineteenth century, all over the province although in varying degrees, of a structure of landed property in which there were a few wealthy zamindars at the top and innumerable fragmented estates and tenures at the bottom. In Bakarganj, for instance (albeit the extreme instance), the tiers in the landowning structure were as follows: a zamindari estate of 2000 acres at a revenue of Rs 200 was subdivided into 4 talukdaris each of 500 acres and a rent of Rs 100; 20 osat talukdaris at the next level, each of 100 acres and a rent of Rs 50; 80 haoladaris, each of 25 acres and Rs 25 rent ; 160 nim haoladaris, each of 12.5 acres and Rs 20 rent; and finally 320 raiyats, each with a holding of 6.25 acres and paying a rent of Rs 15.15 By the 1870s, this differentiation between the older wealthy zamindars and the much larger group of petty proprietors-tenureholders-cum-professionals became apparent in the political, social and cultural life of Bengal.16 From the last decades of the nineteenth century, for instance, provincial politics in Bengal came to be dominated by the class of small rentiers in land. The Indian Association was set up in 1876 12

The Land Question to voice the interests of precisely this class, following the split in the British Indian Association which was thereafter exclusively dominated by the big zamindars. It was also the stratum of society from which came the early generation of successful professionals in law, journalism, medicine, teaching and the civil and judicial services. This class formed the core of an expanding status group widely known as the Bengali bhadralok and often referred to as an ‘elite’ group. It must be emphasised, however, that this ‘elite’, in most of its distinctive features, was a product of the conditions imposed under colonialism. The system of land tenure, combined with the disincentives to the entry of domestic savings into native industrial enterprises and the destruction of indigenous manufacturing, created the basic economic structure from which emerged this class of rentreceivers, usurers and petty traders totally divorced from, and entirely uninterested in, the conditions of social produc­ tion. They lived entirely on ‘revenue’; only the distribution of the surplus concerned them, they had no role in its creation. Added to this were the new opportunities opened up to precisely this class of people by the expansion of the judicial, administrative and educational apparatus of the colonial state. The fact that higher education, in the English language and solely as a means of entry into a white-collar job or a profession, remained confined largely to the same group of people only replicated in the cultural sphere the enormous distance of this group from the sphere of social production. In the mid-1880s, when the new Tenancy Act came up for discussion, the interest of a leading section of organised public opinion in Bengal not only in tenureholding but even non-cultivating tenancy rights was revealed very clearly. In the end, the government, concerned to give protection to tenants against the excesses of ‘high landlordism’ which had provoked the widespread disturbances in Pabna and Bogra,17 further relaxed the qualifications for obtaining occupancy rights, removed the ‘residence clause’, but had to bow to the 13

Bengal 1920-1947 opposition of zamindars and drop the proposal to make occupancy rights saleable.18 By then, however, the basic tendencies of agrarian change in colonial Bengal were clearly visible - the fragmentation of estates, subinfeudation, rackrenting and, with the spread of commercial crops from the later nineteenth century, a differentiation within the peasantry as well. As we move into the twentieth century, it becomes evident that the entire system of zamindari and tenureholding proprietorship was heading towards a massive crisis which, in the 1930s, was to find expression in the prolonged ‘no rent* problem and in organised political opposition to the entire Permanent Setdement system. Yet, despite all these changes brought about by the impact of an external colonial economic interest, there is no attem pt by the owners of landed property in Bengal to seize control of the labour processes in agriculture and, by making the increased productivity of their lands the means of enrichment, to transform the agrarian economy. The legal framework which now regulated agrarian relations in Bengal was laid down by a colonial state concerned mainly with preserving ‘agrarian peace*. These laws could not facilitate such a transformation.19

The basic legal framework had, in fact, been laid down by the Permanent Settlement of 1793 which declared the zamindars to be the proprietors of the soil and gave them ‘all property rights which could not be proved to be an encroach­ ment on the prescriptive or customary rights of the tenants.’20 However, these prescriptive or customary rights were not defined. At the same time, the zamindars were under an obligation to pay each instalment of revenue on time, failing which their estates were liable to be sold for arrears of revenue. The early years of the Permanent Settlement were, how­ ever, marked by considerable confusion in revenue manage­ ment, the zamindars refusing to put on record (in the form 14

The Land Question of pattas, for instance) anything which might be construed as a limitation on their proprietary rights, while tenants failed to press their customary rights in court. It should be borne in mind that at this time it was not land which was scarce, but tenants to cultivate the land. Contemporary estimates mention figures between a third and four-fifths of the total land as uncultivated.21 Consequently, when raiyats refused to pay their rent or abandoned their holdings and moved elsewhere, nearly half the estates in Bengal were sold for arrears of revenue. The Haptam regulations of 1799, mitigated only marginally by the Panjam regulations of 1812, were therefore enacted to arm the zamindars with drastic and arbitrary powers of distraint in order to ensure the regular collection of rent. The Rent Act of 1859 and the Tenancy Act of 1885, by defining the rights of occupancy of a certain class of tenants, by limiting the conditions where enhancements of rent would be permissible, and by allowing transfer of occupancy holdings albeit ‘governed by local custom,’ attempted to clarify in the context of a changing agrarian structure the limitations inherent in the concept of the proprietary right of the landlord. Yet zamindars in Bengal continued to insist that fundamen­ tally their right was one of ‘absolute proprietorship’ which the Permanent Settlement had only ratified, and that all further statements on the rights of raiyats were ‘no derogation from the proprietary right of landlords.’22 But the story of landed proprietorship in Bengal is a story of continuous fragmentation. The process itself had by the twentieth century steadied to an annual increase of 1.82 estates per 1000, i.e. a decadal increase of 1.82 per cent.28 But its cumulative effect on the structure of proprietary rights was staggering. Figures pro­ duced in the Report of the Land Revenue Commission o f 1938-39 show that there was a total of 153,200 estates in Bengal (102,031 revenue-paying and 51,169 revenue-free), and as many as 2,730,000 intermediate tenures.24 This gives 15

Bengal 1920-1947 a ratio of 17.82 intermediate tenures to each estate. Further, for a total revenue demand of Rs 311.84 lakhs, each permanently-settled revenue-paying estate paid on an average a revenue of only Rs 306.62. True there were several proprietors who could still be called wealthy zamindars, some even paying revenues of over Rs 1 lakh each. However, the number of such wealthy proprietors at the top was extremely small compared to the vast proliferation of petty estates. For instance, there were in 1937 only 1,951 proprietors who met the required qualifications for voting in the Landholders5 Constituencies for the Legislative Assembly; i.e. only 1,951 zamindars paid revenue of over Rs 3,000 or cess over Rs 700 in the Burdwan and Presidency divisions and revenue over Rs 2,000 in the Dacca, Chittagong and Rajshahi divisions.*5 Consider now the pressure imposed on the actual cultivators by this massive structure of rentier property. It has, of course, often been pointed out from contemporary reports that, at the time of the Permanent Settlement, the burden of rent on the raiyat was just about the utmost that he could bear.26 The only constraints on further enhancements was the possibility, then very real, that the raiyat would leave his land and run. In considering developments of the mid-nineteenth century and later, however, the significance of this constraint must be kept in mind. The gap between the revenue demand on an estate and the total rent which could be extracted from the ultimate tillers of the land was created in the first half of the nineteenth century mainly by the rapid extension of cultiva­ tion. The natural limits of this process, given existing techni­ ques, were, however, reached by the middle of the century. At the same time, the pressure on the land, increased sub­ stantially by deindustrialisation, reached a point where the erstwhile constraint on the enhanceability of rents was no longer effective. Henceforth, the only real constraint was the apprehension of agrarian unrest and revolt. Express legal provisions were now formulated defining as carefully as possible the grounds on which enhancements would be 16

The Land Question permitted. Rents were often legally enhanced in the second half of the nineteenth century on grounds of parity with the ‘prevailing rate* in adjacent areas.27 Certain court judgments and amendments to the law in 1898, however, made this an inconvenient argument to use. Another ground on which landlords were legally permitted to raise the rent was when they had effected ‘improvements’ of the land at their own expense. Since landlords seldom made such investments, this plea was almost never advanced. From the last decades of the nineteenth century, the most common ground for claiming an enhancement was a rise in the prices of staple food crops. There can be no doubt that rents did in fact rise in every district of Bengal.28 This is revealed by a comparison of the average rates of rent paid by a raiyat, with or without the rights of occupancy, with the rates paid by a mokrari raiyat holding his land at a rent which had remained virtually constant since at least the 1840s (Table l).29 This comparison is even more striking because in many areas mokrari rights were in fact held by the more prosperous tenants with better lands sublet to underraiyats at much higher cash or produce rents.30 In the eastern districts such as Chittagong, Noakhali and Tippera, for instance, and in moribund Bankura, mokrari raiyats were still paying more than occupancy raiyats. In every other district, however, the rents paid on the average by occupancy raiyats were uniformly higher than those paid by mokrari raiyats: this despite the fact that, with the steady increase in the prices of foodgrains and the expansion of markets, the chief means for extracting a larger surplus had, by the twentieth century, become the conversion of money into produce rents. Besides, attempts to enhance the rent by illegal methods, so widespread in eastern and northern Bengal in the nine­ teenth-century era of ‘high landlordism’, continued sporadi­ cally in the early decades of the twentieth century. The case of Dacca district is well documented. Rents there were raised by creating new tenancies and resettling them at a higher 17 2

Bengal 1920-1947 rent, by raising rents after the purchase of an estate, by including cesses and abwabs in the rent, or by altering the standard of measurement.31 In Pabna and Bogra, rents were enhanced by including cesses and abwabs within the rental and then treating this as the rent before cesses.82 There were, in addition, the extraordinarily large amounts of illegal exactions or abwab which proprietors and tenureholders customarily received in the east Bengal districts/8 Obviously, no reliable quantitative estimates can be made of the size of these abwabs, but Settlement Reports on some of those districts, especially Bakarganj, Dacca, Nadia and Pabna, state quite categorically that these were without doubt considerably higher than abwabs prevalent in any other part of Bengal. Bakarganj was easily the worst district in this respect. Jack estimated that abwabs in the district would total not less than Rs 20 lakhs, i.e. more than the total land revenue, and a quarter of the entire rental. Selecting one estate at random, he found that abwabs there totalled 4 a s .- ljp . to a rupee of rent, and in Patuakhali subdivision, where abwabs were the highest, they were never less than four annas to the rupee. One big landlord was found to have collected more in abwabs than in rent.34 These illegal exactions of various sorts36 were really means adopted by landlords to appropriate a larger share of the surplus, means preferable to a straight enhance­ ment of the rent which was more difficult to impose and sustain. Incidental to this, but socially and politically important, was the symbolic demonstration of the landlord’s power: ‘Many landlords,’ wrote Jack, ‘have confessed to me that the delight of the abwab is in the arrogation of sovereignty.’86 In Dacca, too, the ceremonial abwab was a widespread custom consisting of ‘the enforced payment to the zamindar of service either in money, kind or labour on the occasion o f certain events.’87 Ascoli estimated the abwab to range, in money terms, between 2J to 5 annas to a rupee of rent.8* 18

The Land Question Table 1 A verage

rents per acre

Raiyats a t fixed rent

Settled and occupancy raiyats

Non-occupancy raiyats

Rs

as.

P-

Rs

as.

P-

Rs

as.

P.

Burdwan Birbhum Bankura M idnapore Hooghly Howrah

3 3 2 3 6 7

9 6 15 10 5 2

0 3 10 0 6 4

4 3 1 3 7 8

3 14 13 15 12 2

9 1 9 5 1 8

3 4

5 0

0 2

4 11 10

13 4 1

4 4 1

24-Parganas N adia M urshidabad Jessore K hulna

3 1 2 1 2

13 13 15 5 6

4 5 1 10 5

5 2 3 2 3

13 7 7 7 5

1 5 0 5 10

3 4 4 5

1 8 3 11

6 4 0 10

Dacca M ymensingh Faridpur Bakarganj

2 1 2 3

2 8 6 1

9 6 7 11

2 2 2 4

13 15 10 8

0 3 6 10

6 2 3 3

1 8 0 12

6 7 7 8

Chittagong T ippera Noakhali

6 3 5

0 12 3

0 1 2

4 3 4

10 2 4

11 2 5

2 2

15 9

6 6

Rajshahi D inajpur Jalpaiguri Rangpur Bogra Pabna M alda

2 1 1 2 2 1 1

5 9 2 6 1 13 10

5 3 11 3 10 10 3

3 1 2 3 2 3 2

3 15 4 2 14 1 4

0 7 10 11 5 3 0

2 2 2 3 3 3 2

14 2 14 2 6 2 7

0 6 1 6 9 8 8

SO U R C E : Survey and Settlement Reports.

19

------

Bengal 1920-1947 Besides, in Nawabganj thana, ‘incontrovertible evidence has been produced to prove the imposition of numerous fines in individual cases to the extent of Rs 250 for breach of the estate rules or for refusing to obey the impossible and illegal demands of the landlords. Such instances, coupled with the practice of begar, imply the existence of oppression which it is difficult to realize; illegal evictions, false criminal prosecu­ tions, fortuitous fires and the open destruction of homesteads by means of elephants are the ordinary methods of procedure in such cases.’39 The prevalence of such extortionate practices was, of course, limited in Dacca by the multitude of very small coparcenary proprietors, many of them absentee,40 who lacked the authority or will to enforce illegal exactions; still the proportion of cultivators victimised was substantial. In Nadia, most of the bigger landlords collected between a fourth and half of the rent as abwab, particularly from utbandi raiyats whose tenancies were legally rather insecure.41 In Pabna and Bogra, ‘the abwabs are a first charge on the tenant, and must be paid before ever anything is credited to the rent. Should he demur, his offer of rent is not accepted, and he lays himself open to a suit for arrears of rent.’42

The proliferation of estates and tenures in Bengal was, with the exception of some of the northern districts, massive.43 To a large extent this depended on the effective size of the gap between the extractable surplus and the revenue payable to the government. In Rajshahi, an old settled district in north Bengal with large estates of long standing, there was little fragmentation while average accruals per estate were relatively high. As late as 1920, landlords in Rajshahi wielded ‘a sort of sovereign power dispensing justice and imposing taxes.. . ; the submission or subservience of the tenants is the most remarkable feature of relations between landlord and tenant in the district. . . . In the big estates civil disputes among tenants, and criminal matters also, are as a rule first 20

The Land Question taken to the zamindar or his agent before going to the police or the courts.’44 Again, in Pabna, ‘the zamindar’s agents assumed summary magisterial functions, the formal institutions of law being used as the most effective weapon of intimida­ tion.’45 In the rest of the province, however, the usual situa­ tion with zamindar is was one of immense fragmentation. In western and central Bengal, moreover, the picture was one of decay, since the expansion of cultivation within existing technical and organisational constraints had reached its natural limits by the second half of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, in the fertile districts of eastern Bengal, as the area under cultivation increased steadily throughout the nineteenth century and jute became popular as a commercial crop, there more than anywhere else the effective gap between rent and revenue was capable of being stretched to accommo­ date an expanding class of small rentiers.46 By the turn of the century, however, with the steady rise in food prices and indeed the general cost of living, this class of petty landlords all over the province reached a state where their earnings from the land were miserably insufficient for their upkeep. Their accruals from rent were small, they did not have the power of the bigger landlords to be able to extort by coercion what was not customarily given to them; they were, consequently, driven to capitalise on whatever assets they still possessed by transferring or subletting their tenures to a new group of traders-cum-moneylenders, some of whom, particularly in some western and northern districts, were substantial raiyats as well. Such transfers were most marked in the 1920s and, after the depression, in the 1930s in the districts of the Burdwan and Presidency divisions and in Bakarganj, Noakhali, Tippera, Dinajpur and Pabna, all of which were also regions with an aspiring class of richer raiyats - a phenomenon we will consider later. Many small landlords took to moneylending or trading themselves; almost all of them sought to get into urban ‘middle class’ occupations. 21

Bengal 1920-1947 The small landlord in eastern Bengal was particularly distressed. In Dacca, ‘practically every acre of which is now assessed to rent, and in which the rental is capable under the law of an increase which is hardly commensurate with the increase in the landed population, the condition of the land­ lord classes, so far as they are dependent on their income from the land, must continue to deteriorate. The class of landlords, which is most affected, is the petty landlord, whether proprietor or tenure-holder, such as is found in such numbers in Bikrampur and other similar areas of the district.’47 Jack reported from Bakarganj in 1915: U pon this class [the small landlords] the rise in prices w hich has been constant for h alf a century and always increasing in intensity has had such disastrous effect th a t too m any live on the m argin o f s ta rv a tio n .... Such a c la s s ...is a greater danger to the peaceful life o f the community and is in actual fact the direct cause o f a great deal o f its c rim e ...in recent years it has taken more sinister form in associations an d activities which menace the security o f property and so c ie ty .. . .it is known th a t the num ber o f unemployed amongst the bhadralok is large an d th a t the circumstances o f m any families are pitiful and th eir sufferings very great, in some cases falling little short o f death by slow starvation.48

The situation worsened after the slump of the early 1930s when, in the midst of widespread agrarian distress and anti­ landlord movements - which official circles described as the ‘no rent mentality’ - the collection of rents declined drasti­ cally in the districts of Faridpur, Bakarganj, Chittagong, Noakhali, Jalpaiguri, Rangpur and Pabna.49 Undoubtedly, it was the small zamindar or tenureholder who was the hardest hit.

