Agrarian Development in Colonial India: The British and Bihar 9780367771096, 9781032033020, 9781003186632

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AGRARIAN DEVELOPMENT IN COLONIAL INDIA

This book looks at agriculture, development, poverty and British rule in India, especially in the Patna Division in Bihar between c.1870–1920. It traces the economic influence of British policies and maps the impact of legal, administrative and scientific interventions on rural conditions and norms. The book discusses British theories and policies of ‘improvement’, comparing them with Bihar’s agricultural practice and socio-economic conditions to draw conclusions about rural impoverishment. Following on from his earlier book, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort, on the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, the author also presents case studies on famines, debts, canal and village irrigation, flood protection and the cultivation and production of indigo, opium and sugar. He analyses extensive archival material to reflect on property law, scientific interventions, cropping patterns, trade and intermediaries. He examines the economic role of governments, Eurocentric development theories and the complex impact of development policy on agriculture and society in Bihar. The book will be of interest to academics and students of colonial history, modern Indian history, agrarian studies, economic history, sociology and development studies. It will also be useful to development practitioners and researchers working on the history of agrarian conditions and public policy. Peter Robb is Professor Emeritus (formerly Professor of the History of India and Pro-Director) at SOAS University of London, and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic and Royal Historical Societies. His book Ancient Rights and Future Comfort (1997) is a precursor of this book. Also partly on Bihar are Evolution of British Policy towards Indian Politics (1992), Liberalism, Modernity and the Nation (2007), Peasants, Political Economy and Law (2007), and Ideas Matter (2020). His other books include Government of India and Reform (1976), History of India (2002; 2011), and, on early Calcutta, Sex and Sensibility (2011), Sentiment and Self (2011) and Useful Friendship (2014). He has also edited or co-edited ten collections concerning Indo-British relations, protest, identity, ideologies, race, Dalit movements, labour, rural South Asia, agriculture and development.

AGRARIAN DEVELOPMENT IN COLONIAL INDIA The British and Bihar

Peter Robb

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Peter Robb The right of Peter Robb to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-77109-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-03302-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-18663-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of tables Preface Abbreviations used in the notes

vii viii x

Introduction1   1 States in development

3

  2 Context and agenda

19

PART I

States and societies

35

  3 State matters

37

  4 Property through law

48

  5 The land in question

64

PART II

Science and agriculture

79

  6 Science and superiority

81

  7 Benefit and loss

108

v

C ontents

PART III

Agrarian Bihar

125

  8 Active government? Chaukidars and commerce

127

  9 Famine, borrowing and debt

147

10 The Son canals and Nasriganj estate

170

11 Village irrigation and embankments

195

12 Interpreting agricultural production

210

13 Sugaring the pill?

228

14 Production, privilege, prejudice and poverty

246

Sources and references Index

269 283

vi

TABLES

7.1 Lowland Rice Prices 9.1 Relief Works in Muzaffarpur in 1892 9.2 Famine Relief in Bihar, 1873–92 9.3 Unsecured Debts of Nawab Amir Ali of Patna 10.A.1  Eleven Villages of Nasriganj Estate, 1868–82 10.A.2 A Tahsildari Report: Harvests and Crops in a Nasriganj Village in the 1880s

vii

112 148 150 162 188 190

PREFACE

A draft of parts of this book was written to complement my study of tenancy law and its impact on Bihar (Ancient Rights and Future Comfort: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 and British Rule in India, Curzon Press: Richmond, Surrey 1997). Completion of a promised second volume was delayed by academic responsibilities and further books and other publications. Two books included aspects of my work on Bihar (Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation, and Peasants, Political Economy, and Law, both OUP: New Delhi 2007), but three monographs were on quite different topics. I  was able to return to my Bihar project a few years ago. I began to reconsider, refocus and rework the original draft chapters, while adding new material. That led to the present book. It summarises some of my earlier discussions to provide context but concentrates on interventions as the British tried to improve agriculture and the rural economy. One question is what the British thought, not so much systems of belief as particular ideas and their consequences. Another concern is to understand Bihari society over time. Neither interventions nor Bihar should be considered in isolation. While accepting British rule was not all-pervasive, I  will argue that Bihar was changed in specific ways. A book about government and economic development resonates with more recent experience. I  think of it partly as a test case contributing to wider debates: current, more general questions about how development efforts may be distorted and about what states and other agencies can and cannot do. That the state in question was foreign and colonial but also significantly indigenised arguably makes it a good example to be reconsidered in an age of international aid agencies and increasingly global production and trade. To ensure this example is generally accessible, broad contexts will be explained. A list of sources gives full references for all books and articles; short titles are used in notes. For related discussions, see Peter Robb, Ideas Matter. Debating the Impact of British Rule on India, Primus: New Delhi 2020. I have included evidence and short passages from earlier publications (some of them abridged versions of longer drafts revised for this book) in order viii

P reface

to provide convenient single statements on some topics: from Peter Robb, Empire, Identity, and India. Peasants, Political Economy, and Law, New Delhi 2007 (pp. 25–32 on indigo, pp. 132–4 on opium and p. 135 on sugar), and, in Chapter  9, extracts adapted from two articles: (1) ‘State, Peasant and Moneylender in late Nineteenth-Century Bihar: Some Colonial Inputs’, in Peter Robb, ed., Rural India. Land, Power and Society under British Rule, London 1983, pp. 106–48; or 2nd edn, Delhi 1992, pp. 109–52; and (2) ‘Bihar, the Colonial State and Agricultural Development in India, 1880– 1920’, Indian Economic & Social History Review xxv, 2 (1988), pp. 205– 35; reprinted in Binoy N. Verma (ed.), Agrarian Relations, Institutional Change and Colonial Legacy. The Case of Eastern India, New Delhi 1993, pp. 47–82. Over many years, parts of the book have been presented as papers, notably in London, Cambridge and New Delhi, and also at the ADRI conference in Patna in March 2017. I am grateful for comments, suggestions and questions. I have benefited from the knowledge and companionship of many of the historians of Bihar cited in notes. My greatest scholarly debt is to Clive Dewey’s generosity, encouragement and advice, especially for this book. My thanks are due above all to my wife, Elizabeth. This book is dedicated to her. I  am glad to acknowledge that she assisted me enormously when much of the material for this book was collected, long ago, in the National Archives, New Delhi, and in what was then the Bihar state record office in Patna. Liz did not pretend that she found all of it as interesting as I did, but her efforts were essential to my work and this book. Peter Robb, London 2020

ix

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

AgH Agriculture and Horticulture Branch Agric Agriculture Branch BR Board of Revenue, Bengal Coll Collector Fam Famine Branch GDP Gross Domestic Product Gen General Branch G/Be Government of Bengal G/I Government of India H. Home Department, G/I ICS Indian Civil Service PC; PCR  Commissioner of Patna Division; PC Records (Bihar State Archives, Patna). Citations include basta, collection/file number, and date, as found, in that order PWD Public Works Department R&A Proceedings of the G/I Revenue and Agriculture Department (mostly National Archives, New Delhi). Citations give Branch, series (A, B, C or Dep[osit]), proceeding number, month and year, in that order, and refer to the proceedings proper and/or to papers kept with them. The latter occur in a separate series of file volumes in India (not available in the British Library) Rev; LR Land Revenue; Land Revenue Branch SR Survey and Settlement Report Stats Statistics Branch

A guide to measures Acre 0.405 hectares Anna a sixteenth of a rupee Bigha locally variable, between about 1,500 to 6,800 m2 (0.15 to 1.7 hectares)

x

A bbreviations used in the notes

Maund in Bengal after 1833, 100 troy pounds, about 82 lbs or 37 kilos (also with local variations) Ounce about 28 grams Pice a quarter of an anna Seer one fortieth of a maund, roughly 2 pounds or 1 kilo

Note on terminology, spelling and dates Words from Indian languages are transliterated in ways reasonably according with current practice while keeping in touch with British colonial usage. They are italicised and translated at the first mention only. Place names reflect the units and spellings of the period being covered. Many have changed since, including district boundaries and names in Bihar. Dates with a slash (such as 1884/5) indicate a fiscal year, not a period of two years (1884–5).

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Introduction

1 STATES IN DEVELOPMENT

Prospectus This book studies state policies in one part of colonial India, Gangetic Bihar, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus is the Patna Division as defined in 1851: Patna, Shahabad and Gaya districts south of the Ganges; Saran, Champaran, Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga to the north, all under the Government of Bengal until the separation of Bihar and Orissa in 1912. The ultimate purpose is to consider the external interventions in the Indian countryside during the expansion of the world economy. The focus will be on government efforts because the state was a major influence and a conduit for wider impact. But by analysing official actions and reactions we also obtain an overview, at one remove, of the conditions in rural society.1 Some historians seem to think there is no point examining the ideas and ­character of colonial government. They know what the problem was: British rule was selfish and evil. They declare that it damaged South Asian economies— draining wealth, undermining or distorting production, impoverishing people. They leave little room for debate. My assessment is more mixed. On one hand, some Indian groups and sectors thrived and became wealthier under the British. There were general benefits too from law, institutions and technology: many might have been garnered anyway, but most were gained under Western influence. On the other hand, it is equally apparent that some industries and arenas suffered or underperformed, notably much agriculture. For vast numbers of people, conditions worsened and opportunities narrowed. How far was foreign rule responsible for any of this? In my experience, evidence shows that officials in India included men who were intelligent and well-meaning. For that reason alone, to say ‘the fault was imperialism’ is neither informative nor instructive. It forecloses on explanations that might draw attention to more general shortcomings in law or policy. If we ask how instead of who, and if we elaborate on why, then we are better able to understand British rule. But more, we can consider whether other intelligent and well-meaning people may also have gone 3

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awry over development policies, and if they might still be doing so. For that reason alone, who was to blame is less interesting than what went wrong. Go wrong it did. Bihar remains poor. In the twenty-first century, its GDP per capita is the lowest of any Indian state, and agriculture, supporting 56 per cent of its population, produces only 23 per cent of that economic activity. The state contains pockets with high income by Indian standards—amid the garishness of present-day Patna, for example—but about a third of the population lives below the poverty line. Those figures alone tell us that Bihar’s problems are more than usually intractable. There are some recent improvements. Gross annual growth has now risen to a high level, and the literacy rate is improving quite rapidly. On the other hand, in 2011, when just under 62 per cent overall were literate, the proportion was over 71 per cent for males and below 52 per cent for females. In rural areas, moreover, it was only 57 per cent for males and 30 per cent for females.2 Biharis may be talented, resourceful and resilient. But they need to be. The British rulers of Bihar could not avoid reacting to evidence of poverty and vulnerability. By the later nineteenth century they were making attempts to improve the rural economy. They engaged in social engineering through law and land settlements. They gathered data and invested in irrigation, infrastructure and scientific research. I describe these attempts as measures of ‘development’. That meaning of the word, ubiquitous today, derives from the early twentieth century and does not quite appear in the nineteenth century; but already at that time ‘development’ could refer to betterment or improvement, for example of cultivation (1816), and advancement through progressive stages (1832) or by bringing out latent possibilities (1885). The modern usage has evolved from meanings already familiar over two centuries ago. In the late nineteenth century, economic development was not yet a formal goal of government or specialist agencies nor an academic discipline; it would be inappropriate to judge earlier efforts against later yardsticks. But improvement was on the agenda; its character and impact may be assessed. It derived from an idea, fairly novel in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Britain, that a country’s total wealth could expand, was not finite. Progress was expected in a new dynamic social and economic paradigm opposed to those of divine dispensation, circularity or stasis. Economic laws were devised, as by Francois Quesnay (1694–1774) or Adam Smith (1723–90). Consumers, producers, capital and labour were distinguished and their relations theorised. Growth was associated with investment and profit. The state’s proper role, if any, was debated. Individual achievements rather than unchanging social norms were thought to deliver merit and success. Merchants prospered; heroes were celebrated. New World discoveries and opportunities epitomised a greater expectation of personal and national advancement. Science, communication and liberalism came to seem instrumental, especially because they linked investigation, experiment, technicians and entrepreneurs. 4

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A related and startling notion—arguably humanist or Protestant—was that peoples could be improved as well as processes. It competed with a renewed insistence on intrinsic difference. The imagining of improvement coexisted with justifications for social division and, before long, racist accounts of the evolution of civilisations. Thus progress in knowledge, in the Enlightenment, ran up against barriers. Rationalists and romantics, both of whom expected change, might also fear upheaval in established norms and rebellion against religion. Under the English East India Company, the search for ‘Asiatic knowledge’—religious, moral, geographical, medical or material—was related to the rise of reason and empiricism in Europe. The Bengal Asiatic Society was shocking to some for its secular rationality and objectivity. But its members too were likely to fear iconoclasm and revolution and look down on Indians as lesser beings. These conflicting changes and attitudes provide a backdrop to this book. In the nineteenth century, when the British ruled India, major adjustments were occurring in trade, commercial agriculture and social and economic relations. There were outbreaks of disorder and the consuming military and civil uprisings of 1857–8. There were disasters of famine, flooding and disease and fears of a crisis in food and work as population grew. Bihar suffered particularly. Arvind Das once lamented that it was exploited by imperialism and at the same time denied its benefits, ‘brutalised’ by both scarcity and plenty.3 Many accounts went further and claimed British policies were designed for exploitation. There can be no doubt colonialism could be very damaging because of its priorities and imperfect engagement with indigenous people and conditions. On the other hand, most policies were more pragmatic than selfishly targeted and shaped by doctrine and (mis)understanding rather than directly by British national interest. What then might justify Das’s lament? Why did Bihar not prosper, given hopes of development? Five explanations may be offered. The first, after all, has to be economic and social exploitation. A  second is that the British Indian government imposed many regulations but often refrained from interference. Sometimes it looked like a minimal, ineffective state, arguing Indians knew their own business best, letting private individuals and enterprises act as they pleased, for good or ill. If that were the case, and if British rule be blamed for conditions in Bihar, then its faults were omission and neglect. Third, public investment in development was very small. The British Indian government’s first priorities were to ensure control and extract revenue. Its development policies were primarily intended to guarantee state income, promote trade, help co-opt powerful allies and reduce popular unrest. Again the colonial state can be accused of not doing enough.4 Fourth, development policies had particular characteristics in colonial India, reflecting individual passions and contemporary understanding. Official interventions might or might not be well-informed and sympathetic 5

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to Indian realities. Sometimes they conflicted with indigenous conditions and produced unexpected effects. Both science and capitalist enterprise had imperfections and contradictions when applied to Bihar. Finally, Bihar may have been less amenable than some other parts of India to the measures introduced to foster ‘improvement’. It certainly seemed less favoured by colonial impact than, say, Punjab. The purpose of this book is to investigate aspects of these explanations, especially the last two (as the others have been much debated): possible failings of efforts at economic development in the countryside. The context may be restated as three main points.5 First, state intervention grew continually, at least from the seventeenth century, but began to change in nature and extent between 1880 and 1920, when comparatively novel technological and scientific remedies set a pattern for ‘development’.6 Second, some state influences and commercial interventions were damaging. Third, there were unhelpful features of existing production and trading systems. Perhaps social and economic outcomes were particularly poor when, rhetorically and in practice, British endeavours conflicted with indigenous conditions. Two contradictory images are implied: British measures and local conditions.7 A conundrum is that British officials and scientists often understood very well that efforts must be appropriate to India and yet derived proposals and measures from their different Western experience. In just that way, after 1917, constitutional reforms were introduced amid a storm of British objections to the influence of ‘unrepresentative’ Indian elites and calls for institutions more appropriate to the interests of the ‘real India’. Having agreed on that, reformers made proposals mirroring British parliamentary forms and best suited to the very same Indian elites. There was no intention to advantage educated professionals, but they thrived under the new dispensation.8 I can only speculate on whether this lack of fit between goals and policies is a failing of imperialism or governments in general.9 Many have noted the imperfections of colonial economic policies, not least in what has been called an ‘intellectual genealogy of development studies’ (in that case referring to exaggerated focus on indebtedness in Punjab).10 My main questions about policies as they affected Bihar are: what worked (that is, was beneficial), what did not work and why? Pursuing such themes, this book comprises both general discussions and development-related case studies. General discussions include state policies, development theories, the applications and shortcomings of science. Accounts are then given on property law and agrarian policy, official involvement in crops, farming machinery and marketing, government farms and research institutes, famine relief and credit, the impact of irrigation and agrarian management, notably under the Court of Wards. Some accounts concentrate on the bureaucracy of development in Bihar. To assess such measures it is necessary to understand the nature of rural society, landed property and agriculture. Detail is provided on ways land was held and on farming practice within existing 6

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and evolving socio-economic norms, and on the production of commercial crops. The implication is not that colonial policies were without impact but that disparities existed between knowledge of India and remedies applied to it. The focus is mainly on shortcomings in government policies. British approaches to development are analysed in three parts, the first concerned with the impact of land policies on social and agrarian structures, the next with Western application of science to agriculture. These provide an overview against which to read the third part: case studies of state intervention in Bihar, discussing problems and consequences. By definition examples in this third group are illustrative, not exhaustive. They are a deliberate choice of detail over dubious statistics or quantification. The first case study is of state attempts to promote improvement by securing and regulating local informants and raising taxes to pay for them, moved by new ideas of what governments should do and the example of Victorian Britain. Bengal’s government, then governing Bihar, was often timid or halfhearted but did try to professionalise its agents and informants at village level, the chaukidars (watchmen), and co-opt local communities. It did so along Western lines rather than by engaging with indigenous society. The next chapter on famine and credit outlines both issues and assesses solutions offered by British interventions, mainly as applied in Bihar, namely in famine relief and agricultural loans. The account of debt includes descriptions of particular instances in Bihar. Another study describes the effects, mainly on cropping patterns but also life choices, of irrigation provided from a government canal. The subject attracted much attention from contemporary officials, as it has from subsequent scholarship. My account shows the variety of responses and consequences and less-than-perfect fit between expectations of canal engineers and those of local consumers of canal water. The detailed information also informs later discussions of conditions in Bihar’s villages. The next chapter tells first of a contest between revenue officers and irrigation engineers over village irrigation. Revenue officers wanted permission to restore and maintain neighbourhood water channels vital for subsistence in some south Bihari villages. Engineers judged the proposals as if they were for a regular canal, demonstrating ‘scientifically’ that they were uneconomic. It was a conflict of perspective, expertise and purpose, characteristic of problems when large bureaucracies apply general rules. The same chapter’s second subject is embankment policy in north Bihar. Amid conflicting local pressures, officials were often trying to preserve the status quo. The Public Works Department was suspicious of new embankments likely to protect some lands at the expense of others. Larger projects were deemed impractical. Non-intervention left some people worse off than others, from existing embankments and disruption caused by infrastructure. 7

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Two chapters then consider commercial crops: indigo, with particular reference to development, and opium and sugarcane, with a focus on poverty. Both examine the impact of Western capital investment on agricultural production, relating aspects of commercial production to social continuities or changes and to the colonial goal of improvement. The final chapter has three sections. One sums up, with comparisons of earlier views, the importance of socio-political hierarchy and various agents and brokers to the impact of commercial agriculture on Bihar. The second reviews administrative problems and priorities including political self-interest, adding examples from government estates. The final section reflects on imperial attitudes to India, British impact on poverty and contradictions between Western remedies and Indian circumstances—flaws of ­imperialism and travails of modernisation. Overall the chapter describes limitations of development measures while arguing understanding and lessons for the future are more useful than condemnation. Problems of agriculture and poverty are perennial in Bihar, despite its importance in ancient times. They did not start in the twentieth century when rapid population pressure, natural disasters and uncompetitive production might be blamed. They were evident in the period covered by this book, providing good opportunities to examine the success or failure of development policies.11 Also the context, if economic development requires revolution, was already changing markedly, even considering only foreign government and commercial and export crops.

Some general theories Two general questions are relevant to this study of development in colonial Bihar. One is whether or not the state could be instrumental in furthering improvement. The other is whether local conditions necessarily or characteristically impeded economic advance. The first takes us to theories about states’ roles. The second is connected, in part, to ideas about development as an aspect of modernisation. The state looms large alongside keen nineteenth-century debates about its proper role. Many theorists considered significant state involvement essential for development, while others famously believed public intervention a curb on economic success. Nowadays, neoliberals attribute economic growth to unfettered market competition, contrasting the dead and depressing hand of bureaucrats and politicians with the nimble opportunism of the entrepreneur. In the late twentieth century, with a triumphalism that has sounded odd in more recent decades, some attributed ‘failures’ of command economies to their inability to secure sufficient consumer goods for their people. Little mention was made of the perennial failure of laissez-faire capitalist economies to ensure basic needs for large populations.12 Theoretical clichés, then and now, take little notice of actual examples.13 But 8

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free-marketeers mostly admit the value of state input, even if they have to contradict themselves, as when Alan Greenspan (according to Stephen Holmes) accepted that ‘Economic growth requires not merely government forbearance but also government performance’.14 India’s economic changes involved expansion of the state alongside concentrations of private power and capital. Businesses inevitably operate in conditions states help to shape. Governments assist, protect and regulate entrepreneurs, apparently contravening their short-term interests but helping them against rivals and workers, theft, fraud and public disorder. They also encourage minimal conditions for workers and consumers. Unregulated business, relying (for example) on excessively cheap labour, has little incentive to seek efficiencies or innovation and is liable to incur costs from worker unrest, lower output, reputational damage or consumer protest. (We may agree that describes rural Bihar under the British.) Practical efforts at improvement seem to rely on trade-offs between control and freedom, regulation and lawlessness, with good governance enabling institutions to survive by placing limits upon their behaviour.15 Doubts still arise over the efficacy of particular policies.16 British efforts in India took distinctive forms. Laissez-faire doctrine ­leaving everything to the market restricted intervention but was challenged. The British promoted investment, predominantly for European interests, for tea, coffee, opium, indigo, jute and (at least at the managerial level) cotton and steel manufacture, mining, shipping, insurance and banking. Government helped with infrastructure; laws of property, inheritance and contract; data collection and records; security of person and communications; and limited opportunities for education. The British thought their administration superior to its predecessors, priding themselves on knowledge-based policies and fairness; they challenged corruption and made investigation and reporting an obsession. They helped create the environment for enterprise. Arguably, whatever the overall usefulness of state contributions, such intervention could be effective. If it often was not in Bihar, policy may be one reason and investment or management another. Outcomes were uncertain or disproportionate to effort for scientific research, new crops and commercial production. The verdict also remains open on state inputs thought valuable— canals, railways, roads, bridges and docks, flood protection, property rights, famine relief and public order. Another point of departure for this book is interpretation of economic improvement. Development studies as a discipline has seemed somewhat uninterested in history. Perhaps it now shows increasing awareness of the past, but development is still usually described as change from subsistence to commercial agriculture and from ‘traditional’ to capitalist modes of production. Causes may be thought endogenous, abundance of land and labour producing a ‘vent for surplus’, or exogenous, provision of capital, technology and infrastructure to allow demand-led reorientation of production.17 9

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Many and varied are the details, but it is hard to escape the idea of uniform linear progress even when evidence is stacked against it. Prime movers were empires, technologists and capitalists; most theories explain industrialisation, and agriculture becomes secondary, whether cause or symptom. A typical narrative traces a ‘long prologue’ in Western Europe: prehistory of evolving efficient institutions, state formation, knowledge economy, new marriage patterns, labour markets and skills.18 Such accounts cite a fortunate conjunction of capital, raw materials, independent enterprise, technological innovation, political liberty and social cohesion. The story is of continual progress in statecraft, science, technology and trade.19 Thus the modern era is frequently characterised by worldwide export of Western ‘achievements’. Western industrialised societies developed differently from other parts of the world, and, because they became powerful in world affairs, their specific things and ways were (and are still being) transferred to other places and adopted or adapted there. Revisionist historians sought more proximate causes as when Kenneth Pomeranz, stressing the similarities between England and China around 1750, identified accidental, ecological, dietary or institutional explanations for industrial development in Europe.20 Other critics questioned the historical trajectory. As Kaveh Yazdani and Peter Frankopan argued,21 a misleading narrative of ‘modernity’ was evolved by Europeans to explain their self-proclaimed ‘superiority’. It misrepresented Europe’s past levels of development and achievement in comparison with other societies. Consequences of change are also noted increasingly—not least by recognising ecological and environmental damage caused by capitalism and its unrelenting search for ‘cheap nature’ as well as cheap production.22 Recently, India has not played a very prominent role in many of these debates (except for Yazdani and to some extent Frankopan), especially in comparison with writings in political economy in Britain in the nineteenth century. Indianists accept that the north–south connection restructured less-developed economies. But India challenges the theories, not least from its long history. Most accounts conceive pre-capitalist society in terms of low population, poor communications, feeble capital development and segmented land-based polity. But India (like China) entered the European imperial era with features attributed to modernity: high population, energetic states, agriculture geared to the market, well-developed mechanisms for capital deployment. Some South Asian precolonial economies give credence to the idea that Indian development was ‘arrested’ under British rule.23 The history of India pushes back the starting-point of transformation or creates new ideas about it, ‘proto-capitalism’ being an example. Periodisation is a problem mainly because ‘modernity’ is comparative not absolute. It involves more extensive cultivation of more crops; more commercial relations of production and exchange; more developed instruments of capital accumulation and investment. It implies more trade: faster and 10

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safer transportation; more elaborate and extensive communication; wider, more diverse consumption. It supports more developed industry and mechanised production; improving technology, more empirical science, more systematic categorisation. It leads to more centralised systematic political and social power, wider public spheres of culture and ideas, changing ideologies and greater urbanisation. Such developments are relative by definition and occurred at different times, places and rates, not necessarily synchronised or one-directional. Perhaps Yazdani overstated the case a little when claiming modernity (for which he identified three phases) was a globally interdependent process ‘most of the time’.24 But surely it reflected changes in different regions for different reasons, with diverse elements and rates of transition, and developed in Europe by building on innovations and aptitudes existing in many regions, sometimes for a long time. It depended too on much older histories of exchange in goods, technologies, innovation, skills and ideas. All this seems self-evident, and the real question one repeatedly being asked: were there prevalent conditions that assisted or resisted change?25 In Gujarat and Mysore, relatively advanced parts of India, Yazdani identified productive social sophistication and rapid take-up of European innovation in shipbuilding, military technologies and textile manufacture. He also found institutional or ecological constraints on economic development—­ autocracy, defective civil law, a weak merchant class, ‘undernourished scientific and intellectual currents’, limited or declining state revenues. He thought many impediments worsened by British laws and discriminatory policies or at least, as for education and skills, not improved by public investment in India as they were in Britain.26 Though they will be only superficially examined, these questions matter for this book. One implication is that, whatever the intrinsic problems revealed, there will be no crude suggestion that Bihari conditions inevitably precluded development. But it will also be necessary to counter assertions of special merit and harmony in precolonial societies.27 Equally, from my remarks on the economic role of states, it follows that crude assumptions will not be made about British responsibility. Some may contest that last point too.

Imperial villainy In Clive Dewey’s words, ‘Too many historians have used “colonialism”, a vague and variegated concept, to explain everything, and in consequence they have explained nothing.’28 As implied at the outset, modern writers on South Asia sometimes seemed certain that the colonial was all bad and the indigenous always good. They are seen as binary opposites though closely implicated with each other. Surprisingly often, attention to what actually happened has been diverted by a priori assumptions.29 Amiya Bagchi, for example, once claimed the Bengal jute industry failed to become efficient because of an environment inhibiting investment and development of skills, 11

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something broadly true of commercial agriculture as well. Bagchi concluded that the problem faced by jute factories was ‘colonial’.30 What did that mean, and was it a sufficient explanation? If investment and skills were impeded, was British rule the reason? It is very probably true that where European managers predominated, Indian expertise was slower to develop; but in many instances skills were being acquired or applied by Indians. Again, Indian investment was often impeded by the banking system, unequal access to information and foreign prejudice, but could be inhibited by Indian priorities and social attitudes. It proved vigorous under outside influence but equally so within wholly Indian parameters, among Parsis, Marwaris and others. An equivalent observation about agriculture might be that its expansion tended to be by extension (more cultivation) rather than by intensification (better cultivation). Was that because of colonialism? The mechanism is not obvious. British principles were smuggled into indigenous forms, and vice versa; David Washbrook wrote of colonial government ‘hiding’ under Indian practices.31 British interventions had most effect where they ran with the grain of India rather than against it, but that raises the question of how far Indian institutions or norms shaped economic outcomes, whether for jute factories or farming. The complementary possibility is that British influence was malign when out of step with India, and ‘challenging’ India did not have the effect its colonial rulers expected, of making it ‘better’. Finally, there is the opinion that British influence was fairly marginal. At the other extreme from Bagchi stood Eric Stokes, who, as will be discussed later, contrasted the economic performance of the eastern and western halves of the Gangetic plain by relying particularly on a range of indigenous physical, cultural and institutional differences.32 I hope to get beyond colonial categories, such as the equation of tenants, raiyats, cultivators and peasants, and replace them with socio-economic distinctions evident in the countryside.33 I shall try to escape notions of linear progression. Insisting on multiple causes and effects will avoid one pitfall of focusing on state policies. Access to land, for example, is an obvious factor in all development models, to be discussed here at length. But there was no unambiguous movement in India from restricted social possession to a free market. Collective and individual ownership co-existed; there were degrees of land scarcity and limits on acquisition. Expense or effort of clearance, dangers of conquest and price of purchase all give land value, while joint-family pressure and public regulation restrict its transfer. Similarly, structural developments (improved communications, law or state intervention) may explain increased production or trade, but aspects of production were not transformed in Bihar. External credit was provided for commercial agriculture conducted by largely precolonial systems of production. The story to be told is of partly failed attempts at improvement, a failure that may have been indigenous and contextual or theory- and policy-related, 12

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or all of these. To reiterate: rural Bihar may have been resistant to ‘modern’ improvement and the colonial government may have made matters worse. Or the fault may have lain with the remedies, not their recipients. Features of agricultural production and work-management affected these outcomes. Two of my studies provided relevant descriptions of agricultural conditions.34 ‘Hierarchy and Resources’ showed contingent economic ranking in a Bihari village, outside very broad parameters, judging from patterns of land use. Such evidence of fluid, not structural, differentiation implied persistent interdependence rather than individual decision making—effects also of social norms and exclusion and oppression. ‘Peasants’ Choices’ described the non-commercial nature of commercial agriculture from the cultivators’ perspective and the ubiquitous commercial and social intermediaries who forced or encouraged market production. Alongside co-existence of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes35 could be found fragmentation of landholdings and production units, a confusion of mixed cropping and growing impediments to crop rotation. Mixed cropping was the rule, except for rice, even in canal-irrigated villages or areas devoted to a single commercial crop.36 As already implied, a question for British administrators in nineteenth-­ century Bihar was not if there were inherent technological, ecological or cultural barriers that could not be overcome but if the intended remedies were appropriate to political conditions and social norms. Science plays a part in this story, supporting a cogent statement provided by Gyan Prakash. Its ‘cultural authority’ in India, he explained, started with the British ‘civilizing mission’. After 1857, ‘bit by bit a new structure of governance crystallized, and India emerged as a space assembled by modern institutions, infrastructures, knowledges, and practices’. Science was constituted as ‘universal reason’ but also as ‘dissolving and secularizing’ superstition. It was thus a ‘profoundly contradictory enterprise’, conscious but unable to overcome ‘the paradox’ of practising ‘despotism in order to project the ideal of freedom’. The British developed what Prakash described, following Foucault, as ‘a pastoral form of power’, its ‘chief concern’ the people to be classified, protected and ‘improved’, but they were aware India was not tabula rasa: ‘modernity’ had to be ‘translated into the idioms of those it sought to transform’. The Western authority of science was not forged before but during colonial exploration, trade and dominion. Yet the ‘laboratory of modernization’ in India was ‘underfunded and over-extended’, with ‘minimum . . . expense and maximum . . . ambition’.37 This book will assess colonial impact and conditions in Bihar and therefore ways ‘colonialism’ worked under Indian conditions and upon Indians. It will discuss conflicts between the imperial and the local, the large-scale and the small, some relating to system—such as local agency—and others to ‘knowledge’. Political economy, science, engineering and technology will be in apposition to indigenous and environmental realities. The latter include local agrarian structure, agricultural practices, priorities, customs, beliefs 13

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and the roles of intermediaries but also general issues such as famine and widening disparities of income, resources and information. Relevant, but mainly beyond the remit of this study, are developing ‘class’ interests and political rivalry and resistance.

Notes 1 In many ways this emphasis is not ideal, but see ch.2, n.1, this volume. Note that this book covers districts later included in Tirhut Division but mostly excludes Monghyr, Bhagalpur and Purnea to the east and Palamau and Hazaribagh to the south. Earlier accounts of rural Bihar are listed in the bibliography; none offer quite this focus. The nearest are Pouchepadass, State, Power and Market, on Champaran, and Hill, River of Sorrow, about Purnea district. Rorabacher, Bihar, though apparently similar, has general, theoretical essays on development and ‘backwardness’, discussing the latter mainly from after 1950. It claimed Bihar was ‘rapidly becoming backward’ from the early 1950s (emphasis added; ch.2) shown by agricultural output per acre and per capita (ch.3). This might seem to follow from the Muzaffarpur SR claim (1892–3, p.  357) that it was ‘only partially true’ that people in Bihar were ‘impoverished and depressed’: the cause could not be high rents, for tenants were comparatively well-off where rents were highest; nor subletting or insecurity of tenure because ‘not more than half the produce is paid as rent’ and ‘the high caste cultivator’ had long had security (emphasis added); nor overpopulation as famine had struck harder in less-populated Champaran, and, though ‘demand for labour’ had not increased with population, ‘any one familiar with the subject . . . would testify that the labourers in Bihar are better off than 20 years ago’. Even from internal evidence this optimism seems self-serving. However, in a sense, Bihar’s relative poverty is not crucial for this book. Its subject is the impact of British development policy, in detail, at a time when rapid population growth and export failures had not yet exacerbated the situation in Bihar. 2 See https//census2011.co.in; https://en.m.wikipedia.org, accessed 28 January  2020. At the national level there still are remarkable continuities despite India’s economic growth. For example, in 2017/18 over half rural households were ‘self-employed’, often meaning they were marginal cultivators or artisans, while a quarter survived through casual labour, according to the Government of India, National Statistical Office (2019), Annual Report, Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2017/18. 3 Das, State of Bihar, pp. 15, 33. 4 These are not arguments that British rule had little influence. I have discussed some of the mechanisms whereby even a ‘limited raj’ had significant impact in Robb, Liberalism, passim but especially pp. 176–86. 5 Versions of this outline were published in Robb, ‘Bihar, the Colonial State’. 6 Baker, Indian Rural Economy, argues inter alia that the growth of state power may have been the most significant change of the latter part of British rule in India. See also Bharadwaj, ‘View of Commercialisation’, especially pp. 10–16, for a discussion of the context and limitations of economic change in this period. 7 Rorabacher, Bihar, relates ‘backwardness’ to a range of ecological and social factors (ch.1) but thinks they ‘did not fit together well’. He refers to ‘gossamer threads of history’ and a ‘form of socio-economic group cohesiveness’ resulting in ‘inability to reshape and control . . . [the] changing social, economic, and political environment’ (p. 41). Pulling threads together in ch.7, he finds ‘no single,

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readily identifiable cause for Mithila’s backwardness’. Despite some common ground on embankments, irrigation, society and law, his very general assessment of local conditions differs from my concern with the interplay between state policy and rural practice, balancing specific external and intrinsic factors. Other comparisons might be made, on Punjab, with Bhattacharya, Great Agrarian Conquest. 8 See Robb, Government of India. Efforts were made to widen participation for political reasons with special and communal electorates (and some involvement of princes), but these further distorted the constitutional reforms without altering their fundamental procedures or direction of travel. 9 For example, Ezra Rashkow, ‘The Tribal Problem’ (draft book chapter, courtesy of the author), makes a similar point about policies on Indian ‘tribals’: Noteworthy here is that whether these administrators and anthropologists supported isolation, assimilation, or integration, all three positions were deeply paternalistic: all three presented tribes as needing to be cared for because they could not care for themselves. Rarely in the literature do we ever find any suggestion of asking the tribes what they themselves wanted, and there never was an official policy of consulting the communities in question.   Ignoring agency and failing to consult seem typical. Similarly, I suggest, British Indian agrarian development policy misconstrued or recognised but in practice overrode the conditions of production and trade that it purported to improve, while failing to consult the local producers or effectively consider or value their knowledge. If not merely true of governments, this seems a product of the difference between all kinds of rulers and their subjects and arguably was especially apparent under an imperial regime. Also, as Rashkow shows, paternalist reformers had to believe their subjects reformable but, like Christian missionaries, often seemed to think that reform meant the subjects would disappear, become something quite different. If that were not enough, even the most idealistic and balanced approaches were often undermined by conflicting priorities and realpolitik. 10 Sultan, ‘Malcolm Darling’. 11 See Jha, Land, Labour, setting out causes (ch.1), starting with the low yield of crops, for poverty that was ‘crushing the rural masses of Bihar’. She lists other usual suspects including poor equipment and cultivation, inadequate seeds, irregular water supply, indebtedness (and ‘improvidence’), forced labour, poor health, a ‘faulty land system’ and failures of scientific and other development. Her account of Congress government efforts culminating in so-called zamindari abolition leads inexorably to conditions eloquently described by Januzzi, Agrarian Crisis, and then Chakravarti, Social Power, and to déjà vu for those looking before 1900. 12 Those championing state action range from acolytes of Rostow to structuralists, opposed by classical economists and their followers and more recently in structural adjustment programmes. In recent decades public policy in the United States and Britain seemed to value unbridled individualism and self-gratification above all, unlike Victorians inculcating doctrines of hard work, loyalty and civic responsibility, initially in local government. Central governments, taking over the municipal role, may subvert it, as in Britain from the 1980s, while wars, depressions and pandemics suspend the debates and favour state action, as in 2020.