22

3 over land were circumscribed by rights of a different sort: those flowing from the occupa­ tion by the peasant of his holding. In origin, the latter concept goes back to pre-British times where, in the maze of customary rights and duties characteristic of any feudal land system, the peasant possessed the hereditary right to till the land. The peasant had then to be settled on terms which would ensure that he would remain on the land and cultivate it every year, and as a relatively stable land and revenue system had emerged, these terms came to be regarded, perhaps with varying degrees of sanctity, as the customary rights of the peasant. Paradoxically, the completely altered circumstances of the nineteenth-century land economy of Bengal created condi­ tions where many of these customary rights of peasants had to be consciously incorporated into a legal system theoreti­ cally based on full private proprietorship in land. Conse­ quently, alongside the record of estates and the various grades of fragmented tenurial interests, the periodic settlement operations were also directed towards the identification of the direct occupant of holdings. This record of occupation, however, created yet another anomaly. Theoretically, the object of the operation was to identify the ‘peasant’ as distinct from the ‘landlord’ who was the proprietor of the land. Yet, all land within an estate was not necessarily distributed to raiyats for cultivation - there

P

r o p r ie t a r y

r ig h t s

Bengal 1920-1947 were khas or demesne lands which the proprietor retained for ‘direct cultivation by labourers*. So did tenureholders at every level of the fragmented proprietary interest. In all such cases, the khas holdings had to be recorded as being in the direct possession of the proprietor or tenureholder. Further, not every person having a raiyati interest in a holding recorded in his direct occupation was necessarily the actual tiller. The process which facilitated subinfeudation within the structure of proprietary rights also made possible the emergence and fragmentation of rentier interests among those who had raiyati rights of occupation. For, as the extension of the cultivated acreage reached its physical limits given existing techniques, the abundance of cheap labour and absence of alternative sources of livelihood meant that for any person with a given titular right to a piece of land and a given rent, there was another who was willing to cultivate it at a higher rent and an inferior right. The codification of many of these rights flowing out of the occupation of land - legal rights against eviction, against enhancement of rents, etc. - also created a legal basis for the subletting, mortgage, sale and transfer of the raiyati interest, within the overall framework of private proprietor­ ship of the landlord. Subletting and alienation of raiyati holdings were common practice since the late nineteenth century, and were formally recognised for the case of occu­ pancy raiyats in the Amendment to the Tenancy Act in 1928, with a stipulated ‘transfer fee’ payable to the landlord and the landlord’s right to preemption. The latter restrictions were abolished by the Amendment of 1937-38. A fair amount of land in every district was recorded as being in the direct possession of proprietors and tenureholders, i.e. not distributed to raiyats (Table 2). The figures range from a high of 73.28 per cent in Chittagong to a low of 11.39 per cent in Faridpur. The Chittagong case is exceptional since the peculiar tenancy arrangements there had bestowed tenureholding rights on persons who would, in any other 24

The Land Question Table 2 P r o p o r t io n s

of

po ssessio n o f

a g r ic u l t u r a l

land

in

d ir e c t

p r o p r ie t o r s , t e n u r e h o l d e r s ,

RAIYATS AND UNDERRAIYATS

Proprietors

Tenure­ holders

Raiyats

Underraiyats

5.02 5.09 7.26 10.71 3.76 4.51

20.54 14.80 42.52 20.15 10.14 8.36

71.56 77.45 46.34 65.78 81.84 83.55

2.88 2.66 3.88 3.36 4.26 3.58

24-Parganas N adia M urshidabad Jessore K hulna

3.13 4.37 4.06 2.51 2.39

15.09 13.09 10.61 9.69 14.22

70.31 73.36 76.62 60.37 70.40

11.47 9.18 8.71 27.43 12.99

Dacca Mymensingh Faridpur Bakarganj

8.79 13.42 2.89 9.23

5.84 7.96 8.50 26.42

84.23 75.35 79.50 60.68

1.14 3.27 9.11 3.67

Chittagong Tippera Noakhali

22.55 3.76 7.24

50.73 9.57 26.23

23.43 83.87 60.73

3.29 2.80 5.80

7.40 7.81 8.08 6.81 4.60 7.42 8.60

5.14 4.10 31.62 4.78 3.36 6.97 7.04

78.44 83.58 51.49 81.48 85.12 81.63 82.07

9.02 4.51 8.81 6.93 6.92 3.98 2.29

Burdwan Birbhum Bankura M idnapore Hooghly Howrah

Rajshahi Dinajpur Jalpaiguri Rangpur Bogra Pabna M alda

SO U R C E: Com puted from Statistics on Tenancies and Rent in Survey and Settlement Reports.

25

Bengal 1920-1947 district, be classified as raiyats. But Bankura (49.78 per cent), Jalpaiguri (39.70 per cent), Noakhali (33.47 per cent), Bakarganj (35.65 per cent), Midnapore (30.86 per cent), Burdwan (25.56 per cent) and Mymensingh (21.38 per cent) also have fairly high proportions of such land held directly by proprietors and tenureholders. O f these, Chittagong, Jalpaiguri, Noakhali, Bakarganj and Midnapore were all areas where considerable new land was brought under cultivation in the very late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hence, it is very likely, as is well known in the case of Chittagong, that a large number of enterprising abadkari cultivators were later found to have become rentreceiving tenureholders. This land held as khas often included gardens, orchards, etc. besides uncultivable land which could not be given to raiyats. In Bankura district, much of which consisted of uncultivable jungle land, 64.79 per cent of the land held khas by proprietors, and 43.20 per cent and 47.73 per cent respectively of those held by fixed-rent and variable-rent tenureholders, were wastes and jungles.50 However, a lot of khas land was also cultivated, either directly by hired labour, or sheer begar, or under a crop-sharing barga arrange­ ment - the last, on the evidence of the Settlement Reports, being the most common form in which labour was employed on these lands.

But clearly, the vast bulk of agricultural land in Bengal was in the direct possession of raiyats: Table 3 gives the propor­ tions in different districts. Again with the odd exception of Chittagong, and the marginal case of Bankura, a clear majority of the land was recorded with raiyats in every district. But the variations among districts, and among different categories of raiyats, are instructive. As with tenures, rent-free and fixed-rent tenancies too were frequent in the older zamindari and patni areas of western 26

The Land Question Bengal, i.e. in Burdwan, Hooghly and Howrah. Besides, fixed-rent tenures, which Were mostly held by substantial owners, were also found in Nadia, Murshidabad and Dinajpur. The bulk of the raiyati holdings in each district were settled cash-paying tenancies with occupancy rights. However, it is of vital importance in the context of political organisations, movements and ideologies in twentieth-century Bengal to note that such tenancies were far more preponderant in the districts of eastern and northern Bengal than elsewhere. In these districts, with the exception of Jalpaiguri, Chittagong, Noakhali and, to some extent, Bakarganj, well over 70 per cent of the land was in the direct possession of cash-paying settled and occupancy raiyats. This situation was in sharp contrast with the distribution of occupation rights in the western and central districts (see Map 1). Produce-paying tenants are seldom found to have land recorded in their direct possession. Whatever little evidence exist come from districts where settlement operations were completed before 1928 when the new Amendment to the Tenancy Act expressly disqualified produce-paying tenants from being given occupancy rights. It is difficult to get accurate figures on the distribution of raiyats by size of holdings. The little evidence we do have (for instance, the results of a survey conducted by the Land Revenue Commission in 1937-38) goes to show, first, that everywhere the largest single group of families, in many districts a majority, was in the lowest size-class of less than 2 acres, but second, that in the eastern districts of Dacca, Faridpur, Bakarganj, Chittagong, Tippera, Noakhali and Pabna, over 60 per cent of the surveyed families had less than 2 acres each and less than 15 per cent over 5 acres, whereas, by contrast, in districts like Burdwan, Jessore, Rajshahi and Dinajpur around 40 per cent had more than 5 acres of land.51 This is at least a priori indication that the process of differen­ tiation among the raiyat peasantry was much less advanced in 27

Bengal 1920-1947 T tU e P r o p o r t io n s

o f a g r ic u l t u r a l l a n d in d ir e c t

Total proportion under raiyats

Rent-free

Service

6.47 5.09

0.39 0.7 3

0.00

0.00

1.69 6.83 8.00

0.27 0 .6 4 0.59

0.67

0.07 0.70 1.25

Burdwan Birbhum Bankura M idnaporc Hooghly Howrah

71.56 77.45 46.34 65.78 81.84 83.55

24-Parganas N adia M urshidabad Jessore K hulna

70.31 73.36 76.62 60.37 70.40

Dacca Mymensingh Faridpur Bakarganj

84.23 75.35 79.50 60.68

0.26

Chittagong Tippera Noakhali

23.43 83.87 60.73

0.13

Rajshahi Dinajpur Jalpaiguri Rangpur Bogra Pabna M alda

78.44 83.58 51.49 81.48 85.12 81.63 82.07

0.00 1.48 0.01

0.00

0.00 0.29 0.17

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.56 0 .24 0.21

0.00 0.04 0.36

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.03 0.21 0.15 0.92 0.30 0.01 0.09 0.41 0.26 0.36

SO U R C E : Computed from Statistics on Tenancies

28

The Land Question

POSSESSION OF DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF RAIYATS

Fixed-rent

Settled Occupancy cash

NonOccupancy cash

Produce-rent

Others

1.65 0 .5 6 0 .0 3

0.21 0.36

0.72 0.90 9.03 8 .76 1.11 1.81

52.50 46.02 59.11 52.49 57.09

2.88 9.06 1.08 0.3 0 1.51

1.87 0.69 0 .83 0 .9 4 3.95

0 .1 0 0 .3 4 0 .4 0 0 .0 3

0.54 0.33 4.69 0.26

77.69 71.15 64.60 55.80

2.16 2.91 3.76 1.81

3.58 0 .96 6 .16 2 .64

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

0.22 2.06 5.66

21.61 80.83 49.11

0.38 0.46 5.58

1.06 0 .24 0.0 6

0.00

1.25 10.98 0.91 2.45 4.29 4.51 4.63

72.18 71.15 38.58 77.18 78.20 73.23 73.32

1.40 0.55 1.07 1.47 0.83 1.94 3.03

2.68 0.04 10.68 0 .02 1.39 1.65 0.37

0.01

23.69 13.92 10.20 6.48 16.89 15.67

38.37 56.01 26.81 48.47 54.22 55.94

12.22 16.55 12.47 6.63 7.82

0.27 0.24 0.27

0.11

an d R ent in Survey and Settlement Reports.

29

0.00 1.94 1.18

0.00

0.07 0.17

0.00 0.00 0 .06

0.00 0.00 0.00

Bengal 1920-1947 M ap 1 D is t r ic t - w is e

p r o p o r t io n s o f l a n d

RAIYATS

30

held

by

occupancy

The Land Question the eastern districts. There the preponderance of a small peasantry was much stronger than elsewhere in Bengal. O f those holding raiyati rights of occupation and cultiva­ tion, the more substantial often acquired superior rights. Historically, this process of differentiation was most facilitated in the areas of new reclamation and settlement - in Midnapore, 24-Parganas, Khulna, and parts of Bakarganj, Noakhali and Tippera in the southern coastal regions and in Jaipaiguri, Dinajpur and Rangpur in north Bengal. As this process continued over decades, many substantial raiyats came to enjoy superior rights by custom or under the legal provisions of the Tenancy Act.62 On the other hand, this process of differentiation among the peasantry took on a new form in the twentieth century with the rapid and general rise in the prices of foodgrains and the spread of irrigation in districts like Burdwan and Midnapore: the enrichment of a superior peasantry now became possible through exploitation by produce rents, moneylending and graindealing, and the mortgage and transfer of raiyati holdings. Upto the early decades of the twentieth century, however, a major aspiration of the substantial cultivator was to acquire a superior property right. Khulna, for instance, was an area of comparatively recent reclamation of jungle land. M any tenureholders there were originally abadkari praja who h ad been given large tracts of jungle land by a talukdar or haoladar for clearing and cultivation. In areas such as Dakope, Paikgachha, Rampal and Shyamnagar, in fact, the average size of raiyati holdings ranged between 6 and 12 acres. ‘Now a raiyat with a holding of six to twelve acres of newly reclaimed land must be a very substantial man if he can continue to cultivate this area himself. Day labour is not to be had in a newly reclaimed “ abad” , and plough cattle, if carried off by one of the diseases which attack them in a saline climate, cannot easily be replaced. He therefore sooner or later finds himself obliged to reduce the size of his holding. He does not however do this by an outright sale, for on the one handj^he 31

Bengal 1920-1947 has a distinct sentimental objection to parting with his land, and on the other hand the purchaser will be obliged to pay salami to the landlord for recognition of the sale transaction. He therefore prefers to subdivide the holding by a sub-lease to a friend or neighbour who is willing and able to cultivate part of it. Sometimes the lessee pays a considerable premium for the lease and stipulates to pay a rent which leaves little profit to the lessor... .he still does not sell it outright but comes to an arrangement with the purchaser that the latter will execute a kabuliyat in his favour and will therefore pay the rental of the holding direct to his landlord.’63 All abadkari praja in Khulna enjoyed many customary rights not common elsewhere among raiyats, such as the right to trees or to dig tanks. Salami payments on transfer of holdings were also nominal.64 Many such cultivators in Khulna were accepted as tenureholders under the Tenancy Act: ‘No nouveau riche more ardently covets a rise in social status than the well-to-do Muhammadan cultivator of that district.’66 In Midnapore, too, there was a group of intermediate tenureholders locally known as mandals who were in origin substantial raiyats whom the zamindar had granted waste lands for purposes of abad. This abadkar gradually acquired rights superior to those of ordinary khudkasht raiyats and became a mandal who later came to be recognised as a tenureholder under the Tenancy Act.50 However, there was another kind of tenureholder too, ‘a creation of the Settlement Depart­ m ent,’ who was usually ‘a mahajan [substantial raiy at]... who has bought up raiyats’ holdings and re-settled them and has been recorded by us as a tenure-holder in order to preserve the rights of the cultivator, though he regards him­ self and is regarded by the proprietor as a raiyat.’67 Again, in Bakarganj, many tenureholders were hakiatdars who held permanent, heritable and transferable interests in land with unlimited control as long as the rent was paid, and the rent was usually fixed in perpetuity. But many of those who had purchased hakiat (or milkiat) rights were earlier 32

The Land Question karsadars with rights merely to cultivate, and many, in fact, continued to cultivate the land themselves even after becoming hakiatdars.58 But even after the structure of tenureholding was codified under the Bengal Tenancy Act, 1885, cultivators were promoted to the status of tenureholders because the smaller landlords, hard hit by rising costs of living and lacking the power and resources to raise the rent, found it possible to sell these intermediate rights to prosperous cultivators who had reaped some of the benefits of the rise in foodgrain prices. Even the Court of Wards paid off debts by creating tenures of this kind: ‘these owners are naturally the more prosperous amongst the cultivators, who have often in their turn sublet a part of their lands.’69 The Noakhali Settlement Report says of the Muslim culti­ vators in that district that many of them ‘have risen to become middlemen howladars and talukdars, and a few even zamindars, but they are all of the same stock,’ and many continued to cultivate even after acquiring superior rights.60 In Tippera, too, it was reported that ‘the majority of those who have raised themselves to the position of middlemen and subsist as rent-receivers and as beparis, small collecting agents in the jute and betel-nut trades, are of the same stock as the cultivators.’61 In the northern district of Dinajpur, the Report says: ‘Almost every village will reveal some large family of sub­ stantial cultivators___ As elsewhere in North Bengal, this jotedar class is socially supreme in the countryside___ Mostly holding “jote” , or raiyati right, they may have progressed in the world and acquired superior proprietary rights in some estates, or for ease of collection, have taken a patni lease of a whole village, from the landlords. Most union board presidents would be found to belong to the jotedar class with from 30 to 300 acres of land.’62 In Susang and Sherpur in Mymensingh district, ‘most tenures... are cultivated by tenure-holders, who are really ryots who have risen in status by buying taluki shares.’63 33 3