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13 Examined empirically, markets may not always have a much better record of long-term economic success than bureaucracies. Public success stories including universities contrast with private sharp practice; many companies poorly balance profit distribution, development and employees’ well-being; success that chief executives attribute to their richly rewarded efforts can owe more to borrowing on good terms, evading external constraints and ignoring the public good. 14 Holmes, ‘How the World Works’. 15 States do not necessarily create development—interventions may be ­insufficient—nor will quality of public goods guarantee it. Economic advance may be driven by private force and so-called rent appropriation, profits increased when grasped by the powerful. But weak regulation (as now in aspects of the global economy) may encourage fraud, recklessness, waste, unfair competition, irresponsibility and exploitation, creating entry barriers, increasing transaction costs, limiting investment, skill-pools, markets, trade and internal consumption. Conversely, protecting the poor and respecting human rights have other benefits. 16 Nowadays Soviet Russia is cited as the example of over-regulated failure despite industrial and strategic rebuilding after two twentieth-century wars. Earlier, British nationalised industries were seen as a wearisome story of decline, forgetting the long haul back after 1945, because civil servants had neither experience nor motivation to innovate or maximise efficiency and politicians pursued public and social instead of corporate goals, feared a labour force that also voted and creamed off profits to reduce taxes. By contrast, India supposedly leapt forward once freed from stifling state regulation imposed under the British and by a generation of Indian rulers. Even centrally controlled China benefited from delegated decision-making and decentralised responsibility and rewards, though lack of management agility may stall its progress. Perhaps production is less adaptable and efficient both when the state commands and monopoly prevails. 17 This invited dependency theory. I shall argue there was no ambiguous movement in Bihar from restricted possession to a free land-market or from labour surplus to shortage, given persistent socio-economic controls; agriculture was changed, not transformed, by commercial production and external capital. 18 These approximate to chapters in van Zanden, Long Road, arguing for development of distinctive preconditions between 1000 and 1800, a ‘long prologue’ (p. 291) for the ‘major historical breakthrough’ (citing Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread, New Haven 1966) to ‘sustained increase in per capita income combined with structural change’, through industrialisation and ‘related’ changes in agriculture and services (p. 1). 19 It could result from petty selfish advantage, not grand systemic advance. Steam is said to have replaced water-power in Britain for temporal and spatial flexibility, not technological superiority: labour efficiency to serve capitalists rather than society; Malm, Fossil Capital. 20 Pomeranz, Great Divergence. On earlier non-Western economic strength see also Frank, ReOrient. 21 Yazdani, India, Modernity, esp. pp.  13–14 ff., 24, 32–61 (references are to a PDF copy courtesy of the author, with thanks); and Frankopan, Silk Roads. See discussion expanding on this paragraph in Robb, Ideas Matter, pp. 6–8. 22 Moore, Capitalism. 23 Useful discussions may be found in Dewey, Arrested Development. 24 Yazdani, India, Modernity, p. 24.

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25 See for example ibid., pp. 62–3: Gujarat’s and Mysore’s depth of secular philosophical discussion, the level of science, secular education, circulation of knowledge . . ., secularisation of society . . ., institutional efficiency . . ., property rights . . ., the nascent bourgeois class consciousness, inter-communal and protonational identity formations . . . seem to have been less developed than in advanced parts of 17th and 18th century Western Europe, especially England, France and the Dutch Republic and . . . also less vigorous than in advanced parts of China and Japan. Furthermore, contingent geoclimatic circumstances . . . were probably more apt in Western Europe, implying lesser degrees of South Asian transport capacities (during the wet season) and market integration, even though its effects should not be exaggerated. More or less like many European cities, however, urban centers of Mughal and post-Mughal India (e.g. Delhi, Lucknow, Surat) witnessed the gradual emergence of a “public sphere” . . . . Moreover, the two regions . . . possessed a substantial level of agricultural growth . . ., living standards . . ., transport (during the dry season) and infrastructure .  .  ., military capabilities in terms of ground forces (in the case of Mysore . . .), commercial and manufacturing capacities . . . and social mobility of merchants (in the case of Gujarat . . .) that—in spite of less dynamism, inventions and innovations—did not look unfavorable when compared to European core areas. At least since the second half of the 18th century, a number of Indo-Persian writers and rulers were interested in Europe and European innovations . . . . India was superior in some branches of technology and manufacturing and also in a few branches of science and philosophy, while the Europeans were leading in others, including the all-important ‘engine culture’. . . . Some advanced Indian regions, like Gujarat, were better equipped in terms of merchant capital . . . and were globally more competitive in certain commodities (especially dyes, textiles and ships) than most European countries . . ., whereas, fortuitous American bullion reserves permitted the Europeans to purchase Asian wares, as they had few products (e.g. guns, glass and mechanical instruments) that Asians were willing to buy. 26 For example in Mysore (ibid., pp. 124–360) property rights, industry, communications, administration, technology including weaponry, education and so on were not necessarily a disadvantage compared with Europe; but ‘Islamic theocracy’ possibly was, despite Tipu’s ‘openness’ to innovation, because of the marginalising and penalising of non-Muslims. See also p. 576: ‘internal structural shortcomings, as well as exogenous, contingent and contextual conjunctures are essential ingredients to understand Gujarat’s and Mysore’s falling behind advanced parts of Europe’. 27 Arguments about the significance of Indian conditions should not be taken as ‘excuses’ for any British failings, nor should they be equated with ideas that continue to be promoted about long-term stability in India, for example of social attitudes, mercantile status, limited property ownership, effective labour scarcity and ecological adaptation little changed by the impact of Mughal or British rule; Lal, Hindu Equilibrium. 28 Dewey, Steamboats, p. 251. 29 Empiricism, admitting no interpretation is ‘pure’ yet trying to respond to evidence alone, seems almost neglected among modern historians of India, when

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records are not ignored but explanations rely less on data than on theories or attitudes to imperialism, nationalism or anti-capitalism, sometimes on what was said at the time, not what happened—now-exploded assumptions that factories necessarily wipe out handicrafts or capitalist funding always implied capitalist production methods. My discussions include Robb, ‘British Rule’. 30 Bagchi, ‘Relation of Agriculture’. 31 Washbrook, ‘Law, State’. 32 Stokes, ‘Dynamism’. See ch.7. 33 Of these ‘peasant’ may be the most problematic, as seemed to me demonstrated by Thorner, ‘Peasant Economy’, and in a different way by Habib, ‘Peasant in Indian History’. The problem is related to another theme here, the persistence of ‘apparently archaic features’ and a view that ‘essential aspects of India’s precolonial social order outlasted colonial rule’; Perlin, ‘Proto-industrialization’, pp. 52–3. Hence, similar pitfalls occur in other fields. For example, Sinha, Communication, shows that emphasising the novelty of railways ‘threatens to flatten the rich and changing history’ of pre-railway circulation (p. xxi), thus misrepresenting existing conditions and the impact of colonial rule or new technologies. 34 Robb, ‘Peasants’ Choices?’ and ‘Hierarchy and Resources’. Despite specific Bihari features, such intermediaries are universal: people in nineteenth-century Odessa became rich by ‘cornering the market’ in grain, buying from ‘middlemen who transported it on carts along deeply rutted roads’; de Waal, Hare, p. 24. 35 See also Yazdani, India, Modernity, pp. 31–5. 36 See note by D.J. MacPherson (officer on special duty), 9 April 1884, PCR 341 10/63(9) 1884/5. 37 Prakash, Another Reason, pp. 3–14. I shall not follow up on his important conclusions that nationalism arose ‘by appropriating classical texts and traditions of science as the heritage of the nation’, permitting an indigenized science with a close link to politics, ‘dramatizing the . . . language of reason as an idiom of power’, despite the predicament of recognising Western authority with a ‘Westerneducated elite at the borderlines between cultures’. The subjects of colonial medical scrutiny and strategies were ‘irreducibly Indian’, leading to attempts to identify and separate ‘Indian medicine’, and technical means to control communications and production (that I shall discuss) fuelled demands for the national development colonial rule had distorted and undermined. Thus, India’s ‘modern power . . . sought to overcome the limits imposed by its association with alien dominance’. See Kumar, ‘Modernization’, pp. 634–6, for an overview, especially on agricultural science.

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2 CONTEXT AND AGENDA

The context: agriculture Well into the twentieth century (and in many ways since then) agriculture was the necessary foundation of Indian economic activity, not least in Gangetic Bihar. This chapter provides a broad description of agriculture in India as a whole and a short overview of British interventions in general.1 It provides a checklist to help assess the general significance of policies and conditions in Bihar.2 In most settled agricultural areas in India, millets were a major food crop. Rice and wheat were very widely grown, rice especially in wetter zones and river valleys and wheat particularly in the drier northwest. In each locality those crops were usually intended both for consumption and for sale but existed in myriad varieties (obscured by the English crop names), some cultivated primarily for the market and some for food. There were wide variations between and within regions, and within localities, but on average food crops occupied about 60 per cent of cultivated land in the early periods of British rule and probably before then as well. Other food crops, especially varieties of oilseed, maize, peas and lentils, took up another 20 per cent or so of land. In some areas, important items for consumption or export were various spices and exotic crops—chillies, groundnuts, tobacco and potatoes (the last treated with suspicion, especially by Brahmans, until the mid-nineteenth century or beyond). In general, so-called cash crops—mainly relied upon to meet external obligations or provide profit—occupied the remaining 20 per cent of cultivated area in the period covered by this book. Before as well as during British rule, cotton, opium, indigo and sugar were the most important; silk was also produced in significant quantities. Though there were limited areas focused on exports, such as some riverine tracts in north India, cash crops were typically dispersed across numerous cultivators’ holdings, a pattern that persisted even as international exports grew. Finally, pastoralism was widespread. In many areas it was not only important for local people but the mainstay for seasonal migrants who might also provide harvest labour. 19

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Some areas were irrigated and double- or even triple-cropped. Mostly there were two main harvests a year, each associated with particular crops or varieties, even when the production cycle extended over more than one season, as was the case for sugarcane. In many areas the rabi (spring) harvest was the most important for cash crops. Even on artificially irrigated holdings, the agricultural cycle was dominated by climate: monsoon and lesser seasonal rains, summer meltwater from high mountains, occasional frost in northern lands and almost everywhere droughts in the hot weather. Because seasons varied, and for political and social reasons, cultivators were adaptable, changing crops and methods according to conditions; they were generally risk-averse. They relied on hardy millets and frequently preferred drought- and pest-resistant though at best less-productive varieties of other crops.3 They often mixed different crops in one field, limiting their reliance on any crop or season. Some regions had little cultivable waste but in others (especially in large tracts of the south and hilly regions flanking the great north Indian plains) wastelands were used for grazing, food- and fuel-­ gathering or occasional cultivation.4 In some places much land was held and cultivated jointly and in others differing proportions were cultivated by family units, free and unfree labour or non-resident farmers. Land could be transferred or reallocated through a rich mix of entrenched customs. Dominance did not depend only on land control but on prestige, wealth, stores of grain and force of arms. Everywhere collective arrangements could govern access to land, use of cattle, ploughs and water and even harvests. Variations related to density of population and agricultural conditions.5 Thus cultivation, primarily undertaken in household units, was complicated by interdependence, dominance and dependency. Practice varied with conditions, from famous hard black soils of Bellary in South India that needed very heavy ploughs drawn by up to 16 oxen to rich floodplains of Purnea, Bihar, where cultivators were said merely to scatter their rice seed in the mud as river-water receded. Crop rotation and manuring were understood but not always affordable; in many areas there had been little systematic improvement in methods, implements or seed quality over long periods, though at the start of colonial rule yields were not necessarily lower than those in contemporary Europe. Rarely were landholdings and landownership consolidated on adjacent plots; holdings might differ markedly from one year to the next as well as over longer periods, for reasons of fortune or family cycles. This was significantly different from Western Europe, where feudalism and then enclosure encouraged consolidated units of production. Cooperative work was common for irrigation, sowing and harvesting and for some processing (for example, of sugar). Many cultivators undertook unpaid work for dominant landholders or shared collective tasks such as building and maintaining roads, pathways, field breaks, water channels, reservoirs and embankments or providing social and religious services. Many 20

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tasks (spinning, weaving, oil-pressing and so on) were undertaken by specialists, identified by caste, as well as by members of cultivators’ households; the specialists might also cultivate plots for food. Ploughmen and artisans often worked for a share of the harvest. Paid workers and semi-servile or bonded labourers were widely employed. Unequal relationships often persisted between families for generations. Many networks of interdependence and a host of more or less privileged intermediaries existed both within and beyond villages, supported by dues, cash payments or harvest shares. Their function was to regulate payments and access to land; support rituals, temples, shrines or mosques; provide for augury, genealogy and marriage; and distribute goods and services.6 Agriculture played an important role in defining society. Dry, shifting and marginal cultivation tended to encourage ‘tribal’ social models, emphasising patriarchy, military prowess and relative equality, at least among those who controlled land. Richer and irrigated lands favoured social models based around more settled, hierarchical organisation, mostly patriarchal but in a few instances matrilineal. Local detail was less clear-cut. For example, as remarked in the Muzaffarpur settlement report of 1901, employment data were obscured by ‘the traditional caste occupation’ that Hindus professed and officials mostly recorded regardless of practice. Thus only about 1 per cent of the population was returned as field-labourers. The true proportion dependant on agriculture was thought to be at least 85 per cent. A survey of 22 villages suggested 60 per cent were ‘pure cultivators’, nearly 19 per cent ‘cultivating labourers’ (mixing personal cultivation with work for others) and 9 per cent landless labourers, leaving 12 per cent not directly engaged in agriculture. Bhabataran Chatterjee, officer in charge of the investigation, concluded that two-thirds of people lived by cultivation and one-third by labour.7 Poverty was likely to be associated with the labourers, except for a few artisans, but many cultivators were also poor. These conditions and proportions were fairly typical of Bihar. In many cases extra-local political power exercised by state functionaries, regional chiefs or religious foundations played a role in agriculture and redistribution of surplus. There is evidence of exploitation and oppression of ordinary cultivators and workers. One official’s account in 1846 described the impact of land-revenue demands in Ahmadnagar in the Deccan, where moneylenders lent to the revenue payers and then commandeered the indebted cultivators’ whole output at very low prices.8 In the same general region, ‘alien’ groups found it hard to break into landownership, but rich peasant landholders and intermediary economic controllers were reinforced as more commercial agriculture developed. It had not been ‘primitive village egalitarianism’ before that; ‘beneficiaries of economic and social change’ came ‘from groups with established prominent positions’.9 Such hierarchy was widespread. In 1832, in Ferozepur, Punjab, under Sikh rule, Hindu merchants owned almost all the seed, animals and implements 21

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needed for production; impoverished cultivators were forced to borrow at vast interest rates in order to survive.10 Even in Punjab canal colonies after 1900, family farms covered only about half the cultivated area; the remainder was largely rented out. The colonies’ land grants, intended for peasant farmers, were initially too large, allowing subtenancies and employment of non-family labour, replicating norms of Indian village life in a highly artificial situation.11 Similarly, sub-infeudation was well-advanced in Bengal even before 1793, when superior landownership was fixed. Land control generally followed caste status, despite some low-caste zamindars. In precolonial times there were more revenue-free holdings, not just for charity or services but to encourage agricultural extension.12 Land reclamation and forest clearing then benefited dominant villagers once again, not necessarily because they monopolised the land but because they captured output by providing credit. In the context of eastwardly moving rivers and a ‘booming rice frontier’ from the seventeenth century, ‘complex tenure chains’ developed, with ‘wide scope for countless intermediaries who were, in effect, capitalist speculators, or classical revenue farmers’. The system was still in evidence in Bakarganj district at the time of its settlement report of 1908.13 It was linked to commercial agriculture—jute particularly. Its spread depended on investment and marketing. In Mymensingh, according one report, it was first grown by raiyats (tenant-cultivators) of substance. Given poor communications, it could not find its way to market without intermediaries. An early example was a single mahajan (merchant or moneylender) able to sell the crop in Sirajganj on the Brahmaputra river. Later, population grew and commercial production increased with improved connections and advances of money or materials that, however, perpetuated the systems of control.14 Unsurprisingly much of this emphasis on hierarchy and dominance was echoed in contemporary British accounts, sometimes with concomitant judgments that are hard to stomach today, though they broaden our understanding of deep social and cultural aspects of this rural economy. The Muzaffarpur report of 1901 identified the influence in north Bihar of what it called a ‘high degree’ of Hindu learning and culture largely unaffected by Mughal rule but causing the ‘degradation’, not the amelioration, of the ‘moral and material condition of the people’—‘a deplorable reflection on the Hindu social system’—leaving ‘the lower classes . . . most degraded and most depressed’. To take one more example among many, a judge, Cecil Walsh, reflecting on village crime in 1929, commented on the lack of public responsibility in India alongside a strong sense of mutual involvement within families and castes. He gave examples of rural oppression, village factions and feuds, enforced social and economic behaviour and culturally specific views of right and wrong. Applied to agriculture, these norms helped shape practice and priorities.15 22

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By definition they were features of villages but not confined to them. One reason was that, well before the arrival of the Europeans, India had widespread trade in high-value items, supported in some areas by transport, finance, banking and insurance, mainly under the aegis of regional networks of merchant families. Movements of bulky goods, especially on the plains and along navigable rivers, sustained local towns and some great cities and also numerous peripatetic military forces. Cloth, salt, oil, sugar and grain were the main bulk commodities. For rural communities, longdistance trade was more limited but mattered for salt, shawls and carpets, pottery and metal goods. Urban centres contained high proportions of craft and service personnel and depended on recruitment of labour and rural production. Most cultivating households were taxed directly or indirectly, either in cash or in kind, but each locality had to render payments ultimately in cash. Except where there were large landlords, various kinds of broker generally managed this relationship with the state. Credit and exchange systems then helped shape agricultural practice. The systems were facilitated by local markets and travelling merchants but dominated by caste and kinship ties. Richer families and professional moneylender-traders provided loans in cash or in kind. Stores of food and cash in most localities, though by no means every household, supported the population between harvests and during poor seasons. Almost all these all-India conditions and influences had some equivalent in Bihar. During the nineteenth century, commercial production increased and exports of largely unprocessed agricultural produce expanded enormously, following a sharp decline of the trade in manufactured cotton piece goods around 1800. Relatively large and inflexible land-revenue demands may have stimulated increased production of commercial crops. In Tinnevelly district in south India, for example, cotton acreage increased fourfold between 1812 and 1852.16 In addition, although (as said) crops such as cotton, opium and indigo had long been produced for the market, they became important commodities of international trade; several attracted European capital or fell under European management from the later eighteenth century. Much the same was true of tea, coffee and jute when they developed as major cash crops. Tea production was introduced, mainly in the northeast, and coffee growing increased in the southern Indian hill country, joined there by tea after the 1850s. Cotton producers began to be subject to international prices. For two main reasons—capital investment and state intervention—the modern history of commercial agriculture in the Indian subcontinent divides not in the late eighteenth century, as once supposed, but in the later nineteenth century. International trade in agricultural produce and its impact upon the areas of production reached new levels after about 1860. Raw cotton fed British and then also Indian and Japanese mills. Jute, again processed both in India (especially Bengal) and in Britain, grew enormously 23

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alongside world trade, for which it supplied sacking. Food exports became more important from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially from newly irrigated areas such as those in Punjab, where there was already a ‘sophisticated’ market for wheat.17 In international terms, by the late nineteenth century India had a mature ‘colonial economy’ devoted to production and export of raw materials and consumption of imported manufactured goods.18 Overall there was marked expansion, despite major fluctuations, until the third decade of the twentieth century. International prices, already observed to have impact in the 1820s, became more influential.19 Exports gradually gained in local importance and played an important part in rural prosperity and dearth. As a measure of the scale of the increase, one index, taking the 1834 export figures as 100, gives 1,353 in 1891, 1,227 in 1897, 2,025 in 1905 and 3,115 in 1913. The growth suggests higher incomes, better communications and changing demand both in India and for its trading partners. Thus began the second ‘modern’ trading system of India.

Some trends and comparisons What did these changes mean, especially for rural communities? Their novelty or reach should not be overstated. Western India in particular had highly monetised trade even in the seventeenth century. In 1850 Bengal mainly exported opium, indigo and sugar and imported cotton and salt; it had large trade with other parts of India conducted by Indian merchants. India accounted for about a third of Asia’s regional trade, larger than Europe’s, in 1840. India’s international trade declined in relative importance after the 1830s.20 Production for export was a minority of India’s total agriculture and industry. Most local economies were not strongly integrated; prices differed markedly between places near to each other. They did seem to be converging in the 60 years before 1914 at central marts and for wholesalers, rather like a city’s public transport: better articulated along the spokes than around the rings. Generalisations about impact need to be qualified; they obscure many differences over time and between areas. First, visible imports were consistently smaller in quantity and value than exports, the difference representing 36 per cent of the value of exports in 1891, 40 per cent in 1903 and 23 per cent in 1913. The low demand reflected India’s large internal markets, infrastructural and cultural barriers, subsistence economies and widespread poverty. There was greater appetite for imports after 1920. Second, as Christopher Baker put it, closer regional links were being made by 1900 ‘within the outer shell of the Europe-dominated international economy’.21 Over time, India traded in a wider range of international markets, sometimes with a ‘metropolitan’ role exporting capital and manufactures and importing food and raw materials. Third, there was wide variation between regions and 24

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commodities. Between 1850 and 1930 a greater proportion of all exports was made up of jute goods and food grains, and eventually the former staples, opium and indigo, collapsed. In 1850/1, opium was about 30 per cent of India’s total exports, by value, and indigo 11 per cent. Indigo was at zero from 1910/11 and opium from 1920/1. Raw cotton was a constant proportion of exports, except for a spike in the 1870s related to the American civil war: about 19 per cent in 1850/1 and 21 per cent in 1930/1. Raw jute rose from 1 per cent in 1850/1 to 10 per cent in 1900/1 before dropping back to 6 per cent in 1930/1. Cotton goods were consistently between 4 and 9 per cent throughout the same period, but jute goods leapt from 1 per cent of the total in 1850/1 to 22 per cent in 1920/1. The scale of the increase may be judged from this index: if export values for 1899/1900 to 1903/4 are taken as 100, then those for 1879/8 to 1883/4 had been 15. These changes affected some parts of India more than others. Cotton manufacture was concentrated in Western India, while jute was largely manufactured near Calcutta. Raw cotton was notably produced in the Deccan and jute mainly grown in East Bengal. Food-grain exports were greatest from areas with major irrigation projects, such as Punjab. Both processing and export of irrigated crops indicated value being added locally. By contrast, opium and indigo had been most important for Bihar and eastern parts of the North-Western Provinces. Their local processing brought little or no extra value, and those producers and areas were major losers when the crops ceased to be traded. These varying circumstances were reflected in regional economic development, as will be discussed later. Government played a part. The last 70 years or so of British rule saw a transition to the government intervention that dominated until at least 1980. During this period, various economic changes increased the ambition and capacity of the state, and Indian expectations also grew. The colonial policies were not planned as a whole; they resulted from countless separate decisions; but the direction of travel was unmistakable. Change was apparent from at least the 1880s; the first peak in public spending came between 1900 and 1918: an increase of 200 per cent even though tax revenues went up by less than 60 per cent and total revenues by just over 40. These changes, given the nature of the colonial economy and fiscal system, meant that, at least at first, the British Indian government (though not its spending) concentrated even more on rural India. Military priorities and worries about disorder, public opinion, disease and poverty decreed that rural society attracted special attention, not as for previous Indian regimes but to an unprecedented degree: measures to encourage and assist peasant proprietors, support the ‘real’ India (against Indian intellectuals and politicians) and develop agriculture as part of a worldwide economy. Government-sponsored and private enterprise created sectors distinct from but complementary to regional trade and the informal so-called bazaar economy. Even the nineteenth century’s many equivocations did not conceal the state’s interventionist policies. 25

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Discussions in the 1870s and 1880s were particularly important. Famine was a spur. Occasional dearth had occurred before colonial rule and in eastern India (1769/70, 1791) and north India in the 1830s. Famine was widespread from the 1860s to the early twentieth century. It was a force of nature; nineteenth-century climate played a part—the el nino effect is shown in pioneering Indian weather records. But human causes were hotly debated. Governments exonerated and nationalists blamed revenue demand, food exports, commercialisation, falling productivity, village-community breakdown, rising population. Rulers believing in technology and progress found it convenient to point to local shortages of food or work and effects of profiteering or panic; officially, famines were identified by measurements of prices, ‘excess’ death rates and take-up of work at ‘distress’ wages. But high death rates, augmented by epidemic and endemic disease, were a catalyst for action. Famine directed attention to great swathes of the countryside. Townspeople and beggars were early victims, but the landless and cultivators with a little land but few reserves were often severely affected. After Famine Commissions (1880 and 1901) suffering was reduced through loans and relief work (though camps spread disease), aided by measures to improve property rights, agriculture and communications. Change was evident despite the wartime Bengal famine of 1941 and occasional scarcities after Independence.22 Public spending rose during the later nineteenth century and by almost 200 per cent between 1900 and 1913. Taxation grew more gradually, 40 per cent over the same period. A paradox, after years of agricultural policies, was that the proportion from land revenue declined from 53 to 35 per cent. The share from salt tax also fell by almost half, from 16 to 9 per cent; it was regressive and unpopular. Other taxes grew, especially income tax and customs and excise duties. A deficit remained, implying borrowing. India’s visible trade surplus was eroded by invisibles including the ‘home charges’ remitted to London; India was also a net importer of private treasure until 1931. Given the government’s long concern with rural conditions and perennial hopes for commercial agriculture, increased spending and relative reduction in land revenue might seem intended to benefit agriculture. No such calculation was made. Administration took a quarter of government spending, roughly speaking, defence a third (disproportionately in Punjab) and public works a fifth. The administrative costs supported official and legal activity in rural areas. Almost all public works spending went on communications, especially railways; 12 per cent on irrigation. Tiny sums went to education and other development, mostly in towns. Rural beneficiaries included official allies and export-oriented users of irrigation and railways; Punjab had such advantages plus military expenditure. Differences between regions matched those between rich and poor. British policy left a legacy. In a mature stage of India’s economy in later decades of the twentieth century, at least three-quarters of the rapidly 26

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growing population remained directly dependent on agriculture, while centrally managed planning concentrated on industry and a burgeoning public sector. Later rapid growth of services and technology largely benefited urban areas. Raw jute and cotton exports were progressively replaced by manufactured products. Some agricultural exports fell as local consumption grew. However, between the Partitions of India (1947) and Pakistan (1971), unlike in the nineteenth century, per capita output of most food crops expanded significantly. In Pakistan that was true both in the West and the East (now Bangladesh). In India new strains of high-yielding crops, greater use of fertilisers, mechanisation and further irrigation more than doubled food-crop production. Better marketing and increased investment benefited some rural regions and classes, although growing numbers of people remained terribly poor. These developments seemed like exaggerated versions of what happened in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Both differences between parts of India and long-term conditions were underlined by change in some indicators and relative stability in others. The proportion of workers of both sexes engaged in agriculture altered little from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Total population rose but did not expand rapidly before 1920; the dependency ratio was fairly constant. There were regional effects from internal and external migration and distortions from famine and disease. Numbers in Eastern India, including Bihar, were estimated to grow by 0.58 per cent per annum from 1891 to 1900, 0.75 per cent from 1901 to 1911 and 0.26 per cent from 1911 to 1921, against all-India rates of 0.11, 0.65 and 0.09. Set against these data are estimates of per capita income. They differ greatly. For the period 1900 to 1920, the consensus is there was growth, but some suggest a 20-year increase of over 25 per cent and others under 10 per cent. More importantly, evidence suggests gross levels of real income remained static for the agricultural sector (between Rs.21,000 and Rs.25,000 million); it grew for manufacturing and small-scale industry from Rs.4,000 to Rs.10,000  million. The standstill in agricultural incomes had diverse effects, given the dominance or oppression of individuals and more cultivation, new crops and irrigation in some places but not others. One change since the 1880s was that long-lasting price stability, concealing short-term local fluctuations, gave way to continual, sometimes rapid, inflation, in marked contrast with contemporary agricultural prices in the United Kingdom and United States. The underlying trend is sometimes attributed to the falling value of the rupee, but exchange rates were relatively stable after 1893 as Indian currency management improved. Whatever the reason, and though detailed figures are unreliable, a trend was clear from about 1890. According to one indicative index, if 1873 prices are taken to be 100, they were 117 in 1890, 143 in 1900 and 182 in 1915. Post-war in 1920 they were 302, a level not reached again until the 1940s. The non-agricultural price index went from 98 in 1890 and 95 in 1900 to 27

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116 in 1910 and 266 in 1920. Corresponding levels of the agricultural price index were 127 in 1890, 147 in 1900, 148 in 1910, and 319 in 1920. Inflation provided opportunities for cultivators able to sell their crops at current market prices. The regional picture varied. Prices were highest for sugar and jute and moderate for rice, wheat and jowar (sorghum); in 1947 they were markedly lower for cotton and indigo than they had been in 1875. Most stark are the different totals for agricultural produce. In Bombay Presidency, output at 1875 prices was said to be worth Rs.20 on average per person in 1868/9 and Rs.25 in 1940/1. For Madras Presidency the corresponding values were about Rs.11 and Rs.16; for Punjab about Rs.17 and Rs.18; for United Provinces Rs.12 and Rs.17. For Bengal, Bihar and Orissa they were Rs.16 in 1868/9 and just over Rs.13 in 1940/1.23

Improving Bihar: the agenda Impoverishment is an underlying concern of this book. The proximate subject, however, is the development role of the British. They underwent a remarkable political and psychological transition. After being supplicants at Indian courts and gaining a precarious foothold on the subcontinent, they became dominant arbiters of an empire—conquering lands, forcing treaties, building cities and monopolising items of trade. Their response was already evident, though not yet secure, by the end of the eighteenth century; it developed from pre-existing attitudes. In 1793 one English observer expressed contempt at what he thought excessive celebration of the end of war with Mysore, saying the ‘natives’ would think the British had been ‘cursedly frightened’ to show so much ‘Joy at Victory over a Barbarian & his undisciplined Rabble’. A little later, in 1799, just before hearing of the final defeat of Tipu Sultan, the same man responded with marked disquiet to rumours of an impending Muslim uprising in Calcutta. He worried about the ‘defenceless state’ of a city where ‘unarmed’ Europeans were ‘surrounded by a host of servants’. He was thus still in two minds at least about internal threats. For a would-be hegemonic state dangerous opponents lay within: in British India’s capital the defensive so-called Maratha ditch was started in the 1740s, never completed and, after 1799, more or less replaced by the Circular Road. On the other hand, even internal scares were already rare by 1800. More remarkable was the quiescence of the population, the honesty of many of the Company’s Indian servants and the self-confidence of hopelessly outnumbered Europeans.24 Interventionist policies followed political dominance. Some blamed the uprisings of 1857 on British interference and insensitivity, but afterwards a sense of being in control grew again, no longer seeming remarkable, despite increased caution about Indian reactions and a renewed idea that Indians needed to be watched, rewarded and appeased. The combination of sentiments produced a host of positive and conciliatory as well as defensive 28

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initiatives. They expressed disdain as well as being pragmatic or strategic and expressive of ideas about good government. One possible agenda was set out by W.W. Hunter in 1868, reflecting on the Bengal famine of 1769. He said the answer was better communications, works of irrigation and drainage at government expense or privately, and ‘giving the landed classes a permanent title to the soil—thus inducing them to enter on such works by securing them the profits’. The aim was ‘to develop the natural resources . . ., to call forth a spirit of enterprise . . ., to render each part less dependent on itself, and to bind up the commonwealth by the ties of mutual assistance and common interest’.25 This top-down strategy through law and public works remained the main option until modified by further famine and the demands of trade. Distinctive ideas shaped policies. Many will be discussed here, but they can readily be summarised. As Eric Stokes put it, ‘The physical and mental distance separating East and West was to be annihilated by the discoveries of science, by commercial intercourse, and by transplanting the genius of English laws and English education.’26 It was a ‘liberal programme to emancipate India from its own culture’, through policies and laws that were at the same time appropriate and fundamental, reflecting the ‘accidents’ of place but embodying universal principles.27 This brings us back to confidence and disdain. Thus were policies adopted with the ostensible purpose of improving conditions in Bihar. British rulers had developed an idea of India; its evolution can also be traced among Indian elites. One element was India as a continuous civilisation, the other evolution over time, particularly (the British believed) because reforms were ‘awakening’ India from its slumber. The stereotype was a degenerate but improvable India. It implied a duty of rulers to ensure public welfare, a long-standing trope in India, where many states promoted production and trade (as mentioned) even during the decline of Mughal power. Many critics claimed the opposite was true of British rule: its goals were entirely selfish, for Britain, not India. But whatever the ultimate balance sheet, an economic role always mattered to British government in India. Two objectives led to ideas of improvement in agrarian policy: control, to produce order and revenue, and trade, with increasing emphasis on agricultural production for export and widespread consumption of imported goods. Such ‘improvement’ was also regarded as a moral issue. A repeated British refrain was that Indians could not manage to better themselves. Explanations varied: fatalism, apathy, religious conservatism, decadence, ignorance, lack of resources, lack of capacity or aptitude, lack of will or social cohesion, and so on. Racism aside, these were self-serving excuses by imperialists faced with deteriorating conditions just as they professed to seek improvement. Supposed Indian inadequacies also had strategic purpose, to justify state intervention by those who favoured it against strong ideological and political objections—government should not get involved (in principle and for fear of reactions), but, if it did not, nothing would ever 29

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improve. The paternalist assumption was that colonial duty was to tackle infrastructure and objective conditions such as property ownership or crop varieties and also provide useful skills, whether through law, policy, formal education and training or example and advice. Involvement increased partly through bureaucratic means. Liberal imperialism was ‘justified’ by worthy purpose: bringing order, improvement and enlightenment to India. Railways and irrigation were the most obvious measures.28 British preferences resembled those of many other modernising states and agencies, to the present day: for grand, heavily engineered projects. Colonial government was happier with and better suited to dealing with large rather than small schemes, for example with irrigation canals rather than wells or water channels or tanks. In the south, major irrigation works began in Thanjavur in the late 1830s, a reconstruction of an eleventh-century canal. A decade or so earlier in north India, a start had been made on repairing canals that had been collapsing for some 50 years or more, leading eventually to a vast system around and between the Ganges and the Jumna rivers. Many such ambitious schemes were undertaken after 1858, using private capital raised under guarantee, not only in the NorthWestern Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) but also in Madras, Sind and most of all Punjab from the 1880s. By the later 1940s there were nearly 75,000 miles of public canals serving about a quarter of the cultivated area of British India, the acreage covered by major works having about doubled in 30 years. The relatively minor example to be considered here will be the Son canal system in Shahabad district. More prominent in Bihar was a new aim in the later nineteenth century, to create an Indian agricultural science by state action, even while officials were still debating the desirability and practicality of state involvement. Already under the East India Company there had been commitment to technology and science by both Bengalis and the British. In 1823, the Hindu College, for example, benefited from donations of equipment from the British India Society in London for teaching astronomy, optics, mechanics and chemistry. Initial British efforts were inspired by enthusiasts such as Robert Kyd at the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, focused on botany, zoology, geology, meteorology and trigonometrical surveys. Route and then revenue mapping were prominent.29 The government also argued that a key developmental function of the state was to secure people in their livelihoods and against oppression. Pushed to intervene, its efforts remained partial, however. In the 1870s, the Bengal government was unconvinced that the state would need to help cultivators to innovate and prosper once new laws protected them. But Agricultural Loans Acts and government-backed cooperative societies attempted to give agriculturalists financial resources and free them from the ‘clutches’ of moneylenders. The Government of India, while favouring legal reform, argued that progress also depended on improved crops and

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better methods. Many officials thought answers would be found largely through science, which the state should encourage. Agricultural farms and fairs would provide information, seeds and equipment. Later chapters cover different aspects of these policies. The context will be problems and distortions, not least from British priorities and misunderstandings and the way external and internal factors played off each other. Bihar rural society had its own character, as outlined: deep social hierarchies, persistent power, fragmentation of class and occupation. Land was deeply possessed, reinforced by British law, labour mobility restricted by social control. The application of capital was hedged in by custom; production remained small-scale and determinedly multi-crop. Cultivating decisions were often circumscribed by barriers to access to factors of production, land, capital, bullocks and implements, through debt, collective irrigation and bondage.30 Such features of agricultural production in Bihar were poorly accommodated by both officialdom and technology. British attitudes played a part in creating that conflict. There was no facile binary of scientific versus traditional knowledge, however. Rather, there was nuance, accommodation and ambiguity. Some investigations attended carefully to indigenous practices and priorities, as Sanjukta Ghosh showed for the Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa in Bihar.31 The paradox is that ideological criticisms often co-existed with respect for Indians and their knowledge or methods, in agriculture almost as much as in warfare for the so-called martial races. But Western ways and remedies were taken to be exemplary, while Indian society (on the whole) was regarded as degenerate, unable to achieve scientific, economic or political progress on its own— Indians often thought incapable of working together for the common good, even for such obvious needs as clean water and village sanitation. The British might concede the Indian farmer often knew his business and had tools and crops suited to his environment, but they were convinced development was something that had to be done by Westerners to Indians. They concentrated effort on what they thought the necessary instruments of progress— property, capital and trade. The focus implied a particular not a necessary strategy, one that continued to be influential after the end of British rule. British officials and agricultural experts in Bihar found it hard to avoid making farm-managers and landlords their target audience. There was little real or effective concern for consulting individual cultivators or equipping them to help themselves. This outline set out what this book is asking: were there systemic misunderstandings in colonial policy, law and science? The next chapter says more about British interventions and their impact on the poor in a poor region. But first will be a fuller discussion how the colonial government came to be involved in development in the first place.

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Notes 1 There are countless relevant studies. What follows is a distillation of my own findings and reading over many years. For background, see Kumar, Cambridge Economic History; Ludden, Agrarian History; Bose, Credit, Markets; Guha, Growth, Stagnation; Desai et  al., Agrarian Power; Chowdhury, Growth of Commercial Agriculture; Amin, Sugarcane; Ali, Punjab; Baker, Indian Rural Economy; and Pouchepadass, Land, Power and Market. The last of these, on Champaran and so especially relevant, is comprehensive and remarkable, an excellent discussion of land rights, commercialisation of agriculture, problems with statistics and other issues taken up in this present book. 2 This is a necessary substitute for an agreed quantitative assessment of how far agriculture and cropping patterns changed, a subject that remains hotly contested among historians. It could be a task for an agricultural economist, but a difficult one, because it is hard to secure reliable data or agree upon reliable generalisations. Few have made the attempt, and then mostly over a different time frame. The adoption of improved crop varieties, for example, was notable from the 1920s and 1930s rather than earlier, though the take-up was then rapid. High-yielding sugarcane was grown on a tiny proportion of the area under cultivation in 1920 but on over three-quarters by 1937/8, when corresponding figures were around two-thirds for jute, over a third for cotton and over a quarter for wheat. See Evenson et al., Agricultural Research, p. 26. For an earlier discussion quantifying the benefits of the dissemination of improved varieties of wheat and cotton in the Punjab, see Pray, Economics, and ‘Accuracy’, pp. 312–33. For the transformative impact of jute cultivation in Bengal, see Ali, Local History. 3 Many pests existed, not only insects but also birds such as the crows, rooks and ravens among others thought particularly injurious to bhadoi (autumn) crops such as millets; R&A Agric A16 July 1890. 4 Crop acreages varied between places and years, but as an example for Shahabad see R&A Agric C8 October, C12  & 20 January  & C7 December  1898: with 5% double-cropped, winter rice occupied over 63% of the land, wheat about 6%; rabi crops including barley, gram (a millet) and other cereals about 17.5%; bhadoi crops such as paddy, marwa (a millet) and maize about 12%. Indigo occupied about 0.4%, sugarcane about 8%. For English, Bihari and botanical crop names, see ‘List of the Principal Crops Grown in Bengal’, Calcutta 1895, R&A Agric C5 March 1895. Note the special words for crops in combination given in Grierson, Behar Peasant Life, pp. 214–15. 5 See for example Kumar, Land and Caste, p. 19, on land control in the relatively rich, surplus-producing Tanjavur district in 1817. 6 Typical cesses (abwabs) in Bihar included mangan, 5 seers of grain for having a plough; siddha, to help a zamindar celebrate his son’s marriage; tut, a discount when zamindars paid for crops; sarf-bhatta, a charge on cash-rent raiyats for converting produce or money into standard coins; various small fees for zamindari servants; and rasidana, a levy of 3 to 5 pie per head for patwaris; LR Report 1892/3, R&A Rev 358 12/9 1893/4. 7 Stephenson-Moore, Muzaffarpur SR, pp. 25–7. For views on Indian labour see Chattopadhyay, Conditions of Labour, pp.  1–10, and also Patnaik  & Dingwaney, Chains of Servitude, including Tanika Sarkar, ‘Bondage in the Colonial Context’. 8 Guha, Agrarian Economy, p. 70. 9 Charlesworth, Peasants, pp.  72, 201. The argument differed somewhat but reached the same general point.

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0 Roseberry, Imperial Rule in Punjab, p. 234, n.24. 1 11 Ali, Punjab, pp. 194–5. The average size of holdings declined over time through inheritance. 12 This has been argued by Datta, ‘Rural Society’. 13 Eaton, Rise of Islam, pp. 207, 221. 14 H.J. Reynolds’ report, 1858, referred to in Chakrabarty & Ando, ‘Revenue Survey’, p. 20. On population and land use, about a third of the land was estimated to be ‘waste’ at the end of the eighteenth century, and 598 out of 4,078 villages (15%) were said to be uninhabited in 1851; pp. 22–4, 45. Despite protests (p. 9), thakbast (boundary) surveys demarcated and mapped east Bengal’s villages or rather revenue units (mauza) between 1847 and 1865 (pp. 5, 31). 15 Stephenson-Moore, Muzaffarpur SR, pp.  6–7; Walsh, Indian Village Crimes, pp. 65, 84–8 (factions), 97–8 (izzat), 149–51 (oppression by a patwari), 212–13, 222 (by a thikadar), 224–8 (caste’s power; here over a wife’s morality). Walsh (1869–1946) served on the North-Western Provinces High Court. Hunter, Annals, noted ‘an infinite gradation in the rights of the various classes interested in land’ with peasant rights acknowledged in some districts and cultivators ‘mere serfs’ in others (p. 373) and, in another context, that it is ‘a bad thing for a race to be able to get other people to do its work during three thousand years’ (p. 137). For an example of strong traditional attitudes, despite external influence and even self-interest, see Sarkar, Essays, pp.  151–311, comparing Ramakrishna and Vidyasagar. 16 Kumar, Land and Caste, p. 114. 17 Ali, Punjab, p. 224. 18 This and the following paragraphs draw on K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments (1757–1947)’ and to a lesser extent A. Heston, ‘National Income’, Leela Visaria  and Pravin Visaria, ‘Population (1757–1947)’ and J. Krishnamurty, ‘The Occupational Structure’, in Kumar, Cambridge Economic History. 19 It may be that this effect is exaggerated in the record, as much of the available price data was taken at larger and central marketplaces. On early reactions to export opportunities, setbacks and prices, see Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, pp. 243–53, 263–7, 283–90. 20 See Sugihara, ‘Reconstructing’. 21 Baker, Indian Rural Economy, p. 100. 22 On famine see Bhatia, Famines; Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy; Stone, Canal Irrigation; McAlpin, Subject to Famine. See also ch.9, this volume. 23 See n.18 for statistical data in preceding paragraphs. 24 See Robb, Useful Friendship, pp. 3, 125, 130–3, 262; Sentiment and Self, pp. 10, 34–6. 25 Hunter, Annals, p. 55. He added (pp. 365–8) that English settlers were desirable to bring trade and force improvements of government and administration and that the ‘influx of British capital’ gave employment to a growing population. 26 Stokes, English Utilitarians, pp. xiii–iv. 27 Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p.  127. On the general point see especially pp. 123–50. 28 Railways, not being directly related to agriculture, will not be discussed. Sinha, Communication, provides an excellent account for Bihar. Government irrigation will feature, though it mattered less in Bihar than in some other areas. In some regions it was developed by precolonial states. In south India there were extensive works supported in part by grants of rent- or revenue-free land. Ancient well and tank irrigation was helped by tax concessions and grants under the

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Marathas too but declined in the disturbed conditions of the later eighteenth century. At first the East India Company let many irrigation systems fall into disrepair, for example in western Indian districts east of the Ghats—Pune, Satara, Sholapur, Bijapur. The situation was made worse by British laissez-faire policies, at least until the 1830s and the reform of excessive revenue rates in many regions. Similarly, around the same time, irrigation had been neglected under the Talpur mirs, rulers of Sind. 29 Basu, ‘Indian Response’, pp.  124, 126. Across the Indian empire geology and trigonometry predominated, employing 62 senior European officers against a total of 15 in the other three disciplines named. See also Sen, ‘Introduction of Western Science’, and Biswas, Science. 30 See D.J. McPherson on Shahabad district, 9 April  1884, PCR 341 10/63(9) 1884/5. 31 The Agricultural Research Institute, aided initially by a large private donation, began work at Pusa in 1905, on land acquired by the East India Company in 1784. Comprising departments of agriculture, cattle breeding, chemistry, economic botany and mycology, with bacteriology added 1907, it was renamed Imperial Institute of Agricultural Research in 1911 and Imperial Agricultural Research Institute in 1919. It was moved to Delhi in 1936 after suffering serious earthquake damage in 1934. The Pusa Institute and especially the Howards’ work there provide interesting examples, to be discussed later. See Ghosh, ‘Scientific Knowledge’, pp. 298–319. Kumar, ‘Modernization’, mentions Howard’s standing and attitudes while analysing American missionaries in United Provinces and an alternative role for agricultural science: small-farm indigenous mobilisation, an alternative to the top-down approaches mostly discussed in this book.

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Part I STATES AND SOCIETIES

3 STATE MATTERS

Why development? States develop by co-opting public support for internal order and external protection. Environments favour change: ideas move societies; doctrines both follow and prescribe practice. It is said the French revolution hastened political concessions in England and cholera concentrated minds on public health and sanitation. Governments become concerned for practical reasons, not least fears and self-interest of the elites, and gain functions by devising national interests and promoting that ideological construct, a national economy. Measures follow from definition of citizens and responsibility assumed for their welfare. State roles extend as more people are known—investigations reveal their number and condition. They build on centrally collected data such as the English census from 1801. The new kinds of records and administration were exported to India. Policies depended on respect for rules and law that was vital to British policymaking. In retreat more recently in Britain, for hundreds of years it was a remarkable feature of national culture and a proud, not to say complacent, self-image. Law was the foundation of rights and the answer to problems; laws were the goal of science and a basis for civilised conduct. Origins of the preference lay, perhaps, in Britain’s unwritten constitution, Parliamentary supremacy, courts and bureaucracies bound by regulation and precedent— ways things were done and thought about and institutionalised. It was an exercise in power as well as self-denial and easily conceded by those able to suborn or coerce poorer subjects or colonised people. Frequently forgotten in cases of necessity or expediency, with suitable excuses, it remained a core reflex in Indian administration as in home policy and international relations.1 The East India Company, it has been argued, was despotic, but (as the seventeenth-century jurists argued) it was a despotism under law: not being limited specifically by the Charter that created it, it was able to make local laws ‘as absolute and beholden to the same principles as if it were the king himself’. The King’s right, hotly disputed, was not absolute because he was 37

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‘beholden’ to certain principles; royal authority was progressively limited.2 Obsessive legalism in British governance derived from thus curbing the Crown and then the much-reviled East India Company by common law and parliament. The Government of India after 1858 was even more firmly yoked to constitutional authority and committed to law, including (up to a point) that prevailing in India. Disputes and policy debates often resolved on the question: ‘What is the law?’ It could be a cover for self-interest or even despotism, but professed regard for law and thereby rights helped generate the progressive goals of liberal imperialism and a development agenda. An excellent brief account of early East India Company arguments about government responsibilities and the goal of ‘improvement’ was provided by Tobias Wolffhardt in regard to Madras presidency. He started with the Company’s recognition that the south was different; experiments with some types of revenue collection had already required knowledge of the countryside, leading to the surveys devised by Alexander Read and Thomas Munro. Then works such as Francis Greville’s British India Analyzed (1793) and John Sullivan’s Tracts upon India (1794) popularised the idea that British rulers had a duty to conquered lands and peoples requiring ‘direct and minute attention’. When several devastating floods attracted adverse public notice, with much evidence of poor maintenance of protective works and irrigation, Colin Mackenzie, later Surveyor-General, highlighted the Company’s neglect; a Superintendent of Tank Repairs was appointed. Civil, not just military, surveys came to be thought necessary. Major improvement in irrigation and water management was planned, started and forgotten. Wolffhardt described the Company’s attitude as ‘inconsistent’, but three desiderata were established: for improvement, precise knowledge and historical awareness. The aim was ‘gradual change in harmony with social, cultural and natural conditions’. We shall see how well that fared. It represented one aspect of colonial development agenda, the other being the desire to discharge admitted responsibility through wholesale change and Westernisation.3 Thus, almost from the first, even when the East India Company asserted naked self-interest to justify ruling India, alternative voices insisted on the long-term responsibility of rulers towards subject and country. Some Europeans wished to understand India with motives both scientific and instrumental (the better to rule). Knowledge was sought for its own sake as well as for practical advantage and influenced by intellectual trends. By the early nineteenth century a duty of care was taken to be axiomatic (in rhetoric if not in practice) and offered as rationalisation for extending British control.4 The desire to improve symbolised beneficent husbandry and benevolent rule. Consequent policy would be determined by an ambitious official, much-vaunted principles of political economy, strategic and economic interests or practical needs of the population. 38

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The British influence and global background for change were obvious; we need to look no further than similar state undertakings in nineteenthcentury Britain. But the British state in India also evolved with imperial priorities and economic doctrine. Conservative imperialists favoured inherited systems and minimal political interference; progressives envisaged social engineering and economic development; opinion was never neatly divided between the extremes. Among officials, John Strachey insisted on intervention to mitigate famine but believed export trade essential to India’s progress. Denzil Ibbetson would encourage the productive power of surplus agriculturists but also soften disruptive social effects from expanding market relations.5 Battle lines were confused. Prevailing historicism relied on partial understanding of Indian society, production and trade. Radical interventions might be presented as protecting the status quo. Ritual obeisance to the god of laissez-faire was qualified by political expediency and fears of disorder. Belief in autocratic paternalistic government or ‘the common good’ was not simply abandoned to benefit landlords or peasant proprietors. Whitehall could not be openly thwarted by shifting the burden of taxation to favour India over Britain or any particular sector over others. India had to help or at least not hinder British economic interests that were also supported by theories of those days. Ideas decrying state intervention were bolstered by fears of Indian reactions but contradicted by pragmatic needs and economic and political crisis.

What an Indian government should do Indian pressure for improvement was felt in the debates over government intervention—expectations, at first for a different kind of state and then for a wider range of state roles than had been the norm in Britain when its rule began in India. These and more broadly exigencies of ruling helped change the character of government in India. They encouraged the British to overrule their fears of resentment and assume responsibilities wanted by ­Indians—provide famine relief, canals and roads; back financial institutions and trade; promote order. Despite thinking it represented ‘superior’ culture, the imperial government also had to recruit servants and supporters.6 A long list of policies was traceable in part to Indian opinion. States were always justified democratically or contractually by tasks they undertook: mediating between citizens, constructing institutions, managing the economy and determining acceptable legal and social norms. Nineteenth-century Western thinking met in complex dialogue with indigenous expectations and dissenting perspectives.7 State responsibility surfaced in colonial India after long gestation, as indigenous notions linked with Western elaborations. Of course insouciance or at least ineffectual expressions of concern about conditions of the poor and the weak still pervaded much government policy and private conduct, both in India and in Britain, through to the twentieth 39

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century and beyond. Neglect was sometimes but not generally reduced by liberal and egalitarian principles, charity and civic pride. Policies supported more often than challenged powerful interests. The colonial improvement agenda derived from theory and self-interest: need for revenue, legitimacy and security, pressure of public opinion, self-justification, scientific curiosity, personal pride and ambition. It should not be confused with effective measures to improve the lot of most people. Sectional interests, as ever, meant there was no straight line from eighteenth-century mercantilism through Victorian ‘duty’ to Nehruvian planning.8 But the development discourse did help create ‘Indian’ interests and the ‘Indian’ civil service. New roles for government required an administrative revolution. It is worth pausing to ask where this was leading. Around 1920 the British committed to transferring power while devising ways of holding on, pushed by their own ambition, increasing intervention and Indian demands. Politics dominated, but bureaucratic reform had also helped reshape government. Company servants were persuaded to place career ahead of quick profit and were followed by Indian Civil Service officers claiming duty and professionalism.9 Governments also began to think about advancement for subordinates, including possible transfer to posts normally reserved for the ICS.10 In 1905, the Government of India favoured grades on fixed pay, with incremental salaries for those with no hope of future promotion. Its object was to improve prospects for clerks generally, a goal thought more important than minor savings.11 Next-year proposals for district administration from the Bengal government were criticised for having ‘too many appointments in the lowest grade’. Shortly afterwards, though timidly, ‘improved prospects’ for Indians came to include targets for the proportion of Indians in the higher services and the officer cadre of the Indian army.12 Agricultural improvement, this suggests, was part of a larger momentum towards good governance and ultimately common identity and nationhood. The path was not easy. Sanjib Baruah among others hoped for citizenship based on territory,13 but local particularities could not be wished away. India had ancient metanarratives, but it was hard to extrapolate from regional powers and empires and craft a unified representative state.14 Common ground needed to be prepared—the nation as a great simplification. Identities remained localised but were deliberately challenged, hidden worlds taken over by religion, state and science, through print, travel and mass media; some became sites of resistance.15 Impetus came from the colonial state engaging with political and economic development and then making Indian government look more Indian. Bihar’s agriculture showed the local resilience. Alterations in Indian society and politics, Britain’s place in the world and her relationship with India helped force the pace. The state expanded into agriculture, credit and marketing. After 1920, with greater financial 40

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autonomy, it set prices, regulated distribution, introduced protective tariffs and devised national economic plans. Currency management and investment needed a central bank. As the state grew, it also had to become more Indian, not just through constitutional change or slow civil and military Indianisation but by taking up Indian aspirations and listening to Indian opinion, contradicting the colonial instinct to which many officials clung. It did so across a wide range from India’s international role to education, including technical and agricultural colleges, treating policy as a device for public improvement accommodated to Indian requirements. A  British Indian government was not very good at any of this; it did it mainly in the hope of preserving itself; paradoxically it undermined its raison d’etre by doing it, but did it nonetheless. The successor governments not only began new policies directed towards development, they also inherited a corpus of policy and administrative practice.

A trajectory of ‘improvement’ As already remarked, many East India Company policies had an agrarian focus. The emphasis continued in the Government of India, despite diversification of interests and income, growth of cities and professional classes, increasing wealth of merchants and industrialists and burgeoning demands by Indian politicians. Agrarian policy had general effects, changing rural society through property law and encouraging commercial agriculture.16 Change from what, though? Some regard the past as a period of harmony recently disturbed by whatever is disapproved of, for example British rule. That is not my view of rural Bihar. There were many precolonial legacies. A new legal and economic framework was provided by British policies, but, given India’s long history of producing crops for sale, state intervention did not start with the British. Rulers built marketplaces, promoted market systems, developed cesses and taxation, all with the goal of increasing revenue. Political structures depended on control of money rents from agricultural land; many Indian regimes promoted exchange of goods, probably increasingly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within areas not disturbed by war, practising what has been called ‘portfolio capitalism’.17 The Company felt the impact of measures dating back to the time of Akbar or earlier. Precolonial, colonial and independent states in South Asia all sought, at a minimum, to maintain order in the countryside by both coercion and persuasion. The East India Company did so even in the seventeenth century. It was one among others when it first attempted to manage trade and production. It inserted itself to drive down cotton prices, thwart rivals to its commercial and political authority or promote new items of trade such as opium, indigo and tea. In a foreign land, the British also had to re-establish the limits and meanings of regulations in any number of spheres—for property, labour, wages and social practices—although to seek Indian support 41

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and avoid untoward reactions they were bound to conform somewhat to existing practice. The inherited structures had already come under strain. The British refurbished them initially but gradually undermined them through their economic and political influence. Company policies reflected self-interest (to ease the flow of Company and private trade and maximise income) but also responded to economic theory, echoing Adam Smith, for example, despite the Company’s monopolies in Britain (trade with the East) and Bengal (salt, opium and effectively cotton piece goods). It attempted to regulate money and measures and tax markets on the basis of ground rents rather than cesses on transactions.18 It showed concern for roads and navigable waterways and tackled brigandage at sea and on land. Land revenue and property laws were designed around the assumption that trade should and would grow. For a long time, land revenue and the interests of its payers featured in British calculations, despite changed theories disparaging landlords in comparison with ‘actual cultivators’ and disputing how best to promote prosperity. In the later nineteenth century, when (as said) government relied less on land revenue and more on the taxation of trade and income, superior and formal rentreceivers were challenged by numerous managers of cultivation, competing for political and economic influence—successful smallholders, dominant ­peasants and intermediaries (including other landlords) who provided links to long-distance trade. Wooing such people, the British began to intervene far more in the economy and society, not just to provide infrastructure and incorporate local systems but to shape agricultural relations and eventually regulate trade. They developed special arguments to justify providing a ‘helping hand’ where indigenous institutions were deemed inadequate. They increased their intrusions. Elaborating on this description contextualises the origin and nature of the colonial interventions in agriculture. Measures were qualified by desire for continuity or appropriateness; importance accorded to precedent, economic doctrine and imperial priorities.19 But state responsibility developed from notions of sovereignty and separation of public and private, although concern for moral conduct, legality and altruism, linked to honour and reputation, was also reflected in personal mores, friendly dealings and business. Indian improvement related to expansions of trade after the end of the French wars and foreign conquests; it followed British industrialisation, steamships, telegraph and exports of capital.20 Sophisticated debates ensued among Europeans and Indians. The period from 1880 to 1920 then saw a step change as science, technology and learned professions became preferred ‘modern’ means to promote progress. Government sought to involve itself increasingly in social reform. Because local conditions were influenced by British rule over many decades, we need to get a sense of the tendencies of economic change before we can fully understand the shortcomings of these British attempts to improve 42

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India. The era has had a bad press, at least since nineteenth-century nationalist assertions that the increasing export of crops distorted rural occupations and patterns of land use, forcing food production onto poorer lands. On the other hand, many scholars claim to have discovered ‘rich peasants’ and other signs of prosperity for some, even under colonial rule. For Bengal, a contrarian view on commercial growth in the Company era was expressed by Shubhra Chakrabarti and Rajat Datta, reporting on the rise of great merchants and new lands brought under cultivation to benefit from rising prices for cash crops.21 The growth of international trade modified some and intensified other aspects of Bihar’s agricultural economy. Milestones of external impact included the Patna Opium Agency, indigo planters of north Bihar, the Son canal system and Pusa Agricultural Institute. Commercial rationale was applied to assess the beneficial use of land under cultivation;22 Bihar felt the effect of revenue, property and contract laws intended to encourage market production, including the policy of resuming (taxing) revenue-free land. Laws (more or less from 1793) imagined formally defined property rights, any tenancy being theoretically regulated by a contract setting out a specified rent and later by new laws, surveys and settlements. One point was to ensure landed property was beneficially used. We shall see the outcome: dominant people gained resources while becoming more exploitative and less supportive of production. Greater commercialisation, affecting opium, indigo and sugarcane but also oilseeds, wheat and rice, represented challenges for many and opportunities for some. It reinforced local hierarchies of caste and power. The poor and dispossessed were yet further damaged by progressive reductions in flexibility—in land ownership and use, cropping decisions, marketing, risk aversion and responses to seasonal variation—attributable to colonial land law and economic opportunity. Pastoralism, crop rotation and alternative rural occupations were circumscribed. Thus, in Bihar, British attempts at rural development were made in the context of a worsening environment for a majority of the people. It mattered that rural Biharis were not a more or less egalitarian peasantry but ritually and economically hierarchical, ranging from landlords through surplus farmers to landless labourers. The differences were more material in Bihar than some regions of India. No one can study rural India without encountering the so-called self-­ sufficiency of its villages,23 thought by some to have inhibited capitalist development. It is easy to see why the British had excessive confidence in the value of their interventions. But, as indicated, this isolation has been exaggerated, even for Bihar. There too villages imported many commodities, such as salt, metals, cloth and other raw materials for artisans and household ­ ­ production—mixed employment was common (artisans who were also farmers, for example). Biharis as well as other Indians experienced a range of external contacts, including kinship links, genealogists, 43

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pilgrimage, overlordship, taxation, local fairs and bazaars. The nomadic Banjaras and other carrying peoples plied their trade in Bihar as well as over most of the subcontinent. There was evidence of physical mobility, including seasonal movements of labour and military employment from some districts, during Mughal rule as well as under the British. From early times, courts, towns, forts and many other administrative, productive and religious centres required provisions from the countryside and networks of long-distance trade. Where in human history have they not? External linkages operate to varying degrees, however. In Bihar, trade with the countryside was unequal (more was going out than was coming in). Products were mainly traded locally at regional and village markets, as indicated by the relatively low degree of price integration. Kum Kum Banerjee analysed the grain trade centred on Patna, making a distinction between long-distance exchanges and the local markets, noting that only part of the cultivators’ output of any grain was traded, rice was the most marketed product but not the main food crop in all areas and ‘paddy very rarely entered the market’, being used as food for humans and animals.24 (To explain: ‘paddy’ was a term for rice (oryza sativa) in records relating to summer or autumn crops, referring to early rice (boro dhan) or bhadoi dhan. Here it may mean rough rice, whole or unhulled, often called paddy rice, rather a valuable product to be used for animal feed. Commonly fodder was rice straw, not very nutritious or digestible but usable. Cultivators with small plots of land might plough using cattle or buffaloes but generally cut their rice close to the ground and threshed it by hand. They were able to collect the straw, which they stacked before feeding it to livestock. It could support high numbers of animals, though with that diet they would not be of high quality.) Apart from poverty and low productivity, trade was inhibited in Bihar because of limited specialisation of production, lack of standardised money, prevalence of inland duties and insecurities of travel— risks from poor roads and tracks or unsafe boats and landing places, bad weather, disease and sometimes brigands. Some inaccessible parts of Bihar had limited access to organised carriers; few commodities other than salt were consistently imported and transported throughout the countryside.25 Similar isolation affected the poor in all areas. Problems were not identical throughout India. But there were enough common features to make it worth examining Bihar; it helps us understand what came next. In most regions, disease, famine and malnutrition worsened the plight of the majority during the nineteenth century, providing savage limits to the pressure of population. In the twentieth century rising population exacerbated problems, despite migration and extension of the cultivated area. Many effects of legal and economic change persisted, largely unmitigated by protective laws, state-backed investment or democratic elections. By the mid-twentieth century throughout India large majorities of agricultural holdings were uneconomically small (below five acres). Much land 44

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was controlled by few landlords, increasingly including absentees or others who played no direct part in cultivation. Scientific research, development efforts, infrastructural investment and legislative reforms, both before and after Indian independence, had had little positive impact on poor, bonded and landless rural people. Bihar, a largely agrarian state, more impoverished than most of India, was an extreme case. This book examines reasons for failures in its development between about 1880 and 1920. We now turn to the promised overview of policy in practice, to land-revenue law and policies, and, in Part II, agricultural improvement in relation to science.

Notes 1 See Hull, Scrap of Paper. For clarification, I am not asking if such behaviour were more common for British than other peoples. I refer to law and informal legal forms it shaped, accepting conflict with other systems; India was plural in understanding and applying state law, even without many distinct legal norms and jurisdictions interacting and in separate spheres. The ‘construing of imperial presence as a matter of [legal] jurisdiction’ was ‘consistent with British practice’ in the 1830s; ‘British imperial practice and political thought did not move fully into an absolute, territorialised notion of sovereignty until later in the nineteenth century’ (McHugh, ‘ “A Pretty Gov[ernment]!” ’, p.  234). A  commercial corporation ruled India with delicate legal fictions about Mughal suzerainty—despite the Supreme Court, Bengal regulations and incursions of English commercial, ecclesiastical, criminal, admiralty, personal and common law, confusion that only began to be cleared after 1861. But state law, including law above the state, had special status for the Company and Government of India, affecting their impact on India, as did ‘laws’ of ethics, science or political economy. 2 The quotation is from Charles II’s attorney-general in 1681; Stern, ‘ “Bundles of Hyphens” ’, p. 29. See also Govind, ‘Revenue, Rent, Profit?’ 3 Wolffhardt, Unearthing the Past, pp. 100–7. See ch.11, this volume. 4 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Mantena, Alibis of Empire. 5 Strachey (1823–1907) was, with his brother Richard, author of The Finances and Public Works of India (1882); appointed Chief Commissioner of Oudh in 1866 and Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces in 1874; and G/I Finance Member from 1876–80. Ibbetson (1847–1908) was G/I Revenue and Agriculture Member (1894–6), appointed to the Governor-General’s Council in 1901 and Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, 1905–7. 6 See Robb, Ancient Rights, pp. 83–90. 7 European radicals used India as a ‘laboratory’; see Stokes, English Utilitarians. Influential thinkers with personal experience of Indian administration and often of India included the Mills, Malthus, Macaulay, Maine and Fitzjames Stephen. 8 Robb, Ideas Matter, discusses the view that the state was antipathetic to Indian traditions, arguing instead that it ‘reached deeply into the India psyche’, but also noting that the darker side of the ‘improvement’ agenda was British belief in the degradation and backwardness of India. 9 See Robb, Ideas Matter, pp. 38–40; also Evolution, ch.2, and Ancient Rights, ch.2. One interpretation is offered by Hopkins and Cain, British Imperialism, vol.1, ch.1: ‘The move to meritocratic recruitment was intended both as a device to maintain and advance gentlemanly status and as a method of rigging the

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market .  .  . once patronage had ceased to be .  .  . socially acceptable’ (p.  27). Nowhere was this truer than in the ICS. 10 Office note, 9 July 1906, H. Establishment A113–17 December 1906. 11 Ibid., Risley note, 11 March 1906. Excessive innovation was also suspect: Sir D. Barbour complained the union boards scheme (see ch.8, this volume) ‘sprang from the brain’ of a Bengal secretary. Though he probably meant C. Macaulay, and I suspect A. Mackenzie, P.P. Hutchins assumed he referred to the ‘creative’ MacDonnell. However, though that less-than-admiring epithet was often applied to him, MacDonnell rose very high. See H. Local Boards A2–5 February 1893. 12 See Robb, Government of India, p. 56. The supposed character of the service was to be preserved with no ‘rapid swamping’ so as to reduce its ‘qualities of courage, leadership, decision, fixity of purpose, detached judgment, and integrity’ (Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms 1918, para.314). 13 Baruah, ‘Territoriality’. 14 Robb, ‘Place and Difference’, pp. 31–8, discusses the advent of wide-scale agriculture, a transition discernible between the Vedas and the Upanishad, and the contrast of court and forest in Ramayana or Western fairy stories as a memory of ever-extending frontiers and material and economic change, taming the wild: a ‘linear narrative . . . like a single colour washing across a map’. 15 Ibid. Comparative examples were Mughal pir reclaiming the wetlands of eastern Bengal; minister ­Colbert (1619–83) with his maritime code and dream of trunk-roads criss-­ crossing France; the European settlers who tamed the pampas and ­dispossessed their peoples; the forest officers punishing informal local use of timber (a newly valuable and regulated resource); the schoolmasters drumming Shakespeare into young heads; and capitalists squeezing village labour into cities and factories. (p. 37) 16 On relevant agrarian policies see Robb, Peasants, especially pp. 7–21. They do not alter overarching priorities. Money always mattered. Many of the most able civil servants were involved with land revenue. 17 See for example Subrahmanyam  and Bayly, ‘Portfolio’; also Subrahmanyam, Merchants, Markets. 18 Datta, Society, Economy, and, earlier, ‘Merchants and Peasants’. Datta sees the Company as trying to subvert a vigorous system of local markets in Bengal and bring all markets under its control, one instance of this being, he claims, Tiretta’s market, which however was rather a special case, being promoted privately within Calcutta itself where (as in other municipalities, increasingly) there were efforts to keep streets clear and concentrate civic functions on approved sites. This is not the same as saying that the Company attempted to manage all zamindari markets (let alone succeeded in doing so) though it did try to regulate many aspects of extra-local trade—prices, measures, money, roadways and ghats (landing stages). From time to time (or eventually) it succeeded in capturing particular trades and standardising some practices. Another way of interpreting the evidence is that the Company was trying to accommodate itself to local markets and encourage them on its own terms—including, for example, a principled objection to duties on transactions (interrupting trade) in favour of ground rents (expressing property rights). These efforts too, judging by the persistence of transaction dues in markets well into the twentieth century, were less than wholly successful. See Robb, Evolution, pp. 161–70, especially the example of

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Nasriganj in nineteenth-century Bihar. On the earlier period see also Sen, Empire of Free Trade, which also stresses the vigour of precolonial trade marketplaces, their economic, social and political importance and the Company’s efforts to understand and control them. Arguably, it overstates the effect on these markets of both the earlier domination by local rulers and the later debilitating influence of the Company. 19 Robb, Ancient Rights, concentrates on agrarian structure after 1885. 20 For a discussion of these developments, in which Indian experience seems to have played an important part, see Robb, Sex and Sensibility and Sentiment and Self and Useful Friendship. 21 See their chapters in Chakrabarti and Patnaik, Agrarian and Other Histories. 22 Though not significant in Gangetic Bihar, forest policy—definition and regulation of wild and wooded areas—showed the pattern. The avowed aim in administration and legislation from the 1860s was to check and criminalise ‘devastation’ caused by shifting cultivation, unrestricted grazing and other indigenous exploitation. Said to be to conserve forests, the primary concern, despite suggestions about effects of deforestation on rainfall, was to protect an economic not an environmental resource—timber and fuel for the railways. In line with land policy in general, it evoked more commercial values than those to the fore in the past, when agriculture encroached on waste lands. 23 Yazdani discusses this too, in India, Modernity, pp. 120–4. 24 Banerjee, ‘Grain Traders’. This article also includes a good account of local distribution networks and the linkages of the travelling local merchants (beoparis and paikars) with urban wholesalers, retailers and mahajans. It discusses the elaborate and rather closed ways grain was exported from Bihar, the overarching state controls before and after East India Company rule and the relatively brief, unsuccessful efforts of the Company to capture the grain trade and store grain as a defence against famine. 25 Sinha, Communication, stresses the extent and importance of communications in Bihar before the railways. It seems they had long existed but were relatively poor away from navigable rivers. Pack animals were vital for transporting many goods. Even in the late nineteenth century, some villages a few miles from a railway, a main road or a river landing still had no access for wheeled vehicles.