Bengal 1920-1947 In the zamindari areas of Jalpaiguri, as in Rangpur, apart from the adhiar praja, there were two classes of tenants - jotdars and chukanidars (or mulandars). A jotdar, by local custom, was ‘one holding land immediately under a proprietor, his rent being liable to enhancement, having originally acquired a right either to cultivate it himself or sublet it to others, his title therein being permanent and heritable but not trans­ ferable without the consent of the proprietor obtained by payment of a salami. The right to realise this salami has not been exercised in every case by the zamindars, so that a popular belief has grown up in places that jotdars have the right of transfer absolutely.’64 Yet, all jotdars in Jalpaiguri were not classified as tenureholders under the Tenancy Act, because ‘there were many small jotdars whose predecessors h a d .. .clearly taken up jotes for their own residence and cultivation.*66 Hence, the principle was laid down that a jo t would be classified as a raiyati holding if the jotdar'*s homestead was within the tenancy and at least a third of the arable land was in his immediate possession (not including cultivation by adhiar), or if his homestead was outside the tenancy but half the arable land was in his immediate possession.66 As a result, 41.8 per cent of jots and 30 per cent of dar-jots (with derivative jotdari rights) were classified as raiyati holdings.67 O n the other hand, a chukanidar was one ‘holding land under a jotdar on a money rent, which is liable to enhancement, his right being primarily the right to cultivate, and his title permanent and heritable, but not transferable without his jotdar’s consent.*68 Still, 7.6 per cent of chukanidars and about 1 per cent of the derivative chukani holdings had to be classified as tenureholding rather than raiyati interests.69 All this is illus­ trative of the process of differentiation among the peasantry: many who were still regarded by law as peasants had custo­ marily acquired superior rights of property; on the other hand, many who were customarily only peasants with a right to occupy and cultivate were granted, by the application of the new legal codes of tenancy, superior rights of 34

The Land Question tenure-holding. The situation was quite different in east Bengal proper where landed property was highly fragmented from above and the peasantry relatively undifferentiated. In Dacca, for instance, cases of cultivators operating in effect as inter­ mediary rentiers were rare. ‘The proportion of middlemen recorded as raiyats is not large and may be disregarded for statistical purposes.*70 ‘The cultivating tenureholder is very rare in Dacca.’71 In Faridpur, too, the ‘promotion of the cultivator by grant of the status of tenure-holders’ was ‘very rare*;72 not surprisingly, therefore, ‘the cultivating tenure­ holder [was] very rare.*78

35

4 Car has been in terms of the proportions of agricultural land held by different categories of the agricultural population having various kinds of rights of proprietorship or occupation. A corresponding picture of the proportions of the agricultural population belonging to each of these categories —landlords, i.e. proprietors and tenureholders; tenants, i.e. raiyats of different kinds; and labourers, i.e. those working in agricultural occupations without any legal rights to land - can be obtained from the 1921 Census figures (Table 4). The definitions of the various occupational cate­ gories used in this Census followed almost exactly the legal categories under the Tenancy Act.74 Table 4 shows that 4.02 per cent of those pursuing agricul­ tural occupations in British Bengal were landlords. The pro­ portion was greater in the districts of Chittagong, Howrah, Nadia, Jessore, Faridpur, Khulna, Dacca, Hooghly and Rajshahi than elsewhere. On the other hand, whereas 83.75 per cent of the agricultural work-force in Bengal were tenants with some sort of rights to the land which they tilled, there were marked differences in this regard between western and central Bengal on the one hand and the rest of the province on the other. In Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura, Hooghly, Howrah, 24-Parganas, Nadia, Malda and Murshidabad (and Chittagong, but that, of course, was an exceptional case), this proportion was below 80 per cent. Correspondingly, the proportion of ‘labourers’, i.e. tillers without any sort of legal i e a n a l y s is so

T

The Land Question Table 4 C l a ss if ic a t io n

o f a g r ic u l t u r a l w o r k - f o r c e b y

1921

TENANCY CATEGORIES,

(PERCENTAGES)

Labourers

Landlords

Tenants

Burdwan Birbhum Bankura M idnapore Hooghly Howrah

4.19 2.00 4.18 2.37 4.87 8 .8 9

68.42 62.38 68.39 80.45 68.57 61.06

27.39 35.62 27.43 17.18 26.56 30.05

24-Parganas N adia M urshidabad Jessore K hulna

4.39 7.85 4.15 6.94 5.73

76.19 70.05 68.99 85.34 85.68

19.42 22.10 26.86 7.72 8.59

Dacca Mymensingh Faridpur Bakarganj

5.08 2.49 6.61 4.26

89.24 92.12 88.84 87.75

5.68 5.39 4.55 7.99

Chittagong Tippera N oakhali

9 .55 1.93 3.36

72.53 93.87 82.50

17.92 4 .20 14.14

Rajshahi D inajpor Jalpaiguri R angpur Bogra Pabna M alda Daijeeling

4.60 3.18 1.37 1.99 4.12 2.12 1.65

84.18 87.28 91.84 91.68 89.24 88.28 75.99 96.26

11.22 11.72 4.98 6.9 5 8 .77 7.60 21.89 2.09

British Bengal

4.02

83.75

12.23

1.00

SOURCE: Computed from Census o f India, 1921, vol. 5( Bengal), part ii, Tables 2, 3, 4, 5.

37

Bengal 1920-1947 rights to land (underraiyats without any tenancy rights, sharecroppers, agricultural labourers), in these districts was much higher - above 20 per cent - than elsewhere, the propor­ tion of such ‘labourers’ in the total agricultural population of Bengal being only 12.23 per cent. The sharp distinction between the agrarian structures in these two regions of Bengal is clearly observable in this classification of the agricultural work-force by tenancy categories. The 1931 Census used different categories for classifying the agricultural population. It defined landlords as ‘those who have land but lease it out and live on the rents in cash or kind and do not actually cultivate either themselves or by hired servants or hired labourers.* Cultivators were those ‘cultivating the land either with their own hands or by servants or hired labourers.. .irrespective of his status in the land-tenure s y s te m .... I f the cultivator had a permanent title to the possession of his land he was regarded as a cultivat­ ing owner.. . , even if at law he was not entitled to the privileges of a permanent or settled raiyat under the Bengal Tenancy Act. Similarly, even if the cultivator was not a tenant under the definitions in this Act, he was still to be regarded as a cultivating ten an t.. .if he was entitled to remain in possession of his land during the season in which crops sown and tended by him were in the ground although he might be liable at the end of the season to make over a proportion of the crops to the person with a title in the land.’ Agricultural labourers, on the other hand, were those who cultivated the land ‘for hire in cash or kind.*75 Table 5 shows the results of this classification by economic categories.78 A comparison with Table 4 is instructive. The proportion of those who now qualify as ‘rent-receivers’ under the 1931 definition exceeds the ‘landlords’ in Table 4 by a significant margin in Bankura, Burdwan, Hooghly, Howrah, Jessore, Mymensingh, Bogra, Pabna, Malda and Darjeeling. This is indicative of the presence in these districts in large numbers of those who were not proprietors or tenureholders 38

The Land Question Table 5 C l a s s if ic a t io n e c o n o m ic

o f a g r ic u l t u r a l

c a t e g o r ie s ,

1931

w o r k -f o r c e b y

(per c en tag es)

Rentreceivers

Ownercultivators

Tenants

Labourers

Others

Burdwan Birbhum Bankura M idnapore Hboghly Howrah

11.60 2.42 19.48 4.2 5 8.92 13.99

40.96 44.10 31.17 52.46 32.78 31.37

7.22 3.6 5 5.42 5.10 12.31 8 .8 4

39.94 49.10 43.75 37.91 45.24 44.64

0.28 0 .7 3 0.18 0 .2 8 0.7 5 1.16

24-Piarganas N adia M urshidabad Jessore K hulna

8.29 9.31 6.15 11.11 7.98

38.78 37.34 41.91 56.47 48.82

9.91 12.59 4.71 14.02 8.3 6

41.54 40.03 45.55 17.91 34.40

1.48 0.73 1.68 0 .4 9 0 .4 4

Dacca Mymensingh Faridpur Bakarganj

5.79 8.59 9.6 8 7.86

74.49 69.15 69.48 58.61

6.49 7.70 8.79 6 .4 4

12.92 14.10 11.83 26.36

0.31 0.46 0.22 0.73

Chittagong Tippera N oakhali

11.41 5.27 6.6 8

46.06 77.64 62.09

7.49 1.80 4.10

32.55 14.90 26.67

2.49 0.39 0.4 6

Rajshahi XHnajpur Jalpaiguri R angpur Bogra Fabna M alda Darjeeling

7.99 3.67 6.60 4.65 7.94 9.82 6.22 15.20

56.27 46.88 36.25 52.41 54.88 59.30 42.71 36.55

5.7 4 14.62 25.83 18.94 6.22 7.76 8.29 24.79

28.99 34.22 31.09 23.53 30.47 22.36 41.54 23.03

1.01 0.61 0.2 3 0.47 0.49 0.76 1.24 0.43

British Bengal

7.90

52.63

8.81

30.26

0.40

SOURCE: Computed from Census o f India, 1931, vol. 5 (Bengal), part ii, Tables 2, 3, 4, 5.

39

Bengal 1920-1947 under the Tenancy Act, but who had in effect become pure rentiers. Second, the proportion of owner-cultivators is still substantially higher in Dacca, Mymensingh, Faridpur, Bakarganj, Tippera, Xoakhali and Pabna than dsewhere. Third, the proportion of cultivators who were largely inde­ pendent tillers of the soil but without any permanent rights of occupation - ‘tenant cultivators5 under the Census defini­ tion - is large in Darjeeling, Jaipaiguri. Rangpur, Dinajpur, Jessore, Nadia, Hooghly and 24-Parganas. A large part of the mdkiers, bargadars, sanja tenants and mtbendi tenants would be included in this category. Finally, 'labourers’, working for hire in cash or kind and thus including, besides agricultural labourers and farm servants, a large number of bkagekasi who were not regarded as independent tenant cultivators under the Census definition, form large proportions of the agri­ cultural population in most of western and central Bengal — Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapore, Hooghly, Howrah, 24-Parganas, Nadia, Mursbidahad and Malda.77 The Land Revenue Commission of 1938-39 conducted a jurvty in selected villages to find out the manner in which the land was cultivated in different districts of Bengal: the results are shown in Table 6. It is clear that the predominant mode of cultivation was by the labour of the owner himself and his family in the districts of the Chittagong and Rajshahi divisions and in Faridpur, Mymensingh and Jessore, where over 70 per cent of die land was cultivated in this manner. O n the other hand, in the other districts of western and central Bengal, a large proportion of those having land in their possession were not cultivators themselves: much land here was cultivated by sharecroppers or labourers. O f sharecroppers, die largest proportions were in Khulna ^50.2 per cent), Bakarganj \44.7 per cent). Hooghly 130.9 per cent), Bankura 29.2 per cent), Jaipaiguri 25.9 per cent% Murshidabad 25.8 per oent', Burdwan 25.2 per cent, and Birbhum (24.8 per cent . O f course, there were differences in the status of the landlords employing these sharecroppers - some 40

The Land Question T a b le 6 P r o p o r t io n s

o f l a n d c u l t iv a t e d

b y f a m il y

MEMBERS, BARGADARS AND LABOURERS

by family members

by bargadar

by labourers

Burdwan Birbhum Bankura M idnapore Hooghly Howrah

53.0 32.7 50.8 53.0 64.8 67.3

25.2 24.8 29.2 17.1 30.5 23.4

21.8 42.5 20.0 29.9 4 .8 9 .2

24-Parganas N adia M urshidabad Jessore K hulna

51.1 61.2 58.9 71.3 47.7

22.3 24.1 25.8 22.1 50.2

26.6 14.7 15.3 6 .6 2.1

Dacca Mymensingh Faridpur Bakarganj

60.9 78.2 80.5 55.3

22.9 10.3 11.4 44.7

16.2 11.5 8.1 0 .0

Chittagong Tippera Noakhali

78.1 70.6 70.5

11.9 12.4 16.8

10.0 17.0 12.7

Rajshahi D inajpur Jalpaiguri Rangpur Bogra Pabna M alda

81.0 72.0 70.4 72.2 80.8 77.6 89.3

15.0 14.5 25.9 22.8 16.0 19.4 9 .6

3 .9 13.6 3 .7 5.1 3.2 3.0 1.2

Bengal

65.9

21.1

13.1

SOURCE: LRCy vol. 2, pp. 118-19, Table VlII(e).

41

Bengal 1920-1947 were proprietors or tenureholders cultivating the land in their khas possession under a bhag system, while others were raiyats who had sublet their land to sharecroppers. Land cultivated mainly by employing agricultural labourers com­ prised quite a small proportion of the area in eastern and northern Bengal: on the other hand, much land was culti­ vated by ‘labourers’ in Birbhum (42.5 per cent), Midnapore (29.9 per cent), 24-Parganas (26.6 per cent), Burdwan (21.8 per cent) and Bankura (20.0 per cent). The same survey also included an enumeration of the number of families who lived mainly or entirely as bargadars and those who lived principally on wage earnings. The results are shown in Table 7. Comparing these with the results in Table 6, it is evident that in several districts, viz. Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapore, Nadia, Murshidabad, Jessore, .Khulna, Dacca, Bakarganj, Chittagong, Tippera and Noakhali, although much land was cultivated by bargadars (Table 6), a much smaller proportion of the agricultural population could be classified as being mainly or entirely bargadars (Table 7). This suggests that a large number of small owner-cultivators in these districts also leased in additional land for cultivation on a crop-sharing basis in order to supplement their incomes. Second, Table 6 shows that only in a few districts, viz. Birbhum, Midnapore, 24-Parganas, Burdwan and Bankura, was any substantial part of the land cultivated principally by hired labour. Yet, in Table 7 there are several districts, viz. Burdwan, Hooghly, Howrah, Nadia, Murshidabad, Khulna, Mymensingh, Faridpur, Bakarganj, Rajshahi, Dinajpur, Bogra, Pabna and Malda, where the proportion of families living mainly or entirely on earnings from wages was far greater in comparison with the land cultivated principally by wage-labourers. This, again, suggests that in the latter districts a lot of hired labour was used to supplement the family labour of the owner. This is particularly so in Hooghly, Howrah, Murshidabad, Khulna, Bakarganj, Jalpaiguri, Bogra, Pabna and Malda. 42

The Land Question Table 7 P r o p o r t io n s

o f a g r ic u l t u r a l f a m il ie s l iv in g a s b a r g a d a r s

AND AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS (PERCENTAGES) AND RATE OF AGRICULTURAL WAGES (R S -A S .-P .)

R ate of wages Mainly/entirely M ainly/entirely ------------------------------------bargadars on wages Harvest O ther season seasons Burdwan Birbhum Bankura M idnapore Hooghly Howrah

27.2 12.9 6 .6 6 .5 27.7 27.1

40.0 39.6 24.6 24.9 24.3 31.2

0-5-9 0-3-9 0-3 -6 0-4-0 0 -6 -0 0-6-0

0-3 -6 0 -2 -9 0 -2 -6 0-3 -0 0-4 -0 0 -4 -0

24-Parganas N adia M urshidabad Jessore Khulna

18.7 6 .7 10.9 4 .2 13.2

17.3 36.1 40.8 7.9 41.9

0-4—9 0-3-3 0-2-9 0-4-3 0-5-3

0-3-9 0-2 -9 0-2-9 0-3 -3 0-3-3

Dacca Mymensingh Faridpur Bakarganj

6 .9 7.3 23.8 7.1

22.2 20.0 15.7 23.6

0 -4 -3 -f-food 0 -3 -3 - f food 0-5 -6 0-4-9

1.8 1.1 2.2

11.6 4 .8 17.9

0-6-0 0 -4 -3 0 -4 -3

0-3-9 0 -2 -9 0 -2 -9

Rajshahi Dinajpur Jalpaiguri Rangpur Bogra Pabna M alda

13.0 13.8 26.6 19.1 13.4 26.1 18.7

23.8 23.5 4.1 12.9 25.9 15.2 39.8

0-4 -0 0-3-0 0-4-9 0-3 -9 0-4 -0 0-5-3 0-2-9

0 -2 -9 0 -2 -6 0-3 -9 0 -2 -3 0—2—6 0 -4 -0 0-2-9

Bengal

12.2

22.5

0-4-3

0-3-3

Chittagong Tippera Noakhali

c

SOURCE : LRC, vol. 2, p. 117, Table V lII(d).

43

--------

--0—4-0 0-2-9

■

Bengal 1920-1947 It is also worth mentioning here that in a survey of 77 villages conducted in 1944-45, Ishaque found the proportion of the total agricultural land in Bengal let out under barga cultivation as 24.9 per cent.78 Excluding the area occupied by homestead, tanks, orchards, etc. this proportion comes to 30.1 per cent as compared to the Floud Commission finding of 21.1 per cent for Bengal in 1938-39 (Table 6). Unfortu­ nately, a sample of 77 villages distributed over 25 districts is far too inadequate for a district-wise comparison between the two sets of findings.