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4 PROPERTY THROUGH LAW

Land policy Property ownership matters to this study because of its role in theories of development and the part it played during British rule, shaping improvement strategies and affecting the well-being of different sections of rural society. For present purposes, rather than tracing the long history of agrarian relations, we need a description of policy as a window on to conditions.1 I shall begin by sketching features of land revenue, surveying and records, and hence land ownership and tenancy. The main objective is to establish how land control was imagined by the colonial protagonists of rural development. Measures had impact because of ideas in the minds of policymakers. Later I shall compare these with ways land and agricultural production were controlled and managed. There are very many studies of Indian land policies.2 British law was based around the revenue settlement, the decision on who paid how much land-tax to the state. Across the East India Company’s Indian territories, surveyors strove to find, name and attribute landed property so that it could be taxed.3 This was not new. Rulers and elites had long demanded tribute. At least from the late sixteenth century, they preferred to relate demand to capacity, so that data and categorisation informed land policy. They wanted to reward collaborators, curb local resistance and secure or increase revenue from agriculture. The British took over much of the Mughal and regional revenue systems, even in 1793 when various temporary arrangements were superseded by a settlement declared permanent: that is, the tax rate was fixed in perpetuity. It applied to most of Bengal presidency including Bihar. Building on the past, it placed its faith in superior landlords (zamindars) thought to be, though in many instances they were not, hereditary landed magnates. The state relinquished its share of future profits and any hold it had over land use and local landholding records.4 The settlement of 1793 recorded property rights for territorial chiefs and payers of revenue by linking the tax to the land, not current payer. The intention was to secure and limit the state, create a landowning aristocracy 48

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and promote economic prosperity. In the main, rates and payers were set and then managed on the basis of written records, either inherited or newly prepared by the Company. The effect was to impose landownership where power or status had been a determinant. Some zamindari families prospered; others did not. Some successful merchants gained land. Few rights were provided for the generality of cultivators. The need to ensure payment of an initially high demand led to further regulations introducing concepts of contractual rents and tenancy-at-will. These and common law assumptions by the courts undermined the legal security of most tenants, as land values grew. Almost all Bihar was permanently settled, but it is relevant for the present study to note that the opinion turned against the Bengal system. Very soon after its introduction it was challenged by Company officials, especially Thomas Munro, backed a little later by political economists employed by the Company in London, most notably James Mill. This alliance ensured that future revenue settlement would be ‘temporary’ and mostly ‘raiyatwari’— that is, made ostensibly with ra’iyats (those regarded as ‘actual cultivators’) rather than landlords.5 This suited local revenue officials and village headmen. Some variants followed. After the 1820s, Charles Metcalfe’s famous image of village communities and an ideology of caste and tribe as supposed building blocks of Indian society were translated into land policy by revenue minutes of the department secretary Holt Mackenzie and Governor-General William Bentinck. Thereafter, notably in North India and Punjab, most settlements were devised for ‘village communities’ (mahalwari) or co-sharers (pattidari or bhaiachara); they envisaged co-parcenary ‘brotherhoods’ with both several and collective rights over land. ‘Aristocratic’ land-control was tried again in Awadh following the rebellion of 1857–8: a temporary settlement with superior landlords (taluqdars) replacing a village-level settlement introduced immediately after the British annexation. It was debated whether all settlements should be permanent. In the end they remained temporary, outside the original area in Bengal, even when superior revenue-collectors were again recognised in central India as well as in Awadh. Many aspects of the new property regimes were at odds with Indian experience, even though some older practice was deliberately retained during a transition period. Both permanent and temporary settlements defined new forms of private ownership and encroached upon inferior and common rights. They standardised categories of landholding and individual title, in some areas replacing systems based on shares or collective liabilities. In permanently settled areas the officials depended on records, courts, and surveys of contested, defaulting, revenue-free or partitioned estates.6 Temporary settlements implied close and personal rather than distant legalistic government. Regular surveys investigated, mediated and recorded a range of land rights, establishing ownership, size and boundaries of estates and holdings and revenue payment or rents. In both systems definitive landownership 49

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potentially replaced more ambiguous conditional possession. Taxes were imposed at fixed rates and on set dates in countryside dominated by harvests and seasons and imperfectly monetised for everyday transactions. In most parts of India, revenue rates for each cultivated plot were set for a limited period; actual payments depended on annual reports on the use of that plot. This allowed the government’s revenues from land to increase over time. Surveys were always elaborate and became more time-consuming and ‘scientific’ during the nineteenth century, separating measurement and drawing plans from recording landholders and assessing economic, social and historical conditions in every village and in regions (called circles) of similar character. Revenue rates were supposedly related to the capacity of the soil (not current output) in order to discourage idleness. They were calculated in accordance with the definition of rent by David Ricardo—that it was merely unearned extra produce from better land, compared with least favourable land, and therefore both measurable and safe to tax. When this (in fact very imprecise) calculation led to overly high revenue demands, they were modified by more subjective assessment of what areas could afford. All settlements were, among other things, expressions of the Company’s developmental goals. Sometimes these were achieved. Under the permanent settlement, cash generally had to be borrowed by revenue payers to meet state demands when they were due; that provided incentive to cash cropping, land reclamation, dispossession of failing landowners and benefits for entrepreneurial agriculturists. Cultivated area increased, and more crops were grown for local and international markets. Zamindars, despite pockets of resistance, gave up broader military and political roles and became adjuncts to a new political order, sometimes its allies. Gradually, from early years when land could barely be sold at any price, a land market grew, giving value to rights created in and after 1793. New landlords, often resisted at first by local communities, were able to call on state force to ensure possession. Advantages for separate rather than shared landholding led to partitions under official scrutiny, and the number of estates increased markedly, especially in some districts in Bihar. Land became a reliable security for borrowing and mortgages but also, through debt, one way traders and moneylenders could extract agrarian produce at lower cost and somewhat reduced risk to themselves.

Property in land Let us reflect a little more on the concepts of political economy and in particular landed property found repeatedly in the history just outlined. It is true that agrarian policy towards land rights, considered in isolation, retained an echo of the minimal government favoured in the eighteenth century and by laissez-faire doctrines in the nineteenth. But colonial policy introduced new ideas about land use and types of land control, ideas common to the 50

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different kinds of Indian agrarian policy. Most important for our present subject is the impact on power and, related to control over land, dependence, interdependence or independence in agricultural production. I shall reprise British understandings by summarising views of R.B. Ramsbotham, writing in the 1920s. He asserted that precolonial zamindars had rights derived from their authority to collect land revenue. Though the nineteenth-century historian and official W.W. Hunter stated zamindaris were not heritable, in the 1760s and 1770s kanungos (chief revenue officers) claimed they were: a son and even a daughter could inherit as could other relatives (brothers or nephews) provided they performed customary funerary and other duties. Supposedly zamindars were then ‘as impregnable as . . . the average English landowner’. However, as a privileged class, they had been overcome by ‘inertia’ which ‘in the Bengal climate soon turns into degeneration’. They were mostly ‘idle, ignorant, effete’ and ‘in the hands of unscrupulous servants’. The kanungos, who formed a powerful interest with zamindars, were a crowd of Persian adventurers practising ‘their native oppressions over a timid, servile, and defenceless people’—so claimed the Company’s Bengal government in 1769. Officials were kept in ignorance through general deception, venality and collusion by zamindars and tax collectors. An ‘industrious ryot’ had to satisfy a host of avaricious ‘underlings’ and their principals and was also oppressed by ‘traders . . . and petty agents’. He thus lost ‘all confidence in Government’ and sought ‘protection in other places’.7 (This description would have appealed to tenancy reformers in the 1880s, though they argued zamindars’ rights had always been qualified.) Ramsbotham recalled forlorn attempts to guard against oppression and corruption in the revenue collections made by the Committee of Circuit in Bengal in the 1770s, including measures to record lawful dues and abolish all other demands, reduce revenue officers’ conflicts of interest and restrict moneylending by officers (a means of obtaining influence) while maintaining agricultural investment by landlords.8 The raiyat’s lot ‘after 1740 was one of increasing misery . . . not completely alleviated in the Company’s days to which the Permanent Settlement of 1793 added its share’. A major problem (Ramsbotham thought) was that, in common with most Indian systems, settlements did not assess tax ‘in pyramid fashion’ from what the man at the bottom could and should pay but ‘top downwards’ from what was wanted by government or acceptable to the superior landlord.9 We see here, across almost a century and a half, the history of an idea. Landowning was a universal practice found in India as in England. Various landowners and intermediaries were oppressive. Actual cultivators were industrious but also defenceless. The bones of later orthodoxy were traceable in the earliest British debates. The pro-landlord view that prevailed in 1793 was advocated in the 1770s by Philip Francis, who claimed it was not true ‘that the ryot is proprietor of the land’ though he did have some rights and was entitled to protection, and that he and his zamindar would 51

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‘soon come to an agreement which each party will find to his advantage’ if ‘left to themselves’. Disagreeing, Warren Hastings sought ‘to secure to the ryots the perpetual and undisturbed possession of their lands, and to guard them against arbitrary evictions’. He proposed the Amini Commission of 1778 to investigate ‘the real value of the lands’ pending a definitive revenue settlement and the first systematic British-inspired examination of Bengal revenue collecting.10 However, acceptance of perpetual landownership and recognition of cultivators’ rights, though poles apart as strategies, were not ultimately incompatible. They were part of a shared view, constants of British socio-economic thought and political attitudes. In addition, ungraceful notes were added in the eighteenth as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: familiar British complaints that Europeans were kept in ignorance, Indians were inveterate liars and Indian climate sapped morality, will and enterprise. British revenue settlements changed the basis and nature of land rights in India, despite the eclectic nature of British practice, because they had common elements. Property was defined in law, not by personal power or status. Various kinds and levels of entitlement reflected terms and conditions applying to the land, not the person. Derogations in property rights (mortgages, leases, rents and so on) were matters of contract, agreement between different parties subject to prevailing laws. India’s British rulers were convinced of the superiority and often the universality of this model. Officials saw alternatives as arbitrary and subjective, effectively nullifying private property, leaving it at the mercy of power. Disparity between Western and Oriental definitions (for example of rule, honour, property and crimes such as murder and sati) was a marker of civilisation or savagery and a justification for British rule.11 Before the permanent settlement non-payers could be punished in their person—by imprisonment or torture. Now landed property was at risk; revenue payment underwrote possession. Some great zamindars lost out as the demand was initially high (a notional 90 per cent of rental income). Overall, proprietors gained. In the next few decades helpful regulations gave zamindars near-absolute powers over tenants and tenants’ property including standing crops. More laws then defined landlords, tenure holders and tenants; some agrarian classes had pre-existing rights recognised, qualifying those of the zamindars. In certain areas intermediary landholders (jotedars) gained most from the permanent settlement by directly managing production. On the whole, the legal position of cultivators was weakened. These were effects of law, ultimately from notions of sovereignty introduced by colonial rule. Norms and transgressions were increasingly recognised by state and judiciary, set out by administrative and coercive actions, statute, common law and precedent. Regulations paid attention to Indian sensibilities but were at root imports from Britain, shaped by political interest, philosophical and juridical theories and ongoing conceptions of propriety and utility. 52

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Variations exist in all kinds of legal and political regimes at the borders between law and executive or administrative power. Similarly, there are different boundaries between the civil and the criminal. But in a modern Western society, if one seeks the origin and basis of these differences one finds that one source—the state, including the legislature and the courts—takes precedence over others, such as social and religious norms, private privilege or force majeur. What did that imply for property in India? As a result of colonial policies, it presumed both ownership and value, neither existing independently of the other. Such property was said to serve a necessary function for society. Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879) showed how the value of land rested on its being owned: clearance, surveying and development all demanded investment, which usually required security of property. But these ‘universal’ conditions that we now take for granted were the product of historical processes and social choices. They were not universal in their specific character. It was new for an economic system to be based around a single pervasive kind of real property. Andro Linklater traced its origins and impact. He remarked that a form of landowning was imposed by British colonists of North America on principles illustrated by the royal charter to Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583. It allowed him to dispose of lands ‘in fee simple or otherwise, according to the order of the laws of England’. This charter was issued, Linklater says, when the pattern of landownership in England was still very varied—a mix of ‘strip-fields, commons and orchards’ as well as fields enclosed by the landowner and tenancies whose farmers provided a foundation for England’s economic development. Around 1500, the idea was conceived ‘of individual, exclusive ownership .  .  . of the immovable near-eternal earth’, an idea that destroyed ancient civilisations and displaced peoples but also ‘spread an undreamed-of degree of personal freedom and protected it with democratic institutions wherever it has taken hold’.12 Whatever the merits of this argument, a process of transformation led to the modern era. What was different (not in 1500 in England but later and progressively) was symbiosis between three elements of landed-property rights, each necessary to the others, namely definition, exclusive possession and legal protection. As the pervasive mode of land control, whether by states, institutions or individuals, it came later than the idea of personal moveable property but was analogous to it. As one became legally enforceable (a matter of attention for the sovereign through public and criminal law) so did the other, under the purview of an expanding and supposedly objective state. Both assumed rationality, consistency and proportionality in all legitimate systems and behaviour. Both regarded individuals (or institutions treated as individuals) as notionally equivalent exemplary legal subjects. Both were necessary preconditions for development of capitalism. They were regarded as distinctly odd by many in South Asia with different concepts of rights and ownership. British relations with local rulers, 53

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landowners and people in general were replete with misunderstandings and resentment even as they provided opportunities for the adaptable and the sharp-witted. Faced with a new idea of property, Western thinkers speculated about its origins, some supposing it eternal and that the past provided legitimacy for the present, a recurrent emphasis on precedent. Locke traced property to initial settlement; legal systems were erected around that principle. Though the new notion spread to India under the East India Company, itself the product of property-owning capitalism, it was challenged even as it was being established; it is still contested. Many thought large-scale landowning essential to progress and civility; others declared it a blow to equity. Naturally colonial officials did not agree with Proudhon that ‘property is theft’ (an axiom well-illustrated by contemporary land grabs in the European colonies of settlement, including Siberia; arguably in India). They also did not hear Alexander Herzen’s denunciation of the ‘absolute despotism of property’ as the foundation of a bourgeoisie able to make a mockery of ‘liberty’. They did try to restrict some oppression by superior landlords. Their emphasis on knowledge and regulation in the public interest might seem to support Piercy Ravenstone’s ‘opinion’ that ‘states will approach to a democracy, an aristocracy, or to a despotism, in exact proportion to the influence of industry, of property, or of taxation’.13 Such proportionate influence is, after all, mainly effected through scrutiny and law. The motto might be: equality is the enemy of excellence but equality of opportunity its ally. Status and privilege reduce equality of opportunity, and the public interest is to place limits on them.14 ‘Modern’ property is still argued over, by neoliberals but also advocates for plural, communal or culturally appropriate ways of holding land. In British India, pragmatism as well as theory shaped policy, but what happened to real property was reinforced by parallel concepts. Theft, embezzlement, fraud and inheritance presuppose personal property—exclusive possessions including land. Such laws imply standard definitions. Their controls on conduct—for families, sexual behaviour, children and vulnerable persons, say—presume a society in which established categories and norms are enforceable and hence an effective state accepting a duty of enforcement. Security of the person (implied by crimes as assault, kidnapping and murder) imagines individual rights. Rules of commercial conduct (taxation and charges) are shaped by the nature of business or the state. The latter also defines political offences. Agrarian reformers found it hard to escape such a pervasive model. It reflected prevailing explanations of industrialisation and urbanisation in Britain, and the assumption that political revolutions generally ended badly. Because so many economists and moralists insisted landownership was key to prosperity, many arguments in India were not about that but about who should enjoy such property. Part of the consensus remains, on the role of 54

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private property, making land nationalisation a relatively rare and ill-fated experiment.15 Ownership was key too when property was a model for other rights—to goods, work and even beliefs. It was empowering (as for ownership of one’s labour) even though that aspect of its productive effect was ‘unearned’. Whether they are earned or not seems irrelevant to the perceived usefulness of rights.

British Indian practices Once again a caveat is needed. Did British laws create landownership in India? It depends what is meant. Classical European civilisations had ideas of landed property, as did Indian. Alan Macfarlane claimed some private property in land could be found in England as far back as records go.16 Marx accepted this while doubting its pre-existence in India. Dharma Kumar showed it easily predated British rule.17 In some senses India had private property in land from earliest historical times. Religious notions of renunciation depended on it as did payments and grants to kings, temples, elites, co-sharers, workers and artisans. Otherwise there could hardly have been ancient temple inscriptions recording land gifts from individuals as well as kings. Over time, different states found sophisticated ways of measuring and defining land rights, including surveys, records and title-deeds. Land-rights could be sold and inherited; there were stories and theories about their origins and the proper behaviour of landholders. The holders could enjoy one or more of very many specific kinds of tenure. What manner of private property was this? In England, notions of feudal hierarchy, royal prerogative and institutional ownership (especially by the Church and the Crown), plus the practical insecurity of possession through pillage, death and uncertain inheritance, created a mosaic of land rights rather than a single type. The same was true in India, where caste status, family relationships, conquest, personal allegiance to a ruler and taxcollecting, tax-paying or cultivating rights all shaped the varied often ambiguous terms on which land was held. Special conditions applied to communal spaces, marginal and forest areas or temples, shrines and charitable institutions. Land-rights were not absolute—they never are—and could be lost by force or usurpation. They were qualified by obligations to pay land taxes or supply materials and manpower. They were subject to communal and jointfamily obligations and rights of others, both superiors and inferiors. All that also applied to land rights under the British. Nonetheless, colonial laws and policies brought changes. They reduced legally recognised types of land right to proprietorship more or less as developed in early modern Britain. It did not prevail immediately. Often it fitted poorly with local practice and ecology—for example in Bihar notably riverine tracts (diara) where rich land could be created or washed away in annual floods. Accommodations were needed, responding to the impermanence of 55

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floodplains but also recording names of local tenures or tackling the complexity of forest rights.18 But one idea of ownership was promoted and protected by law. With it grew the notion that land was a commodity. An apparently alternative view was advanced by Faisal Chaudhry. He claimed consensus among scholars that the British-Indian rule of property was more apparent than real, developed from misunderstanding preexisting land rights; early nineteenth-century official disagreements were about the ‘who’ not ‘what’ of ownership; later reforms supporting subproprietors did not change property law fundamentally. He cited the short nineteenth-century usage of ‘proprietary’ referring to land rights (not exactly the same as a history of the concept to which the word came to be applied). In the second half of the century B.H. Baden-Powell also suggested landed property was relative, not absolute, a concept of proprietary rights newly developed to meet Indian conditions. His ideas on the contingency of Indian land law were intensely political, related to heated debates over restricting zamindari rights, applying state privileges reserved in the permanent settlement and improving the lot and enterprise of tenants. Moreover, even accepting Baden-Powell’s arguments were part of a wider revolution in jurisprudence, the fact remains (as Chaudhry conceded) that Indian law in essentials was ‘insulated’ from it.19 Long ago I argued it was misleading to regard the colonial rule of property as ‘pure farce’, in David Washbrook’s phrase, referring mainly to the temporary lack of an effective land market. I also suggested (as again here) that property rights were extrapolated to legal rights in general, modification and extension of property rights through tenancy and other laws aiding the spread of other entitlements. In that respect I obviously endorse Chaudhry’s similar conclusion. I too related this explicitly to classical ideas about property, notably Justinian’s, though I would not go so far as Chaudhry and say that was the main reason for broader assertions of rights.20 But reification of real property was important for extrapolating from land rights to rights of other kinds—those already suggested, in one’s person, family, labour, traditions, community, opinions or interests. It also mattered more immediately that revenue and legal systems identified social communities: villagers and outsiders or castes, religions and ‘tribes’, often though not consistently ascribed good or bad ‘properties’. Fixed ‘types’ were identified by behaviour and roles, including entitlement to landed property.21 Another point from Chaudhry concerns an emphasis, supposedly developed in legal thinking, on ‘will’ rather than ‘right’. I suggest it was addition rather than replacement. Contract was as significant as possession, but that need not fundamentally modify ‘absolute landed dominion’, because (as said) ownership was never unqualified: one person’s rights were always relative to the rights of others, to the sovereign’s initially in the case of land, and, under British rule, landowners could transfer or alienate parts or incidents of their property rights by contract; unitary control of specified 56

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legal privileges over measured and recorded space remained definitive for all forms of real property however ‘ownership’ was subdivided. It seems an overstatement to suggest, as Chaudhry did, that landholding rights were more about rent than control over physical space. The former was ambiguous and the latter objectified by surveys, maps and records. A major contemporary voice on land law was Denzil Ibbetson, bestknown for survey and settlement work and his chapter on castes and tribes in the Punjab census of 1881. In common with other reformers, he was anxious to find parallels between the policy he desired and norms he argued had prevailed in India. In a comprehensive statement, he concluded there had been land transfer before British property laws, but it was discouraged by the state, joint proprietary and joint family customs and fiscal and political instability reducing land values. He also suggested, more controversially, that rights had been sold rather than land: cultivating possession or a well would be transferred without annulling overall proprietorship.22 That could happen in British law too. The serious points to take from Ibbetson are that there was no effective land market before the later nineteenth century, and customary practices remained strong. In early nineteenth-century Bihar, purchasers at forced land sales often met local resistance when trying to take possession. They were still buying a piece of paper, not necessarily ownership recognised by maliks (social elites and land controllers) and raiyats. Integrated systems of law and administration were needed before awarding title would transfer actual as well as notional rights.

Seeking entrepreneurial peasants One by-product of property law was that, during much of the nineteenth century, most cultivators did not share the benefit as incomes from agriculture improved. Even in the eighteenth century, dispossessed and opportunist people had formed criminal gangs (as ‘dacoits’) in the countryside. In the nineteenth century, armed or concerted resistance broke out, expressing religious, social and economic grievances. Disease, scarcity and famine worsened in rural communities, partly because of the effect of the changes in law. But none of the systems introduced between 1770 and the 1850s remained unchanged. New ideas and perceived problems prompted adjustments up to and after the end of British rule. Measures were taken to preserve property. The Court of Wards, first introduced into Bengal in 1790 and 1793, provided for temporary administration of an estate by the Board of Revenue, where necessary or requested, on behalf of an ‘incapable zamindar’, a description often held to include women. The British encouraged primogeniture on large estates to avoid the risk of subdivision upon inheritance. Legislation was passed to ease the burden on ‘encumbered estates’ whose survival was threatened by bad management or misfortune. After riots in the Deccan in 1875, a host of 57

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policies sought to protect landholders in temporarily settled areas against moneylenders who, supposedly, were snapping up land rights and disturbing an age-old political and social equilibrium. Various laws qualified the advantage given to creditors by the increased security of landed property, including tenancies, and by the operation of the laws of contract. The most extreme, the Punjab Alienation of Land Act of 1900, tried to restrict land transfer (and hence mortgages on rural land) to recognised agriculturists, members of ‘tribes and castes’ listed in a schedule to the Act. Though such measures were not extended to permanently settled areas, they affected them. Fears about alienation of land by proprietors and tenants were heard in Bengal policy debates. Government loans and cooperative credit were added to the state’s armoury of ‘improvement’ measures. A second set of adjustments concerned tenancy. Most important after the middle of the nineteenth century, even in permanently settled areas, it was clearly influenced by the theories of political economists, a colonial reading of Indian history and institutions, and advocacy of ‘peasant’ rights. Punjab officials had turned survey and settlement into an expensive intellectual exercise, one of the founts of today’s anthropology and development studies. They helped advance more interventionist agrarian policies that spread over India. Members of the Punjab service, promoted to serve in the central government, advocated a peasant-proprietary model of agrarian policy that became influential even in Bengal. Now the priority was not promptly paid land revenue but agricultural development. Encouraged by political worries and trends in political economy, officials sought property rights further down the tenurial and social scale. Ideas of secure tenure and fair and fixed rents were also current during tenancy debates in Ireland, taking on a populist and nationalist hue. Indian Tenancy Acts set out to protect superior landowning interests while providing a measure of security to the cultivators, giving rights to those holding land from landlords rather than directly or indirectly from the state. In Bengal and Bihar, the Rent Act of 1859, purporting to help zamindars collect rents, also recorded as settled or occupancy tenants those who had held the same land for 12 years. It placed restrictions on rent enhancement and tried to provide more effective resolution of agrarian disputes. Defects in the Act and more radical impulses after famine and rural unrest led to the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, adding two major points. First was presumption of ‘settled’ status in a village for all holding any land there, meaning legal rights of occupancy for most first-tier tenants (excluding subtenants).23 Second was provision for survey and settlement to record holdings and rents by analogy with procedures in temporarily settled areas. As operations proceeded, these established legal rights and familiarised people with them. In hope of ending endemic poverty, especially in Bihar, occupancy tenants were thus given property after the Punjab peasant-proprietary model to encourage them to invest. 58

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Political motives mattered. Rich peasants were more important than poor. Priority for zamindars was never abandoned. In Awadh there were measures to organise and educate ‘chiefs’ along lines favoured by the British. In Bihar and Bengal, the government respected landlords’ power and protected their interests. Tenancy reform was a response to worries about rural unrest and poverty, but pro-tenant policies were promoted by a government needing zamindars’ support. The contradiction was resolved by self-serving rhetoric. Privileges for landholders would cure a whole society. ‘Normality’ after famine was an end to ‘starvation’ and ‘excess deaths’, not to inequity or suffering. Improving landowners’ credit and supporting peasant-entrepreneurs was a surrogate for improving the living conditions of poor cultivators and bonded or casual labourers. The government needed more revenue to restore its finances; it wanted to meet British industry’s demand for raw materials and markets. Strategic property rights answered all these needs. Twentieth-century laws to protect sharecroppers and bonded labourers were less effective than measures favouring landholders. They did not relate to property but to inequity, partly caused by earlier policies. Later reforms also helped landlords raise rents and moneylenders secure loans; formal tenancies increased.24 To sum up on British land policies, property became a right applied equally within prescribed categories, supposedly promoting order and economic development. It was potentially universal: political and religious rights were also defined by their properties (boundaries, incidents, entitlements, possession and use). A gradual revolution had started in Bengal in 1793, modified by officials and courts. It survived the idea that landownership is socially deleterious—Adam Smith favouring a tax on land values; David Ricardo arguing taxes on income from mere ownership would not reduce incentive; Marx focusing on surplus value added by labour. Raiyati settlements in India were designed to prompt land improvement, and pro-tenant reformers advocated land rights. How could they be an engine of economic progress even against the Crown and yet socially unjust? The contradiction cannot really be resolved, only overlooked, as it was in British India. The ‘magic of property’ prevailed because British rulers could not abandon it while depending upon collaborators, professing to respect old customs, establishing their own sovereignty and legitimacy, and benefiting Britain. More generally, colonial officials and most political economists thought economic progress depended on private efforts. Hierarchy (classes and key actors) and accumulation (capital and security) were supposed to encourage enterprise. Public interventions and concern at socio-economic inequality in India were regarded as exceptions mainly explained by Indian failings. Colonial revenue officers wielded power within theoretical frameworks. They were challenged when inalienable religious or educational endowments were regarded as sacred and eternal, not temporal. Much that Indians valued was above and apart from their rulers’ norms. Nonetheless, colonial 59

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categorisation was a powerful instrument for change. In the countryside, surveys and records of rights measured land objectively; they defined property and registered its possession. Urban lands had Western-style registries (from the eighteenth century in Calcutta). Public lands were delineated and subsumed as a category in property records. As said, variants existed for ‘tribal’, ‘forest’ and other lands, and around charitable endowments and ‘waste’ or common lands. There were anomalies in the treatment of land rights in everyday transactions or litigation. But in most cases property was ‘created’ in set categories for one owner or another. This book, having established that point, will ask: who benefited?

Notes 1 For earlier, longer contributions, see Robb, Ancient Rights; for a short overview Robb, ‘Landed Property’. See Robb, Peasants, linking agrarian policies with social and political identities. For a useful summary on British laws, zamindars, raiyats, labour (and commercialisation) in north Bihar, see Ram, Land and Society. 2 For the following, see Stein, Making of Agrarian Policy; Ray, Change; Guha, Rule of Property; Islam, Permanent Settlement; Bose, Peasant Labour; Stokes, English Utilitarians; Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt and Land, Landlords; Smith, Rule by Records; Ludden, Agrarian History; Yanagisawa, Century of Change. Rorabacher, Bihar, ch.7, also cites property and law in general terms, basing his account on the period of his earlier book (1757–1825), taking most examples from zamindars and caste politics after 1947. For an original rethinking of these questions, see Chakrabarti, ‘Agrarian Localities’ and ‘Problem of Property’, the latter concluding (relevant to this book) that what emerged in India was not an individual right conducive to capitalist improvement but an expression of sovereignty (p. 1032). 3 See Robb, ‘Completing’. 4 In personnel it was partly a return to Mughal land controllers and revenue payers, replacing temporary revenue farmers discredited by theory and practice. Afterwards British state officials did measure and record estates that were partitioned, sold for revenue arrears, brought under protection of the Court of Wards or subject to legal action. 5 The start was Alexander Read’s survey and settlement of Baramahal (1792–9). The system was popularised by Thomas Munro, with endorsement from the Fifth Report of 1812. Munro was no advocate of a large interventionist state. See Beaglehole, Thomas Munro, pp. 19–20. 6 There were also recognised disadvantages for government: the obvious ‘objections to the unlimited multiplications of petty accounts’, including avoidance of revenue and dues by small estates, as rules prevented the use of the Sales Law in petty cases until the arrears grew large. That may well have been a reason for partitions, which grew enormously. See Darbhanga Coll to PC, 7 May 1894, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. 7 Ramsbotham, Studies, pp.  3–8, quoting W.W. Hunter, Bengal MS  Records (1894), vol.1, pp. 30–46, Revenue Board Proceedings, 27 April 1773 and Bengal Proceedings, 16 August 1769. ‘Ryot’ is a very common spelling of ‘raiyat’, the form preferred in this book. 8 Ramsbotham, Studies, pp. 27–30.

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9 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 10 Ibid., pp. 75–81; the text of the Amini report is at pp. 99–134. See also Hastings, Journal. Hastings was not concerned for the condition of the raiyats, assuming that zamindars would recover from high revenue demands by increasing or improving cultivation (vol.2, pp.  62–4). Behind his policies was the idea that ‘The incessant activity and the recognised equity of the Government can alone solve the problem how the enormous population . . . is kept in tranquil obedience without any show of efficient strength’ (vol.1, p.  63). He thought ‘that under no other Government is there such incessant and laborious application to the business of office’. It failed only in ‘the want of any attempt to inculcate principles of morality into the natives, who are strangely destitute of any such instruction’ (vol.2, p. 73). That helped explain his enthusiasm for instruction in the English language, as some Indians wanted (vol.1, p. 127), and also his wish to enlighten the ‘lower classes’ (vol.2, pp. 149–50). On Francis and Hastings, see Guha, Rule of Property. 11 See also Robb, ‘Property Rules’. 12 Linklater, Owning the Earth; see also Mount, ‘That Disturbing Devil’, p. 11. 13 Ravenstone, Few Doubts, p.  437; ‘La propriété, c’est le vol’: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu‘est-ce que la propriété? ou Recherche sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernement [1840], Paris 1841; Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts [1852–70], tr. Constance Garnet, Berkeley 1982, p. 659. It is true that secure property rights have permitted obscene concentrations of wealth; they have also permitted technological change, increases in productivity and provision of most public goods. We might think British Indian officials right to regulate property. 14 To value everyone equally might imply all ways and views are valid, a discouragement to knowledge, education, enterprise and development, all of which are also impeded by privilege; hence need for balance in maintaining and restricting rights. That would have been accepted by many Britons in India, while believing inequality unavoidable and, at least in their case, desirable. 15 Land taxes have commonly been resisted by the powerful who own land. What should be the response? Many favour land-value taxes. Land nationalisation raises more problems. It may appeal on grounds of equity as argued in Christophers, New Enclosure. Proposing landownership shapes societies, large-scale public ownership was relatively new in Britain and its privatisation after 1970 the main feature of neoliberal policies, Christophers asks about the history and theorisation of landownership and the balance between public and private. But what sort of state would it be that owned all land—the Crown as in feudal regimes, notionally the freeholder, or enclosing landholders who assisted urbanisation? Would it be Soviet Russia collectivising and increasingly tyrannical and corrupt, or industrialising Britain, dispossessing, oppressing and polarising but somewhat respectful of law and popular will? Rival centres of power challenge or moderate the state and decisions about uses decreed or permitted for land. Do malign effects of private property (especially for equality of voice, opportunity and privilege) outweigh advantages from patronage, investment and resistance to tyranny? One way or the other, land ownership produces goods and profits that, while ‘unearned’, can be invested to assist economic growth. Rights to land may encourage other rights, many also ‘unearned’, for women, workers, the poor and the different. In property-owning Britain, agricultural workers lost rights over smallholdings and common land and had to work in towns and factories; eventually standards of living did improve for many. On origins of property and capitalism, see Sartori, Liberalism, pp. 206–8 with reference to Marx;

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its introduction about the long ‘battle over the control of land’ and its ‘urgent’ current manifestation; and ch.2, ‘The Great Rent Case’. 16 Macfarlane, Origins of English Individualism. 17 Kumar, Land and Caste; ‘Private Property’; ‘Note on the Term “Land Control” ’. In his notorious letter to the New-York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853, https://marxists.catbull.com/works (accessed 26 January 2020), Marx wrote as a man of his time that India was in dire need of regeneration. A land with ‘no known history’, it was ‘passive and unresisting’, socially destitute ‘in the midst of plenty’, internally and externally ‘isolated’ by ‘the self-sufficient inertia of the villages’ and ‘paralysed by the utter want of means for conveying and exchanging its various produce’. Among many new instruments of change, Marx noted that the ‘Zemindari and Ryotwar [systems] themselves, abominable as they are, involve two distinct forms of private property in land’, which was ‘the great desideratum of Asiatic society’. See also Karl Marx, ‘Private Property and Communism’, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, various editions and translations, first published 1932. As is very well-known, Marx cited the fetishism of money becoming profit and goods rather than only a means of exchange. That led to private property in means of production and capitalism and exploitation of labour. In Communist Manifesto, Chapter II (1848), Engels and Marx, claiming property relations had been subject to historical change, aimed to abolish ‘bourgeois’ rather than all property. 18 See later in the chapter on the 1885 Tenancy Act. On riverine (char or diara) land the same land still had to be held to acquire occupancy rights. 19 Chaudhry, ‘Rule of Proprietary Right’. It includes a lengthy discussion of BadenPowell, with most of which I agree. See Robb, ‘Property Rules’, Ancient Rights and ‘Landed Property’. 20 See also Washbrook, ‘Law, State’, and Robb, ‘Law and Agrarian Society’. In Robb, ‘Property Rules’, p. 64, a footnote quotes Justinian’s definition of property: ius utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus iuris ratio patitur: the right to use and abuse a thing, within legal limits (Code 4, 35, 21). Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books . . ., bk.1, ch.1 (1753), referred to ‘sole and despotic dominion’ excluding the rights of any others. Bentham added an expectation of benefits that were legally protected. Others have pointed out that property is not only in ‘things’, and that more than one property right may pertain over any one ‘thing’ without overlapping. The broader implications are also discussed in Robb, ‘From Law to Rights’. More obliquely, see Robb, ‘Memory’. 21 In a Delhi University PhD thesis in preparation, Vishal Singh Deo will argue that under colonial laws and practice certain lower castes in Muzaffarnagar, western U.P., were liable to be deprived of property rights because these were not expected or supposed to be enjoyed by people of their status. 22 Selection of Papers on Agricultural Indebtedness, pp. 1–23, 304–445. He was supporting the Alienation of Land Act, described later. 23 After 1885 a raiyat no longer had to hold the same land to acquire a right of occupancy; it was sufficient to hold any land in the same village for 12 years as a tenant. This, the major change of that Act, intended to prevent zamindars from shifting holdings or falsifying records so as to preclude occupancy rights under the 1859 and later Acts, following court interpretations. However, these rights were not accruable on landlord’s own demesne (zirat), lands often held by raiyats on short-term leases. A proposal had been rejected to allow a settled raiyat to acquire occupancy rights on all lands held in one village. There was a distinction between a settled and an occupancy raiyat, the former status being heritable

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but not transferable. Someone, not being an occupancy raiyat, who bought the holding of a settled raiyat did not thereby acquire occupancy status in that or all of his holdings; but a settled raiyat by virtue of this status had occupancy rights on all his holdings in that village however recently acquired. Occupancy rights were transferable ‘by custom’. Obviously there was much potential for lawyers in all of this. Principles of the Bengal Act were applied to the Central Provinces in 1895. Other regions also had tenancy legislation, though needs were different where numerous cultivators rather than landlords were the ostensible revenue payers. 24 Independent Indian governments imposed land ceilings and established land development banks for poorer farmers alongside guaranteed prices for agricultural staples. The Zamindari Abolition Act of 1951 in Uttar Pradesh, for example, led to abolition of joint tenures, compulsory purchase of individual holdings of over 30 acres and equation of cultivating possession with landownership, measures—widely circumvented by the powerful—repeating the colonial emphasis on property owning and protecting commercial cultivators.