We have already shown in Table 1 the proportions of land held in the direct possession of proprietors and tenureholders. The typical landlord of this kind was non-cultivating: his khamar or demesne lands were traditionally cultivated under a crop-sharing arrangement. Ascoli, reporting from Dacca, described this ‘old barga' system as follows: in the khas khamar lands of proprietors and tenureholders, ‘bargadars are invari­ ably found to cultivate the lan d . . . . khamar lands are never settled on a money re At.’ These bargadars were ‘subject to ejectment at the hands of the proprietor from year to year at the will of the latter,’ the arrangement having ‘the sanction of custom and usage, old enough to be classed as immemorial.* In practice, bargadars were usually ejected every four years.79 In Jessore, khas land was usually cultivated on produce rent, the crop-sharing barga as well as the fixed-produce dhankarari systems being prevalent, although barga was far more common and was particularly in vogue in M agura and Narail sub­ divisions and in Salkopa thana.80 In Burdwan, cultivation by bhagdars was ‘freely used by tenureholders for their khas lands, by bhadralok whatever their status, and by widows and others unable personally to manage their lands.’81 ‘The essence of the barga,’ MacPherson explained, ‘seems to be the agreement between both parties as to the crop to be produced, and the equal division between them of risks and 44

The Land Question returns. As soon as the “bargadar” is allowed freedom of choice on the crop he cultivates, and in return for that privi­ lege, agrees to pay a certain stipulated amount of money as compensation for the use of the land, he ceases to be a barga­ dar, other than in name.* In the latter event, the bargadar would claim to be a korfa tenant.82 The ‘old barge? arrange­ ments worked in Pabna on this basis, with bargadars often cultivating the same plot for generations. In Bogra, barga leases were commonly made out for periods upto nine years, ‘and their duration ruled out the possibility of their being mere contracts for labour,’ although the word parisramik [payment for labour] was invariably used in the kabuliyat to describe the share retained by the cultivator.83 The Settlement Report for Rajshahi notes: ‘When a proprietor gets his land into his own possession free of occu­ pancy rights.. .he does one of two things - either he sells the raiyati right in the land subject to a customary rent for as large a salami as he can get or else he lets the land on a half produce re n t... Custom, however, sanctions a half produce rent; by taking a half produce rent the landlord usually gets more than the economic rent of the lan d .. .four annas an acre than the economic rent.’84 In Faridpur, too, where khas lands were cultivated predominandy by bargadars, they paid half the crop as rent, but in Kotalipara the share was some­ times lower - one-third or two-fifths. Dhankarari tenants were also found in Kotalipara and their fixed produce rent was ‘much severer than the prevailing cash rents.’85 In northern Bengal, particularly in Jalpaiguri, Dinajpur and Rangpur, the crop-sharing arrangement of cultivation was both common and old, and was used by landlords irres­ pective of whether they were categorised as tenureholders or as raiyats under the Tenancy Act. By custom, adhiars in Jalpaiguri were regarded as ‘labourers cultivating the land of proprietors, jotdars or chukanidars on a half-share basis. They are not considered to have any right or tide but to be liable to be ejected at the will of their employer. They are 45

Bengal 1920-1947 sometimes found to have lived for many years in the same place and cultivated the same land and to be independent of their giri, as the immediate landlord of an adhiar is called, in the matters of ploughs and cattle and even seed. The great majority however move about from field to field, from giri to giri, from locality to locality and have to be supplied with all the implements of agriculture,.. .his giri supplies him with a free house and prescribes the crop he has to grow; while in addition to growing that crop the adhiar works as a general labourer for hire on the lands of his giri or on those of his neighbours.*86 In Dinajpur, although ‘there was a tendency to conceal the existence of adhiars, for fear that the noting of adhiars’ names in the working khatians would give them some rights,’ Bell, the Settlement Officer, nonetheless ‘confidently asserted that fully a quarter of the cultivated area of the south and west of the district is cultivated through adhiars.*87 Those who gave out land on adhi were sometimes non-resident or non-agriculturist landowners, some were widows, some too old or too young to cultivate on their own. However, ‘the enquiries clearly proved.. .that most land is given to adhiars because the raiyat or jotedar has got more land than he can cultivate himself, even if he and his family worked full time on the land.’88 It was also found that the less fertile lands were generally given to adhiars. The system was particularly favoured for the winter paddy crop ‘which requires litde capital and no expensive operations like weeding, watering, or ditching.. . .winter paddy can be grown very successfully by a man who has no capital except his own strength, and plough and cattle.’89 The arrangement was that the adhiar would take half the crop and usually half the straw. Some­ times the landlord would supply the seeds at 50 per cent interest. A sample survey conducted during settlement operations showed that 45.4 per cent of adhiars also held in tenancy right land below 1 acre each and a further 34 per cent between 1 and 5 acres.90 46

The Land Question Adhiars in Dinajpur did not possess any rights by custom. Like many poor raiyats in the district, and like adhiars in Jalpaiguri, the Dinajpur adhiars too would work a few extra days for their jotdars on wage payments. Many ‘Muslim and Rajbangshi jotdars [who cultivated] upto 100 acres by own ploughs and labourers’ would employ 8 men of this kind in the busy season and 4 to 8 men throughout the year at Rs 4 to 6 per month besides food.®1 In Rangpur the adhiars were ‘recruited from among the poorer under-tenants who do not hold sufficient lands in tenancy right to maintain themselves and their families’ and were generally ‘regarded as having no rights at all in adhi lands.' The adhiar accepted ‘as quite normal an order to quit the land after reaping the harvest.’ In the north-western areas of the district, adhiars were entirely landless. Normally, the adhiar supplied half the seed and, of course, the labour, while the landlord supplied the plough and cattle, the remain­ der of the seed and, if necessary, manure. Most often the adhiar took an advance of the entire seed and possibly some grain as well. ‘This is recouped with heavy interest, generally 50 per cent, at harvest time.’92

As early as the first and second decades of this century, much concern was expressed in official circles to give the share­ cropper some rights - rights of occupation to which cashpaying raiyats or underraiyats were entitled, and the right to have his produce rent commuted to a money rent. Milligan, writing his report on the settlement operations in Jalpaiguri in 1919, voiced this concern: I t was felt to be intolerable th a t an agricultural system, which was extending an d establishing itself w ith such remarkable rapidity as the adhtari system has done during the last quarter o f a century, should deny all rights in the land to the class which forms the basis an d backbone o f any community carrying on agriculture under its auspices. I t was resolved that this settlement must a t least make a beginning in the

47

Bengal 1920-1947 cradicfion o f this gross injustice. In the course o f d it c w d o u .. .some misunderstandings arose from failure a t a ll times Id distinguish between i t facto incidents o f an «idhiar’s tenure according to local custom an d usage, an d the dt jure character with which it was considered desirable and feasible to invest it at the present s ta g e .. . . Such was the unanim ity a n d rigidity o f local opinion on the question t h a t . . .all adkuars wore a t first merely recorded in the khatians o f jotedars an d chukanidars in the column for subordinate interests in the occupation of plots----- I t further transpired th a t in many cases written agreements w o e drawn u p ----- I t appeared th at in most cases where such a document was executed the g iri was forcibly converting a cash-paying tenant into an m dkiar- a common tendency throughout the district. Such kabmlijmts were invariably found in the possession o f the g iri, and no corresponding document was found with the adhiar. T he essential features o f these kabtdijats were that the adhiar bound himself to repay advances, deliver h alf the crop, obey orders, properly cultivate the land, and vacate it at the end of the contract; bis use an d occupation o f the land being guaranteed for one year or longer as the case might b e . . .th e fact th at such kabuliyats were by no means uncommon w ent far to contradict the popular definition o f an adhiar as a m ere labourer.*3

In the end, it was decided that in the Western Duars area, adhiars who cultivated with their own ploughs and cattle would be recorded as tenants who could not be evicted ‘except by their own consent or under the orders of a Civil Court.’ And in the zamindari areas of Jalpaiguri, adhiars having their own ploughs and cattle were recorded as raiyats where their landlords were proprietors or tenureholders, and as underraiyats where the landlords were raiyats.94 Milligan added as comment: ‘It should be clearly stated that the rapid growth of the Adhiari system is viewed with alarm and disapproval by Government, and that the deliberate aim of the policy now inaugurated is to check the further spread of a system which is so economically unsound —in the zemindary areas, by replacing the helpless Adhiar of today by an Adhiar who has recognized tenant rights; in the Western Duars by dis­ couraging cultivation by Adhiars, by reducing the size of jotes so as to eliminate the necessity for sub-infeudation, by increas­ ing the area held by small resident cultivators, and lastly, as in the zemindary area, by converting the Adhiar, who has no 48

The Land Question recognized rights, into a tenant.’95 However, given the processes of change which had already set in within the structure of land relations in Bengal’s agri­ culture - the rise in the prices of foodcrops, the extension of trading activities in foodgrains and commercial crop» such as jute, the virtual stagnation in levels of productivity,96 popula­ tion increase, lack of alternative avenues of employment - all these made it impossible to set the agrarian economy on a viable basis by a simple reliance on legal measures to protect the small owner-cultivator. Already in eastern Bengal, the move to restrict the barga system and give the sharecropper some lights of occupation was coming up against tremendous opposition from landlords. In Dacca, over 77,000 bargadars were recorded as tenants in the khas lands of proprietors and tenureholders (and only 15,751 holding land under raiyats), and still Ascoli believed ‘that in a large area of land held directly by proprietors and tenureholders, bargadars were suppressed at all stages of the preparation of the record.’97 The Settlement Officer decided to open records for bargadars, implying that they were tenants. But the number of ejectments of bargadars who were so recorded was ‘enormous’. The attem pt was given up.98 On the other hand, a new barga arrangement was on the increase in Dacca, occurring in cases ‘where the landlords indulge in a wholesale money-lending business___ The new purchaser is so often a mahajan and it is seldom that the purchase is not made with the ulterior motive of extending his money-lending business.’99 Ascoli himself suggested that commutation from produce to cash rents be applied to raiyati land only and not to khamar lands, thus protecting the old barga system but checking the spread of new barga. In the eastern parganas of Mymensingh, too, and in Susang and Atia, there were in 1919 ten thousand dhanyakarari tenants whose produce rents went mainly to tenureholders.100 Produce rents were frequent in Tippera as well, and ‘in certain localities up and down the Meghna and in Brahman49 4

Bengal 1920-1947 baria there are signs that the system is likely to become more common, and it is not by any means improbable that certain middlemen with an eye to the preparation of the Settlement Record were specially careful that those who cultivated their lands close to their homesteads for them should not be able to claim any right in them. The record of bargadars as raiyats under middlemen in Dacca caused a great stir in that district, and along the Meghna opposite Dacca, Tippera people have regular communication with those who live across the river.’101 The Midnapore Report states quite categorically: ‘So long as no question was raised as to the status of bhag-chasis land­ lords were content with few exceptions to allow them to remain on from year to year undisturbed provided they cultivated the land in some fashion and delivered over their share of the produce, but the moment an attempt is made to give them a definite status on the basis of existing practice all the forces of self-interest are aroused and a fight starts in which all the advantages of the heavy artillery of the law courts are on the side of the landlord, and it may be appre­ hended that the bhag-chasi runs the risk of being crushed out of existence or reduced to the position of a mere labourer----*102 In Bakarganj, produce rents were found ‘chiefly in the area where the bhadralok live,’ and tnese ‘have increased greatly in the last quarter of a century. It is to be feared that in the areas where they prevail not only are most new tenancies granted with this liability, but many old cash-paying holdings have been converted into produce-paying holdings.'108 During settlement operations in this district in 1908-15, over a thousand cultivators were given the right to get their produce rents commuted into cash rents. Soon afterwards, the Board of Revenue received a petition from ‘a body of pleaders and Brahmin priests’ of Barisal alleging that this award was un­ fair, particularly because it would ‘affect only the poor people who depend entirely upon the produce rents for their subsis tence.’ On investigation it was found that of these, 671 awards 50

The Land Question affected landlords whose circumstances were ‘described as good*, 435 cases where they were ‘fair’, and only 58 cases involved landlords who were ‘poor’. H. Savage of the Board of Revenue thought, however, that the Settlement Officer had gone too far: while the raiyats could claim sympathy, the landlords should not on that account be hit too hard. ‘What I am told is that the landlords intend either to harass their tenants by suits for the produce rents now in arrears and so bring them to their knees, or failing this to resort to the lathi, dao and similar weapons in the use of which the inhabitants of Bakarganj are past masters.* It was finally decided that the landlords concerned would be given the opportunity to appeal against the awards. 80 appeals were made, of which in 14 cases commutation was disallowed; in others, commuta­ tion was permitted but at higher money rents. A few months later, however, the Settlement Officer reported that ‘where rents have been commuted, the landlord has in many cases brought suits for three years’ arrears of paddy rents and obtained decrees sometimes even in contested cases.’ A Special Officer appointed for the purpose reported that of the thousand odd cases of commutation in Goumadi thana, over 200 landlords had successfully moved the court to decree arrear payments of produce rents, since no receipts were ever given for produce rents. ‘There is not the least doubt that the greater portion of the tenants who got their produce rent commuted at the time of attestation have suffered. . . . many of the tenants, whose produce rents I have recently commuted as Special Officer, will certainly be persecuted by their land­ lords in all conceivable ways.’ In utter desperation, the Land. Records Department pleaded that a sum of Rs. 1000 be given to the Setdement Officer ‘for the payment of compensation in a few of the hardest and best authenticated cases.’104

So much for official protection of the rights of sharecroppers.. Indeed, it was no longer merely a question of granting tenancy 51

Bengal 1920-1947 rights to those who had customarly cultivated the landlord’s lands on a crop-sharing basis, i.e. under the ‘old barga9 or adhi systems. By the 1920s, it was being widely reported that cash-paying tenancies and under-tenancies were being con­ verted into produce-paying ones. ‘With the increase in the price of rice,’ there was in Faridpur ‘a great increase in the area held by the cultivators at produce r e n t.. . .many of the tenants who now hold at a rent-in-kind had previously held the same land at a cash rent and were setded raiyats in respect of it. They had been compelled by their landlords who were always small middlemen to agree to the conversion of their rent into a produce re n t.. .without any process of law but by the threat of eviction. In addition.. .there was also a considerable area held under middlemen at a produce rent by yearly tenants.’108 In the Rupganj and Narayanganj thana areas of Dacca, it was found in 1917 that produce-paying tenancies were ^increasing at a very rapid rate.* In the Bikrampur region, the dkaki system involving a fixed-produce rent or its monetary equivalent was spreading rapidly. In Raipura thana, it was the commuted cash-value form - the taka dhaki system - which was on the increase, with the landlord-moneylender resettling the land on an effective rental increase of ‘fifteen or twenty­ fold*. The Dacca Report also goes on to describe this process: ‘The increase in barga lands and khas lands of proprietors and tenureholders is largely due to the indebtedness of the raiyat. . ..Indebtedness invariably leads to the sale of the holding; the money-lender steps in, and the bargadar follows in his wake. In this area many of the landlords, headed by the Murapara zemindars, lend money to the raiyats at 37 per cent interest, and gradually acquire holdings, keeping them in their own possession or letting them in barga . . . . In many cases.. .we find cash-paying tenancies converted into barga commuted back to cash rent at the value of the produce, the nett enhancement being from Re 1 to Rs 5 per kani.’106 A similar process of increase of produce-paying tenancies 52

The Land Question was also reported from M idnapore: *.. .far from bhag rent showing any tendency to disappear in favour of money rent it seems to be on the increase. When a tenant [paying money rent] is sold up for arrears of rent it is a common practice for the purchaser to resettle the land with the defaulter on bhag rent; it is impossible to get exact data, but the general con­ sensus of opinion seems to be that the practice is more common than it used to be. From an economic point of view bhag rent is hopelessly bad and is always associated with inferior culti­ vation . . . . But such considerations do not operate to any extent with the class of petty mahajans [landlords, not exclu­ sively moneylenders] who are the greatest devotees of the system and they prefer to have a tenant whom, relying on local opinion and in defiance of the intentions of Government, they can oust at any moment; and indeed the price they can obtain for even their legitimate share of an inferior crop is probably equivalent to the money rent they might otherwise have got, while the system lends itself to the petty chicanery and oppression so dear to their hearts and gives them a firmer hold over their victim.’107 Not just chicanery, one may add in qualification: the element of control implicit in this process was of crucial importance for the continuance and spread of sharecropping in such an economy. In the Sundarban areas of the 24-Parganas, ‘all landlords regarded the bargadars as labourers irrespective of the condi­ tion and duration of their tenancies.’ Some of them were entirely landless and were allowed ‘to live in a hut on the landlord’s land’ for which they were not charged separately. Others migrated twice a year from Tamluk and Gontai sub­ divisions in Midnapore, once for cultivation during the rains and again for harvesting in winter.108 During settlement operations in the district in 1924-33, only 680 bargadars could be recorded; this was ‘only a fraction of the real number of bhag-tenants, but the landlords’ opposition was very strong and the bhagdars could not prove their rights to be tenants.’109 In Jessore, ‘it is only barga lands held by the under-raiyat 53

Bengal 1920-1947 which are on the increase due to raiyati holdings passing to the mahajans and others by purchase and subletting to original tenants on produce rents.’110 In the fertile eastern alluvion of Pabna, there were ‘influential and wealthy jotedars, who claim to be raiyats, but have their extensive possessions farmed in barga, or sublet at vexatious terms.’111 In Bogra, there were Santals and Oraons from Chota Nagpur who, ‘although they had, by clearing the jungle and breaking up the waste, made the west of Bogra fit for habitation,* had little land. ‘Such lands as they had, they have lost; and they pass a poverty-stricken, though apparently cheerful existence, tilling the soil as bargadars or in the winter going as reapers.’112 Instances were ‘commonly found’ in Malda where ‘the lands cultivated by adhiars were previously their occupancy hold­ ings but had been sold up in rent or mortgage sales*; this was particularly so in the Barind area ‘where the Santals have lost their occupancy rights over a large area.*113 In the 1930s it was reported from Burdwan that cashpaying underraiyats were not numerous,114 but cultivation by bhagdars was ‘extremely common throughout the area. Owing to the tendency to conceal their existence, it is difficult to form an exact idea of their numbers, but there is reason to suppose that not less than a quarter of the paddy lands, and in places over one-third, are cultivated in this way.* Besides tenureholders and other bhadralok, the bhag form was used ‘to an extent that is rather surprising by those raiyats whose holdings are too large to be conveniently cultivated by their own families. The period for which bhagdars hold the same land varies much. Cases are not uncommon where they have held even for generations. On the other hand, some landlords change them every year. The more general practice is to change the plots every so many years, though the same bhagdar often continues under the same landowner.’115

Table 1 had shown that the proportion of land legally recogni54

The Land Question sed in the direct occupation of underraiyats was small in every district; the only significant figures were in Jessore, Khulna, 24-Parganas, Nadia, Faridpur, Rajshahi, Jalpaiguri and Murshidabad. Most of these, again, were recorded as paying cash rents; only in Bankura (2.23 per cent), Midnapore (2.39 per cent), Rajshahi (3.92 per cent) and Jalpaiguri (2.96 per cent) were there any significant proportions of produce-paying underraiyats holding land in direct posses­ sion. However, evidence exists that a much larger proportion of raiyati land was sublet on cash rents to korfa tenants, although these were not recognised in the tenancy records. In Jessore 27.43 per cent of the land was legally recorded in the posses­ sion of underraiyats, but as much as 31 per cent of raiyati holdings were actually sublet.116 The Settlement Officer commented: ‘Raiyat’s rents are fairly low and admit of much room for subletting at a profit. This, as well as the fact that the underraiyat’s interest is recognised as good as a raiyat’s, accounts for the existing subletting to underraiyats.’117 Again, in Howrah, although only 3.58 per cent of the land was legally recorded in the direct possession of underraiyats, 18 per cent of the total interests in the district were actually underraiyati interests, of which again, 34 per cent had acquired some rights of occupation by custom.118 In the more fertile tracts of Kushtia subdivision in Nadia and in the southern areas around Ranaghat, many raiyati lands were sublet to korfa tenants for a salami}19 M. N. Gupta estimated that there were about 5 million underraiyats against 16 million raiyats, holding as sub-lessees 3 million acres of the total raiyati land of 28 million acres. Thus each underraiyat held only two-thirds of an acre, and obviously held other lands as well, as raiyat or sharecropper, or else supplemented his earnings from the land by working as a day-labourer. Korfa tenants were most common in the districts of Jessore, Khulna, 24-Parganas and Nadia and very rare in the eastern districts.120 In most cases, especially in the 55

Bengal 1920-1947 decaying central districts, their position was very insecure. In the Sundarban areas of 24-Parganas, on the other hand, where most of the original lessees of the government ‘lots* were absentees from the very beginning121 and where many so-called tenants had become renders, ‘the majority of the underraiyati interests were hereditary on which permanent structures were allowed to be constructed. In many cases they were created by registered documents with rights similar to their landlords.. . .when the superior interests are extin­ guished by sale, the underraiyats are seldom ejected but allowed to continue in occupation of their holdings.’122 In Bankura, where much of the land was of very poor quality, the crop uncertain and famines frequent, the sanja tenancy, involving as rent a fixed quantity of the produce, was more common than bhag. When a transferred holding was resettled with the cultivator by a la.nd\ord-mahajan, it was usually on a sanja basis.123 So also in the hilly areas of northern Mymensingh, particularly among the Hajong cultivators, a fixed-produce system called tanka was prevalent with rents varying from 3 to 11 maunds per ara (1 ara = 1.25 acres). There, too, the tendency was to convert cash rents into tanka with zamindars refusing to recognise tanka cultivators as tenants.124 In Howrah, a small part of the land was cultivated under the kut-khamar system where the cultivator would pay a fixed share of the produce (usually half or 11/20), but he was also liable to pay instead the money value of his share as rent in cash. Not surprisingly, not only did the landlord overestimate the total quantity of the produce but also overstated the prevailing price of paddy.126 In Chittagong, there existed the ek saner (annual) raiyat and even the ek crop (one crop) raiyat, and the courts upheld such contracts.126 In Nadia, which was an area of relatively poor fertility and where about one-sixth of the total land (in some parts, an even higher proportion) had to be left fallow at regular 56

The Land Question intervals, usually every three years,127 a rather special form of tenancy known as utbandi had developed. Here the holding of a raiyat (or underraiyat) was not a fixed area; a measurement was made every season and the rent paid every year in cash according to the area which the raiyat had actually cultivated that year. In many cases, the utbandi was only nominal, but landlords did not recognise the distinction and treated real and nominal utbandi tenants at the same level of uncertainty and insecurity in respect of their rights and liabilities.128 Utbandi was most prevalent in the western and north-western parts of the district, particularly in Kaliganj, Nakashipara, Krishnanagar, Nabadwip, Karimpur, Tehatta, Meherpur and Chapra.129 In the Meherpur and Sadar areas, it was also noticed in the early 1920s that raiyati land was being ex­ propriated and converted to utbandi: ‘tnis process goes on moreover in a way that cannot always be detected.’180 Utbandi was also prevalent in the Bongaon subdivision of Jessore.181 In Simlapal and Raipur thanas of Bankura, a form of tenancy similar to utbandi, but not called as such, was prevalent mainly among Santal cultivators in which the rent was determined according to the area actually cultivated. In Taldangra thana many Santal tenants were charged a rent according to the number of ploughs they possessed; the rent varied from 8 as. to Re 1 per plough, and the langalcha tenant could cultivate as much land as possible.182 A fairly widespread labour-form in Birbhum was the kishani system, ‘...th e landlord supplies seed, manure, catde and plough and all other implements of labour . The krishan supplies all the labour necessary from the sowing of the seeds to the delivery of the landlord’s share of the produce to his granary. He gets one-third the crops only (and no str aw) as his wages. He is a labourer both according to local opinion and the legal opinion and has not been given any khatian.*138 Those working as kishans were usually the poorest peasants, some with small holdings and some entirely landless. A large number of landless men in western Bengal, parti57

Bengal 1920-1947 cularly in Birbhum, Burdwan and Hooghly, were actually wbole-time farm servants or mahindars,. who were given a fixed pay and either a meal in the landlord’s house or a fixed quantity of paddy. The mahindar did not get any share of the produce.134 Besides, some of the landless families in Birbhum h ad also been given homestead lands, free of rent, and were required to provide the labour in the khas lands of their landlords for which they were paid the usual wages in kind. However, ‘as usual in such circumstances, those on whose lands they settled were of the status of feudal lords and had a preferential r l a i m on their services, but they were always remunerated. With the growth of population, land became scarce and a t times as a fee for the fealty, they worked without full remuneration. I t happened that in case o f bigger landlords - D ot excepting the M aharaja of Burdwan - the smaller agents like nmb and tahsildars used that labour not in the interest of the landlords but for their own personal work-----The homesteads were [now] constructed by the people from whom begars were w anted___ Their services are requisitioned for certain specified days in theory but for all odds and ends in practice and in the hands of unscrupulous and high-handed people become a source of great annoyance and harassment.9185 Qjiite similarly, the landless labourer in the Sundarban was allowed to live in a hut on the landlord’s land for which he was not charged anything. He tilled for the landlord on a bhag system without the accrual of any of the rights of occupa­ tion.186 In some of these cases in Basirhat subdivision, evidence was found of the forcing of begar labour.187 Most of the ‘agricultural labour* in pre-partition Bengal, prevalent mostly in the districts of south-western Bengal, took one of these forms - sharecroppers under different cropsharing arrangements but without any customary or legal rights, faim servants or labourers on wage payment (almost invariably in kind) but under some form of bondage to their landlord. The most ‘free* of them all was probably the land­ 58

The Land Question less Bauri or Santal of Bankura who worked on the extensive khas lands of the Bankura proprietor or tenureholder and migrated every year to the rice fields in the lowlands of Burdwan and Hooghly. ‘The men did the ploughing, the women the collecting and transplanting, and both reaped the crop. The male munish was paid 3 or 4 pies of paddy and one pie of muri a day, and the female kamin 2 pies of paddy and one pie of muri.* The Bauris, particularly, ‘as a class exist mainly as labourers and a large proportion of them are landless men.’188 However, it was also pointed out in the late 1930s that ‘a very large proportion of the landless, particularly in western Bengal, were not regularly employed in agricultural operations at all, but only intermittently employed on road and other constructional works.’189

59

5 The legal form of land relations in Bengal created two sets of rights over land - one, a right of proprietorship, and the other, a right of occupation. The entire structure of zamindari and tenureholding property, based on the first kind of right and subjected to a continuous process of fragmentation since the early nineteenth century, was by the 1920s on the edge of a crisis of massive proportions. Second, with the emergence in the late nineteenth century of jute, and later of rice, as commercial crops, the dominant tendency in the sphere of agricultural wealth-making was in the direction of extensive rent exploitation (in most cases on the basis of rights of occupation rather than of proprietorship) and of usury coupled with the trade in rice and jute. Third, there was a strong tendency towards increased differentiation within the peasantry, with the emergence of a significant strata of substantial peasantry at the top and the immiserisation of a poor peasantry who lost their rights of occupation over the lands which they cultivated. There was, in fact, an increase in de jure and effective transfers of land from the small to the larger peasantry (or to tenureholders with large khas possessions), with indebtedness the usual mechanism for effecting such transfers. However, these did not, in most cases, lead to absolute eviction. Rather the dis­ possessed peasant continued to cultivate the same plot of land, but with inferior rights and higher effective rents. This process manifested itself in particular in the increase in tenancies TT

et

me

su m m a r ise .

The Land Question paying rent in the form of a share of the produce. There was also a strengthening, rather than a weakening, of various forms of ‘unfree* labour, which reflected a declining bargaining position of the working peasantry, i.e. the small and landless peasants, vis-à-vis the landlords, whether proprietors, tenureholders or superior raiyats. However, the tendencies towards a differentiation within the peasantry were, in the early twentieth century, far more advanced in the south-western and some of the northern districts of Bengal, and least advanced in the eastern districts. In the latter, the natural fertility of the soil, abundance of rain water and, above all, the specific advantages of the adoption of jute as a commercial crop gave the small peasantry a relatively viable economic status, and hence, until the late 1930s, a relatively undifferentiated social character. In conse­ quence, whereas in the western and some of the northern districts, there emerged among landlords - proprietors, tenureholders or superior raiyats - a common interest in subjugating the poor or landless working peasantry, in the eastern districts the vast mass of relatively undifferentiated raiyat peasantry had a stronger basis to unite in common battle against exactions by zamindars and tenureholders. This was to attain a relatively organised political character in the 1930s. The overall constraints within which these tendencies deve­ loped were set by the conditions of colonialism. The initial pressure of revenue, deindustralisation and consequent pres­ sure on land, the lack of non-agricultural avenues of invest­ ment, the absence of a growing demand for labour from the industrial sector - all of these created the conditions for the break-up of zamindari property, and for the growth of sub­ infeudation, rackrenting and usury as the predominant modes o f enrichment. This also produced the contradiction in official policy of instituting unfettered rights of private property on the one hand and a faith in the viability of a small-peasant economy on the other. In the sphere of law-making as in 61

Bengal 1920-1947 executive action, there was the permanent assumption that the zamindar was proprietor of his estate; while at the same time there persisted the concern that the raiyat must be protected in his right to cultivate. The contradictions as well as the possibilities cf political manoeuvring inherent in this policy were well revealed in the 1928 Bill to amend the Bengal Tenancy Act. In order to systematise the discussion which follows, it would be useful to bear in mind the following major elements and the relations between them that have emerged from our survey of the evolution of the agrarian structure in Bengal: (1) a landed proprietor class in decline, faced with an old contradiction with the mass of the peasantry and a new contradiction with a rich peasant-moneylender-trader class; (2) the rich peasant-moneylender-trader class, challenging the erstwhile dominance of the landed proprietor and seeking greater control over the land and the produce of the peasantry; (3) a growing poor peasant-sharecropper-labourer class formed out of the dissolution of small-peasant production; and (4) the colonial state, seeking to maintain the economic conditions for expanded colonial appropriation from the agrarian sector but faced with a major political challenge to its very survival and trying, therefore, to intervene both in the process of agricultural production and in the evolving class struggle within the social formation. Later we will add to this a fifth element - a new middle-class intelligentsia, formed principally out of the ranks of the declining rentier classes, but playing an independent role of leadership in the political sphere.

62

6 to take a look at the major organised political ™ forces in Bengal and the main developments of the decade of the 1920s. A good point to begin the story is the start of the Non-cooperation and Khilafat movements and the formation of the Swarajya Party in Bengal. The controver­ sies over Gandhi’s Non-cooperation programme, G. R. Das*s initial - and formidable - opposition, somersault and ultimate emergence as unchallenged leader of the Congress in Bengal are episodes well described in the historical literature.140 Two points of major significance here were, first, the entry into the Congress organisation - at provincial and district levels of members of the former revolutionary groups, and second, the induction into the provincial leadership of several leaders who had recently conducted local peasant movements aimed against Union Boards or the chaukidari tax, or against settle­ ment operations. Indeed, the end of the W ar and the early 1920s brought increasing economic difficulties for the predominandy Hindu middle classes of Bengal - rising prices, shrinking real incomes from rent and the lack of employment opportunities. Criticism of imperialism now became trenchant and the demand for radical action more assertive. The Moderate leadership of Surendranath Banerjea or Byomkesh Chakravarti began to appear much too gentlemanly and much too loyalist. Even among constitutionalists, the urge was for greater militancy in ideology and programme and for a wider spread and tighter ¥ V 7 E now turn

Bengal 1920-1947 control of the organisation. Chittaranjan’s own political ideas were not marked by any great degree of clarity or consistency. In his preferences regarding the forms of political activity, he was certainly a constitutionalist. He also spoke vaguely, as early as in 1917, of abandoning ‘the path of European industralism,’ of stopping the decay of villages and rehabilitating them.141 Yet, he bitterly opposed the Non-cooperation resolution in Calcutta and Nagpur and then led the protracted battle against Gandhi over Council-entry. It was, in fact, the fight against Non­ cooperation, the Council-entry issue and, once that was clinched, the elections to the Council, which impelled Chittaranjan to pay attention to the organisation of the party. And here he turned for support to the organised revolutionary groups. Although Chittaranjan did not approve of the politics of terrorism,142 he found in these groups ready material for building up an organisation of full-time cadres.143 The terro­ rists, the Jugantar group in particular, had by that time realised the difficulties of continued underground activity and had resolved to take to open political activity under the Congress as a cover for ‘revolutionary’ work. Chittaranjan’s offer was, therefore, of mutual convenience.144 Chittaranjan also attempted to link up the provincial organisation with the various local agitations and movements which had grown up in the Bengal countryside, in Midnapore, Bankura and Tippera, for instance, during the years of Non­ cooperation and the anti-Union Board movements.145 Specifi­ cally, he brought in local leaders like Birendranath Sasmal, Anilbaran Ray and Ashrafuddin Ahmed Chaudhury into important positions in the Provincial Committee and sought to provide central support for local organisations and move­ ments. A third significant feature of the Congress in Bengal under C. R. Das was the participation in it of a much wider section o f the Muslim leadership, brought into the organisation as a result of the tying up of the Khilafat movement with Non­ 64