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5 THE LAND IN QUESTION

Transformation or hybridity? The last chapter discussed how landed property became the norm and a device for agrarian development, whether by landlords or independent yeomen. This chapter moves on to distortions property introduced and inequalities it exaggerated, significant for any assessment of its economic impact. The British not only assumed secure ownership would prompt harmony and development but intended to direct necessary change, even introduce new attitudes or institutions to improve India. They persisted when optimism about their ‘civilising mission’ faded and motives became protective as much as progressive. It is no surprise British agrarian policies are often regarded as the most important external influences on nineteenth-century India, for good or ill, but, as already remarked, there is little consensus on how transformative the measures were. The colonial state is portrayed as a collector of agricultural surplus used by indigenous groups for their own purposes; or a modernising agent, shifting the loci of power and opening up channels for goods and ideas. Evidence is largely the product of British administration and often inaccurate, partial or misleading. Modern scholarship also disputes the nature of precolonial economies and polities. If new land laws started a revolution, what kind was it? For the nineteenth century, evidence of change in Bengal has been particularly suspect. Reports were impressionistic, subject to shortcomings and omissions of data collection—most often blamed on the permanent settlement that left the state in want of village agency. Doubts over data were exacerbated by exigencies of Indian agriculture, when all seasons were abnormal, determined by climatic and other variables. Most importantly, information was produced within definite though not constant assumptions by British officials. These assessed the recent past, certain that Asiatic ways were different from European and British rule was transforming Indian society. There was, in short, a willingness to believe changes in late nineteenth-century India were mainly the product of British government (and for some its justification). The 64

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eighteenth century was not only a period when the old political order was in decline but also the culmination of an Asiatic mode of production and premodern social and economic stagnation. The recurrent explanations were tradition, feudalism (by analogy with the European past) and community— the last defined by hierarchy, interdependence and self-regulation. By explicit contrast, nineteenth-century Europe evolved, according to otherwise contradictory explanations, into a higher form of society, more productive and integrated but less communal. Supposedly nineteenth-century India was starting on the same journey under British tutelage. The interpretation depended on a view of the past that was always open to objection. Clearly revised understanding of the eighteenth century would also revolutionise interpretations of the nineteenth. The impulse towards such revision is by no means new. It might have been deduced from B.H. BadenPowell’s criticism of what he called unwarranted generalisation in Maine’s idea of the village community.1 It was more recently brought to attention by Dharma Kumar’s pioneering work on agricultural labour.2 Others, especially Irfan Habib, mined the ideas of students of Mughal systems and proposed earlier starting points for agrarian change. It was suggested the eighteenth century saw a commercialisation of kingship. In northern India a unified merchant class and service gentry resulted from state activities. Between 1600 and 1800 the gentry captured rural power, monopolised land rights and advanced irrigation, roads and commercial agriculture. Monetisation resulted from centralised administration, especially armies, and the breakdown of the jagirdari system (assigning specified revenue). It was accompanied by a growth of trade.3 Such revisions relocate many of the changes associated with British rule. They make the nineteenth century a period not of new directions but of economic continuities. They identify British impact with the decline of the gentry in the north-west, due to administrative recentralisation, reductions in demand for particular items of trade and increasing vulnerability to external forces.4 Another provocative work, by Ratnalekha Ray, challenged most of the suppositions about the effects of the permanent settlement in Bengal. It did not, she claimed, displace an ancient aristocracy through its legal innovations; the Mughal zamindar was essentially a creature of politics, not economic production. It did not establish a market in land for the first time, nor was the market that arose a free one. It did not, by instituting private property in land, concentrate economic resources in few hands to the detriment of self-sufficient peasant communities: there were landless villagers and village landlords before 1793. At issue therefore were not new relationships forged by the British but their influence on the operation of old ones. The conclusion was that, in spite of the attempt to transform the role of the zamindars, village landholding classes generally managed to maintain or improve their position, if necessary by shifting an increased burden on to the poor.5 65

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A parallel argument is that various categories of cultivators and landholders and the rights they implied continued to exist in practice during British rule, though ‘tenants’ had few legal rights after the permanent settlement. For example, there were various terms for occupancy tenant after that status was given legal form in 1859 and 1885, implying long-term tenancy. The names in Bihar were maurusi, kadimi, dehi and jaddi, in turn meaning ‘hereditary’, ‘ancient’, ‘resident’ and ‘ancestral’. They contrasted with pahi (foreign or non-resident), kharidgi (acquired by purchase) and hal uparjit (newly created).6 Hereditary residents supposedly claimed descent from a first settler or conqueror; others, who might also have been resident, made no such claims or were not so recognised. I  infer that various customary rights were attached to the new legal form, but they had previously been distinguished from other kinds of right (and thought superior). In the Bihar countryside some kinds of landholding were of long standing and some more recent. This hybridity mattered for development efforts that often seemed to assume that rural society had been transformed.

Land control and agriculture There seem to have been three basic varieties of indigenous landed power in rural Bihar. There were proprietors whose political authority apparently derived from surplus agriculture and irrigation. There were proprietors whose military control or settlement efforts were associated mainly with the political or agricultural frontier. A few of both kinds of proprietor were great caste leaders who lorded over huge areas, along with their high-caste agents. Elsewhere (also within the great estates) was a third kind of influence where multitudes, mainly of the same few castes, vied with each other over petty holdings: their dominance came from a mixture of ritual status and weight of numbers.7 British tenurial categories sat uneasily on these realities, embedded as they were in ecology and belief. In practice, moreover, ownership of land was conditional upon power and custom, not just as Dharma Kumar reminded us all ownership is conditional but because exclusive enjoyment of property was rarely achieved or perhaps sought.8 In pre-British days non-cultivators might provide irrigation. Customary harvest-shares were deemed reasonable for types of zamindar or cultivator (rather than particular soils or crops). Overlords could only collect where their authority prevailed, and it was uneven, restricted partly by administrative difficulties among dispersed and divided holdings (it was no accident that successful zamindaris supported many relatives and retainers) and partly by the influence of dominant castes, notably Rajputs and Maithil and Bhumihar Brahmans. Though prejudiced against cultivating for themselves, they were dispersed throughout different economic roles and might oppose as often as they cooperated with powerful caste fellows. There was not everywhere an intermediate level of power such as Ratnalekha Ray 66

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emphasised in Bengal. As said, some Bihar zamindars held sway over large tracts; others were controllers in the village rather than over it. All needed to enforce their will in a society with many overlays of rights and privileges. Rivals ousted by current holders of power might not disappear and could not be treated as part of an undifferentiated mass of inferiors. The Bihari cultivator often could not independently determine his inputs— water, seed, technology and labour—because he lacked capital and needed credit. Interdependence was born of divided and interspersed holdings and shared labour-force, machinery and cattle. But agricultural decisions were not necessarily taken by village leaders, landlords or moneylenders. Most were unable or unwilling to manage the multitude of dispersed holdings under their influence. They imposed strong negative control rather than definitive direction. Thus it was difficult for the cultivator to show enterprise, though he could benefit from effort; it was hard for the dominant to encourage improvement in methods but easy for them to set parameters such as the choice of cash crops. Their role was reinforced by social norms and preferences; it might rest on deference as much as wealth, but high castes too were restricted by practices expected of them (such as refusing to hold the plough) that gave non-economic rewards. Did caste culture help explain low productivity and poverty? On one hand, it has been suggested Brahmans in north Bihar ‘enjoyed a disproportionate share of political patronage and popular prestige’, ‘eschewed all contact with their conquerors . . . [and] made no concessions to modernity’. Socially conservative and insular, they resisted social or economic change over many generations, pursuing caste purity and religious learning while excluding the lower castes from education or advancement.9 On the other hand were signs of lower-caste assertion; ‘tyranny’ was resisted in Bihar.10 Exclusion from respect, education and opportunity contributed greatly to poverty, of course, but the key factors may not have been high-caste dominance but social conservatism and insularity plus exploitation and limited engagement with cultivation, whosoever was on top—Maharaja, zamindar, thikadar, amin, jeth raiyat or bania.11 Some characteristics were partly ecological in origin. Patna and Gaya districts were ‘hydraulic civilisations’ in miniature, dependent for rice growing on elaborate measures to divert and store floodwaters through channels and tanks for which supra-local authority was a prerequisite. The rental structure, based on produce sharing, reflected these realities. In other Bihari districts extensive irrigation was not practised, though limited cooperation existed because of embankments. On poorer lands, money rents were earlier the rule and cultivators depended on dry crops, not rice. Some huge zamindaris derived from quasi-military and cultural control of underpopulated regions. Elsewhere, small plots reflected fluctuating individual circumstances, dense population, mainly dry agriculture and local variations of soil and climate. A contrast between wet and dry farming existed without being 67

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as obvious as in some parts of India: most irrigated areas had drier, poorer hinterlands. The region was both integrated and insulated. No outsider could be indifferent to local power and status. The combination of economic functions (rentier, usurer, cultivator) in the hands of single individuals increased interdependence in the villages. Within each village, possession of a store of grain between harvests was a primary expression of local power. Its chief possessors did not remain constant but were essential to the majority of people without such reserves. Those with land and power distributed grain and credit for status more than profit. Agricultural productivity was low; sections of the people were oppressed. Production for the market occupied small proportions of cultivated area, requiring most effort and capital input and providing most output by value. Market access might be restricted by a zamindar taking produce rents or a moneylender buying grain just after the harvest at prices reflecting economic and social power, not market forces. Other features were higher castes who avoided marketing their own crops (as noted) and itinerant merchants who sold crops to traders, who passed them amongst themselves until they reached the handful of dealers who exported goods out of the immediate region. Mostly, the agriculturist was only marginally involved because his surplus was small, communications were difficult and trade represented another world to him when expressed in money terms. He might store and lend grain and be familiar with the ways of the local haat (market) or bazaar and the tax (chungi) levied by their proprietors.12 He might bargain with the travelling merchant, borrow from the mahajan and be a man of substance. But essentially he needed an interpreter and a provider of coin in the person of the trader or the moneylender and did not himself venture into the different culture thus represented. The relationship between land, society and production was reflected in the role of money. Without a local money economy, a key relationship had to be between holders of surplus grain and those with smaller holdings or without land. But money was used for measuring and recording dues and debts, though its value differed from place to place and coin to coin. Under the British, as for earlier regimes, it was the form of obligation most readily recognised by the state and law: it became more or less the exclusive standard of value. Even while transactions in kind and immaterial exchanges predominated in villages, the cogency of money was undoubtedly enhanced by its being exclusively acceptable to the state and crucial to long-distance trade. Money, thus reinforced, assisted in perpetuating social command and labour bondage. The village lender, seeking to encourage and control production, was the last link in an international commercial chain for indigo or opium. The British attempts to protect debtors affected only professional moneylending and barely touched local connections between village-level patrons and clients. 68

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For the British, however, land and money came together in the assumption that productive agriculture was necessarily capitalist. As already discussed, the reality in Bihar and much of India was quite otherwise. Commercial production was undertaken by landlords or farmers with large landholdings, but also through intermediaries controlling a host of producers on smallholdings. Rent, long-term debt, harvest loans and formal agreements forced almost all producers to release some output.13 Subsistence cultivators would exchange high-value crops for low, the latter usually bought for cash, participating not so much in a market as in enforced barter at one remove. Some ‘surplus’ went to pay unavoidable dues and for services; some into the stores of the rich; some into long-distance trade. Capital was applied to irrigation or flood protection but not easily to maximise productivity on individual holdings. For larger landholders the difficulties were patterns of proprietorship and scattered units of production. The insuperable problem for many cultivators was how little land they held. The Patna division of Bihar was congested. The population had pressed heavily on the soil for generations. Partitioning holdings and smaller estates formalised and exaggerated complexity. This was not capitalist production as understood in Britain. It depended on markets but also intermediaries’ control over labourers and smallholders. Just as profits from agriculture were increasing, the twin levers of power (land and credit) became more effective. One reason, as government and judiciary intervened, was a new legal garb for subordination alongside that from social status and myth.

Errors and outcomes of land policies Property laws provide a basis for judging British development efforts. What were their consequences, given circumstances that predated British rule and did not end with its imposition? In Ancient Rights, I discussed in more detail how the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 helped expand the state’s roles. In particular, the Act marked an attempt to regulate social and economic categories by means of defining concepts of property and the market. It expressed the influence of mechanistic binary schemes of classification and enumeration. Landholding and tenancy were distinguished by incidents or ‘rights’ supposed to determine their economic role and the social goods they produced. Theory was bolstered in practice by taxation, land surveys, property courts and concomitant records; some policies were confused and contradictory. Legal property for individuals was provided for some not all, a metaphor for the impact of colonial rule. The 1885 Act redistributed rights from landlords but only to a middle stratum of peasants.14 There was no necessary correlation between occupancy right and holding size; occupancy was recorded in very different areas for very large majorities of tenancies. Why should a privilege apparently accorded to the many mainly benefit a few? Partly to appease critics of reform (land issues enflamed 69

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opinion), the privileges went to ‘tenants’, not cultivators. The reform sought to create market-oriented peasant-proprietors as if raiyats were uniformly depressed and would be equally benefited. But Bihari agriculturists were already differentiated by status and resources. Many workers were landless. Some occupancy holdings were much larger than others. Some tenants, in a fluid and fragile position, found it hard to cling to new rights. The reforms encouraged subletting.15 Colonial agrarian policy generally hardened divisions between social classes. With regard to landholdings the evidence is unequivocal. Statistics on average number and size show that larger holdings preserved their integrity and maintained or even increased their share of total cultivated area; they became relatively more profitable. The number of smaller holdings increased, and their size and share diminished. Similar tendencies were seen throughout India, with different starting points and forms in permanently and temporarily settled tracts and on irrigated and dry lands. But, broadly, the same two features can be seen everywhere, among and between holdings with many different kinds of title, in lands dominated by large landowners and in lands under peasant proprietors. They were evident in Gangetic Bihar. There had always been many landless in India, and migrant populations of many kinds. Under colonial rule (and since) the pressure increased for people to settle on land and cultivate it, but large populations were unable to subsist from land in their possession. Growing numbers in cities and factories were too small to compensate, especially as population and average life expectancy rose. Micro-holdings—and share-cropping and food from landlords’ home farms—often became devices to lower cash wages. Impoverishment was increased when people had to rely on employment by others. Again, this applied in Bihar. Specific changes often reinforced the importance of existing hierarchy. Property law offered clarity, backed by measurement, maps and recordkeeping, about who owned which land and what ownership entailed. Individuals, families or kinship groups came to be identified as owning land, sometimes because their allies were well-placed to manipulate surveys and records. Formal rights interdicted informal use of common lands, waste, pasture and forests. A mystique developed around written forms as the repository and arbiter of rights, proof of familiarity with a new norm. Records existed long before British rule under the control of patwaris (record-keepers) and kanungos;16 the rent-roll or village accounts (hastobud) implied a formal memory with authority over informal recollection.17 British policy turned away from quasi-public to private repositories and then tried to regain rights of scrutiny and supervision. Land measurement too existed in the eighteenth century but was regularly resisted in the nineteenth, regarded as effectively reassessment, marking an upward trend in rents by consolidating regular and irregular dues.18 But by the 1880s information was more 70

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open to scrutiny by government and units were standardised in answer to many complaints about fraud, such as the use of short measuring poles. Theoretically the record of rights, though no panacea, set limits for future rent enhancements. Survey and settlement proceedings in Bihar made the parcha (deed; individual copy of the record) valued by raiyats, virtually all of whom needed it read to them.19 One result of government interventions was increasing disputes over rent and in regard to abwabs, additional dues that had become illegal by definition without disappearing in practice. In the five districts under the Commissioner of Patna, for example, an experiment was made for rents to be remitted by money order. The Commissioner declared it a failure because it was used only in disputed cases. In 1893/4, there were 4,665 applications involving rents worth nearly Rs.90,000.20 In the same year in Gaya, 62 applications for commutation of produce rents to cash were received from just four villages. ‘As usual . . . strained relations existed between individual landlords and the tenants of particular villages’; in several, high-caste tenants were arguing over which lands were zirat (landlord’s demesne; sir) and which raiyati. The Collector commented that no doubt the disputes had much to do with ‘the strong position which the Tenancy Act has given to the settled raiyats’. In one place raiyats had ‘lived at peace with the same landlord for about half a century’ but now there had been a ‘serious riot’. The tenants had been ‘stirred up by an old pleader of the Babhan caste’ (Bhumihar Brahman). On another estate, landlord–tenant relations had supposedly been damaged by a ‘set of rapacious amlah’ (agents) who had created illfeeling and been dismissed. However, the landlord, the Raja of Maksudpur, was himself ‘very exacting’; his tenants ‘had little confidence in him’. He had tried unsuccessfully to impose ‘most oppressive’ conditions through the civil courts and then persuaded some of the tenants to execute a ‘regular document agreeing to almost everything he had failed to obtain’. That was evidently a device to ensure submission and stave off official interference because ‘he had abstained from putting most of these conditions into force although six years had elapsed’. If he should try, the Collector mused, the ‘raiyats now know what to do’.21 Another report, by M.B. Morrison, a sometime patnidar (intermediary tenure holder), claimed that records revealed a range of tenancies existing in south Bihar from before 1765 with named stages whereby the raiyat’s share of the produce would gradually reduce; they were ostensibly to encourage the extension of cultivation. In parts of north Bihar and in Bhagalpur south of the Ganges, the records also facilitated a long-standing system of cash rents. Even when zamindars lost their estates, the data could be used by thikadars to fix rents with undisclosed surcharges in return for conceding occupancy rights under the new tenancy laws. Smaller zamindars allegedly followed suit, but intermediaries benefited most, though they also increased investment. The system was used by thikadars in Darbhanga and 71

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sub-managers on zirat lands in order to overhaul tenancies and measure lands. It was also available to village leaders and office-holders, including some from agricultural castes.22 As written rights became more significant, it mattered more how and by whom they were used. Morrison described a situation he believed typical. He wanted to raise rents in some villages. The raiyats were Goala (Ahir), Koiri, Kungar and Dhanuk by caste, meaning that there were no high castes (Brahmans or Rajputs, reputedly more assertive). Supported by leading villagers (jeth raiyats),23 the tenants tried to delay the change, pleading poor harvests. They drove away surveyors Morrison had sent. Eventually they agreed to pay higher rents provided these were not recorded in the jamabandi (rent-roll, successor to the hastobud) but then withheld their rents from Morrison, depositing them with the headman. They were taken to court, where the patwari gave evidence that they were fixed-rate tenants (having paid the same rate for 20 years). In the end, Morrison lost the villages, as had three of his predecessors as patnidar over the last eight or nine years. Later, he found from old revenue maps that the lands in question had been covered by a large river channel as late as 1843 despite records given in evidence showing unchanged rents. Obviously, extra-legal forms of land control survived after the impact of new laws and were adapted to them.24 But cui bono? The most likely answer is those who engineered the subterfuge, rural elites who understood the new rules and could protect themselves. Most raiyats, it was agreed, were too weak and divided to resist their landlords, and the Tenancy Act was ‘by no means generally taken advantage of by the ryots’. Still, the availability of new laws did make a difference. In Darbhanga in the 1890s landlords applied less often to distrain crops in lieu of rent, as was permitted by regulations, because the law now required them to give notice to tenants and placed the onus of proof (of the rent due) upon the zamindar. Few applications were made to the District Officer as permitted under the 1885 Tenancy Act. Instead the law was used to resolve other disputes—applications to deposit rent with the authorities, supposedly pending a decision on what was owed but really to dispute whether lands were raiyati or zirat and rents payable in cash or kind. Raiyats as well as zamindars were also said to be biding their time in the early 1890s, aware that a general survey and record of rights was about to begin.25 After the tenancy legislation, landlords complained that they had been seriously undermined in their rent-collecting capacity. Laws and records would sometimes be used against them: rents on regular, long-standing tenancies could become harder to raise. Richer and more effective tenants gained land at the expense of both zamindars and poorer cultivators. Some tenants with secure holdings began to compete for labour with established zamindars. But enterprising landowners took to managing cultivation on lands they treated as zirat and cultivated directly or with share-croppers. 72

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In short, revenue and property laws benefited the already powerful, above all landholding classes identified by title to land and socially by themselves and the British. Most direct and indirect pressure was felt by the weaker sections of society, increased by ecology, indebtedness and growing commercialisation. Numbers of dependant tenants, share-croppers and landless grew, and their relative conditions worsened. Resistance did occur. India was caste-­ridden and communal in colonial imagination, hierarchical and oppressive, but it was not wholly deferential. Even poor people and low castes, including those the British stigmatised as inherently criminal, could assert themselves. Land being particularly valued and constantly disputed, mofussil (district) courts were inundated by cases about it, not only among elites but between the higher and lower classes.

Land and politics In political pronouncements addressed at decision makers and opinion formers in Britain and India, officials often equated a part with the whole (for example ‘landlords’ or ‘tenants’ with all rural people) or treated one measure as sole catalyst for general effects such as agrarian harmony and improvement. All might have been well had British rulers successfully imposed their own categories and assumptions on the Indian countryside. But they did not immediately transform India. Like evolution, their influence proceeded gradually in some respects and by a sudden leap in others. Their rhetoric flourished despite awareness of its contradictions and inconsistency, such as poverty and oppression that implied agrarian classes and competing interests. There was, in short, a sleight of hand that made large proportions of the population invisible in policy terms. Too often (and as so often) the dominant became the norm and the oppressed the exception. In this case it was land controllers, proprietors and independent tenants at whom legal and developmental efforts were primarily directed. A multiplier of these effects was the way Indians thought about them. There was considerable influence from ideas exemplified in real measures. Gandhi had a vision of an India of self-sufficient communities in some ways indistinguishable from the ideal advanced by European moralists and some colonial policy-makers in tenancy law and even local policing: the dream of a village watch supported by a local community. Independent India sought zamindari abolition and land ceilings partly because of colonial debates about economic progress and social equity—another victory for the peasantproprietary school but also for subterfuge, pragmatism and compromise preserving the power of landed families. Groups identified with class interests also drew on European debates. Zamindars’ societies defended their interests and sought to reduce their liabilities—in Bengal in the 1870s and 1880s they called additional local taxes and tenancy laws a ‘confiscation of property’, though rural taxes were comparatively low (as also after 73

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Independence). In the twentieth century, each kisan sabha (peasant society) reflected a complex indigenous and colonial inheritance, usually representing successful agriculturists operating within a market economy. Religious and social movements drew on older texts and traditions (often Vaishnava), making claims to status within an increasingly generalised varna hierarchy. But much insistence on rights developed concepts embedded in colonial law and transmitted through administration, courts and settlements.26 Influences from agrarian policy persisted in scarcely questioned assumptions and in towns as well as the countryside. Take the case of Calcutta (Kolkata), long dominated by upper-caste literate service and professional elites, bhadralok. These were not direct descendants of landed magnates, merchants, bankers and office-holders who ran the eighteenth-century city but partly produced by what the permanent settlement created. After an upheaval in which some great families were dispossessed, secure landed classes emerged, living in the city; building houses, temples, schools and hospitals; sponsoring societies, printing and other civic goods. Many smaller subordinate landed interests were less secure, but regulation and statute also implied, for landholders and government, private and public bureaucracies regulated by law courts rather than dispersed day-to-day hands-on administration. Managers, agents and clerks served alongside professionals, especially lawyers. Calcutta’s concentration of writers and literate workers was one result; they manned offices, schools, newspapers and associations.27 The British, for all their ideals of equality before law, concentrated on rights to land as property; these defined agrarian relations for the state. Privileges for landlords in 1793 did not merely harden old ambiguities of status; occupancy tenants’ protection in 1885 did not just obscure old distinctions between resident and non-resident. By design, they sharpened the difference between holders of land right and the landless. State action effectively endorsed high rank. Subordination expressed in caste and the value system was reinforced by the machinery of government. It was a deliberate choice. In 1893 the Shahabad Collector blamed a ‘peculiarly hard and stiff-necked generation’ of raiyats in Bhojpur for trouble bad enough to lead ‘to the quartering of punitive police in the locality’. He noted a zamindar in Kharwan obtained decrees for arrears of rent but was afraid to execute them; again the raiyats were at fault. He praised the Maharaja of Dumraon for not oppressing tenants, proof of which was that as Collector he had not received a single complaint from them during his cold-weather tour. He went on: ‘A good deal is said now-a-days about the decline of the Zemindar’s influence over his tenantry’ but Bihar zamindars still exercised ‘a considerable amount of influence over their ryots’ and were ‘a real and potent factor in our administration of the country’.28 The British preoccupation with landed property focused development efforts on landlords, managers or secure tenants. That helps explain ways the strategies were misdirected. Proprietors were favoured by laws and 74

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protective measures, partly to ensure payment of the land revenue. Advocates of tenants wanted to give them property rights too. The very people who criticised landlords’ lack of enterprise and oppression of ‘real cultivators’ introduced laws allowing privileged tenants to behave in the same way. The problem for development was not that there were no improving landholders. It was (as later chapters will show) that the complex interdependence of agricultural decision making was not easily transformed by, for example, marketing opportunities or publicity through fairs and journals. Ideas about production and public benefit often also ignored the landless. The government eventually introduced protective legislation (with little effect) for workers and to regulate labour mobility from congested districts. The last was essentially a cheap labour policy to the advantage of British revenue and trade. By the 1920s and 1930s India’s old dominance had reacted with new weapons. Leaders mobilised caste or community and enlisted the ‘masses’. This chapter asked who benefited from British property law, what distortions it produced, what inequalities it exaggerated. The revenue laws did not exactly match the countryside and could intensify existing socio-economic disparities. A similar confusion clouded official attempts to understand and improve agricultural practice and standards of living, with their new emphasis on investigation, statistics, agricultural experiments and credit. Theories about Indian rural development still posit cultivators taking opportunities or resisting due to culture or circumstance. The famous Green Revolution of independent India, by such accounts, occurred either because of relative economic advantage provided by new crops, irrigation and credit or because opportunities were appropriate to changing political and social conditions. In nineteenth-century Bihar, some development policies misread caste and power, access to land, cultivation and marketing. Legislation and ‘improvement’ imagined agricultural decisions belonging to independent proprietors (improving landlords or secure tenants). Agrarian society in Bihar contrasted with those normalising impulses in British law and policy, and also with those of science, to which we now turn.

Notes 1 Baden-Powell, Indian Village Community, pp. 3ff. See the preceding chapter for a discussion of Baden-Powell, property law and arguments of Faisal Chaudhry. 2 Kumar, Land and Caste. Many such findings preceded those of Yazdani discussed in ch.1, this volume. 3 C.A. Bayly, ‘Gentry, Merchants and Agrarian Society in Northern India in the Early Nineteenth Century’, paper given at the symposium on the External Dimension in Rural South Asia, SOAS, 12 December 1981. See Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen. See also ch.3, this volume, on ‘portfolio’ capitalism; on related issues Robb, Ideas Matter, and Roy, Business History. 4 See for example Mann, British Rule. 5 Ray, Change.

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6 Grierson, Behar Peasant Life, p. 325. 7 See Robb, ‘Hierarchy and Resources’. 8 See the preceding chapter; and Kumar, Land and Caste. 9 Dewey, History of Mithila. See also Henningham, Great Estate, on Darbhanga raj; for recent examples Chakravarti, Social Power. Stevenson-Moore, Final Report, quoted by Dewey, went further: despite their intellectual and cultural development, Mithil Brahmans degraded instead of improving the lot of the ‘people at large’; in this ‘ancient seat of learning’ (Mithila) ‘ignorant fanaticism’ was ‘rampant’ and the lower classes ‘most depressed’. Something similar seemed the view of Rorabacher, Bihar and Mithila. 10 See Pinch, Peasants and Monks, pp. 33–4, 85, 88–93, 115: the surveyor, Francis Buchanan, reported (1812–13) that higher-caste informants in Shahabad thought high proportions of people ‘unworthy’ of religious education but also that some cultivating castes, Kurmi and Goala (Ahir), were claiming high status. By the twentieth century, Pinch notes, concern with ‘personal dignity, community identity and caste status’ had reached a peak among Kurmi, Yadav and other peasant castes. An ‘aggressive’, ‘newly-formed peasant and artisanal elite’ was ‘building a Kshatriya past’ for themselves. Later the peasants’ leader, Sahajanand Saraswati, led resistance to what he called ‘total and absolute control’ of zamindars and their agents, including forced labour (begar) when the zamindar’s men would lay a club (danda, lathi) at a kisan’s door requiring him to ‘work for the zamindar the following day and night regardless of any personal obligations’. But Sahajanand’s first two books had been on Bhumihar Brahmans, who, he recalled, ‘did not have a significant sense of pride in their Brahmanness. And accordingly they did not act as though they were Brahmans’, resulting in ‘baseless and often malicious stories about . . . their community’. He believed them ‘as good as Mithils’ who would intermarry with them at all levels of society but try to conceal the fact. See his biography, Hauser, Culture, pp. 160–71, 411. 11 A cast list: zamindar, landlord by contract, agent, chief villager or moneylendertrader. On thikadars and jeth raiyats see ns.22 & 23, this chapter. 12 There are many references to this tax, for example Saran Coll to PC, 8 May 1894, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. 13 The system had a long pedigree, common in India from at least the twelfth century as a way of directing production of certain crops and converting ‘surplus’ into cash. See for example Aquique, Economic History, pp. 153–60. My claim is that it need not be related to capitalist or European trade. 14 Rothermund, Government, Landlord, pp. 21, 28, 40, 96, 104, 113, 185. 15 See Asok Sen’s essay (pp. 1–112) in Sen et al., Perspectives. 16 The patwari was an estate or village official, at one time registered in the Collectorates, who kept records, appraised crops, received rents, issued receipts and played a part in disputes and festivals under the supervision of a kanungo, in return for a salary, land grant, fees and indeed bribes. There is a useful summary in L.S.S. O’Malley, Gazetteer, Saran District (rev. A.P. Middleton, 1930), reprint New Delhi 2007, pp. 38–9. 17 The hastobud was an annual statement of each raiyat’s account and land under cultivation or not, signed by the patwari. See Wilson, Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms. 18 Bhatta, Principles, observes that measurement and surveys of area and crops had become the major means of rent enhancement, though thought against everyone’s—even the zamindars’—interest. Tenants found them ‘irksome and alarming’; rather than submit they might agree to pay abwabs.

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19 This is discussed in Robb, Ancient Rights, chs.8–10. Singer, Creating Histories, pp. 151, 171, rightly claims ‘People in Indian villages recognised the role of written culture, even as they lived according to oral customs’; survey and settlement provided ‘a written language for disputes’ and ‘the personnel to settle them’. For more on their role in disputes, see ibid., ch.6; see ch.7 for the influence on local power in the 1930s. 20 PC to BR, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. There were 424 applications (Rs.22,002) from Patna, 240 (Rs.11,200) from Gaya, 2,167 (Rs.45,738) from Shahabad, 380 (Rs.5,285) from Saran, 1,330 (Rs.11,728) from Champaran and 77 (Rs.1,944) from Darbhanga. Overall, 1,236 were refused (Rs.10,769). 21 Gaya Coll to PC, 8 May 1894, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. Generally Gaya district had produce rents (bhaoli), ‘the material outcome of its physical features’, especially irrigation as discussed in ch.11, this volume. Bids for commutation were often markers of tension. The civil courts declined to intervene: whether lands were held bhaoli or commuted to cash rents was not a matter for them. 22 Morrison, Experiences. He claims rent rates were reduced by the end of the hastobud system but incomes in Darbhanga increased. The rental scale in south Bihar reduced the raiyat’s share, as lands were longer under the plough. They were akin to jangalbari tenures in Bengal. Thikadars, as will be shown later, were mainly indigo planters taking over zamindari rights in return for fixed payments or mortgages. 23 The jeth raiyat was a leading villager, usually on large estates, who ensured rent payments in return for a percentage and/or a land grant. See O’Malley, Gazetteer, Saran. 24 See n.22, this chapter. The vantage point of the observer no doubt helps attribute the blame in such cases. 25 Darbhanga Coll to PC, 7 May 1894, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. Applications for deposit of rent numbered 1,487 in 1891/2, 1,323 in 1892/3 and 1,091 in 1893/4. In the same years applications to distrain crops totalled 74, 246 and 32. 26 See for example Stokes, Peasant and the Raj, pp. 203–89. For Bihar, Damodaran, Broken Promises, and Hauser, Culture. 27 Other revenue settlement encouraged different government and society. Colonial Calcutta contrasted with Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai) or Lahore, administrative, commercial and industrial centres of temporarily settled regions. In Punjab military needs were reflected in land policy, emphasis on peasant proprietorship, preservation of some great landed families and a paternalist government defending its personalised rule and customary law, helping explain much of Punjab’s twentieth-century political history. 28 Shahabad Coll to PC, 1 May 1984, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5.

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Part II SCIENCE AND AGRICULTURE

6 SCIENCE AND SUPERIORITY

Knowledge and development The application of science to production is described in most theories of development. It is important for this book as another colonial input after land law and agrarian policies. Categories and chronology were again deceptive. Misleading stereotypes were compared: Indian custom versus Western science; eighteenth-century stagnation versus nineteenth-century development. Science reiterated that the official model of agricultural improvement was derived from Britain. But policy fell more or less between universalism and indigeneity. Development politics often revolve around questions of status and identity.1 The design in Bihar was British in personnel, purpose and ideology. It applied supposedly universal principles to everything in a given territory, thus treating India as a putative nation of territory, not a nation of people. In a nation of territory all citizens are subject to the same laws, including scientific and economic ones. In a nation of people, indigenous forms are thought necessary or legitimate, in line with common social identities. British rule purported to support the latter rationale in the social sphere but found it hard to escape its own guiding principles.2 By contrast, the universality of science was axiomatic, supposedly cutting it free from religion and partiality. That had disadvantages; it was also incomplete and misleading. Even in science, identity politics are often inescapable. It was counterproductive for the British to ignore specific ingrained local conditions. But it was also hard to escape the belief that one’s own way was best, making the universal parochial. A development effort that pays no attention to local specificities is likely to fail, but local specificities alone (praxis) will seldom be enough without the application of more general understandings (science). This too has its political parallel: a territorial state at odds with its inhabitants or unable to claim to be one people by language or culture is difficult to turn into a nation whatever the strength of sovereignty, laws and institutions. Equally, without some such formal framework within a territory it is hard for national 81

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identity to be expressed. Given these conditions, it is evident that indigeneity and universality are not givens but evolving processes. Comparison may be made between late nineteenth- and late twentieth-century approaches to development. There were dissenting voices in colonial India as well as more recently. Some individual scepticism foreshadowed Albert Hirschman in doubting the efficacy of remedies devised in Europe or North America when imposed on different societies with little consultation or adjustment. Questions were also raised among the British in India, as later by Hirschman, about fundamentals of economic theory and expected stages of development.3 Nonetheless it remained true that the prevailing ethos was often at odds with relevant social, political and economic conditions. Administrative convenience and prestige exaggerated the disparities. Institutional preference was for measures that were top-down and largescale, not bottom-up and small-scale. Large projects were linked to the assumption of European superiority and the prestige of Western science and technology. Often that pride was misplaced, as Clive Dewey showed about steamboats introduced on the river Indus.4 There were examples in minor projects too. India’s Revenue and Agriculture Department tried to introduce a patent water-lifter costing Rs.250 for use in Shahabad district. It was ‘voted useless’ after being proved to raise just under 127 cubic feet per hour in comparison with the ‘country mote’ that managed over 294.5 But hubris was inevitable because there was fervour in British espousal of Western expertise and knowledge in the later nineteenth century. It was not a simple commitment developing from rationalism and the idea of progress. It was produced by keen advocacy in the midst of contention. It reflected the uncertain status of material sciences and political economy in Britain. Some people promised they would solve all problems, benefiting supposedly benighted territories ruled for their own good by Britain. But many challenged and condemned the commitment to science and its equation with progress. In the nineteenth century, the ancient universities of Britain and the Indian Civil Service examinations had yet to pay proper attention to the success and promise of Europe’s scientific and industrial revolutions. Advance of science in the public mind was slow and erratic, as it still is today. Around the 1830s, as James Secord showed, contemporary publications, while seeking to promote science, also reacted to conservative and Christian opposition to its method and findings. Joseph Priestley’s Birmingham laboratories had been torn down by a mob; he fled to America. Mary Somerville’s On the Connection of the Physical Sciences (1834) a translation and reworking of Pierre-Simon Lapace, Mécanique céleste (on the solar system, with no mention of God) was criticised as godless despite claiming that mathematics was the highest form of theology. Charles Babbage in the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1826) aimed at interconnected scientific advance that would bring social progress within cautious limits but even 82

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this was too much for many conservatives, who judged science by atheistic tracts such as those of Richard Carlile. Britain thus seemed to fall behind Germany and France; see Charles Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830). Darwin and Thomas Beddoes were mocked in anti-science lampoons, and their ideas prompted fierce debates between supposedly opposed camps of religion and science, but throughout the period various efforts had been made to render science attractive and palatable to people and the powerful; taught and acceptable in old universities. John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), printed cheaply by new industrial processes, was not only a scientific primer but also a ‘good conduct manual’ (Secord’s phrase) teaching ‘good character and appropriate modes of thinking’. Charles Lyall’s Principles of Geology (1830–3) often thought to capitulate to religious orthodoxy, in fact took a middle line by seeking not to offend while accepting a model of ‘deep time’ from palaeontology. George Coombes’s Constitution of Man (1828), initially phrenological, in later editions became a text on understanding intellect and mental habits to promote social progress. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, also had modest achievements.6 Thus, for some, science was potentially socially and politically radical, enough to condemn it after the French revolution. They objected to its challenge to orthodox religion—in geology, palaeontology or dating the earth. Countering this in the Royal Institution lectures of 1802, Humphrey Davy promised safety: science would make the ‘different [social] orders’ contribute more effectively to each other but reaffirm, not undermine, the basic inequalities of existing society and polity. Gradually, empiricism and scientific doubt became more acceptable to upper classes and the genteel, but only provided they were not too popular or likely to inflame the masses. At issue was work of scientists in the sense coined by William Whewell, as late as 1833, meaning empirical investigators rather than natural philosophers. They were makers as well as explorers, creating science as artists created art. Their methodology was hardly new, having been defined by Aristotle and al-Battani and their many successors, but was newly codified as the only reliable testable route to both practical and theoretical discoveries. In that sense, it was quite recently established even in the later nineteenth century, not least in India, where it provided an investigative model for policy-making and improvement. But technological advances were made by practical men and only later provoked more theoretical interest. There was no even progress through seventeenth-century experiments, the Enlightenment, Farmer George, geographical exploration and progressive mechanisation. Instead were discontinuities, contradictions, ambiguities and complexities of the kind now recognised in Isaac Newton, with his interest in alchemy and the occult. On the other hand, Britain was relatively open to new ideas and supported them socially, politically and financially. In the ‘early industrial age’, 83

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Secord claimed, there was at last ‘intense enthusiasm for the new literature of science’. Britain espoused the cause with the devotion of the convert. Every official investigation and policy purported to have science at its core. Law was regarded as a science (or at least ‘touched by the electric current of modern science’) along with Maine’s comparative method.7 Major initiatives were preceded by inquiries and paraded as examples of inductive method. Science became an arbiter and standard-bearer of imperial Britain. Recent conversion not its far-from-proven success helped explain its force. Its novelty showed that the inherent difference between rational West and emotional superstitious East was nonsense, but in its practice science did not contradict other ideas of the time. In India many British officials espoused conservative principles and evangelical Christian faith. Humphrey Davy’s promise that science would reaffirm ‘basic inequalities’ was keenly felt by the empire’s subjects. They were indeed subjected, not least through ‘scientific’ racism. As others have remarked, the British assumed a patriarchal role in the ‘family’ of their empire and to different degrees infantilised and emasculated their subject peoples. Thus was chastisement justified: a duty of the father; a punishment for the wicked ungrateful child. Colonial rulers latched on to stadial theories of human history and cloaked their regime in notions of tutelage and improvement. Because their theories were gendered, they also portrayed the subjects as stereotypical women: weak, irrational and in need of protection. Primogeniture had long prevailed, and law increasingly discriminated against illegitimacy; this connected to the mythologising of ‘blood’. That was tempered by ‘morality’; peoples under British imperial control were cast, if not as legitimate blood-kin, then not as bastards either. At best, they were younger siblings, common subjects of the Crown. They too had rights. The British self-image implied rationality but also moral purpose. Of course the Briton was ever the oldest brother. Stereotypes and arrogance distorted science. Many British officials did admire and respect India. A group associated with Mountstuart Elphinstone, for example, was among many who disagreed profoundly with James Mill and the denigrations of his History or with T.B. Macaulay’s certainty of the ‘intrinsic superiority’ of Europeans and their culture. These were voices of experience opposed to ignorance and prejudice. Nevertheless, British people constantly, even reflexively, celebrated their own high achievements and manifest destiny—a default position in the popular mind and in historical, scholarly and quasi-scientific analysis. Applications of ‘knowledge’ and experiment to Indian agriculture sometimes presumed this superiority and painted Indians as irrational and passive. As already remarked, the very idea of ‘improvement’ by the British was often closely related to accusations of Indian inferiority. India’s agriculture could be improved, as often claimed from the time of Charles Grant and early interventions (tea, for example), because natural conditions were supposedly favourable but human capacity inadequate. 84

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The application of science to Indian agriculture had positive aspects but (more importantly for this book) policies towards agriculture were part of a much larger set of attitudes, which helps show why approaches persisted in the face of contradictory impulses or confusing evidence. We need to understand that world view and how it arose. It is worth doing because similar attitudes persist within the development fraternity and more generally. At root the critique was cultural, even religious.