The Land Question cooperation. In fact, khilafat had begun in Bengal mainly among the Urdu-speaking non-Bengali section of Calcutta Muslims,146 with Abul Kalam Azad emerging as the most active leader and with several leading Muslims from northern India such as Shaukat Ali, Saifuddin Kitchlew and Rail Ahmed Kidwai spending considerable time organising the movement in Bengal. But once the Non-cooperation pro­ gramme became part of the khilafat struggle, the movement spread far into the countryside in northern and eastern Bengal. The main impetus, it was reported, was provided by the alim, ‘mainly belonging to the Farazi sect,5 and the bulk o f the agitators were ‘itinerant maulavis\U7 The spread of khilafat also brought forward a new section of leaders into the political life of Muslim Bengal: lawyer leaders like Abul Kasem and Fazlul Huq found it difficult in terras of their personal means of livelihood to accept the Non-cooperation programme in toto; they thus lost considerable credibility as leaders belong to the ‘extremist’ section of the Congress. In their place, there emerged a new line of leaders —organisers of khilafat and Non-cooperation in different districts of Bengal, having strong connections with the religious and social leader­ ship of the Muslim peasantry, many of them maulanas them­ selves with considerable eminence as religious scholars - men like Abdullahel Baqi of Dinajpur, Maniruzzaman Islamabadi o f Chittagong and Calcutta, Akram Khan of 24-Parganas, Shamsuddin Ahmed of Nadia and Ashrafuddin Chaudhury o f Tippera.148 The depth and effectiveness of this KhalifatNon-cooperation propaganda can be judged from the fact that in the 1921 elections to the Council, when voting was declared to be gunah (sin), there was a very low Muslim turnout, particularly in Rajshahi, Dinajpur and Rangpur, whereas in Chittagong and Noakhali, illiterate grocers, carters, cobblers and shopkeepers who had been put up as candidates in collective mockery of the entire edifice of constitutional reforms, won by huge majorities. In 1922, a conference of the alim at Comilla, attended, it was said, by 10,000, pro65 5

Bengal 1920-1947 nounced Non-cooperation to be ‘obligatory* for all believers.149 In his effort to coalesce diverse forces and strands in the politics of Bengal, Chittaranjan had consciously attempted to reach beyond the small coterie of Westernised aristocratic Muslim leaders of Calcutta to wider sections of the Muslim leadership in the districts. But here too, as was his wont, Chittaranjan sought to achieve this in organisational terms in the form of a Hindu-Muslim pact which, apart from allay­ ing Muslim fears about music before mosques and cowslaughter, provided that 55 per cent of government employ­ ment and 60 per cent of membership to local bodies in Muslim-majority districts would be reserved for Muslims.150, In this, Chittaranjan was following the same ideological tradition which had sought at the time of the Swadeshi movement to create Hindu-Muslim political amity through concepts such as Bipinchandra Pal’s ‘composite patriotism’products of a strange marriage of religious-communal consci­ ousness with the institutional forms of representative politics.151 Indeed, although the Pact achieved Chittaranjan’s imme­ diate objective of rallying a broadbased Muslim support for Swarajist politics in the legislature and the various elected local bodies - many Muslims stood as Swarajist candidates in the elections of 1923 and the Party scored major successes in the district boards of such heavily Muslim areas as Jessore, Dinajpur and Mymensingh152- h is own thinking on the subject appears to have been based on a firm idea of the distinct communal identities of the two religious groups. The novelist Saratchandra Chattopadhyay gives us a startling insight into the fears and calculations which went into Chittaranjan’s move. Deshbandhu smiled and asked me, ‘Do you believe in Hindu-M uslim unity?’ I said, ‘N o.’ Deshbandhu said, ‘But your love for the Muslims is w ell-know n.. . . Yet, w hat alternative do we have?Just imagine w hat will happen in anothei ten years!’ I said, ‘This doesn't exactly express your love for the Muslims. I mean, the way your face pales a t the thought o f w hat w ill happen ten years from now, it doesn’t seem your ideas are very

66

The Land Question far from mine. Anyway, numbers aren’t the only thing. If they were, four crore Englishmen Would never have ruled over a hundred and fifty crore other people. T hink o f the Namasudras, Malos, N ats, Rajbangshis, Pods draw them towards you, find for them a place o f honour among the people of this country, bring them up as hum an beings, do something about the unjust an d cruel way in which women are treated in society, an d you won’t have to worry about the numbers on the other side.*153

A year after Chittaranjan’s death in 1925, the Bengal Pact was already a dead letter and the political leaders of the two communities had moved further and further apart, not unabetted by some clever manipulating by a Government determined to break at any cost a broad combination against colonial rule by dyarchy. Already in 1923, Khan Bahadur Musharaff Hussain, a firm loyalist if ever there was one, had proposed in the Legislative Council that the terms of the Hindu-Muslim pact be put into immediate operation and 50 per cent of government appointments be given to Muslims, to which C. R. Das had had to make the rather disingenuous reply that the Pact could be fully implemented only after the attainment of swaraj.154 But the seeds of strife had been sown. The 1924 Bengal Provincial Conference was accompanied by a separate Muhammadan Conference at Sirajganj, organised by the poet Ismail Hussain Siraji, which demanded that the terms of the Pact be immediately put into practice.155 After Chittaranjan’s death, Sir Abdur Rahim virtually made an open offer to the Government that it could win Muslim support against the Hindu non-cooperators if it adopted a discriminatory policy in favour of Muslims in the matter of recruitment to government service. The Government obliged; indeed, it went even further to actively promote Muslim associations, cooperative societies and even krishak associa­ tions in the eastern Bengal districts.156

The two or three years of growing discord following Chitta­ ranjan’s death were marked by a series of communal riots in 67

Bengal 1920-1947 different parts of Bengal. Some of these, such as the one at Kidderpore in Calcutta on Bakr-Id of 1925, were due, according to the Government, ‘entirely to an unprovoked attack by the Hindus on Muhammadans.’157 Besides, the rioting in Calcutta - there were three riots in the city in 1926-w a s confined to a very large extent to ‘up-country Hindus and Muhammadans’158 and were undoubtedly in­ fluenced by the outbursts of communal frenzy in northern India at this time following the cow-protection and shuddki movements and the murder of Swami Shraddhanand. ‘A further cause for disunion was supplied by the provocative character of the speeches which were made during a series of Arya Samajist meetings which were held in Calcutta in November 1925, but it is possible that neither community would have realised the extent of the existing disunion if Sir Abdur Rahim had not, in his speech at Aligarh in December 1925, rent the veil and exposed the actual state of affairs.’159 It is noteworthy that the most important Muslim leaders of the city made repeated representations to different government officials during and after the riots seeking protec­ tion for ttieir community and making allegations against the other: Abdur Rahim complained to the Police Commissioner tnat ‘Hindu constables appeared to be siding with the Hindu element,’ while H. S. Suhrawardy, then Deputy Mayor, ‘was more emphatic still and went so far as to say.. .that if things did not improve he would be obliged to exhort his co-religionists to reprisals.’160 On the other hand, J. M. Sen Gupta, the Mayor, proposed that he be allowed to raise a volunteer defence party for the protection of mosques and temples, but when the Police Commissioner explained ‘the necessity.. .of recruiting these volunteers equally fiom both com m unities... M i. Sen Gupta expressed considerable doubt regarding his ability to provide the necessary Muhammadan contingent.’161 The July riots that year over the Rajrajeshwari procession in Burrabazar in the heart of Calcutta saw the not very covert involvement of some of the foremost 68

The Land Question leaders of the city. M r [H .S.] S u h raw ard y .. .was found to be very intimately connected w ith two men o f the hooligan-leader type, namely, M ina Peshawari and Allah Baksh Peshaw ari-----On the 13th Ju ly a t a meeting at the house o f Sir A bdur Rahim, which was convened for the purpose o f considering w hat action should be taken concerning [the Rajrajeshwari] procession, M r. Suhrawardy counselled strong opposition and his language was such th a t Sir A bdur Rahim found it necessary to tell him more than once th a t there must be no breaking o f h e a d s .. . . M r S uhraw ardy.. .was in fact more than any one else responsible for the resistance o f a lawful procession on the morning of the 15th Ju ly w hich. . . culminated in rioting and serious loss of life-----162

The Pabna riots in July that year had other, more signifi­ cant, dimensions. In the first place, it revealed clearly the effects of a new movement to purify Islamic practices among the Bengal peasantry, carried out by people who were des­ cribed in official circles as ‘itinerant maulvis’ and who, it was officially suggested, had been brought into the arena of organised mass politics by the Khilafat-Non-cooperation movements. The chief point of campaign was an appeal to Muslims not to participate in Hindu religious festivals and to insist on the prohibition of music before mosques.163 But on this occasion in Pabna, it was alleged that these maulavis had gone even further and had provoked people to interfere with the immersion of a Durga image at Shibpur and to desecrate Kali images in Kaijuri, Kankia, Shibpur and Ekdanta,164 and the Government of Bengal reported that ‘in the latter part of April and in May the cases of surreptitious desecration of more or less abandoned idols were more frequent in Pabna than in almost any other district in East Bengal.’165 Indeed, the series of incidents in Pabna in July 1926 began when it was reported that ‘some idols of Pabna town had been removed overnight from their places of resting and left in a mutilated condition on the public road near the Sitlai zamindar’s house’166 - an act which the Commissioner of the Rajshahi division thought had been committed ‘by some 69

Bengal 1920-1947 Muhammadan bad characters.’107 In response, the leading Hindu gentry of Pabna town, including Indujyoti Majumdar, the Chairman of the Municipality, held a ‘secret meeting* in the house of Jogendra Nath Maitra, zamindar of Sitlai, ‘at which they decided to have the procession with music past mosques in the town at the time of the evening prayer*; intelligence sources also reported that ‘they had collected and kept concealed lathis, etc., in Hindu shops near the mosque.’168 The procession was taken out that evening and there was a clash before a mosque in Khalifapatti. In the next ten or twelve days the disturbances spread to the countryside and the chief targets were Hindu, particularly Marwari, shops in the village hats of Pabna, Atgharia, Sujanagar and Santhia thana areas.169 A case was reported of the looting of the house of a Hindu big joldar near Pabna by his Muslim tenants.170 A few days later, the Commissioner of Rajshahi, touring the disturbed areas, saw much evidence of mob violence on the small Hindu minority in the villages around Pabna: in Char Tarapur, a large village, ‘the whole Hindu population (said to consist of some 50 families) con­ gregated on the roof of a large two-storied house belonging to the leading Hindu of the village who was also the president panchayat___ It was clear that he was too afraid of reprisals to give names [of those who had looted]. . . . ’m He added: ‘My impression is that the leading Hindus feel that they were wrong in taking out the procession, and that some of them are in danger of prosecution in connection with the incident. . . . There is no doubt that after the occurrence on the 1st the Hindus were in a panic and feared a general attack by the Mühammadans.’172 He also thought it ‘practically certain that emissaries from the town (not the ostensible leaders) went to the mufassal and incited the disturbances that actually occurred’;173 ‘some maulvis have been preaching religious hatred, and they are at least partly responsible for the recent occurrence.’174 Later he sent in a more detailed report on the agitators in the countryside: ‘From the information at present 70

The Land Question available, it seems likely that there is an organised nucleus of possibly some hundreds of Muhammadans who have come largely from the char areas on both sides of the Granges and who, after looting a house or shop, disperse into the neigh­ bouring villages where they find food and shelter from their fellow Muhammadans and stir them up with tales of desecra­ tion of mosques and then with their aid attack some other villages. They have spies and skirmishers to watch for the arrival of any police force, when they again disperse and are sheltered by their co-religionists.’175 As reports went out from Pabna of communal violence in the district, a bevy of leaders of provincial eminence descended on the town with the ostensible purpose either of helping restore the peace or, more directly, of protecting their co­ religionists. Asutosh Lahiri, Assistant Secretary of the Calcutta Hindu Relief Committee, arrived with eleven Hindu volun­ teers and was immediately followed by a telegram from his President, Padamraj Jain, announcing the departure of Gurkha volunteers from Calcutta ‘to defend the Hindu hearths and homes.’176 D r J. M. Das Gupta, the Swarajist leader from Calcutta, arrived with eight or nine Hindu volunteers ‘carrying a gun and revolver with them ,’ and made speeches which were ‘misunderstood by the Muhammadans who appeared to be excited.’ Another large team of sixty Hindu volunteers was led by K iran Sankar Ray, Mohitosh Roy Choudhury, Syam Sundar Chakrabartti, Dr Deva Prasad Ghosh, and Swami Biswananda and Swami Bisuddhananda o f the Bharat Sevasram Sangha. J. M. Sen Gupta also came, accompanied by Pratap Guha Roy, and was followed by Mrs Sarojini Naidu. On the other hand, a group of fifty Muhammadan volunteers was sent from Sirajganj.177 It is also interesting to note in this context certain aspects o f the way the Government chose to handle the situation, for they reveal some important features of the ideological pre­ suppositions on which the colonial state operated and which had an important bearing on the development of the commu­ 71

Bengal 1920-1947 nal situation in Bengal. When the disturbances first showed signs of spreading, Hugh Stephenson, the Acting Governor, put in a somewhat imperious note to be conveyed to the district authorities: ‘ .. .let the respectable leaders of both communities know that we expect them actively to assist in controlling their co-religionists, and shall be extremely dis­ pleased with them if they don’t.’178 When the first prosecutions were about to be brought up in court, the Commissioner of Rajshahi wrote to the Chief Secretary: ‘The Public Prosecutor here is a Hindu and an old man. I do not think he should be allowed to prosecute. . . . Babu Surendra Mohan Bhaya, Assistant Government Pleader at Rajshahi, is, I believe, a good pleader, but it might be better to have a Muhammadan for the case against the Hindus. Could you arrange to send some good pleader from Calcutta? If so, Babu Surendra Mohan Bhaya or some good Calcutta Hindu pleader might be engaged for the other cases in which Muhammadans will be the accused.’179 The Government also decided to impose a collective punitive tax - on Hindus as well as Muslims in the Pabna municipal area and on Muslims only in the affected areas in the countryside.180 After the taxes had been collected, it was pointed out, first by Debi Prasad Khaitan, a member of the Legislative Council,181 and later confirmed officially, that the Hindus of Pabna town, having more valuable property than the Muslims of the mufassal and thus paying a larger punitive tax, were having to bear the burden of paying compensation to the Hindu families affected by the riots in the villages. The Chief Secretary noted: ‘The doctrine of collec­ tive responsibility has produced results which were probably not contemplated and will be hard to justify before the public.’182 But talk of a change of policy put the district authorities in a quandary. Alarmed, the Commissioner wrote: ‘There was general agreement that [the Hindus of Pabna Municipality] should not be exempted,. . . . It seems to me that it would now cause considerable unrest and resentment among the Muhammadan community if Government were to 72

The Land Question reverse that decision.’183 Finally, on Lytton’s intervention, a revised assessment was carried out in which the Hindus were to bear only the cost of posting additional policemen and not that of compensation.184 In September that year, riots broke out in Dacca city over the annual Janmastami procession. T he Janmastami procession in Dacca is a time-honoured institution which is said to have been instituted in the time of the M uhamm adan government and to have been encouraged by the M uham m adan rulers. It brings in a large number o f visitors to the town and stimulates trade and provides employment for a large num ber o f people. It has been the custom to employ M uhamm adan musicians and labourers in the procession and wealthy M uhammadans have lent their elephants and horses and given other assistance, while the M uhammadans of the town and surrounding villages have crowded the streets while the procession passed. The proces­ sions are managed by the Dacca Basak families, the cost being met from a trust fond created for the purpose and subscriptions.185

In the tense atmosphere of 1926, however, Islamic purifica­ tion had become a political battle-cry and the tolerant social customs of a medieval manufacturing town could hardly resist the onslaught. The District Muslim Association led by Habibur Rahaman, a rival body to the Dacca Anjuman led by the Nawab family, claimed with flagrant disregard for the facts of history that there had never been any music before mosques ‘in this ancient city of the Moghuls, the traces of whose suzerainty do still exist to proclaim the power which the Musalmans once held in the capital of East Bengal. Who would believe that the Hindus had ever the audacity of playing music before mosques in this city where the Muslim element was always predominant? Not to speak of the past 200 years, even so lately as 1905, Hindus were taken to task for carrying an idol of Kali with music by the mosque at Nawabpur Road.5 It then went on to present its own analysis of the recent situation: The Hindus never dared to play music before mosques and they never claimed this right till the disturbances in Calcutta in April last, since

73

Bengal 1920-1947 which event the H indu M ahasabha an d such other organisations are engineering this movement only to create a m artial spirit among the H indus. They have realised this inferiority to the Musalmans in th a t respect, and in order to make the H indus feel their helplessness in such communal riots which they knew fully well would be the natural consequence of provoking the Musalmans by playing music before mosques, these H indu leaders have engineered this movement so th at the H indus in general m ight get an incentive to ameliorate their condition.186