Knowledge and understanding Countless examples could be adduced to describe the colonial world view,8 and some will be indicated elsewhere in this book—prevailing attitudes to knowledge and colonial stereotypes that were wrong in many respects. It will be useful to refer to a book by C.A. Bayly for ambiguous parallels between Indian and Western knowledge and also the latter’s influence, even among Indians, that reinforced the European sense of superiority. Bayly’s study on empire and information had three main subjects: the role of information in warfare and government, development of Western knowledge about India and evolution of knowledge and communication among Indians.9 It distinguished between systems of communication and sets of information, skills and concepts and between older and ‘modern’ forms. Its first subject included intelligence, surveillance and propaganda. To Bayly, successful generals and states were above all information-rich. Presumably he did not really disagree with Charles Metcalfe’s dictum that British rule rested on both opinion and force but concentrated upon the former. ‘Effective intelligence’ was, he claimed, more important to East India Company success than military advantage or ‘ambiguous capitalist character’, more important than command of the seas and Bengal revenues. States, as information systems, were defined through postage and other communications, spies, messengers, writers, officials’ reports and records and by managing public images and attitudes. Sophisticated precolonial modes of intelligencegathering evolved in precolonial India; many were taken up or adapted by the Company. Bayly’s second subject moved from political to intellectual or ideological elements, giving numerous examples of how the British tapped into indigenous systems. As one English diarist wrote, of a suspected Muslim conspiracy against the Europeans in Calcutta, ‘A knowledge of disorder is half the cure.’ The same source offered a beguiling image of the scholar, John Gilchrist, in his house at Number 1 Writers’ Buildings, teaching Persian to a gaggle of Company novices.10 Similarly Bayly described munshis (secretaries, writers) instructing Company servants in 1800. Up to a point the British simply had to understand. No European household, let alone any government or trader, could have survived in India, especially in earlier times, without communicating with and listening to Indians. The British needed Indian 85

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almanacs, for example, not just as intellectual curiosities but because Indian religious holidays were observed by servants and workers. Too much can be made of the inscrutability of the East. In treating his third subject, evolution of Indian systems of knowledge and communication, Bayly stressed that survivals and modern indigenous forms co-existed. He described a cultural community and information system (calling it the north Indian ‘ecumene’) and contact between Indian and Western thought and practice for astronomy, medicine, language and land. Precolonial Indian states collected information and statistics about resources ‘in much the same way as the future British conquerors were to do’: there was no simple contrast between West and East, rationality and irrationality existed on both sides. In late eighteenth-century Calcutta, I would add, colleagues of John Shoolbred, later head of the vaccination programme but then practising at the Native Hospital, provided smallpox immunisation in season to as many European children as they could manage. In the hands of British doctors, this ‘Indian’ treatment was regarded by parents as best European practice. Sharing knowledge was perhaps most of all illustrated by collections of materia medica (what can India tell us? is it specific to the ‘tropics’?) rather than by broader linguistic, social, political and economic surveys that sought universal ‘truths’: the latter were infused with European norms. What then happened was deliberate subordination of ‘Indian’ to ‘Western’ knowledge. While still seeking to learn from Indians, the British sought to replace the indigenous. They wanted to open up thoroughfares, as it were, to diffuse noxious air and infuse light, literally and metaphorically. Indians’ well-developed evolving orders of knowledge were increasingly challenged by print, collection and diffusion of data, Western-style education and Christian-evangelical or official propaganda. Change followed. In precolonial times, for example, accurate mapping existed in India, sometimes showing military or trading routes, replicated by Europeans. But inexact metaphorical representations were more prominent, combining space, history and human typologies, what Bayly called people-in-space. In the nineteenth century depictions of space-with-people dominated: comprehensive scale maps based on mathematical survey or structured overviews in gazetteers, history, political economy or ethnography. Similarly, the use of Persian by the East India Company reflected linguistic plurality in the eighteenth century. For Europeans in early Calcutta (I add) the language was English for policy and higher commerce, Persian for records and diplomacy and Hindustani–Urdu for the army and upcountry trade. Hindustani or Bengali was used for workers, artisans and local collaborators; and, as elsewhere in the Company’s older settlements, Portuguese was often needed when slaves and servants were migrants (often Christian) from southern and western India. As Bayly made plain, the nineteenth century saw a reduction in the number of languages in use, that is,

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generalising of functions as well as standardisation of those that survived. It led, for example, to literary Urdu and (belatedly) Sanskritised Hindi. The conclusion was that various kinds of knowledge co-existed in colonial as in precolonial times, but that during the nineteenth century India began to experience the ‘modern’—such as mathematical not metaphorical maps, comprehensive rather than irregular censuses, and standardised instead of ambiguous and subjective borders and categories. Through print and in the army, law, bureaucracy and everyday life an enhanced role developed for written texts, not only as literary culture but also in practical spheres such as bills, contracts, leases and letters of credit. Increased power for writing increased surveillance and regulation, though (I suggest) not quite as in Europe. Western countries had longer experience of bourgeois public spheres, literacy and hegemonic vernacular languages, centrally regimented belief and custom (as in heresy and witchcraft trials) and integrated commercial, constitutional and legal norms. There were many debates among and between Indians and Europeans, and reactions of resistance, self-reflection or assimilation from both. Bayly claimed adoptions from the British ‘had a profound longer-term effect on Indian society’. Many Indians were acutely aware of the importance of information, not least to the British, and sought to guard their knowledge, as might be remembered from the alleged lament ‘alas, Sind is now gone since the English have seen the river’ (the Indus, which James Burnes portrayed as a ‘channel of communication and wealth’).11 On the other hand, as Bayly showed, Indian resistance to outsiders was matched by readiness to communicate with them. Many Indians served the British. From pandits explaining Sanskrit texts to town watchmen reporting petty crime, Indians often conscientiously passed on what they knew. Some learnt English, worked closely with the British and gained access to unfamiliar intellectual and technological worlds. Leaving aside servants, soldiers, other employees, polemicists and students, one need picture only the armies of copyists who could not have been impervious to ideas as they reproduced financial accounts, proceedings and correspondence and prepared (for the printing press) learned articles on Indian and European subjects. That Indians were influenced by necessary contact showed Europe was not all-powerful; what it offered could be accepted selectively. Indians would take up foreign ways with enthusiasm when they suited them. As early as the 1850s, said Bayly, ‘maps were being used by plaintiffs in court cases against British Magistrates and collectors’. Indeed, as early as the 1790s and probably well before then, surveyors’ plans were routinely commissioned in property cases in Calcutta and its environs, between Indians and by Indians against Europeans, including officials. Endless litigation over property was merely one aspect of huge and early Indian use of Western law. In the words

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of ‘Asiaticus’, writing in 1774, amply borne out by other evidence from before 1800, attorneys .  .  . are extremely successful in supporting the spirit of litigation among the natives, who . . . are highly pleased with the opportunity of harassing one another by vexatious suits. . . . Even the menial servants are now tutored to breathe that insolent spirit of English licentiousness, which teaches the slave to insult his master, and then bring his action for damages . . . if deservedly chastised.12 Bayly contrasted ‘new’ establishments such as the army, government and schools with indigenous spheres of mosque, temple and bazaar and concentrated information in survey and revenue office with decentralised news from local watchman, harkaras (runners) or women. At other points, presumed divides were being dissolved, sharp dichotomies denied: Indian/Western, indigenous/modern, precolonial/colonial. On mapping, Bayly argued purposes and content of representation were not as neatly distinguishable as form; varieties of spatial awareness co-existed in sacred geography, travelogues and textbooks. He demonstrated continuities across political, social and religious networks, describing the outcome as a ‘dual economy of knowledge’. Implying separate spheres or enclaves, that was perhaps not the most apposite phrase; mostly he stressed that both means and content of information were porous and overlapping. Finally, Bayly was concerned with the explosion of communication that led writers, castes, nationalists and religious leaders to recreate Indian public arenas in the nineteenth century. In many accounts, the old essentialisms of unchanging, isolated, traditional India are remarkably resilient, renewed to serve new intellectual or political agendas. Bayly’s compelling and judicious framework provided a different account of the origins of modern India: strong but open traditions adapting from Indian and European influences and employing print and organisation to forge new communities and norms. One conclusion is that big forces are never the only story, as continuing Indian resistance and adaptation showed. New means may be mobilised in defence of older norms: print, bureaucracy and capital used to support supposedly ancient values. On the other hand there was an evolution in the information order towards generalities, away from a time when a high proportion of knowledge was folk, occupational, local or dialectal and a poor man’s larger ignorance might be mitigated by his particular skill, inherited from kin or through apprenticeship. Broader connections and norms devalued such ‘small’ knowledge and disempowered those who depended upon it. Some prestigious and remunerative techniques were no longer available to outsiders or heterodox rivals; they were professionalised, closed behind education and regulation, often a reflection of power rather than quality, as for property or agricultural knowhow where Western normative forms and 88

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practices (law and science) were not necessarily superior. Similar processes of standardisation and exclusion also created larger and harder identities of religion and nation. The need and opportunity for more generalised public regulation were provided by print, faster transport, extended market relations, individual legal rights, bureaucracies and social ideologies. But where then was the West ascendant over the East? It was not in exclusive access to scientific methods or particular knowledge. Western forms and skills were elevated above the indigenous in India by monopoly, patronage and prejudice.

The illusion of knowing Many disjunctions existed between Indian conditions and British assumptions. During the 20  years after 1880 the British gained the illusion of knowing about Indian agriculture and the well-being of the people. Each new generation of officials congratulated itself on progress, on passing, as claimed in 1898, ‘from misapprehension, want of uniformity . . . and faulty returns, towards rectification of errors and perfection’.13 Each generation bewailed the fallibility and fallacies of statistics based on estimates or even ‘rough estimates’, subject to errors of collection and calculation, leading to conclusions experienced observers dismissed as ‘absurd’. Some calculations were divorced from reality; there was strong, not always unconscious pressure to arrive at ‘probable’ figures; frequently what was being sought was inadequate for contemporary purposes.14 Dark places included Bihar’s population, cultivated area, cropping patterns, output and rents. Pointed criticism, for example, followed an inquiry into famine relief in Saran district in 1873/4. It had been based around two erroneous beliefs—that 50 per cent of the area was under winter rice (the crop that had failed) whereas the true proportion was 28 per cent; and that people depended on rice for food, so that large quantities were imported from Burma, whereas the majority ate mainly millets, available from the North-Western Provinces.15 Confusion mattered. Emphasis on science and experiment implied they would diagnose problems and provide cures, but policies would be undermined by false or inadequate data. Collected to meet problems, data also defined them. One example was concern about demography and dearth. The case made by economic nationalists and attacks such as Digby’s Prosperous India, described as ‘hysterical special pleading’ by J.B. Fuller, irritated officials and led them to seek contrary arguments to convince themselves and the Secretary of State if not the critics.16 The conclusion of some officials was the inevitability of a Malthusian crisis. ‘It is obvious’, wrote T.W. Holderness, Revenue and Agriculture Secretary, in 1901, that if the Indian population continues to grow at its present rate, no Government can prevent its average agricultural income per 89

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head from declining. There must come a time when all the land fit for cultivation has been brought under cultivation, and the point is speedily reached in agriculture beyond which increased returns from an acre are not to be expected. It is therefore .  .  . that the salvation of the country must be looked for in the increase of the non-agricultural income.17 Despair in the face of adversity was hardly progressive or ‘British’ in the definitions of the day, but we shall encounter more of it. Others in the Government of India took a more positive stance. They believed agricultural productivity could be increased; agrarian development was possible and officials should promote it. John Strachey pointed to the tea industry, arguing it would not have started without government help. E.C. Buck, pioneering secretary of the Revenue and Agriculture Department, said there could be no improvement by transferring European skills; he urged research.18 To other officials, more valuable crops and improved agricultural methods would produce future prosperity. Not everyone agreed that maximum agricultural productivity was ‘speedily reached’. Some argued irrigation would be transformative, and uncultivated land was a ‘fund from which the wants of the growing population have to be met’.19 But only among the few British administrators most interested in agriculture was there much optimism. Even in agrarian policy-making, a powerful influence was demographic pessimism. It had lasting if belated impact in the emphasis placed on industrial development in India. The official agenda related to economic theories but also to investigation and statistics, especially from the 1880s. Worries about the approaching crisis arose out of and generated attempts to assess productivity and average incomes. Reports on cultivated area and harvests were instituted on a regular basis from 1884. But there were problems. Detailed compilations are impressive, but once again the scientific credentials of much of this knowledge were spurious. Data were inadequate at any one time, and it was impossible to make sensible comparisons. Despite Holderness’s theoretical certainty, the officials could not be sure how economic indicators were moving for population, yield per acre or prices. Categories of analysis were defective. Economic classes were not clearly identified. It was said cultivators were prospering but labourers held down the average; it could not be tested. Cultivated area was calculated on varying systems; harvests’ out-turn fluctuated; they were poorly understood by those reporting; cropcutting experiments were neither accurate nor typical. From 1896/7, statistics excluded areas re-sown after one harvest had failed or for which data were unclear. Complexity added to the problems. In 1894, to answer Antony MacDonnell’s request for information on the movement in food prices in Bihar since the permanent settlement, the Revenue and Agriculture Department 90

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suggested the cost of rice had increased five- or sixfold over 100  years: a rupee once bought nearly 67 seers but now bought just under 13. Further examination produced the observation that the normal rate in the 1890s was more like 16.5 seers; on average the price had probably increased three or four times. The exercise was worthless. However fine the assessment, the variety of contexts ruled out comparisons, especially over long periods— that is, changes in measures, objects of measurement or conditions of production and exchange. The statistician J.E. O’Conor sent Edward Maclagan an eloquent explanation of the ‘unanswerable difficulties’ in interpreting old figures: What sort of year was it that was taken to account? . . . What was the coin called a rupee .  .  . [and] what was its intrinsic worth as compared with the present rupee . . . ? What were the maund and the ser? They were certainly not the present maund and ser, & they may have been local district weights, & may have been kutcha or pukka. Were the prices wholesale or retail? And finally was the rice husked or unhusked? . . . These difficulties I have found in the figures . . . every time I have tried to work out comparisons, & I have made the attempt repeatedly.20 Taken in isolation certain data were informative. Some improved by the 1890s, because figures may be assumed accurate in proportion to the importance placed upon them (in particular when they involved money, but not when collected merely for record), and because increased government activity, notably in canal or famine administration, generated better statistics. Even in this period, however, information was often unreliable and processing sometimes inept, making comparisons unreliable. In this book data are deployed to cast light on particular cases, but generalisation is approached with caution, as in the next chapter for agricultural prices. The salience given to information by nineteenth-century officials represented a triumph of hope over experience. The imperfections were more significant the more knowledge was applied. Further examples will be given later. Ideas also shaped policy. Nineteenth-century officials, having imbibed the ideas of Thomas Malthus in regard to population, also placed great emphasis on theories about the productive influence of trade. They accepted Adam Smith’s idea that exports provided an outlet and an encouragement for surplus and followed David Ricardo in regarding exchange as demandled, flowing from the comparative advantages of different producers and regions. State support for railways depended on such justifications. Theory and self-interest combined in asserting also the primacy and durability of agricultural improvement and its appropriateness in a populous, fertile country such as India. But, in regard to agricultural production and public welfare, theory was thought backed up by evidence, however defective that 91

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was. In spite of speculation and investigations about poverty and labour, the conclusion was that India faced a crisis of productivity, not entitlement. The theories comprised laws explaining capitalist relations or, in Smith’s seductive phrase, ‘the natural progress of opulence’.21 The perception that India was different invited the heresy of state encouragement of agricultural progress: hence the establishment of agriculture departments and scientific advisers. The work was not, as sometimes suggested, wholly inappropriate or entirely swallowed by the interests of European enterprise and trade. But it concentrated on improvement through capital and technology. A higher priority was given to deployment of time and labour than to changing their availability or value. As with tenancy reform, the impulse was once again towards security and advancement for those already enjoying ‘property’ of some kind rather than towards spreading opportunity and independence. No judgment is implied of the long-term merits of these alternative developmental strategies, but their immediate consequences differ.

Incongruities Why did it matter? To assess the effect of scientific development we are led back to the previous discussion of agrarian conditions and the examination of further distinctive features. The conditions outlined here will inform later discussions of cultivation in this book. Was the Indian cultivator a free agent, as was assumed on both sides of the debate? I  have already contradicted that idea. To recap, holdings of ordinary cultivators were so small that, in the words of the Bengal government much later, in 1916, few ‘could afford machinery or plant except of the very simplest and cheapest type and even this they would seldom be able to use economically except in co-­operation with others’.22 Accordingly, as one planter reported of the Samastipur area of Bihar in the 1920s, the Indian hoe was the only agricultural implement obtainable in every bazaar.23 The Beharee newspaper explained that agriculture was generally in the hands of ‘very small holders who work on borrowed capital and who, even if they had the will, have not the means to carry out suggested improvements’.24 Most cultivators depended, as said, upon intermediaries for equipment as for credit and marketing. The mahajan or dealer hired out the sugar mill, cotton gin, jute baler, oil press or rice husker. The same man or entrepreneurial landowner or substantial tenant determined most innovations of crop, processing or marketing. The role imagined for profit came up against the same problem. The government and its scientific advisers, like engineers promoting canal water, assumed their input would benefit cultivators and the country. However, despite greater commercialisation (on a small proportion of already-­ fragmented holdings), rising agricultural prices were not generally enjoyed by most producers, partly because of indebtedness and contractual inequities. Rewards for effort or investment would be uncertain given the weakness 92

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of local marketing networks and the power of intermediaries—even or especially where great efforts were made by such outsiders to focus production on crops that were lucrative for them such as opium, sugar and indigo. The farmers’ priorities might be to secure against drought, minimise costs, safeguard subsistence and meet obligations. Survival and the moneylender were their main worries. These conditions have long been observed as part of distinctive economic trends that affected much of India. In the second half of the nineteenth century, agricultural production increased, especially in some areas that attracted in-migration but also on more marginal and vulnerable lands. There was limited local impact—new crops and methods and even agricultural machinery, as we shall see—but little increase in the productivity of land, labour or even capital. Throughout the nineteenth century there were striking limits to ‘scientific’ and commercial improvements of cultivation and manufacture, even in the production of sugar, indigo and opium where capitalist outsiders and the state were most closely involved.25 Demand for and remuneration of agricultural workers increased only marginally if at all. Poverty was their common lot; and there was significant expansion of the effectively landless proportion of the rural population from ‘depeasantisation’ as smaller tenants lost land through debt and transfer. As explained, richer secure tenants and some landlords gained resources (as did some urban workers, artisans and professionals). Over the same period there was a gradual shift from socially enforced to debtbonded working and from permanent to casual or seasonal employment. Many wages and rents continued to be paid in kind (proportions of the harvest), but cash payments were becoming more common. Often they did not keep pace with prices inflated by demand for exports and sharp falls in the exchange value of the rupee. The poor tended to move their consumption to poorer grains.26 The government’s famine policy, as I argued elsewhere,27 was just as badly articulated to meet more general challenges. The alarm was sounded by significant price rises (due to poor harvests) and shortages of work (due to bad weather). I remarked that measures diverted attention from underlying conditions of cultivation and rural life, presenting famines as crises rather than evidence of endemic deprivation and oppression. This suited the British by diverting attention from conditions their policies had not relieved and nationalist critics by dramatising failures of the foreign rulers. Agrarian production, however, was characterised (as also said) by widespread interdependence for water, labour and subsistence and by disparities of wealth related to ritual status. The link between high caste, occupation and wealth was inescapable albeit somewhat blurred. In normal and not only famine conditions many had inadequate resources to finance their cultivation from one harvest to the next, while a few had means to support others when it suited them. 93

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In the twentieth century, the common assumption of almost all agricultural investigation was still that low productivity was the key problem of Indian agriculture and could be solved only by the application of capital. Such thinking jarred awkwardly against the cause of the peasant proprietor but did not contradict it. From the start of the pro-raiyat reaction early in the nineteenth century, British writers stressed the potential productivity and purchasing power of the cultivators: James McCulloch argued both were artificially depressed by the Company’s monopolies and excessive land-revenue demands, while Richard Jones, criticising what he considered errors of rent theory and revenue policy, held out the prospect of capital accumulation among peasants and even labourers in India.28 All the propeasant officers of the later nineteenth century believed in a version of this programme. But they emphasised the motive power of capital, which was universal in the theories, rather than that of consumption; that is, of supply rather than demand. By the 1920s this took more logical expression in worries about subdivision and fragmentation of holdings; rather ineffectual efforts were made to facilitate land-swaps and consolidate holdings.29 But the assumption was that India could and should follow the path of northern and western Europe where consolidated holdings allowed improved techniques and generated capitalist relations in agriculture. These shortcomings were probably unavoidable in British officials without the benefit of hindsight and with the impediment of national interest. One must have in mind the comparative narrowness of the path along which Britain passed while holding India, in agriculture and industry, scientific awareness, civic amenities, bourgeois property and professional satisfaction. The leap of imagination required to envisage a specifically Indian form of development, though achieved over details, was too much to expect in terms of grand seminal theory. Nor is it yet easy to say what that indigenous theory should have been. The European model of agricultural revolution has been explained in terms of ecological differences, especially the short growing season and low natural productivity of major grains in northern Europe, in contrast with potential multiple harvests and relatively high yields of tropical wet-rice. But, as we shall see, the Indian case was less distinct on these grounds. The main foods of the majority in nineteenth-­century Bihar were the two large millets, jowar and bajra (pearl millet), and the effective growing season for any crop in one harvest was arguably shorter than in Europe in that there was very little latitude in sowing and harvesting times and considerable danger from minor variations in rainfall through much of the growing period.30 The dominant consideration seems thus to have been protection against vagaries of climate in conditions in which a succession of options was usually available. That was one motive behind the prevalent mixed cropping. Similarly, jowar and bajra were popular in most areas because of their flexibility in regard to soils (though they would also reward careful husbandry). 94

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Policy was not always intended to encourage change. But the British intervened on the assumption that India’s problems and remedies related mainly to two kinds of property—land and money—and depended to some extent on certainty and a retreat of risk related to the expansion of the state and its support for most kinds of property holders. The main issues were not distribution and equity. Clearly, a distinction has to be made between better instruments of statecraft and greater benefit for citizens. Aspects of the former are obvious, expressed in military, economic and social policy, law and constitution making. They could be traced within cities, among the intelligentsia and government servants (including the army) and in complex interactions with political organisations and popular mobilisations. But for the general benefit, measures needed to be targeted at all aspects of production and exchange, and particularly at the weak and underprivileged.

Experiments and experts As noted, the application of scientific investigation to agriculture was quite reasonably regarded, not least in India, as a nineteenth-century English invention. It started (according to the 1928 Royal Commission on Agriculture) at the Rothamstead research station (1843) and the Cirencester Agricultural College (1845). This model was followed in India after an uncertain beginning devoted mainly to secretariat reorganisation. At first the direct role of government was chiefly to secure information and the burden of agricultural improvement rested on agencies for experiment and education. Then experts were specially appointed: J.A. Voelcker, surveying Indian agriculture between 1889 and 1891, and J.W. Leather, the Government of India’s first official chemist, appointed in 1892. Voelcker was notable for a comprehensive report stressing that scientific enquiry must precede improvement. He recommended Agriculture Department’s Education and appointment of an array of official agricultural experts—a chemist, botanist, entomologist and engineer. By the late 1890s central officials had laid a foundation and were ready to embark on experiment and research. George Watt’s mammoth Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1900) showed their starting point, the current knowledge of the character, production and marketing of major crops. Efforts were encouraged by the Famine Commission of 1901 and agricultural work in various provinces that showed (as the Agriculture Commission later claimed) ‘how little of permanent value can be accomplished by enthusiasm which lacks the solid basis of a definite policy and an efficient organisation’. The implication that scientific methods were needed became important in policy debates, even though, paradoxically, it was sometimes doubted science would help in Indian conditions.31 Work had begun under the Bengal government in the later nineteenth century, if not on the scale promoted by Bombay or the North-Western Provinces. Experimental farms were a regular feature even in Bihar. A model 95

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farm had been established near Arrah in Shahabad on what turned out to be an unsuitable site. In the mid-1880s, about the time an agricultural department was first formed in the province, an officer (D.J. Macpherson) was placed on special duty to choose and develop another base for experiments relevant to Bihar.32 Farms were established at Dumraon and typify the work undertaken at such places. The land was part of the Maharaja of Dumraon’s estate, managed by government agents under the Court of Wards and farmed using employed labour. Relations were established with raiyats of the neighbourhood. The soil was light loam or clay, irrigated from the Bhojpur distributary of the Son canals or, when supply proved insufficient and unreliable, from a reservoir and later a well. Experiments were conducted in aspects of production and with crop strains. For several years the out-turn of wheat was studied to assess the impact of irrigation, eight kinds of fertiliser, different ploughs and varying amounts of ploughing, harrowing and weeding.33 Comparisons were made between varieties of sugarcane, each cultivated under two different regimes, between at least four types of paddy and between local and introduced strains of potatoes, oats, maize, bajra and jowar. A good deal was learnt about difficulties of cultivation in Bihar, wind and hailstones and white ants and other insects, cultivators who diverted canal water before it could reach the farms, the extreme variation in the amount and timing of the rains and the consequences for crops and harvests, splendid prospects suddenly ruined and poor prospects producing a windfall profit. Every report contained precise details of the results of experiment, and each was prefaced by warnings about unusual features of the season. The farms thus had almost no impact on methods, even on surrounding areas. For machinery too they achieved little; ‘strictly speaking’ as one report explained, ‘the problem has not yet been properly taken up in Bengal’—at Dumraon the supervisors lacked expertise. Moreover, it was thought ‘very doubtful’ that new implements could ‘work more efficiently or more economically than hand power, especially in . . . Bihar, where labour is so cheap’. Science was not always thought all-knowing or relevant. Where farms had some local success was in spreading varieties raiyats had seen growing well. In 1895/6 the khari strain of sugarcane was imported from Burdwan and compared favourably with the local mango, a small hard red cane, or bhurli, a very thick short one. The occasion was an experiment to demonstrate the virtues of the Mauritius system of cultivation, but local cultivators were more impressed by results with the new cane and sought cuttings for the following season. The Dumraon authorities sold nearly 170,000 of them. The following season khari flourished again until affected by unseasonal drought. Contrary to its apparent resistance during the previous year, when it had had an ‘opportune watering from the canal’, it fared worse than the local varieties. Next season only one raiyat purchased new cuttings. Despite this setback, the Dumraon report for 1899/1900 claimed 96

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that khari had completely supplanted the local canes. In 1912 cuttings were still being sold in large numbers from the farms as well as amongst the cultivators themselves. The experience was similar with Muzaffarnagar wheat. In 1894/5 it was distributed at cost price to 300 tenants in different parts of Shahabad. The local wheat, Buxar white, was an excellent variety but had become susceptible to rust; the crop was almost totally lost in 1893/4. Muzaffarnagar wheat was a substitute that proved more resistant to the disease. A mass meeting of raiyats at Dumraon led to further supplies of seed being made available for 1895/6. It was then stored and sold locally. A further meeting of ‘well-to-do raiyats’ chaired by the Sub-Divisional Officer at Buxar called for yet more to be imported. It proved too expensive because of a price rise in Muzaffarnagar, but in the following years further distributions were made; this wheat too was reported to be largely grown by 1900. In 1901/2, Dumraon farm was supplying Buxar white wheat as well and also several other grains, including oats, barley, millets, gram (chickpea) and san (fibre hemp). There was less success with rice; many local varieties were available to meet different requirements and as a rule proved superior to the imports.34 Government farms were not designed systematically to distribute new varieties. Their raison d’être was discovery of useful scientific information. But circumstances were against improvement through investigation. Some problems were illustrated by the example of fertilisers. In 1890 Voelcker suggested government had provided much water and now needed to turn to manure, which cultivators recognised as ‘the great want’.35 In the 1890s, government farms studied the effects of various fertilisers on different soils and crops. The results were often inconclusive or discouraging.36 The Government of Bengal admitted in 1892, commenting on a report of Michael Finucane, its Director of Land Records and Agriculture, that ‘comparatively little store’ could be set by results from experimental farms.37 They were too small-scale and sometimes amateurish. More seriously, they were conducted in isolation from the difficult questions of the availability and usefulness of fertilisers to the ordinary cultivator. In most cases he had access only to village waste and cowdung; and, as experts explained tirelessly over 50 years and more, greater use of the latter as manure was ruled out by its importance as fuel. (Still, government control increased over forests, sources of timber and bamboo.)38 Bihar indigo planters seldom provided their cultivators with factory waste or other fertilisers.39 In the 1890s, in one of his many submissions to government, the increasingly eccentric but experienced and knowledgeable planter D.N. Reid claimed that north Bihar’s crops never failed to germinate in soils with ‘a fair amount of organic matter’. But he still thought quickacting manures the best way to help the raiyats, ‘owing to the soil being very deficient in nitrogen’. He prepared ‘farm-yard manure’ underground to preserve nitrogen and applied it to poppy crops, with spectacular results; he 97

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also experimented with and recommended gypsum and vegetable fertilisers for gram. His success was without irrigation; the only use he saw for canals in north Bihar was to provide ensilage as cattle fodder from grasses grown on the banks of distribution channels. Otherwise he did not address the relevance of his experiments to everyday conditions. (We shall encounter Reid again. At this time his schemes were eminently practical, but by the turn of the century, having retired from indigo planting, he was bombarding the Revenue and Agriculture Department with ideas for cooperative cotton mills, emigration to South America and Indian help for Celtic lands in Britain. The Department view was that he had ‘gone off his head’.)40 Implements were also considered. In the 1890s, several improved ploughs became available in Bihar through private or official effort. The Kaiser plough from Kanpur had not lived up to early expectations; it cost only about Rs.6 and was said to give a result worth three ordinary ploughings but still needed strong oxen. The Hindustan plough also, at Rs.10 or more, was liked by indigo planters and people with extensive lands, but ordinary raiyats found it too expensive and rather heavy; it too needed a strong pair of bullocks. On the other hand, there was growing use of several other ploughs, including some from Kanpur and two introduced by indigo planters, the St Joseph’s plough and a preparation plough made by Still & Co. of Motihari. One planter reported the success of the Sibpur patent wroughtiron soil-inverting plough: it was light and cheap and (he claimed) the only new plough that he had been able ‘to get the natives to work . . . willingly’. One year Sealy & Co. sold 103 of their ‘turn-over’ ploughs at Rs.5/8 each.41 It might seem people were looking beyond the apparently limited options and perceptions of a society that had essentially only one word for ‘plough’ (har) alongside a multitude for its different constituent parts and for most other implements.42 The Agricultural Chemist, J.W. Leather, recommended exhibiting ploughs and other implements at agricultural fairs. He well knew the usual objections. The iron plough accomplished twice as much per man-hour, but the result was not necessarily a much larger crop: hence ‘whether it will pay cultivators to use such implements depends on what value this matter of time is to them’. Leather thought it more important than sometimes thought, and cited the use of labour-saving devices such as the Behea sugar mill (to be discussed later) or the steam cotton gin. He also noted that in Madras very expensive ploughs (Rs.70 each, or more) were purchased for heavy black soils that had to be ploughed in January before they became too hard. Yields from different ploughs were exhaustively investigated on experimental farms. Results usually but not invariably showed the superiority of iron ploughs. Leather’s own figures supported this, though he did not therefore advocate iron ploughs.43 Higher yields were effectively special cases, involving valuable crops, for which there could well be bottlenecks of time and labour and where other interests were involved than those of 98

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the cultivators. In Bihar well-to-do raiyats copied the indigo planters and purchased the St Joseph’s plough and Watt’s D.E. plough; it was also the ‘too heavy’ Hindustan plough of which most seem to have been sold (770 in 1891/2). Demand was finite and probably quickly satisfied. In the early 1890s, Sealy & Co. sold far more ploughshares (presumably replacements) than new ploughs. If raiyats more generally had access to better equipment, it was at the whim of their patrons, as happened when Sibpur ploughs were lent to cultivators for their own crops. Bihari cultivators were held to ‘prefer borrowing to buying’, as if many of them had any choice. Most cultivators could not risk the cost of repairs, could not justify owning several specialist ploughs, and depended on headmen and intermediaries or association with planters and landlords. One innovation that may have been an exception was a thresher introduced by the sugar planters Thomson & Mylne, allegedly combining portability, efficiency, simplicity and cheapness, even able to be made by the cultivators themselves. The smallest model needed only one bullock. It would walk ‘outside the grain and straw’, reducing contact with the latter, reputed to cause foot-and-mouth disease. But Behea mills were more typical. In Shahabad in the 1890s, an improved version costing Rs.90 secured a strong footing and helped extend sugar cultivation; the Collector reported it purchased by well-to-do cultivators or banias to be let out at a daily rate.44

Research at Pusa Agricultural development policies had common features from the first provision of experts early in the nineteenth century. These continued with the formation of the college, cattle farm and research station at Pusa after the century’s end.45 Pusa also illustrated other typical aspects. The establishment was intended to replace technical training already provided at Sabour Agricultural College, but in its beginnings in Bihar it was built on the efforts of indigo planters assisted by government to improve their methods and product, diversify into sugar and finally increase the yield of ‘ordinary country crops’. Officials worried (with justification) that Pusa might be regarded as just another device to help the planters. They claimed on the contrary to envisage an Imperial Agricultural College of national and even international importance following the examples of Rothamstead and Cirencester. In the event, because of provincial colleges, the establishment was most significant as a research institute. It provided very little teaching before the 1920s. Even its educational aims had shortcomings. Lord Curzon hoped it would not lay too much emphasis on scientific training and expected it to turn out the class of men required (he thought) on a large scale to manage agricultural estates in India, whether for themselves, native chiefs, the Court of Wards or wealthy zamindars.46 99

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Accordingly, in 1904, Andrew Fraser, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, proposed three-year and five-year courses to provide ‘a sound and scientific agricultural training’ for managers of local experimental farms or Court of Wards estates and teachers in local agricultural schools.47 The research plan was grandiose and elitist. There was talk of interesting the cultivating classes and even enterprising businessmen, but agricultural skills and discoveries were to be disseminated from Pusa by placing the College and its research in the midst of a densely populated tract containing a number of interested Europeans; by better management of large estates, the assumption being that agricultural production rather than rent collection would be their object; and by publicity among minor officials and others through a journal, an annual conference and what was apparently envisaged as a system of education spread throughout the population. There was an unconscious echo of arguments once made for bringing non-official European settlers to India. Pusa assumed an educated elite of agricultural managers responding to opportunity; its improvements required great capitalist estates or cultivators with independent access to resources, information and training. It was not an isolated case. Rabindranath Tagore’s efforts at Sriniketan were similar.48 Bengal’s later proposals for its own agricultural department were also top-heavy, including a ‘superior’ (effectively European) agricultural service at salaries of up to Rs.1000 a month at a time when it employed a mere 18 officers paid at most Rs.15 and had yet to build the school at which members of the new service were to be trained.49 In the tale of colonial intervention in agriculture, the figure for caricature has long been the imported expert, pictured as producing ‘improvements’ that were nugatory or counterproductive. However, in operation, Pusa complicated that verdict. Its experts appeared to know better than anyone how necessary it was to seek appropriate remedies. Experience taught them experiment was pointless in isolation from the practicalities of cultivation. Among leading figures, the botanist Albert Howard provided acute statements of this position. His biographer and second wife remembered how critical he was of English agricultural science for being overly academic, fragmented and out of touch with farmers. His work in India was characterised by a belief in the value of the ‘traditional experience’ of ‘an old civilisation’ and by assessment of discoveries in terms of the realities of production and trade. He knew many imported or technical improvements were useless. In the 1920s, he questioned the value of the soil-inverting plough used in Europe to control weeds and improve the soil by exposure to frosts, tasks left in India to dryness and heat. He appreciated practical skills to which science had made no contribution, most remarkably in cultivating rice. He stressed the importance of improving yield in crops while retaining adaptability and hardiness.50 As Sanjukta Ghosh argued, there were ‘scientific’ agricultural experiments at Pusa that were sensitive to Indian conditions. The Howards were 100

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also distinctive for what might now be called their environmentalism. Earlier too, systematic research at Pusa was made into specific agricultural conditions, detailed comparisons of the value of ploughing-in green crops to enrich the soil, a long-standing procedure in which Indian agriculture was well in advance of European practice and scientific opinion. Eventually benefits of such green manuring were admitted in European agriculture as well. As Voelcker admitted, Indian cultivators sometimes knew what they were doing. Pusa operated on practical results, not first principles: which green manure most increased output of particular crops or in rotation with deeprooted crops that would also aerate the soil. Ghosh concluded: ‘In terms of both goals and methods, the farm experiments showed that scientific intervention needed a tacit understanding of the value or appropriateness of indigenous categories (including natural resources, knowledge and practices) relevant to peasants’ needs’. Findings were hardly unequivocal: green manuring reduced yields on waterlogged soils, and benefits were multiplied if it were supplemented with artificial fertilisers such as phosphates, though that was problematic on many grounds—availability, cost, environmental impact and pre-existing Indian practices. But some recommended finetuning of green manuring came to be quite widely adopted.51 What then could possibly have gone wrong? One issue was simply the very limited stage reached in European knowledge of Indian agriculture and conditions. In the twentieth century the Howards had to undertake, as well as many practical experiments, fundamental work such as the classification of Indian wheat well before they could identify the best. It had to be ‘fundamental’ because varieties (as for all crops) were numerous and their names more so, differing from place to place and language to language. An uncharted environment made it hard to share knowledge or even describe experience in ways that would be widely understood. Worse, conditions varied enormously and outcomes were unpredictable, not only across India but within villages and annually. A vignette illustrating problems came from Gaya district in 1894. Imported Naini Tal potatoes were grown in sandy soil. They rotted immediately after being harvested. A similar experiment with oats was too costly.52 The problem of disseminating knowledge has already been noted. Information did spread quite readily in the Bihar countryside despite difficult communications. Agricultural fairs, government farms and local officials could influence zamindars, richer villagers, agents and intermediaries, those already involved in external transactions. But information transfer was obstructed when many zamindars and almost all raiyats were illiterate. In the whole of Gaya district in the 1890s, for example, there were only 300 or 400 pupils in government upper primary schools and even fewer in lower primary. A system of maintained private schools collapsed when teachers could not earn enough to support themselves. Traditional village schools, pathshalas, were also disappearing.53 Though written documents 101

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were gaining importance, other means were needed to impart information. One was common experience—social and religious engagement, attendance at a haat or involvement with an indigo factory. Another was official intervention as in tenurial relations. Pleaders (vakils) were a conduit, touting for business as more laws affected the countryside and the number of local courts grew hugely. Religious or social reformers, politicians and journalists were increasingly engaged, as transport and print were more accessible in the nineteenth century and more in the twentieth. But local, regional and national elites seldom engaged with the minutiae of cultivation and its improvement. Finally, apart from intrinsic difficulties in the way of scientific investigations, their partiality must have skewed their general reception and character, particularly the link to Bihar planters, as detailed in Chapter 8. They belatedly realised that faults in indigo cultivation and processing were preventing improvements. Expert advice was needed; Pusa was to provide it. Thus its science gained a suspect provenance while also reflecting defects in official understanding, purpose and imagination. Even Howard looked forward to a time when the rising cost of labour would force more ‘orderly’ methods: larger holdings and labour-saving devices.54 Government demanded his interest in commercial production and trade, officials’ usual perspective. It resulted from the character of British rule and deep-seated assumptions about agricultural development. Indigenous thinkers under European influence were not immune, as in many Bengali agricultural societies that grew up alongside official and private initiatives. A focus was acceptance of the capitalist farmer as necessary to innovation as in Britain, in place of attention to existing means of agricultural management in India. The failings were not overcome by increasing sophistication of knowledge and technique.

Notes 1 For example the concept of ‘Hindu’ agriculture espoused in the twentiethcentury edition by Majumdar and Banerji, Kṛṣi-parāśara [1579], comparing different manuscripts, giving texts in Bengali and English. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay kindly provided me with his copy. 2 It was hardly a remarkable contradiction. Nations of territory, being necessarily secular and multicultural, have often proved less acceptable than nations of people, regarded as cultural and denominational. Identity politics may easily become the norm. In particular, to this day the conflation of religion with nationality shapes world politics with malign consequences, such as the Sunni-Shia rivalry treated as confrontations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or laws making Jews the only full citizens of Israel. One of its striking if pyrrhic victories was the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. 3 See London Review of Books 36, 17 (11 September  2014), pp.  34, 36–7, review by Geoffrey Hawthorn, ‘Plan it mañana’, of Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: the Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman and ed. The Essential Hirschman,

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Princeton 2013. Hirschman, at the World Bank from 1950s, was opposed to the Bank’s grand plans. Already dubious about ‘imposing schemes of this kind on Europe’, he argued that ‘no one knew how to impose them elsewhere, and he knew next to nothing about elsewhere anyway’. In a lecture at MIT, he said that ‘The “emperors” of development .  .  . “had nothing on”.’ Starting with Colombia, he favoured moving step by step pragmatically, listening to locals. He insisted that they be involved in deciding what to do; they were already active, creating businesses, arranging small loans and so on. Instead of ‘a propensity to plan’ he advised ‘a propensity to experiment and improvise’. Loans were needed but ought to be given to test what would work and then continued if successful; that way there would be growth. He advocated leap-frogging stages in the evolution of communications (such as railways) and relying instead on airways. (Mobile telephony has since followed this pattern.) The message of Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (1958) is that development cannot be achieved from on high. He wrote Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), meaning choice (giving up what did not work as economists proposed), allowing for time (loyalty) and opinions (voice). At first influential, his work was soon overtaken in development circles by a return to theoretical certainties. 4 Dewey, Steamboats, a salutary correction to the assumptions of D.R. Headrik’s three studies (The Tools of Empire, New York 1981, The Tentacles of Progress, New York 1988, and Power over Peoples, Princeton 2010) and the unsubstantiated dogmas of Ian Inkster (Science and Technology in History, Basingstoke 1991). Dewey showed Western technology falling foul of local conditions, British imperialists not free to choose technologies at will, technology necessarily enhancing their power and Western technology generally devastating indigenous alternatives. 5 PC to BR, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. This was presumably intended for lined wells where traditional lifting prevailed, not the Son canals where irrigation was mostly flow (gravity-fed). The mote system comprised two pulleys tied to oxen to raise and lower a leather container (mote) from a support set over the well. This tale does at least imply experiment and measurement, in other words empirical science rather than an assumption that technical innovation would always be superior. 6 Secord, Vision. See also the review in the London Review of Books 36/22 (20 November 2014) by Mike Jay, pp. 25–6, ‘Like Cooking a Dumpling’ (the phrase a critique of the scientific view of creation). 7 The reference is to an address by Charles Tupper, the important Punjab official, published in 1901; quoted in Chaudhry, ‘Rule of Proprietary Right’, n.54. 8 See my elaboration in Robb, Ideas Matter. 9 Bayly, Empire and Information. Quotations in the following paragraphs are from pp. 54, 97, 21, 161, 372 & 161, in that order. The discussion follows my review in Comparative Criticism 22 (2000), pp. 243–9. 10 Diary of Richard Blechynden, 18 April  & 1 August  1799, Add.Mss.45609, British Library. A few points in the following paragraphs refer to Calcutta and derive from this diary and other papers (Add.Mss.45578–66) and Robb, Sex and Sensibility and Sentiment and Self and Useful Friendship. 11 Narrative of a Visit to the Court of .  .  . the Ameers of Sind, Bombay 1829, pp. 120–1. 12 Stanhope, Genuine Memoirs of Asiaticus, p. 53. 13 L. Liotard, 26 April 1898, R&A Famine A1–6 July 1898.

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14 See for example ibid.; R&A Statistics A2–3 March 1892 & A1–2 June 1893; Famine A5–6 July l898; General A3 February  1899;  & Agric A20–1 February 1908; and Robb, ‘State, Peasant’, pp. 133–8. 15 See H. R&A AgH A167–76 October 1879; R&A Fam B5–6 July 1898. The first of these files predates the separation of H. and R&A; AgH later became became Agric. On the collection of information see Dewey, ‘Patwari and Chaukidar’. By the 1890s, it was thought progress had been made in the recorded information available to government by reducing errors, misapprehensions, want of uniformity and faulty returns. But contemporary sources are replete with evidence of statistical fallibility. There are eloquent accounts in W.W. Hunter’s mammoth study, starting with population figures; see for example for Darbhanga the 16% discrepancy between the 1872 census (867,909) and the detailed survey by A.P. MacDonnell (1,003,886), prepared by patwaris amidst suspicion that it was for a poll tax; they were later employed on survey and settlement work that was allegedly ‘solely in the interest of the ryots’ (A.P.M. note, 28 September, R&A Rev A73–5 October 1894). The census was conducted using famine relief staff as well as patwaris and jeth raiyats and checked by circle officers and their assistants. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol.XIII, pp. 31–6. These volumes are a valuable source on agrarian conditions, with much information on agriculture and crops, credit, trade, communications, tenures, revenue, police and administration. 16 Note, 7 February 1902, R&A Famine A21–4 February 1902. Bampfylde Fuller was then acting secretary of the R&A Department, G/I. This and the section’s other points first appeared in Robb, ‘Bihar, the Colonial State’. 17 R&A Famine C6 April  1901. The occasion was an article in Amrita Bazaar Patrika, 11 December 1900, and a letter, 17 December. 18 H. R&A AgH A167–76 October 1879; R&A Agric A26 February 1895. 19 The phrase is from the Madras Revenue Secretary, 7 May  1901, R&A Rev B63–5 May 1901. 20 Maclagan to O’Conor, 15 June, & reply, 18 June, R&A Rev B18–26 July 1894. 21 From the title of chapter  1 of part 3 of Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), multiple editions. 22 G/I Proceedings, Commerce  & Industry Department, Commerce  & Trade Branch, B61 March 1916. 23 C.G. Atkins, Dowlatpore Agricultural Concern, Rusera Ghat, in Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture, vol.8, ‘Evidence Taken in Bihar and Orissa’. 24 Native Newspaper Reports II, 5 October  1912, H. Political Proceedings B57 November 1912. 25 See later and Robb, ‘Hierarchy and Resources’; and Peasants (pp.  24–34 on indigo in north Bihar). 26 For a valuable assessment of the conflicting evidence see Tirthankar Roy, ‘Agricultural Labor and Economic Transition in Colonial India from Wage Data’, Economic History Seminar, Yale University, 20 March 2005. 27 Robb, Peasants, pp. 49–57, and see ch.9, this volume. 28 These views are discussed in Barber, British Economic Thought, chs.11 & 12. 29 For concern in Western India see the studies by Ranade, Social and Economic Survey; Mann, Land and Labour and Keating, Rural Economy. The implicit model was Europe, where consolidated holdings were said to improve technologies and allow capitalist investment. 30 For differences in European and tropical farming, see Bray, ‘Patterns’. In Bihar as in most of India, varieties of millets and ‘desi’ (local) gram (cicer arietinum) were important foods, the latter for chana dal in particular.

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31 Royal Commission on Agriculture, Pt.A, p. 21. This section also draws on Robb, ‘Bihar, the Colonial State’. John Augustus Voelcker, son of a distinguished agricultural chemist whom he succeeded as a consultant of the Royal Agricultural Society in England, was appointed to investigate Indian agriculture in 1889. His long report, prepared over one year, reflected the failure of the first Indian Agriculture Department (1871–8) and the influence of the Famine Commission of 1880. Departments of Agriculture were re-established under Curzon; Walter Leather was the first Government Chemist. Relevant later in this book, Voelcker’s brief treatment of underlying sociopolitical conditions cited small holdings, debt, extravagance and want of enterprise, though he did mention disincentives to investment. He also believed improving sugar, indigo and other commercial crops could have general agricultural benefits, although these could not be ‘indefinitely extended’ across India. See Voelcker, Report, passim  & pp.  1–6, 286–7, 289–95. 32 PCR 341 10/63(9) 1884/5. 33 Experiments with Buxar wheat in 1892/3 were opposed by raiyats who considered returns at Rs.2/3 to Rs.3/2/4 lower than for ‘country’ wheat after needing more irrigation. In another area production costs were over Rs.106 but yield worth only Rs.56/8; R&A Agric C35 September 1893. For experiments on outturn in Patna, Gaya and Shahabad in 1899, for rice, other irrigated crops and sugarcane, see R&A Statistics A1–267 August 1893. 34 Annual reports of the Dumraon experimental farm, 1895–1904, R&A Agric B29 October 1897, B17 December 1898, C3 April 1901, C1 August 1903, & B19 July 1905. 35 Note, 14 March 1897, R&A Agric A27–63 June 1897. 36 Compare the results given in R&A Agric A9 July 1890 (Voelcker) & C13–15 March 1900 (Leather). 37 R&A Agric A9 December 1892. 38 See R&A Forests A30–1 June 1909 and PCR 334 10/15 1881/2. 39 Finucane to G/Be, 9 September 1890, R&A Agric A7–11 May 1891 & C13–15 March 1900. Sabour College in Bhagalpur district (now Bihar Agricultural University) was founded in 1908. 40 Reid to Under-Secretary of State for India, 25 September,  & note by A.P.M., 8 December  1894, R&A Rev B18 December  1894; and R&A Agric C5–9 August & C1–2 September 1901. Reid failed financially because he was ‘wellmeaning but unbusinesslike’, in the view of Antony MacDonnell, who knew him well. Writing to the Under-Secretary, Reid blamed the 1874 famine when he and a partner built granaries, imported food, provided fodder and ran up a debt of Rs.80,000. His partner’s share in one factory (Sadowa) was bought, he said, by the MacDonald brothers, who had made a fortune from famine contracts to supply grain and then opposed Reid’s attempts to help the raiyats. Reid was also damaged by the failure of Gestome & Co. of Calcutta. He tried to borrow from the Maharaja of Hathwa and Gestome’s liquidators, Begg Dunlop & Co. As an indigo planter he was unusual because he was early to try pure khuski (buying indigo generally rather than only from tenants; see ch.12, this volume) and undertook agricultural experiments on his Maniara estate. He also became involved with cultivating and producing opium, oil seeds and cotton as well as indigo. See Reid to Hathwa (Krishen Pertab Sahi), 9 December 1892, R&A Agric B3 May 1899. 41 R&A Agric A3 January 1890, & A17 April 1892. 42 See Grierson, Bihar Peasant Life, pp. 1–5. Sibpur Engineering College had been founded in 1856 under the auspices of the Public Works Department. In 1882 a

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remarkable early enthusiast, C.P Caspers, Subdivisional Officer, Sassaram, Shahabad, proposing many and various improvements, met with complaints that local bullocks could not draw inverting ploughs; PCR 342 10/63 (wrongly filed) 1884/5. 43 R&A Agric B8–9 January 1896. 44 PC to BR, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. Thomson & Mylne (as Burrows, Thomson & Mylne) had their lands in Shahabad augmented by a grant of confiscated estates as a reward for their services in 1857–8, and in 1881 by estates confiscated from a so-called Wahhabi conspirator (Ahmadullah). The first grant had clauses banning occupancy rights for tenants, requiring the proprietors to pay for the passage of troops and undertake zamindari duties including appointing chaukidars, apprehending thieves and ‘keeping ryots contented’. Thomson & Mylne claimed it was of largely deserted ‘jungle mehals’ that they brought back into cultivation, with no profits for eight years. In 1882 the lease was renewed until 1908, after some debate, more or less on the terms wanted. See PCR 336 10/22 & 337 10/18 1882/3 and 338 10/22 1884/5. On Ahmadullah see Robb, ‘Impact’. 45 Kerkhoff, Colonising Plants, described state involvement in trade, production and experimentation throughout the nineteenth century and beyond—European enterprises and botanical and horticultural research, including Pusa (ch.3–5 & passim), as part of a ‘radical reorganisation of agriculture’ in Bihar. It showed an early stage when Indian ignorance and incapacity were crudely opposed to European skill, with only occasional respect for ‘local peculiarities’, and scientific intervention in tobacco (the book’s main focus) eventually failing because no one had asked people what they wanted, in this case which crop to ‘improve’. 46 R&A Agric A6–9 July  1913, including Curzon to Ibbetson, 20 February,  & notes by J. Miller, 16 March, & Curzon, 19 March 1903. 47 R&A Agric A5–11 March  1904 (including notes by Fraser, 16 February,  & lbbetson. 19 February 1904) & A19–2 May 1904, including semi-official from J.W. Mollison, Inspector-General of Agriculture, to J. Wilson, R&A Secretary, 23 April, & note by Ibbetson, 9 May 1904. 48 See Ghosh, ‘Colonial State’ and ‘Bhadralok Participation in Agriculture: the Appeal of Sriniketan Pedagogues in Colonial Bengal’ (forthcoming). For a critical summary see Dewey, ‘Changing the Guard’, pp. 497–502. Other accounts of indigenous interest in agricultural improvement include four essays in Kumar and Raha, Tilling the Land, namely Arnab Roy, ‘Conceptualizing Modern Science in Agriculture in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1928. A Case of Productionist Discourse’, Sandipan Baksu, ‘Modernizing Agriculture—the Modern Era. A View from some Hindi Periodicals, 1880–1940’, Bipasha Raha, ‘Transformation of Agricultural Practices. An Indigenous Experiment in Colonial Bengal’ (on Sriniketan), and Achiatya Kumar Datta, ‘Agricultural Knowledge and Practices in a Bengal District: Burdwan under Colonial Rule’; see also therein more on the government role, Deepak Kumar, ‘Science and Agriculture. A Study in Victorian India’. 49 R&A Agric A16–17 September  1908. Sabour Agricultural College opened in 1910. 50 See Howard, Sir Albert Howard. Albert and Gabrielle Howard, prolific agricultural scientists, were the leading researchers at the Pusa institute. 51 Ghosh, ‘Scientific Knowledge’, pp. 298–319. 52 Gaya Coll to PC, 8 May 1894, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. Seed potatoes from Naini Tal were repeatedly introduced by officials in south Bihari districts in attempts to promote the crop.

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3 Ibid. 5 54 Howard, Sir Albert Howard. The quotation is from p. 34, Alfred Howard’s lectures to the Royal Society of Arts in 1920. A reference to capitalist methods is at pp. 275–7. However, McLeod, ‘Scientific Advice’, saw a slow move away from the dominance of European scientific perspectives after 1900.

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7 BENEFIT AND LOSS

Agrarian progress The discussion thus far has stressed differences between perception and reality in regard to Bihar’s rural society and ecology, recognising continuities in political and economic practices before and during British rule. It has also accepted that the later nineteenth century saw significant changes. These factors provided the basis for a contemporary intellectual construct: the supposed economic, political and moral divide between India and Britain. It reflected an interaction between two related entities as they were in the process of being defined—a celebration of Britain despite its inconsistencies and failures and a denigration of India even though it sometimes commanded respect. It shaped development policies. By this paradigm, to adapt an aphorism already offered, development was something done by science to custom. A conclusion to be drawn from the preceding chapter is that, from time to time, when appropriate, cultivators were ready to take up new varieties of crop if they had access to the seed. Also key people were ready to try improved implements. That gives the lie to the myth of a passive peasantry uninterested in economic benefit. But it was not enough for a revolution in agriculture. The input, across the region, was small. For the ‘well-to-do’, government farms, including Pusa, proved a useful source of knowledge and supply. Probably the farms duplicated existing patrons in their immediate neighbourhood; mostly they assisted those who controlled agriculture. Behind such people lay a long shadow of traditional practices and hierarchies. It is not entirely frivolous to compare the conservatism of rural traditions and interactions to socio-religious norms that resisted pressure to change: the position of women or the status of high castes. It is not frivolous because some engrained attitudes were common to agriculture, gender and caste. Another recurrent problem was the relevance of scientific experiments. Bengal’s director of agriculture, Michael Finucane, wrote of the importance of ‘communication with the outside world’ but did not consider channels 108

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through which innovation might flow.1 The omission was ideological rather than intellectual. Finucane knew it was pointless to try reforming agricultural methods ‘without first ascertaining what the practices’ were but was conditioned to think education and security of tenure not only essential (as they were) but also sufficient for agricultural development. Neither he nor government with its social detachment from ‘trade’ concentrated on understanding how agricultural production was controlled or on influencing indigenous practices. European experience did not seek enlightenment from India. Efforts were devoted to encouraging independent peasant proprietors, protecting them from deleterious market effects and extending expertise on growing and processing particular crops. The strategies benefited some regions, aspects of production and rural people, but had limited relevance for the majority. This assessment repeats my earlier findings. Behind it lies the question of economic progress. Regions fared differently: for example the ‘backward’ eastern and ‘dynamic’ western halves of the Gangetic plain. Eric Stokes identified possible causes.2 He discounted more subjective factors—both social attributes and social division, the first more or less on the ground that supposedly ‘dynamic’ castes were beset by ‘enervism’ in certain circumstances (and vice versa), and the second partly because even eastern Brahmans would hold the plough rather than starve, undermining the idea that severe distinctions of caste inhibited responses to economic stimuli. Stokes dismissed overpopulation by comparing densities per acre in Jaunpur district and more prosperous Meerut. Underemployment he discounted by showing that even in the east, whatever the average, most agricultural holdings were of an economic size. Urbanisation too he considered an insufficient explanation. Though dependence on agriculture was certainly far greater in the east, the contrast was neither recent nor increasing, and population growth was twice as rapid in the west. For his preferred hypothesis, Stokes turned to landholding: he argued bhaiachara (coparcenary) forms when cultivator and landlord were more or less identical—due he claimed to insecure agriculture—were well-suited to maximising production whereas landlord forms, produced by surplus agriculture, were not. In decline, under pressure, landlords resisted change, preferring to cling to the residue of landlord status. This ‘peasant-proprietary’-cum-cultural explanation linking tenurial status and security of property with agricultural enterprise and knowhow was in accord with ideas of colonial officials from regions of north and western India that Stokes knew best. It left unexplored instances when landlords did promote agricultural improvement: reclaiming land in Bengal from at least the seventeenth-century (discussed by Richard Eaton), responding to canal irrigation in the Doab more effectively than village communities (according to Ian Stone),3 or even cultivating zirat for profit in Bihar. It was unclear from Stokes’s account why strategies evolved in marginal conditions were 109

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effective when conditions became more secure. Accounts in this book have already stressed a variety of responses by both landlords and tenants. Among contextual features, Stokes discounted population and underemployment. He ruled out irrigation, arguing that the cultivated area was greater in unirrigated Jaunpur than irrigated Meerut because of a higher proportion of double-cropping, an intriguing observation that does not take account of variations in productivity of land and labour or profitability of agriculture. Stokes did not follow up the point but noted that Meerut had 30 per cent of land under wheat in comparison with Jaunpur’s 26 per cent under rice, an advantage of 66 per cent per acre in value of output. Meerut also had twice as much of the most valuable crop, sugarcane. Cropping patterns were relevant. Access to capital, markets and information was significant too. Some commercial agriculture was associated with new forms of production in tea and coffee plantations that relied on indirectly recruited and managed wage labour. In a few areas, such as the central Indian cotton districts, an age-old pattern of mixed cropping was replaced by more specialisation. Across India a renewed quest for land on easy and secure terms intensified a long though uneven extension of cultivation by reclamation or at the expense of borderlands and forests. There were redoubled efforts to control and exploit labour. Otherwise much commercialisation followed existing production patterns. Paucity of resources and risk aversion helped explain the supposed primitiveness of Indian farming methods. In Bihar, as will be seen, existing practice was followed for marketed crops including sugarcane, even though opium and indigo were produced under oppressive European control. Disparities increased between sections of the population and between areas. These were realities that made regions richer or poorer and also rendered some scientific experiments irrelevant.

Information and change in Bihar A word is in order about the English ‘progress’ that British officials and scientists assessed in comparison with India’s. A recent account of England provided a convenient description.4 It began with a foreign observer enthusing about well-informed landowners improving their estates and encouraging tenants to adopt best practice. Conditions varied across England, but this portrayal was fair in the main. Over 150  years to the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘aggregate output more than trebled’. Productivity of land increased by about 200 per cent and of labour by 150 per cent. By 1851, output per worker was over twice what it was elsewhere in Europe. The many reasons, alongside changed land use and production methods, included the ‘progressively smaller number of predominantly tenant farmers’ who ‘sought out best practice and the best seeds in a countrywide market of ideas and produce, often drawing on networks of lending and borrowing’ to finance improvements. 110

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To simplify what is a careful and complex account of the nature, timing and regional distribution of these developments, their predominant features were larger holdings that permitted improvements and increased specialisation and entrepreneurial decisions by some farmers. There were impediments such as rural and long-distance roads little better than those in parts of contemporary India. But enclosure produced larger units of production; even more important factors were greater employment of rural wage labour and growing proportions of owner-occupiers. The most enterprising counties became more unequal, marked by (for example) enclosures for the few and loss of common land by the many. But the favoured regions were deemed a success. The preconditions were noticed at the time and fed into ideas about how agriculture would be improved—through science, new knowledge and legal and political changes. How did India compare? In nineteenth-century India prices rose considerably, population rose somewhat and cultivation expanded. This might suggest a related sequence of causes and effects, crucial for assessing rural well-being. But we cannot assume for Bihar as we might for Britain that price rises had a decisive or general impact on production. There were distortions in prices received. Rents too did not relate constantly to output, costs or quality of land but were influenced by caste, tenure and custom. Also, relevant to science’s development role and historical assessment, the data again prevent clear answers. Non-standard and regional measures (a difficulty early in British rule) did not go away as the century progressed. What a zamindar meant by a bigha could still not be relied upon in 1900; more seriously, the purchasing power of the rupee and its significance as an economic indicator fluctuated in largely unknowable ways, with harvests, communications, rents, opportunities for labour and so on. The money economy was expanding but far from ubiquitous in nineteenth-century India. A rent of Rs.2 an acre in Darbhanga, equivalent to perhaps 36 seers of rice, was not more or less the same as one of Rs.2 in Shahabad, where it represented 28 seers (and though the British used a standard, otherwise the seer itself was a measure that meant different things in different places.) Even when expressed in rupees, rents were often paid in kind or in services, both varying according to circumstances. Market data were problematic too. Only in the 1880s were soundings extended to include marts other than central ones, and figures still represented prices ‘prevailing’ on the last day of the reviewed period (not at other times). Some commodities’ rates were given quarterly, some twice a year and some annually. Yearly rates were based on returns in the year in question but from different numbers of returns for each commodity. Averages might be calculated over different seasons without noting that wholesale trade was largely in one season. Comparisons between areas were based on the same products, whereas these played different roles in different places. In Darbhanga, the rice trade in the 1890s operated with non-standard seers 111

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and local pice; officials translated from one measure to another. The producers’ price, in which government was interested, was subject to deduction of a ‘usual’ but unspecified margin between wholesale and retail prices, intended to vary at different times and places after careful inquiry.5 No weighted index could be produced allowing for volume of trade in different years and seasons and different roles played by the same crop in different places.6 On prices, it was impossible to distinguish consistently between district headquarters and elsewhere, and not even sure harvests affected prices similarly in different districts. Returns for 1889–92, the last year being one of scarcity, indicate as much or more variation between areas in one season as between seasons in the same area (Table 7.1).7

Table 7.1  Lowland Rice Prices 1889

1890

1891

1892

89 78 94 74

108 110 117 100

104 104 109 97

88 77 87 77

20 33 30 26

94 104 94 102

104 124 110 112

91 115 107 103

70 88 77 80

34 36 33 32

Arrah, Shahabad Buxar Sasaram Bhabua

95 91 96 85

103 100 100 88

99 92 98 86

78 80 76 71

25 20 24 17

Muzaffarpur Sitamarhi Hajipur

87 85 90

101 117 105

96 106 96

82 84 80

19 33 25

Darbhanga Madhubani Samastipur

95 93 89

119 124 109

104 107 101

88 98 82

31 31 27

84 100

106 122

100 104

91 107

22 22

77 85 83

79 102 98

77 100 91

67 85 90

10 17 15

Patna Barh Bihar Dinapur Gaya Nawada Jahanabad Aurangabad

Motihari, Champaran Bettiah Chapra, Saran Siwan Gopalganj

Maximum variation

Note: 100 = 15 seers per rupee. Source: R&A Agric B17 June 1891; Rev B19 July 1890, B16 May 1892 & B16 November 1893.

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Such figures illustrate the dangers of using a monetary measure to interpret a largely non-monetised economy. Prices vary across all economies in the absence of standardising mechanisms such as price control or large dominant retailers. Variations in Bihar, though, suggested something more. Presumably Chapra had relatively low stable prices as the major river port of north Bihar; transport costs might explain higher prices in Bettiah. But why should prices in Nawada, Aurangabad and Gaya district as a whole fluctuate and be almost as high? In Saran outside Chapra prices were high and stable, possibly revealing a relatively rich district’s dependence on rice imports. In Shahabad, prices were moderate because canal irrigation (as will be shown) increased rice production and reduced the scarcity of 1892. Bhabua’s prices may have been high because it was economically isolated and few people were potential consumers. In other poorer districts, prices were generally lower but more volatile. In Champaran they were probably affected by food imports from Nepal in 1892. The profitable areas for rice production were presumably those supplying Patna and Muzaffarpur towns or Shahabad and Saran districts (relevant later for the Son canals in Shahabad and local irrigation in Gaya); but complexity suggests a poorly integrated rice market. There were also large seasonal variations and social distortions in prices paid to producers. It is not easy to prove who benefited from changes in agriculture. Even doubling or tripling of prices would have had specific, not general, significance. With further and better data, it might be possible to pinpoint beneficiaries: strategically placed areas and people. But even this table implies opportunities for those able to store or transport grain. Another ambiguous change was that Bihar’s population seems to have risen during the nineteenth century before levelling off in the 1880s (the rises of the next century are another matter). Did that lead to ‘involution’ or ‘poverty sharing’? Were expansions of cultivation merely desperate and unsuccessful ploys in crowded and land-hungry districts? It is not certain population pressure forced the changes, any more than price rises. Marginal lands and those liable to flooding were settled, but many of them, in north Bihar for example, under the aegis of European and Indian planters. Forests contracted, with increased competition over their resources, changes apparently tempered by government controls but more accurately induced by them. Late in the century there was increased building of embankments, in which (as we shall see) officials played an ambiguous role; protagonists included planters seeking to increase profits and cultivators to protect livelihoods. Significant expansion of agricultural production may have occurred in a less obvious way: in underutilised villages in heavily populated areas, chiefly by non-resident cultivators. Some villages were dry; the change marked the extension of irrigation. More were relatively underpopulated with larger-than-average holdings and high-caste raiyats ready to sublet to industrious or needy neighbours. Such more intensive 113

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land use was possibly encouraged by British policies, external demands and economic opportunities. Other changes were observed. An inquiry in north Bihar agreed fallowing was no longer much practised in the 1880s. Few raiyats were trying to do anything but get as many crops as possible during the year, paying more attention than previously to irrigation and manuring.8 Was that because they were now pressed so closely to the soil that increased efforts were necessary for survival? Many thought there was no crisis. The problem was said to be that Bihari cultivators were unreceptive to the improvements in methods some eager officials showed them. It seems likely there had never been fallowing in the sense of deliberate regular avoidance of cropping in one season in order to reap a better harvest in the next; vagaries of climate would have made that unwise. An exception would be where returns were guaranteed or partly received in advance; some indigo and opium lands were left fallow. But many villages had areas used for grazing or gathering and only periodically for cultivation; they provided fallowing informally because cultivation often shifted, apart from voluntary rotation, when holdings were transferred or as a result of flooding or drought. One change during the nineteenth century does seem to have been that more land was brought regularly under the plough. Resident cultivators not able or permitted to increase their holdings came under pressure both on their own lands and in areas once effectively common to the village. Evidence included many complaints at inroads made by outsiders (meaning people, often of lower caste, from other villages, who would pay competitive rents) and disputes between proprietors and cultivators over liabilities, rights and measurements. The quarrels indicated changes in marginal land use as well as the extent to which legal title was thought valuable and able to be translated into physical possession. The exploitation of Champaran, marked by increased population and produced by entrepreneurs, was repeated on a more intimate scale within districts where population was more stable. However, yet again, such conclusions need caution. Increases in cultivated area cannot be measured precisely. Difficulties are multiplied if we include increases in double-cropping. District returns, made to provide warnings of scarcity, included (until 1896/7) both areas where crops had failed and others sown subsequently. The Muzaffarpur survey in the 1890s revealed an ‘increase’ of 7.5 per cent in net cropped area in comparison with previous estimates. Area is a blunt indicator of land under different crops: in Bihar mixed cropping was the rule except for rice. Productivity was assumed not to have increased greatly, but on the basis of impressions inappropriately and inconsistently presented by untrained and probably uninterested observers or on rare unrepresentative sampling and experiment; such figures were (as described in 1898) ‘practically valueless’.9 Relative out-turn at each harvest was recorded in annas, an inherently subjective measure shown in 1906 to have led (since 1892) to estimates 20 per cent too low on average: 114

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16 annas was supposed to mean an average crop but was generally taken to mean a bumper one in police sub-inspectors’ and kanungos’ reports. Four annas meant a poor harvest by any standard. Elementary errors were made: average out-turn for rice in Patna, Shahabad and Gaya in 1896/7 was calculated by adding the first-class yield to the average and for wheat by adding the maximum, minimum and mean; the provincial average was produced by dividing the sum of district averages by the number of districts. Extrapolation from small numbers of crop-cutting experiments was not much more appropriate. In 1896/7 the Bengal Director of Land Records decided the results of three years of experiments were so indefinite and unreliable that he returned figures for the previous quinquennium with slight modification.10 There was also no fixity in many practices in Bihar. Observers were confused about which harvest was the more significant in any one region, going beyond disparities by value, purpose or acreage. It was said of Muzaffarpur in 1896 that the largest area was devoted to bhadoi crops (grown from June to August or September), and the aghani or winter harvest was almost as important. In 1899 a survey showed the rabi to be far more significant by area than the bhadoi, though rivalled by the aghani. Subdivisional and pargana figures varied too, rabi acreage exceeding bhadoi by a ratio of 2:1 in some areas and less than 5:4 in others. The importance of different harvests could change each year according to the character of the season. More consistent influences, for example price of particular products, were by no means automatic incentives to production. If revenue demand had had more than marginal effect on cultivation, presumably its influence declined as the century wore on. A consequence of flexibility induced by climate was an ability to react within existing values and customs. That directs attention to continuing features of Bihari society and physical environment as well as incidents and errors of British rule, for understanding the region’s economic, social and political ‘backwardness’. If there were changes, they were probably for someone’s benefit. The obvious candidates were those in possession of the land: that is, existing groups in the society such as landlords who could enforce their will and dominant cultivators elsewhere. They did not have to seek out new crops, techniques or markets but merely to let out land within their control. And if changes in land use were related to power, they would not imply political or social upheaval. What, then, was happening to the main actors in rural society? British rule was part of the environment but influenced particular roles (zamindar, raiyat, bania) without transforming their spheres of operation. In Bihar it confirmed substantial zamindars, surplus cultivators and ‘conservative’ moneylenders more or less regardless of their efforts or changes in behaviour. The existing economy was affected by railways, local irrigation, commercial crops and planters; the permanent settlement helped absentee zamindars. But the British mainly encouraged the existing social order in Bihar, at least until the twentieth century. What 115