As the day of the festival approached, tension in the town began to rise.187 At the initiative of the Nawab of Dacca, a meeting was arranged with some leading Hindus at which the Nawab pleaded that music be stopped at prayer time. ‘The Basaks themselves might have agreed to this but Hindu opinion was too strong for them and they maintained that it would be impossible to take out the procession if restrictions as to music desired by the Muhammadans were imposed.’188 Indeed, ‘radical’ Hindu opinion could hardly be expected at such a moment to yield a privilege which they rightfully felt was accepted custom.189 The district authorities too thought it ‘unreasonable to impose restrictions that would be regarded by the Hindu community as a prohibition of the performance of the ceremony.*190 A mass meeting of the Muhammadan population was convened by the District Moslem Association at the Purana Paltan grounds on 6 September at which the Nawab, however, insisted that no opposition should be offered to the processions and advised any Muslim to whom the procession was offensive to remain at home. But the ‘radicals’, operating through the mohalla sardars of the old Muslim quarters of the town, organised a hartal on the two days of the procession and succeeded in dissuading cartmen and hackney-carriage drivers ‘from rendering any sort of service in connection with the procession.’191 The processions on S and 9 September passed off with a few minor incidents. On 10 September the Hindu leaders organised a sort of counterhartal and prevented hackney-carriage drivers from taking passengers. ‘The hackney-carriage drivers, either under compulsion of their communal organisation, or because they 74

The Land Question had been made to believe that it was a religious duty, had sacrificed the two best days’ earnings of the year and it was natural that they should be exasperated by further inter­ ference by Hindu students or volunteers. . . . Some of the leading merchants [maintained] a sort of lock-out against the cartmen whom they formerly employed. It seems reason­ able to believe that it was the picketing against hackneycarriage drivers that started the disorder on this morning----A number of the incidents recorded seem to have been a series of reprisals between the carriage drivers and the Basaks of Bangshall and N aw abpur-----*192 It was indeed the Hindu counter-hartal which led to the riots. Late in 1926, communal trouble stirred up again, this time in Barisal, and now the political clout of organised Hindu communalism in Bengal was clearly brought to the fore. Patualchali is in a locality where there is a large preponderance o f Muhammadans over the Hindus, the population being about 5 to 1 in the subdivision and the revenue th a n a , an d about 4 to 1 in the headquarter police-station. In th e m unicipality, however, th e communities are almost equal in numbers. In the past there are no records o f any disputes on the subject of music before m osques.. .there was a long standing and well recognised practice under w hich H indu processions out o f regard for the feelings o f the M uham m adans.. .stopped music for a distance o f about 80 yards [from the m osque].198

But a new mosque had come up recently, a few yards down the road from the old one, and the question was whether the same privilege should be extended to the new mosque as well. The situation, however, was hardly conducive to an amicable solution. Latterly as the result o f the forces operating in the Indian Moslem world the local M uhammadans began, among other things, to object to attending the festivities connected w ith certain H indu festivals and to oppose the performance by Hindus o f certain ceremonies in certain places o f which the Saraswati Puja in schools was probably the most prom inent.. . . [The Hindus deliberately organised] a procession with music along the District Board road near the mosques in defiance o f the recognised practice. There

75

Bengal 1920-1947 was no religious festival a t the time, and the object was merely to annoy the M uhamm adans in which object they succeeded.1*4

In retaliation, at Bakr-Id some Muslims deliberately sacrificed a cow in the open, without making any attem pt to screen the ceremony. The Hindus promptly took out a procession at the time of the evening prayer. The leading organiser on the Hindu side in Patuakhali was Satindranath Sen. A former Jugantar activist, he had participated in the Non-cooperation movement and had risen to fame by organising the highly successful Union Board-boycott movement among the overwhelmingly Muslim population in the Laukati Union in Bakarganj. By 1924, be was the principal figure in the Congress organisation in Bari sal. With the local dispute in Patuakhali simmering, Satindranath decided to organise a sankirtan procession past the mosques every day, thus defying prohibitory orders and courting arrest. The satyagraha involved organisation at a fairly high level including ties with Hindu communal bodies in Calcutta. Nagendra N ath Das G upta, Secretary of the Barisal H indu Sabha, has telegraphed to Fadam raj Jain o f the H in d u R elief Committee, intim ating that the Satyagraha a t Patuakhali was being continued and th at help was needed.19® Satindra N ath Sen, the leader of the movement, visited Barisal town during the week, and conferred with all the leading Congress and H in d u Sabha members. H e attended a private meeting in the house of Saral K um ar D atta, a t which N agendra N ath Das G upta, Secretary of the local H indu Sabha, N arendra N ath Sen, Bijay Bhusan Das G upta, Sishuranjan Biswas, T arapada Ghosh, Satish S a rk a r.. .an d several other members o f the T arun Sangha were present. These persons subsequently assembled a t the house o f N arendra N ath S e n .. .an d were joined by Sudhir K um ar Aich, H aridhan M ani Cbakrabartti and more members of the T aru n Sangha. At these meetings the members of the T arun Sangha were urged to go to Patuakhali and continue the Satyagraha movement there. Satindra N ath Sen also attended a meeting at the Barisal Town H all on the 14th September under the presidency of A tm ananda Brahmachari (i.e. ex­ detenu Sasadhar Roy). E xciting speeches are reported to have been

76

The Land Question delivered at this meeting b y Sarat K um ar Ghosh, Satindra N ath Sen, Nagendra Bijay B hattacharji, M akhan Lai Sen, Ananga Mohan Dam and Satish Sarkar, in furtherance of the Satyagraha movement. A ‘Satyagraha Committee' was then formed w ith Sarat K um ar Ghosh as President, and N agendra Bijay Bhattacharji and Nagendra N ath Das G upta as Secretaries. It is thus obvious th a t the movement is being supported by almost all shades of political opinion in the district. Padam raj Ja in was invited by Nagendra N ath Das G upta to visit P atu ak h ali,.. .Padam raj h a s .. .deputed Pijushkanti Ghosh, Bhutnath Mukherji, M akhan Lai Sen an d Ananga M ohan Dam to study the situa­ tion locally. Satish Sarkar o f the Karmi Sangha, Calcutta, also visited the district in this co n nection... .W hile holding out the assurance th at the movement will not be suffered to collapse for w ant o f funds, Padamraj Ja in has expressed a desire th a t an Jhono jrable compromise should be concluded. . . . 198

The sankirtan procession and courting of arrest continued daily for the next four months, and allegations began to be made by the Muslim leaders that the administration, manned largely by Hindu officers, was being partial to the satyagrahis. K han Bahadur Hemayetuddin Ahmed, Chairman of the District Board, wrote a string of letters to senior officials in Calcutta as well as to prominent Muslim leaders in the city, alleging that ‘the constables, being up-country Hindus, have sympathy with the Sankirtan party and do not act loyally,’ and pleading for ‘an European administration in place of a Hindu Raj.*197 Resentment and agitation were also brewing among the Muslim peasantry in the countryside, stirred up by the new propagandists who were calling for ‘the abandonment of certain practices, such as attending the tamashas attached to some of the Hindu festivals, objections to pay certain exactions of Hindu landlords, whereby the expenses of such festivals are met and opposition to the continued performance by Hindus of certain ceremonies in certain places. . . . In this movement Patuakhali has shared the prime mover, being a person called Md. Akram, who seems to have become swollen headed owing to the favour which his anti-non-cooperation activities elicited from the then Collector and SDO.’198 77

Bengal 1920-1947 In late November 1926, E. N. Blandy, the new District Magistrate, reported that with the exception of Satindranath, the other Hindu leaders were ‘evidently tiring of the whole show and even Satindra seems anxious for a settlement of the dispute.’ Satin Sen, he wrote, had been put in a fix: ‘having started, he cannot stop without losing his outside support, as he says frankly continuity is essential if he is to preserve the sympathy which his movement has aroused5.199 He was, besides, losing his grip over the anti-Union Board agitation by his anti-Muslim activity, and the opposition to Union Boards as a whole was weakening.200 Blandy was, however, still apprehensive. As it was, there were ‘up-country Hindu volunteers in this district in large numbers. . . . I believe they were collected by the Hindu Mahasabha.5201 Besides, ‘the point which I do not like in the situation is that both sides are doing propaganda in the villages___ This may lead anywhere and makes it important for the original disputes to be settled. If we could put Satindra away for a spell, the thing would be finished, but I do not see how this is to be done in any convincing m anner. . . . On the other hand, if we can put things right without any definite steps against him, we shall deprive him of the halo which, I suspect, he covets.5202 The fuse blew in March 1927 on the occasion of Saraswati Puja. The District Magistrate had permitted a procession with music at Perozpur, upon which several local Muslim leaders, including Hemayetuddin Ahmed, called for a hartal on the day of the puja. Following the hartal, it was alleged, local leaders and particularly Maulvi Shahduddin, ‘an outside agitator,5 ‘induced large mobs of Muhammadans armed with lathis to assemble and prevent by force Hindu processions.’203 There was a riot at Ponabalia and Kulkati, and to restore order the police fired, killing 15 people, all Muslims. There ensued a furore, with Abdur Rahim, Fazlul Huq and Abul Kasem demanding an inquiry into the massacre, and a meeting in Albert Hall, Calcutta, attended by every 78

The Land Question important Muslim leader, called for the dismissal of the Ghuznavi-Chakravarti ministry.204 Muslim anger was now directed against the Government, and against the District Magistrate in particular: Fazlul Huq announced in Barisal, ‘We have nothing more to fear - to save Islam we will walk over not one but a hundred Blandys and face a hundred thousand bullets.’205 The Soltan of Maniruzzaman Islamabadi wrote: .. .it is easily proved how small is the value of Muslim life in the eyes of the ma-bap government of the co u n try .. . . This karbala enacted at Ponabalia by the British Government to uphold the improper obstinacy of the H indu community is perhaps without a parallel on earth except Jallianw alla Bagh in the P u n jab . . . . Moslems! Let your eyes be opened by the butchery at Ponabalia - may you realise how little is the value o f your life in the eyes of th at government, regarding which as your ma-bap you offered up your all and forgot yourselves.808

Another article entitled ‘Blood for Blood’ declaimed: Blood for blood is the rule of justice and the provision of n atu re. . . . Hence we ask the Governor of Bengal and the Governor-General of India to-day, what is the exchange for the blood of the inoffensive and innocent sons of Barisal? Will punishment be meted out to the murderer Blandy and his associates? Indeed, I do not believe th at on behalf of the British Government in India, adequate punishment will be provided for these murderers. Hence we ask Bengal Moslems, will you wait, depending on the award of the British Government? Have you no duties to-day regarding the provision of punishment for M r Blandy, the Barisal representative o f the British Government?207

In the administrative inquiry which followed, ‘no Muha­ mmadan came forward to give evidence except one school­ master who is reported to have been threatened with social penalty for doing so. It is said that Calcutta Muhammadan leaders advised to this effect.’208 But along with the Govern­ ment, the Hindu community also stood condemned before Muslim opinion: among those who had given information to the police against Shahduddin were ‘mainly Hindu landlords and talukdars.’209 79

Bengal 1920-1947 The Hindu-Muslim question had now come to dominate the political scene in Bengal, and 1927 was a particularly tense year. There were near riots in Noakhali and Bogra,210 an incident of open cow-killing in Kushtia in Nadia,211 and from Mymensingh, the District Magistrate, reporting on the communal tension there, made this observation: There is the economic rivalry of H indu landlords and M uhammadan talukdars or jotedars in this district which is reflected in the keen interest taken by the M uhammadan electors in the fate of the Bengal Tenancy Act Amendment Bill. The growth of Islamic studies has naturally disposed m any M uhammadans possessing influence with the proletariat to religious enthusiasm and strict orthodoxy. A sort of religious revival is taking place a n d M uhammadan M arriage Registrars and Kazis are active in furthering their cau se.. . . The wandering maulvi or maulvis from other parts invited to address strange congregations is undoubtedly a person whose influence is not on the side of concord between the communities.212

Indeed, in 1927 the Government was sufficiently worried to think of amending the existing law to ‘deal with itinerant mollas and outside agitators/ but finally decided that ‘it will be difficult to avoid the charge of interfering with religion, and so perhaps the remedy will be worse than the disease.’213

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7 1928, t h e r e f o r e , the sphere of organised provincial politics in Bengal was hardly remarkable for the cordiality of relations between Hindu and Muslim leaders. When the new Tenancy Bill came up for discussion before the Council in August, it was reported that the Swarajya Party had decided to support it since it provided for certain changes in the Act which ‘the masses had been expecting for a long time.* Although there were several landlords in the party, it was said that the Swarajya legislators would take a ‘reasonable view’ of the matter and support the ‘popular demands’ regarding transferability, protection of underraiyats from ejectment, etc. Amrita Bazar Patrika expressed this fond sentiment of compromise in the following words: ‘Despite occasional frictions between the two parties, the zamindars and raiyats have managed to live, on the wh ile, in mutual sympathy, peace and a spirit of helpfulness. . . . There is absolutely no reason why all disputes between the zamindars and raiyats should not be settled in a way satisfactory to both sides. Nor can we understand why there should be any diffi­ culty in adjusting the new demands of the one to the oldenjoyed privileges of the other without rousing worst passions on the part of both.’214 Curiously enough, Sir Provash Chandra Mitter, introducing the Bill in the Council, was saying the same thing when he remarked: ‘. . . if this House can settle the conflicting class interests with justice and fairness to all, it will be laying deep the foundation of true nationalism in n

I

6

Bengal 1920—1947 this Province.’216 The Statesman proved to be more perspicacious when it predicted: ‘The majority of the Hindu members and many in the Muslim block are either zemindars or permanent tenure holders and as a matter of course they will support all provi­ sions which are favourable to the landlords. The real represen­ tatives of those who cultivate the lands are very few in the Council and it will be difficult for them to gain much.’216 The tone of the debate and the alignments among different parties and interests were set as soon as the very first amend­ ments relating to the status of sharecroppers came up for discussion. When Tamizuddin K han moved that the entire clause laying down the conditions under which a bargadar could be recognised as a tenant be dropped, on the ground that this would rob him of whatever rights he may have acquired under the existing law or by custom, Akhil Chandra Datta reacted sharply and declared that bargadari was ‘the most equitable arrangement that one can conceive of between capital and labour. . . . May I ask if there is any other industry where you can find a fairer and a juster share given to the labour than what is given, viz., half to the capital and half to the labour. . . . If you want a Bolshevic legislation, have it by all means. Let us improve the position of the actual tiller of the soil, even by sacrificing all other people. But if you want to have any regard for private property, you cannot rob people of their property, and certainly you cannot give the right of tenancy to a bargadar who has hitherto been looked upon as a mere labourer.’217 J . L. Banerjee said, ‘Let us accept the plain fact that at present we cannot recognise the bargadar as a tenant. And if we cannot do so openly, what is the use of trying to do so by a camouflage - by leaving things uncertain and indefinite ?. . . We are not legislating in vacuo: we are legislating upon a background of past history and custom: and we cannot leave public opinion out of account. Under the existing state of things the bargadars and adhiars are not recognised as tenants, and the legislature and 82

The Land Question the Government cannot give them the rights of tenants without flouting public opinion. . . . Is the only cultivator of the soil the man who tills the soil with his own hands? Has the bhadralok agriculturist who invests money in land no place in the economy of things ? And should not his rights be recognised as much as the right of the man who actually tills the soil?*218 This particular motion was withdrawn. But another motion by Tamizuddin Khan, seeking to recognise a bargadar as tenant if he was recorded as such in a record-of-rights, was defeated heavily, the Swarajist bloc voting with the government. The official and European bloc naturally stuck to the original draft of the Bill, but in spite of this, Amarendra Nath Ghose’s motion to include within the definition of a raiyat ‘one who cultivates by bargadar* (thus precluding any possibility of recognising a bargadar as tenant) lost by only two votes. And Jogindra Chandra Chakravarti’s motion, strictly delineating the grounds on which a bargadar would be recognised as tenant to those cases where ‘he is expressly admitted to be a tenant by the owner of such land in any document executed by him or in his favour and accepted by him,’ was carried. The position of the Swarajya party on this question was, therefore, decidedly against the bargadar. When Fazlul Huq moved that the next clause, stating that a raiyat holding land at fixed rent may be ejected by his landlord if ‘he has used the land comprised in his holding in a manner which renders it unfit for the purposes of tenancy,’ be dropped, Sir Abdur Rahim, speaking in his support, commented: ‘The majority of this council in combination with the Swarajists, the most powerful party in the House, have already finished with the bargadars, the cultivators of lan d -----This powerful combina­ tion which it is not possible for those who have taken up the cause of the raiyats to resist successfully, have taken away the rights of the raiyats. The proposed measure is absolutely iniquitous.’219 This, however, was a good opportunity for the Swarajists to take up the popular cause. Defending his party, 83

Bengal 1920-1947 J . M. Sen Gupta said that although it had been suggested that the Congress party was not standing justly for the rights of the poor man and that it had gone over to the side of the zamindars, actually the party had taken up an attitude which was in consonance with its election manifesto. T hat meant that as far as relations between landlords and tenants were concerned, the Congress members would see that neither one nor the other was in the slightest way injured. ‘They would see that during their fight for freedom, and until this fight for freedom was over, the interests of the tenants and the interests of the zamindars should be so ad ju sted -so reasonably adjusted - as not to create a civil war in the country before freedom was gained.’ To prove that the Congress was not anti-tenant, they had decided to support the motion to delete the clause regarding ejection of mokrari raiyats.220 Fazlul H uq’s amendment was carried without a division. Nevertheless, on virtually every motion involving relations between landlords and tenants, the pattern of voting was consistent. ‘The Hindu members, Swarajists and nonSwarajists, combined to safeguard the reasonable interests o f the landlords while the Moslem members with solitary exceptions here and there showed a keen desire to further the interests of the ryots.* The result was that the original bill was gradually pushed through virtually unmutilated. ‘The bill has been drafted in such a way,* wrote The Statesman in obvious admiration, ‘that not a single clause is equally acceptable to both the parties. Any clause that is moved by the Government is objected to either by the champions of the ryots or by the champions of the landlords and a majoiity on the side of the Government is assured with the help of the other party. . . . This speaks volumes for the cleverness with which the bill has been drafted.*221 Amendments directed against the landlord were defeated by wide margins. Asimuddin Ahamad’s motion proposing to do away with the rights of preemption and the landlord’s fee on transfer of occupancy holdings was defeated 22-75. 84

The Land Question Tamizuddin K han’s motion that there should be no right of preemption lost 25-76. Kasiruddin Ahamad’s motion that the compensation amount when a landlord chose to exercise his right of preemption should be 25 per cent instead of 10 per cent was defeated 16-69. The landlord’s transfer fee was finally fixed at 20 per cent, after various figures from 0 to 30 per cent were proposed. The final figure was suggested by Ramesh Chandra Bagchi on behalf of the Congress, who said that his party would have preferred a lower figure but it would not have been acceptable to the House as presently constituted. Let the tenants accept this figure for the present; later, when the House was ‘more properly constituted,’ it could be lowered.222 The passing of the provisions on the landlord’s rights on transfer of occupancy holdings brougjht forth a bitter outburst from the maverick Congressman Jitendra Lai Banerjee who said that although the land did not belong to the zamindar, it was still useless to make protests on behalf of the tenants. The combination of the Swarajists, zamindars and government members was far too strong. ‘But I shall not condemn the Swarajists by words. Their deeds will condemn them. They cannot undo what they have done.’228 Dr B. C. Roy, defending the Congress, said that as a party it did not feel that it was time for drastic measures in favour of tenants; there should first be some adjustment outside the Council between zamindars and tenants.224 Almost every amendment moved by Muslim members was defeated. The Bill had proposed that the landlord could enhance the rent if the productive power of the land had increased by virtue of projects either wholly or partly financed by the landlord. Azizul Haque objected, saying that this would be disastrous for tenants, and moved that the earlier position, permitting enhancement only on projects wholly financed by the landlord, be restored. The motion was defeated. Tamizuddin K han moved that the existing right of cultivators to commute produce rent into money rent should 85

Bengal 1920-1947 be retained, since this conferred a right on bargadars. Akhil Chandra Datta said that the interests of the middle-class population of Bengal were involved here, and if bargadars could commute the form of rent at will, the middle classes would suffer. This motion was also defeated 23-62. One amendment in favour of the underraiyat was passed rather unexpectedly. The Bill had proposed that an under­ raiyat could not be evicted if he had been in possession of a holding for a continuous period of twenty years and if he had erected a homestead on his land. Nausher Ali moved that the conditions be set at twelve years or a homestead. No one having called for a division at the proper time, the motion was carried despite government and Swarajist opposition.225 Another clause in the Bill had proposed than an underraiyat could be evicted if the landlord required the holding for building a homestead, or for cultivation by himself or by members of his family or by ‘hired servants*. An explanatory clause said that ‘hired servants’ would not include bargadars who supplied their own cattle and plough. Satyendranath Roychoudhuri moved that this explanatory clause be deleted. Jitendra Lai Banerjee supported him, saying that underraiyats had already been given some protection and the Government should not cut the raiyat at the same time. Several Muslim members opposed the motion on the ground that it would lead to large-scale replacement of underraiyats by share­ croppers. The motion was carried 51-34 because official members remained neutral. Two other amendments in favour of underraiyats, moved by Muslim members, were defeated. The Bill proposed that the rent of an underraiyat could be enhanced by contract provided it did not exceed the previous rent by 4 annas per rupee. Fazlul Huq moved that this be reduced to 2 annas per rupee, thus making the maximum rate of enhancement the same as in the case of occupancy raiyats. The move was defeated 27-39. Ekramul H uq moved that an underraiyat could be ejected only if he used the land in such a way that it 86

The Land Question ‘substantially reduces the value of the holding,’ and not just if he ‘renders it unfit for tenancy* as the Bill stated. This motion was lost 17-59. On the other hand, two motions directed against the underraiyat were defeated more narrowly, with the Swarajya bloc voting against the underraiyat. J . L. Banerjee moved that the underraiyat’s holding should not be transferable at all, instead of ‘with the consent of the landlord* as in the Bill. This move was defeated 32-52. Akhil Chandra D atta’s motion that ‘no entry in a record of rights finally published shall raise a presumption of correctness as to the customary occupancy right of an underraiyat’ lost 34-4-3. An interesting feature of the voting on amendments affect­ ing relations between raiyats and underraiyats was that the Muslim bloc upholding the cause of the underraiyat found an unexpected ally in certain big zamindars such as the M aharaja of Mymensingh, the Maharaja of Cossimbazar, Bijoy Prasad Singh Roy and the Raja of Nashipur. This reflected the old antagonism between the zamindar and the substantial raiyat. On questions involving relations between landlords and tenants, the Swarajya members had generally looked after the interests of the rent-receiver, defending as they were the rights of proprietors and intermediate tenureholders who constituted a large part of their supporters. When it came to the underraiyat, however, they were concerned with the non-cultivating (and absentee) raiyat who had sublet his holdings and was in all probability in a professional job in a district town or the metropolis.220 However, this defence of the absentee ‘bhadralok’ raiyat vis-à-vis his underraiyat necessarily went in favour of the jot dar as well, since legally most jotdars held land as occupancy raiyats. The rising power in the village of the substantial raiyat peasantry was some­ thing about which zamindars at this time had become seriously concerned, as evidenced, for instance, in the statements of the British Indian Association or the Landholders* Association cited earlier. Hence their combination with the supporters of the rights of underraiyats against those of the jotdar. 87

8 on the various amendments revealed three distinct blocs - one, a Muhammadan bloc (to adopt the nomenclature of the electoral system itself) including one or two isolated Hindu members; two, the Swarajya bloc, comprising most of the members elected from: the non-Muhammadan seats allied with a few landholders, nominated members and some elected from various organisa­ tions; and three, the official and European bloc. In fact, the voting by blocs was so consistent that it is not difficult ta identify the members of each bloc (Table 8). he

T

pattern

of

v o t in g

Table 8 V o t in g B lo cs o n t h e T e n a n c y B i l l , 1928 I. The Muhammadan bloc and allies (21 m em bers): Syed M aham ud Afzal (Bakarganj) Partial Support (8 m em bers): Asimuddin Aha m ad (Tippera) Khwaja Nazimuddin (Bakarganj) K asiruddin Ahamad (Rangpur) Em aduddin Ahmed (Rajshahi) A bdur Rahim (Calcutta) Syed Nausher Ali (Jessore) A. F. M . A bdur Rahm an (24-Parganas) Syed M ohammad Atiqullah M uhamm ad Solaiman (Mymensingh) N urul H uq C haudhuri (Noakhali) (24-Parganas) Azizul H aque (Nadia) Jitendralal Banerjee (Birbhum) Syed M aqbul Husain (Chittagong) K. C. Ray C haudhuri (Nominated Non-official) Ekramul H uq (M urshidabad) R ebâti M ohan Sarkar A. K . Fazlul H uq (Dacca) (Nominated Non-official) M uham m ad Ismail (Mymensingh)

The Land Question Table 8 (continued) Abdul K arim (Burdwan) A bul Kasem (Burdwan) M . A shraf Ali K han Chaudhuri (Rajshahi) M uazzam Ali K han (Pabna) Tam izuddin K han (Faridpur) Azizur R ahm an (Mymensingh) Shamsur Rahm an (Khulna) Syed A bdur R au f (Jessore) Nagendra N arayan R ay (Rangpur)

Hafizur Rahm an G haudhuri (Nominated Non-official)

I I. The Swarqjya bloc and allies (42 m em bers): Ramesh C handra Bagchi (M alda) Partial Support (7 members) : P ram athanath Banerjea (Calcutta) Sashi K an ta Acharya Chaudhuri (Dacca University) Promotho N ath Banerjee (M idnapore) Badridas Goenka (Bengal M arw ari Association) A. C. Banerjee (Calcutta) Bijoy Prasad Singh Roy Sasi Sekhar Basu (24-Parganas) (Nominated Non-official) P. C. Basu (Burdwan) Bhupendra N arayan Sinha S arat C. Basu (Burdwan) (Burdwan Landholders) Surendra N ath Biswas (Faridpur) S. C. Bose (Calcutta University) Bejoy K rishna Bose (Calcutta) Abdus Sattar (Chittagong) Subhas C handra Bose (Calcutta) Satyendra C handra Ghosh M aulik Jogindra C handra C hakravarti (Noakhali) (D inajpur) Ja tin d ra N ath C hakrabartty (R angpur) Bijay K um ar C hatteijee (Bankura) H arcndranath C haudhuri (24-Parganas) J . M . Das G upta (Calcutta) Akhil C handra D atta (Tippera) Amulya C handra D atta (Hooghly) A m arendra N ath Ghose (Mymensingh) Jogesh C handra G upta (Dacca) P rabhu D ayal Himatsingka (Calcutta) D ebendra Lai K han (M idnapore) M ahendra N ath M aiti (M idnapore) Jogendra N ath M oitra (Bogra-Pabna)

89

Bengal 1920-1947 T a b le 8 (continued) T araknath M ukherjee (Hooghly) Sris Chandra N andy (M urshidabad) H em C handra Naskar (24-Parganas) R anjit Pal C haudhuri (Nadia) Surendra N ath Ray (24-Parganas) Kum ud S an k ir R ay (Faridpur) R adha G obinda R ay (Bankura) Man mat ha N ath Roy (Howrah) Bidhan C handra Roy (24-Parganas) D. N. Roy (Jessore) K iran Sankar Roy (Dacca) Satyendra N ath Roy C houdhuri (Bakarganj) Sachindra N arayan Sanya 1 (Rajshahi) N aliniranjan Sarkar (Mymensingh) Nagendra N ath Sen (Khulna) J . M. Sen G upta (Chittagong) P. N. G uha (N om inated Non-official) Sarada K ripa Lala (Chittagong Landholders) A nanda M ohan Poddar (Bengal M ahajan Sabha) Satish C handra Sen (Bengal N ational Cham ber of Commerce) II I .

Official and European bloc with allies (37 members) : E. G. A bbott (Indian Ju te Partial Support (2 members) : Manufacturers* Association) A ltaf Ali (Bogra) J . M. Blair (Nominated Official) Khorshed Alam Choudhury B. E .J . Burge (Nominated Official) (Bakarganj) A. Cassells (Nominated Official) Nawab Ali C haudhuri (Exec. Council) D. J . Cohen (N om inated Non-official) A. J . Dash (Nom inated Official) T . W. Dowding (Indian M ining Association) J . Campbell Forrester (PresidencyBurdwan) J . H. Fyfe (Bengal Cham ber of Commerce) M. C. Ghose (Nominated Official)

90

The Land Question T a b le 8 [continued) A. D. Gordon (Indian T ea Association) G. P. Hogg (N om inated Official) W. S. Hopkyns (N om inated Official) F. E. Jam es (Presidency-Burdwan) N . R . Luke (1JMA) L. T . M aguire (Anglo-Indian) A. M arr (Exec. Council) O . S. M artin (BCC) E. T . McGluskie (Anglo-Indian) C. C. M iller (BCC) Provash C handra M itter (Exec. Council) M uham m ad Abdul M um in (N om iaated Official) W. H . Nelson (Nominated Official) Percy P arrott (BCC) W. D. Prentice (Exec. Council) R . N. R eid (Nominated Official) F. A. Sachse (Nominated Official) H . E. Stapleton (Nominated Official) H . W. Thom as (C alcutta Trades Association) W. C. W ordsworth (Presidency-Buidwan) J . G. Drummond (Nom inated Non-official) R. N. G ilchrist (Nominated Non-official) Pranendra N arayan C haudhuri (Expert Nominated) M ahendra N ath G upta (Expert Nominated) M usharraf Hosain (Minister) Abdel K arim Ghuznavi (Mymensingh)

The divisions between the members of the House according to the kinds of amendments moved are shown in Table 9. It is clear from the voting patterns that the Muhammadan bloc identified above generally voted in favour of the bargadar and underraiyat, and for the tenant against the landlord. The Swarajya bloc, on the other hand, generally voted against the bargadar and underraiyat, and in favour of the landlord against the tenant. The official and European bloc generally opposed any amendment to the original draft of the Bill. O f the 21 members in the Muhammadan bloc, 17 were from the east and north Bengal districts. Their consistency in 91

Bengal 1920-1947

Table 9 1928

V o t in o P a t t e r n o n T e n a n c y B i l l , 1

Elected M uha­ mmadans

3

2

Elected NonM uhammadans

4

5

Land­ holders, Organisa­ Nominated Officials, Europeans N on­ tions and official and N ominated M uha­ AngloNon­ Indians mmadans official Hindus

39

46

18

3

38

Pro1 bargadar 2 3

21 21 23

1 0 0

2 2 4

1 0 2

16 0 24

A nti1 bargadar 2 3

2 2 3

37 38 40

6 8 7

1 2 1

0 22 0

Pro4 landlord 5 6 7 8 13 14 15 16

4 3 1 0 5 5 5 5 4

34 37 33 33 40 36 39 32 35

10 12 4 7 8 8 13 9 11

2 2 0 0 2 2 3 2 1

21 28 0 0 1 22 16 20 27

Anti4 landlord 5 6 7 8 13 14 15 16

15 15 20 25 18 17 16 15 16

1 0 1 4 1 2 2 1 1

0 1 4 1 4 1 2 0 0

1 1 2 3 1 1 0 0 0

0 0 18 26 29 0 4 0 0

T otal M O T IO N S

92

The Land Question T a b le 9 (continued)

Total

1

2

3

4

5

39

46

18

3

38

Prounder­ raiyat

9 10 11 12

18 14 18 17

0 1 5 2

3 1 10 8

1 0 1 0

5 0 18 16

A ntiunderraiyat

9 10 11 12

3 3 0 1

31 27 31 32

5 5 0 0

0 1 0 1

0 21 0 0

SO U R C E : Bengal Legislative Council Proceedings, vol. 30, no. 2, 13th Session, 1928. N O TES : 1. T he motions considered for this table are listed in Appendix 1. 2. T he official bloc generally voted against any am endment to the original Bill. T he only exception Was M otion 9 on which it rem ained neutral. However, on th a t motion, 5 European members, viz. J . Cam pbell Forrester, F. E. Jam es, W. C. Wordsworth, E. G. Abbot and J . H . Fyfe, voted in favour o f the underraiyat. O n M otion 8, E. T . McCluskie (AngloIndian) voted against the official bloc for some unknown reason. O n Motion 14, 4 non-official members - Fyfe, Jam es, Thomas an d Wordsworth ~ went against the official whip. 3. Several nom inated non-officials, both H indu and Muslim, voted consistently with the official bloc. T he pro-bargadar and anti-landlord votes in Columns 3 and 4 must, therefore, be interpreted with reference to the official vote on those motions. However, the two -pro-bargadar votes on M otion 2 came from K . C. R ay Chaudhuri and R ebâti M ohan Sarkar; the anti­ landlord vote on M otion 13 an d the pro-underraiyat vote on M otion 10 also came from Rebâti M ohan Sarkar. T he heavy pro-underraiyat voting in Column 3 on Motions 11 and 12 was helped by the vote o f the b ig landholders. 4. In Column 2, the single pro-bargadar vote Was th at o f Jitendra Lai Banerjee. The anti-landlord votes included Nagendra

93

Bengal 1920-1947 Table 9 (SM

«His I

RQi* 4Cil csmi SftST i . . . Gstwnr ^ cvsmi wife t o