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they did not do was one difference between ‘backward’ Bihar-Benares and ‘progressive’ Doab or Punjab and another example of ‘differential impact’ first described by Eric Stokes.11

Agricultural improvement? The paradox is that increasing intervention did occur through an appeal to science, as the last chapter showed. Knowledge had always been valued, but science received further emphasis from the 1870s. The route and degree of commitment to that decision casts further light on its impact. It was after focusing on property laws and tenancy rights that government began to intervene in Bihar over inputs for production other than land—namely, capital, seeds and crops, irrigation, agricultural methods and machinery. They attempted to recruit agents and allies expected to serve agricultural improvement, create an Indian agricultural science and disseminate best practice. One moment of change was in 1879. The decision making exhibited hesitation, ambiguity and misdirection. Responding to proposals for official intervention, the Bengal government under Ashley Eden was at first scornful, claiming it was not (as it had once admitted being) unusually ignorant of the agricultural conditions of its province. Rather it was: because it sees that the people do now make the most of the resources and opportunities available to them . . .—because it sees that they watch and intelligently follow the markets .  .  .: that hardly an acre of cultivable land is left by them uncultivated: that they are ready to procure such improved implements and ­machinery as are suitable to their wants and within their means— it is because it sees all this .  .  . that the Government of Bengal holds that the people, in respect of their mode of agriculture . . ., are best left alone. What the people want is not the opportunity of seeing complicated agricultural implements at work, which are not suitable to the land or the nature of their holdings, and which it would not be possible for them to use even if they were suitable, but the security of property and person, protection from oppression and violence, and free and easy communication with the great markets. More as a debating point than anything else, the local government was claiming to know what had escaped fledging agricultural departments: that cultivators had no use for complex machinery or for heavy ploughs that one man alone could not afford, use, carry from field to field or keep in repair, that were inappropriate for the necessary scratching of the surface in a flooded paddy field. The Bengal government was sure its job was to 116

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provide security of property and person, protection from oppression and good communications.12 Under the influence of John Strachey, the Government of India responded to this declaration with heavy irony. They regarded it as a typical rhetorical flourish by Eden and the Bengal secretary Alexander Mackenzie, wholly consistent with their focus on tenancy law as the panacea for all rural ills. With many in Bengal around this time, Eden was obsessed with the idea of reforming India and Indians through land laws, assuming development would self-start once property had performed its miracle. They sailed for the time being under the colours of the good ship, laissez-faire.13 They thought wide-ranging reforms likely to be risky, unpopular, expensive and futile. Applied to agricultural policy, the old orthodoxy, increasingly qualified in the central government, was being retained in Bengal on the excuse of local conditions. To the newly created agricultural section of the Government of India it was no less heresy for being familiar. Bengal’s debating point misfired: the province was condemned from its own past admissions of ignorance. John Strachey, focused on the prevention and relief of famine, argued eloquently for reforming village records as the basis of efficient economical administration, as advocated also by Edward Buck, great promoter of agricultural experiment. Buck then asserted it was not enough to secure property and free communications; the state had to intervene directly to encourage enterprise. Tea had been introduced by government action: ‘Are we to believe that the ryot who “watches and intelligently follows the markets” would have accomplished this if he had been left alone . . . ?’ On the contrary, he went on, with perseverance government could pioneer a scientific agriculture. Indian conditions and experience should not be ignored but cultivation was not so nearly perfect it could not be improved in ‘this best of all possible countries’. (The echo of Voltaire was deliberate: the Government of Bengal was condemned as Panglossian.) The lesson of initial mistakes, Buck remarked, referring to agricultural farms and machinery, was that work had been ‘experimental, not model’. Strachey seized enthusiastically on reports of success for the ‘Kaiser’ plough received as his minute was going to press.14 Arguments in Bengal’s defence were that the Indian cultivator was too ignorant or conservative to accept change and European research was unlikely to be useful. The germ of truth in the Bengal position was that the cultivator knew his business. Buck did not dissent. He argued: ‘The most skilled English agriculturists ought . . . to have the greatest diffidence in proposing any change, founded on English experience. . . . The onus of proof will always lie on the side of establishing that an English machine is useful in this country.’15 A decade later, when Voelcker was conducting his celebrated survey, he too concluded that there was little to teach the raiyat on the practical side. As a rule he made ‘the most use of the facilities . . . at hand’; there was not much scope for improved implements.16 117

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The government and its experts, though divided on the need for intervention, were at one on the need (as Bengal put it) for improvements to be ‘suitable to the land’ and possible to use. As early as 1873/4, it had been proposed that the ‘most approved native system’ should be adopted as the basis of research on government agricultural farms with regard to methods, manuring and pest control.17 Mackenzie did expect progress from improved crops and better resources because he thought agriculturists ready to adopt whatever novelties proved remunerative. He cited the ‘rapid increase of potato, opium and indigo cultivation’ and extensive use of the Behea sugar mills.18 Following that line he could hardly dissent from the call for state assistance except on ideological grounds—the belief that trade and the profit motive were sufficient. Bengal was soon converted. Eden’s government, arguably more interventionist over tenant rights than any before it, retreated under pressure from its negative stance and endorsed agricultural improvement through science and government action. The way was open for intervention but also for a mismatch between it and Bihar’s needs. Potential Bihari resistance was now overlooked. Mackenzie’s letter raised an issue neither he nor the advocates of agricultural intervention had addressed. How could improvement be managed? The result is known: government did not achieve much change in agricultural conditions. To summarise, problems already outlined, to be covered in more detail later, included unfit policies and unfree cultivators. Science met complexity as well as faulty data. Finucane complained of a major difficulty we have already noted: ‘agricultural practices and conditions of different provinces, and of different districts in the same province’ were ‘so varied and so little . . . known’.19 That problem was unaffected by which strategy was current. It made it hard to decide on causation. Perhaps cultivation was ‘thoroughly well understood’ by the cultivators and (as Bengal suggested in 1879) farmers reacted intelligently to support the population and produce surpluses for export. Then government should improve the conditions of agriculture, not its methods. But perhaps cultivators were part of the problem—yields seemed lower in late nineteenth-century India than in Europe or North America and lower still in Bihar. Then government should not simply persuade the Bihari farmer to use machinery (for example) but cope with the fact that he did not favour it because time and labour were relatively cheap, especially for large families, or because he saw little advantage in increased production given rents were arbitrary and holdings small. Did government fail to overcome obstacles because they were too farreaching? There was also a systemic gap. Missing was examination of mechanisms whereby innovation would be adopted. Almost all policies assumed the cultivator was a free agent. He was not, as we have seen. Bengal officials had a point when they argued that a key developmental function of the state should be to secure people against oppression—in other words to 118

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enable independent decisions. The insight pushed the government to intervene, but because it was incomplete the efforts had limited success, not only for agricultural improvement but also in regard to property rights. Lack of independence was supposed to be addressed by the Bengal Tenancy Acts. They provided benefits for some. Would more security encourage them to improve production for greater profit? The poverty of the majority was one of many risks of growing cash crops. There were no lucrative home markets in a place where most people could afford to buy very little.

Labour and peasants That brings this overview to another impediment in the way of effective improvement: confusion about agricultural labour. The rural economy was thought dominated by peasant farming, meaning the workers were members of households—men, women and children, perhaps including bonded servants; some workers might be hired, especially specialists such as ploughmen or millers. All agriculturists except larger landlords were commonly called ‘peasants’ by officials and since then by historians. All tended to be lumped together in political thinking as ‘raiyats’ and in development thinking as ‘cultivators’. The more independent of them were important targets of political and economic policies that left the bulk of the population at the margins. But if ‘peasants’ are defined as roughly equal, isolated, self-sufficient, semi-independent agriculturists under dominant lords, then they were not that numerous in South Asia. Rural society was hierarchical, interdependent and affected by the outside world. It comprised landless, semi-landless and migrant labour, specialists and artisans, smallholders, surplus tenants, rich farmers, intermediary land controllers, rentiers at all levels and superior landlords—in different proportions in different places. In Bihar a typical middling raiyat might cultivate some land as a privileged tenant and some on an occasional basis. He might let out other land to subtenants, employ non-household labour and engage in processing or non-agrarian employment. Poorer families invariably undertook work for others, often under conditions of servitude, most commonly in agriculture or as domestic servants for landlords and social superiors. Most cultivators also did ‘community’ work, for example on irrigation, roads or temples. Reinforcing these structures were social and caste distinctions that influenced occupation or practice: we have noted that Brahmans, for example, were likely to avoid manual labour such as ploughing. As government intervened, agricultural workers were more or less ignored, partly because invisible under the influence of the idea of the peasant. They were also unremarked because official willingness to assist mostly stopped short of the ‘masses’ except during crises of order, health or food. A good example was the lack of serious attention to Indian agrestic servitude while 119

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slavery was being extensively debated.20 But labourers had remarkably different experiences under colonial rule—from semi-independent but coerced cultivators to road workers in gangs to migrants in factories or plantations. Rural workers were largely left alone, at least until the twentieth century. They were often subsumed into the ‘peasantry’, unlike ‘modern’ labour in mills, plantations, military and even domestic service. Different support and controls were applied in different sectors. As discussed, the countryside was managed mainly through revenue and tenancy laws, plus occasional agricultural research and investment—despite its large contribution to state income. Lack of attention to rural labour affected economic thinking in so far as it applied to what we might call informal or indigenous production, even for export crops. Also neglected in the countryside was most non-agricultural employment, where it was ancillary to farming but also where it was separate: artisans, specialised workers such as unskilled heavy labourers whom the British called ‘coolies’, itinerants of all kinds (holy men, genealogists, traders, stock-herders). The British regarded some of these people as problems, diverting attention from their economic contribution. Itinerants were frequently associated with crime, especially after sensationalised accounts of so-called thagi (thugs) and the invented concept of hereditary or congenital criminality. Some movements of labour were more or less regulated, for example for overseas or internal plantations, mainly as a problem of public order. Some were more or less encouraged—for military recruitment, public works, transport and large-scale manufacturing. The omissions are significant and require explanation. A  state espousing active social and economic objectives, seeking change, was endlessly engaged in defining categories and norms not only as ‘superior’ but as ‘useful’ knowledge. It implied society made up of classes and types. In modern polities, the congruence of political and social systems is mediated by socalled ‘communities’, socio-political and religious identities much discussed by historians. They led to analysis of rural society in terms of castes and religions as well as legal status or economic role. By defining what was important and distinctive in India, they had an effect in policy.21 Next were certain legal categories of the kind already discussed, many related to government revenue; these too were carefully listed and recorded. Finally were fairly precise categorisations of labour in so-called ‘modern’ capitalist sectors, for example tea plantations or jute or cotton mills. From the later nineteenth century, distinctions were made according to age and gender for factory workers. A focus on women and children—age-limits for child labour, ­different rules for female workers—was related to more general acknowledgement of childhood and stereotypical male prejudices about female character but also of women’s distinct roles within joint families, within marriage, even in politics.22 Why were these categories debated while much rural labour was not?23 120

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Tea was obviously an export industry that mattered to Britain as well as to the colonial conceit of ‘doing good’ for India by developing it. But labour on tea plantations was of interest to government mainly because movements of people attracted attention, particularly when there was loss of life en route, as happened notoriously with the river passage to Assam. The industry was largely owned and managed by Europeans. Its recruitment of labour involved significant upheavals, almost always carried out at distance. Workers had to be newly housed near places of work, forming enclaves among existing populations, allowing critics to observe conditions. Some similar factors applied to indentured labour, a subject of concern especially in districts of recruitment. Similarly but much more evident were factory workers, as conditions for a largely migrant workforce gathered together were quite easily observed. There was cause for concern during epidemics and more generally for town planners, local authorities or social and political campaigners. In addition, labour conditions in larger factories (the ones regulated) received particular attention from sections of British industry and social reformers in international efforts to prevent unfair competition and reduce exploitation and suffering of employees. One reason agricultural and much rural work was under-researched and unregulated until the twentieth century was that it was only indirectly connected to things that really mattered to the British: revenue, international trade and public order. Land revenue ultimately depended on agricultural workers but relied on intermediaries of one kind or another, not only landholders but traders and moneylenders who helped even out cash flows between harvests and the times revenue payments were due (kists). As we shall see, cash crops (with few exceptions) were encouraged and extracted by agents, landowners, planters and traders, few of them directly involved in production. Other growing sources of government income were even less directly connected to agricultural workers. It was also convenient for British rulers not to pay much attention to the complex nature of rural production, agricultural and artisanal. They preferred not to admit ill effects from partly forced commercial agriculture, disruption of indigenous trade and influx of foreign manufactured goods. Officials liked to regard it as an all-round success that India was producing copious raw materials for English factories at competitive prices and consuming increasing amounts of those factories’ cheap products. If India were becoming relatively poorer by international comparison, still it was enjoying overall if patchy economic growth. It was hoped those who benefited—successful landlords, substantial tenants, overseers, moneylenders, merchants—would become less likely to foment disorder, while migration or the availability of work would keep many of the poor from destitution and rebellion. The other main reason for ignoring rural labour related to ways indigenous agricultural production was imagined. As said, it was supposedly under the control of independent agricultural managers or peasants, meaning it 121

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would be improved by protecting, teaching and underwriting (according to taste and preferred theory) either landlords and their agents or a body of rich secure tenants. British rulers were not consistent. They devoted much judicial attention to the joint Hindu family and showed even more political concern over partly fictitious collectives, especially caste and religious community. But individual actors dominated their thinking about ways to remedy the ills of agriculture and rural India. This discussion led back to the theme of colonial perceptions and provides an apt counterweight to the complex mix of indigenous and extraneous circumstances that shaped the impact of British policies towards agricultural development. The science of government was as flawed and partial as the science of crops and processing, and the two were closely related. The following section of this book explores such points through detailed examples.

Notes 1 See Finucane to G/Be, 9 September 1890, R&A Agric A7–11 May 1891 & C13– 15 March 1900. 2 Stokes, ‘Dynamism’. This continues the discussion in ch.1, this volume. 3 Eaton, Rise of Islam, implies that it was important that there were means of mobilising capital and manpower (through Hindu bankers, pirs and Islam). Stone, Canal Irrigation, suggests that it mattered that there was security of tenure and moderation and certainty of rent or revenue demands. 4 King and Timmins, Making Sense, ch.6, pp. 163–205. 5 See R&A Stats A2–3 March 1892, A1–2 June 1893, & Fam A12 June 1892. 6 See returns of wheat, rice and maize prices in four seasons and several districts; R&A Fam B3 October 1905. 7 The table and much of this section’s description first appeared in Robb, ‘State, Peasant’. 8 PCR 334 12/4 1880/1. 9 R&A Fam A5–6 July 1898. 10 For this account see R&A Agric A20–1 February  1908, A5 February  1899, Fam A5–6 July 1898 & B22 August 1899, & Gen A3 February l899; PCR 341 10/63–9 1884/5. 11 See Eric Stokes, ‘The First Century of British Colonial Rule in India: Social Revolution or Social Stagnation?’ in Peasant and the Raj, and, for example, Stone, Canal Irrigation, or ‘Canal Irrigation’. 12 For the debate (this and the following paragraphs) see G/Be letter, 22 May; reply, 21 October; minute by Sir John Strachey, 1 September  1879: H. R&A AgH A167–76 October 1879. This returns to the example mentioned in the section in ch.6, this volume, titled ‘The Illusion of Knowing’. 13 Kingsbury, Imperial Disaster, offers a trenchant account of consequences of this emphasis and the response to natural disasters in the late 1870s. 14 G/Be to R&A Commerce, 22 May, and reply, 21 October; John Strachey, Minute, 1 September, H. R&A AgH A167–76 October 1879. 15 H. R&A AgH A167–76 October 1879; R&A Agric A26 February 1895. 16 J.A. Voelcker, ‘Preliminary Notes on Indian Agriculture’, R&A Agric A9, July 1890.

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17 On the other hand, European control was ultimately assumed. When inoculation was developed against rinderpest in cattle, training in proper sterile application was deemed vital to avoid ‘playing havoc’ with outcomes and public confidence; R&A Civil Veterinary Administration A16–17 August, A20–1 September 1901, & A1–2 February 1902, and see A19–21 October 1905 for similar policies applied to bovine anthrax, found much more in Bengal than elsewhere in India. 18 See n.12, this chapter. 19 R&A Agric A9 December 1892. 20 This oversight was not for want of information. See Report from the Indian Law Commissioners Relating to Slavery in the East Indies, Sessional Papers, House of Lords, vol.XV, 1841: ‘Besides the state of absolute slavery there prevails . . . a system of conditional slavery’ (p. 44). Among vast details, note that ‘In South Behar, a great portion of the agricultural labourers are slaves’ (p. 45) and that in Tirhut (north Bihar) ‘Individuals of the poorer classes are frequently willing to sell themselves’ (p. 45). 21 Castes and their norms represented existing vocabularies, a ‘castelike social order’ as Susan Bayly put it (Caste, p. 25), strengthened by British policies such as restoring ‘legitimate’ Kshatriya lineages or applying Brahmanical scriptural rules undermining individual rights, uniform laws and economic or institutional change that might have been expected to produce classes, not reinforce caste. 22 As this is a large subject neglected in this book, at least its range and depth should be indicated. See Agarwal, Field of One’s Own; Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife; Chatterjee, Nation and its Fragments, and ‘Nationalist Resolution’. See also Sarkar and Sarkar, Women and Social Reform; Sumit Sarkar, ‘ “Women’s Question” ’; Murshid, Reluctant Debutant; Borthwick, Changing Role; Amin, World of Muslim Women; and Banerjee, ‘Domestic Manuals’. 23 As background to the following, so far as it concerns peasants, see for example Hardiman, Peasant Resistance and Peasant Nationalists; Ludden, Peasant History; Stokes, Peasant and the Raj; Prakash, World of the Rural Labourer; Sarkar, Modern India; Agarwal, Field; Breman, Peasants.

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Part III AGRARIAN BIHAR Aspects and examples

8 ACTIVE GOVERNMENT? CHAUKIDARS AND COMMERCE

Seeking agents, levying cesses This chapter looks at specific kinds of government intervention in Bihar. It will again consider scientific investigation and public assistance for trade, notably in indigo, but first it continues the discussion of what it was thought governments should do, turning to the search for reliable local agency to provide data. Intervention needed to be based on information. In Bengal Presidency that included an attempt to reform watchmen (chaukidars) and local taxation, efforts that offer a small case study of the government’s response to its ignorance. They show that the Bengal government extended the net of institutions somewhat against its own inclinations and assumptions. Officials were more often reluctant than eager to widen the scope of the state; it grew nonetheless under pressure from perceived need and Indian demands. Its functions were increasingly specialised. The example also illustrates how the government attempted to reach out into the country at large—by institutionalising some of the collaboration and local agency it commanded. More generally, by the later nineteenth century it was seeking to co-opt larger sections of the population than before. Perhaps influenced by the municipal altruism that transformed Britain’s governance after 1835 (now sadly undermined), it tried to incorporate local people in public action in ways appropriate to changing roles expected of the state. The aim was to provide measurable benefits by shaping Indian behaviour and awareness in ‘correct’ ways. It has already been noted that information was an early concern of the British in India. In the eighteenth century many surveys of roads and waterways were carried out, and district officials made it their business to record data to pass on to their successors. One of the first was a ‘diary’ kept by the Resident at Midnapore over several years before 1766. It summarised ‘every material observation .  .  . on the state of the provinces’ in order to ‘convey a general idea of the Country’, serving a useful purpose, along with an ‘annual circuit’, ‘by preventing oppression, encouraging the cultivation and acquiring a perfect knowledge’.1 Already information was thought of 127

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‘great importance’ to security and good governance. Also from the first, however, these aims faced impediments, initially from the Nawab of Bengal’s objections to East India Company interference that led to the recall of European agents in the countryside, despite worries about minor rebellions and defections by Company sepoys, not least in Bihar.2 The contradictions set a pattern that outlasted the Company. The real starting point for our present story is contraction and disengagement. From the 1770s, it was well-illustrated by the case of the kanungos. These so-called expounders of the law were revenue officials and recordkeepers instituted from earlier equivalents in the time of Akbar but were paid mainly in land grants and therefore long regarded as hereditary. The East India Company’s inclination was to distrust and disempower them, as indeed had its predecessor, Murshid Qili Khan. He installed his own nominees, but they then replicated the conditions and character of those they had replaced. The Company therefore wished to abolish what it regarded as an unnecessary and conspiratorial layer of government. At first, in the 1770s, it was held back by the advocacy of Muhammad Reza Khan (the naib diwan or deputy in charge of revenue affairs), by worries about access to and maintenance of vital revenue records and even by an awareness that technically the kanungos did not answer to the Company but to the old Mughal authority. Their obvious replacement might seem to have been a salaried employee, but in the 1770s and 1780s the Company had barely reached that stage even for its own European servants, let alone the army of functionaries needed to administer Bengal. Very soon, however, the Company felt that its own information was improving, no thanks to the kanungos. It seemed that their corruption now outweighed their utility: such possibly hostile and certainly self-interested administrators had practical as well as political disadvantages. The verdict was delivered in a report of 1787 and effectively applied as part of the permanent settlement of Bengal in 1793. A new regulation (5 July 1793) abolished the kanungos and ordered that local records be made available to the Board of Revenue. Cornwallis explained: ‘The public assessment . . . is fixed. . . . The rights of the landholders and cultivators of the soil . . . have been reduced to writing.’ Instead of the kanungos, the courts would adjudicate on agreements between the parties to any suits, basing their rulings on regulations or, if ‘local custom is required to be ascertained’, on evidence obtained from ‘respectable’ residents.3 Zamindars of course continued to maintain and to manipulate their own estate records; these were scarcely visible to government. Anand Yang called the resulting system a ‘bargain’ with local allies to limit direct British involvement by supporting indigenous power.4 Government became almost wholly bereft of local informants in Bengal. It was in possession of patchy and inconsistent data about the countryside from (for example) the partitioning of estates, famine relief and canal, 128

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railway and other public works or the agents who administered lands for government and the Court of Wards. There was also a mistrusted police force that the government was seeking to reform. Its most local agent was the daroga, a law officer responsible for about 20 square miles on average under the control of district magistrates. Increasingly, lack of local information came to be regarded as a problem. Data were needed ‘in the ordinary course of things’ concerning the state of crops, local prices and stocks of grain and also to provide advance warning of famines. More than that, indirect rule with its want of uniformity and faulty returns was ill-suited to a state with a development agenda. To take just one example, the Son canals in Shahabad (discussed in Chapter 10) had to be planned and built with minimal input about local conditions. By the later nineteenth century, however, the government wanted to go much further. It was influenced by pro-raiyat views, wished to remedy the ills of the countryside and sought to turn a prosperous peasantry into allies of the British raj. In this period, therefore, the British tried harder to build collective institutions in rural areas. For years there had been fruitless attempts to improve official oversight without compromising its minimal character. Now the British sought reinstate a consistent government presence and build institutions at very local levels. Attention was paid to patwaris, with patchy attempts to control them, though they had very divided loyalties, being paid by raiyats but servants of the zamindars.5 It came to be recognised that more local taxation was needed to secure better local information. The difference from the eighteenth century is telling. The aim now was greater involvement to tap funds for development and help generate a sense of public responsibility. A proper local agency would need manpower, management and, as said, money. Information continued to be sought from many sources,6 but, after legislation as early as 1856, it was hoped village chaukidars would became a ‘necessary link’ with the people in their neighbourhoods, reporting on economic and social conditions as well as crime. Some officials thought them ‘sufficiently accurate to keep the superior officers apprised of the general state of affairs’, but the majority opinion was that they could not be relied upon because they were in such a ‘hopeless state of poverty’. It was ‘notorious’ that they were ‘irregularly paid’.7 Bengal’s Village Chaukidar Act of 1870 tried to regulate the system, which was difficult as Regulation XX of 1817 had left provision to the discretion of zamindars. They could not be compelled to appoint chaukidars or pay them, and so in many villages none existed; many were too small or dispersed to support an effective chaukidar. One answer was thought to be panchayats (committees), envisaged in the 1870 Act as paying for village chaukidars, or again the union panchayats permitted in the Local Self-Government Act of 1885 to provide local administration, including police. Neither system was introduced. Defects were apparent. In the later nineteenth century the need for reform became palpable across the business of government, for revenue and order 129

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as well as information and development. For land revenue and other forms of taxation, for example, collections remained difficult, costly and irregular despite the vast effort expended over decades. The Public Demands Recovery Act of 1880 was one attempt to improve matters by allowing the use of a summary procedure to recover arrears of public demands. With provisos it was also available to landlords for recovering rents. For private suitors the process was straightforward, but the government found it hard to use because of lack of knowledge and means. Peons had to be sent into the countryside to execute certificates and ‘were naturally amenable to the influence of the judgement debtors’, as the Gaya Collector put it. Officials were also forced to attach immoveable property identified from the records, though it would have been much better for them and the debtors had they been able to attach other assets.8 As for public order, the local police were notorious for collusion with criminals and violence against suspects.9 For example, according to the Englishman, they connived over several months in 1876 at audacious robberies from north Bihar indigo planters and then profited further by harassing and even torturing innocent local people, making house and body searches and confiscating money and possessions. Violence was widely reported, remarked the Indian Mirror. Severe flogging of suspects had gone on so long with impunity that only the occasional exception was ‘a subject of surprise’ for the ‘native community’.10 Despite the warning signs, in the early 1890s the local government of Bengal still worried about financing what was needed. It lagged behind other provinces and once again opposed extra taxation even for education, sanitation and other improvements that it professed to desire and for which central funds were notoriously inadequate. The officials looked ‘with terror’ at the prospect of intervention because of its cost, unpopularity (‘so far from the desires of the people’) and the opportunities that (they claimed) would be provided for oppression of Indians by other Indians. Nor did the government want to trust Indian committees to spend the funds. Charles Elliott, the Lieutenant-Governor, claimed these would spend money for secondary rather than primary education or be too ‘ignorant’ to deal with sanitation. More plausibly, the same argument was made about the proper responsibility of engineers for bridges.11 Opinion in the Government of India was that villagers, if not vakils (intermediaries, lawyers) from headquarter towns, could be trusted to have the right educational priorities, and there was not much room for differences of opinion about the need for clean water. Steuart Bayley noted ‘constant complaints’ in the Indian press and elsewhere about the quality of drinking water and the need for improved drainage in Bengal.12 This concern, some thought, could be used as a lever to bring rural people into the fold for state-sponsored improvements. Madras had introduced a programme of conservancy; it was recommended to Bengal. But Elliott’s objection to extra taxation was accepted—reluctantly because Bengal was thought very 130

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lightly taxed—and political expediency won out. It was remarked in the central government that the only reason Elliot could think Union Boards ‘useless’ was that they had so little money to spend and so few delegated responsibilities. Expenditure is one of the measures of government expansion: central and provincial expenditure in India rose from Rs.436  million in 1861 (about on a par with gross revenue) to Rs.1,104  million in 1900 (gross revenue Rs.1,128 million) and Rs.2,321 million in 1920 (gross revenue Rs.2,061 million). But there was an 84 per cent increase in military expenditure between 1856/7 and 1896/7, when it reached Rs.276 million. (It went on rising but dropped slightly as a proportion of the total, before the effects of the First World War.) By contrast, between 1896 and 1900 the average annual education budget was Rs.16 million and that for public health Rs.50 million. The imbalance intensified the search for local sources of finance and qualifies without refuting the idea of the state expanding into civil spheres.13 The panchayats were being redesigned to provide for local administration, including the police. An amendment bill in 1892 sought to clarify the status of the chaukidars—courts had asserted that they did not have police powers, for example to arrest suspects—and to place them directly under the executive control of the district magistrates. These would set rates of pay, at Rs.2–3 a month, but the money would come from a yearly assessment imposed and collected by local panchayats of three to five residents chosen by male rate payers and appointed by the magistrates. A suggestion that panchayats should simply be elected was resisted on the argument that elections were foreign to India. Bihar’s district officials were sceptical. F.M. Beamish, district superintendent of police in Champaran, was of opinion that regular pay had already been achieved but without any increase in the chaukidars’ usefulness. In his view, as Indian villagers were ‘the most conservative people in the world’, no improvement could be expected while the government retained a ‘police of the people’ whereby the chaukidar was everyone’s servant. G.J. Dalton, magistrate of Darbhanga, thought the villagers were simply reluctant to pay, but J.A. Bourdillon, then Saran’s magistrate, welcomed a law that would provide a way of turning chaukidars into proper police and at the same time compel proprietors of villages to pay for them (he would have had in mind mainly the Hathwa raj). G.A. Grierson, then district officer in Gaya, thought the amendments inadequate: the scheme would leave three-fifths of chaukidars without regular income while panchayats would need 15,000 ‘men of influence and intelligence’ who simply did not exist in his district. The government hoped that somehow they could be invented. The intention was to mobilise local resources in order to turn chaukidars into an extension of an effective police force and above all to make them the government’s eyes and ears in rural locations.14 As opinion was divided, measures were half-hearted. In the 1890s, as said, Bengal still lagged behind other provinces. 131

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In the middle of that decade, Indian newspapers such as the Statesman and Bengali again demanded that district boards be financed more liberally by the government; and in 1896 complaints focused once more on that ‘crying want of rural Bengal’, the supply of clean water. This was one of the key tasks expected to be undertaken and paid for through local effort. By this time, Bengal had set up some Union Committees in Presidency, Burdwan and Chittagong divisions but still did not provide funds to enable then to make improvements in water supply—generally the provincial government contributed only a small part of the local boards’ income.15 In the face of this new pressure, the government, now under Alexander Mackenzie, proposed to allow the boards to retain Provincial Ferry Fund receipts and levy local taxes and tolls. The former proposal was technically to alienate state revenues, which meant that it required the sanction of the Government of India. The local taxes the local government wanted to allow would be on musical processions, marriage celebrations and carts. In the Government of India, the last of the suggested taxes was thought objectionable because of the policy of encouraging trade through cart ownership while the other two raised the spectre of interference in domestic or, even worse, divine matters. The ensuing discussions raised once again the old objection to ‘native agency’, fear of introducing an ‘engine of local injustice and oppression’, such as had been expressed in Bengal by Charles Elliott in 1891 when shelving Steuart Bayley’s proposals for an enhancement of local boards’ powers. Could such a scheme be properly managed—meaning could it be retained effectively in British hands? On the other hand, there were arguments suggesting Indians should be encouraged to run their own affairs. It was welcomed that Bengal’s scheme was designed ‘to enable the people to do what they could do themselves if they chose but will not’.16 The Bengal scheme was, in effect, an answer to the question raised with acerbity by the Finance Member, James Westland: ‘what are you to do in a country where a whole village will rather drink and cook with stagnant water than to combine to dig a simple .  .  . well’?—as could be done, he claimed, over vast areas of Bengal with village labour or at a cost of about Rs.5 per well. Alexander Mackenzie was saying, he suggested: ‘Don’t call on Government to do what you ought to do yourselves. I offer you a means of combining for those common purposes.’ There is a sense, therefore, in which Mackenzie’s impulse was a reply to demands made by Indian newspapers for more funding for district boards. Westland characterised their response as a ‘folding of the hands and a cry to Government to come forward and assist’—‘as usual with Bengalis’. John Woodburn, Home Member in the Government of India, considered the proposals ‘shrewd, ingenious, gallant’, capitalising on a ‘passing alarm’ (about the availability of water, though the intention was to contribute to primary education as well). He also thought Bengal would be well-advised to take up instead the Statesman’s scheme for a lump-sum grant from 132

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government to be matched by local boards and voluntary contributions. But even Westland objected to all of the local taxes Bengal wanted. The context the officials had in mind was one characteristic of Victorian Britain in which theories of laissez-faire and individualism co-existed with a vast expansion of public enterprise and provision, much of it sponsored as much by local and civic pride as by state intervention. India, not having these conditions, was not yet ready, Woodburn thought, for a popular onslaught on problems of village sanitation. That did not mean government should retreat. Woodburn favoured a scheme successfully introduced by Antony MacDonnell in the Central Provinces whereby villages were brought under sanitary inspection in rotation and offered grants equal to one-quarter or a third of the costs of remedial work (the remainder to be raised locally): ‘no measure of recent years’, Woodburn enthused, ‘has given the people . . . so much relief and gratification’. The implication again was that government would have to take the lead. In the end, for a government adopting civic responsibility, criticisms of indigenous institutions drew it further down the line towards intervention. In Bengal the liberally minded Henry Cotton, then chair of a police reform committee, had proposed a scheme of his own in 1890 as a ‘counsel of perfection only’. He judged Bayley’s original intention to have been merely to canvas opinion but thought it ‘desirable that some people should be familiarised with the idea that before long some scheme of additional local taxation is inevitable’. He was sure no purely permissive scheme would be of any use. Others shied away from this suggestion, but the tendency to extend the state’s role was once again evident. Mackenzie’s scheme was dropped when attention shifted to outbreaks of plague in 1896 and because of his own illness in 1897 and forced retirement in 1898; but a residue (minus the influence of his ‘fanaticism’ about village sanitation) was eventually included in a bill of 1903 to amend the Bengal Local Government Act of 1883; it was a watered-down version of Mackenzie’s scheme. As so often, caution prevailed. But, generally, in the decades before 1914 the tendency was to strengthen the powers and political character of district boards, as others have shown.17 This example illustrates first how it was assumed that fiscal policy should be pursued in the light of general economic goals and second how public opinion was considered to be vital to the success of any taxation (a point raised in the 1860s, but then still disputed, on the question of income tax). On this occasion it was noted that much would depend on ‘the temper of the public in receiving the proposals’. What was intended, in short, was a kind of political engineering that would create public action by Indians as a means of meeting the larger goals the colonial rulers were themselves endorsing. Enhanced local boards would ‘substitute for the people at large, whom Government servants cannot “drive”, certain individuals whom they can drive’.18 133

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There are parallels between British attempts to reinvigorate panchayats and those to revive patwaris and recreate a local system to record variations in the land record. A  similar impulse lay behind efforts to provide co-operative credit and even, later, to build political parties. In several ways the division of state functions under dyarchy, after 1919, extended the same policies at the provincial level. The chaukidari panchayats were generally as ineffective as the chaukidari tax was unpopular, but their formal organisation, funding and elections brought a particular model of public behaviour into the heart of the countryside. Bengal’s case is interesting because its local administration and agency were thought to be especially defective. Some administrative, economic and political problems were blamed on that. But many improvements were sought as much to meet the expected and broadening functions of government as to remedy particular shortcomings. To reform conditions was a motive in the foreground. Underlying it was the need for information and local agency as the bases for social and economic improvement. The changes were not important for what they achieved. But self-government in local boards was part of a revolution to which the British government was drawn by ideological and pragmatic considerations against the grain of some of its own convictions—even at times in advance of the expectations of Indian nationalists. It was significant for its potential and because it is unintelligible without admission on the part of the British of a deeper and broader role for government. The chaukidars mattered because they were so localised and for data it was hoped they would provide. They were part of a general revolution in which information was called for with some desperation from a whole army of local or travelling officials and allies such as Managers and Sub-Managers of Government, Attached, and Wards’ estates, Munsifs and Rural Sub-Registrars, or respectable zemindars, farmers of Government estates, naibs and tehsildars; or, again, from . . . educational subordinates, income-tax assessors, excise officers, executive officers of the District and Local Boards.19 The motive was (as said) to secure knowledge ‘in the ordinary course of things’ concerning the state of crops, local prices and stocks of grain with a view to ensuring advance warning of famines. We now have again that ­further element beyond pressures within the bureaucracy, namely the proper role expected of rulers—the very argument used by the British against some Indian rulers (in Sind, Awadh, the Punjab) shortly before their territories were annexed. It was in this context that fiscal policy had to be pursued in line with general economic goals. Henry Cotton expected additional local taxation would be needed. Public opinion was regarded as vital. Woodburn believed Bengalis should be encouraged to involve themselves in public life. Part of the pressure for slowly changing government policy in this sphere as in others, indeed the very purpose of local boards, was obviously to 134

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provide additional money. Funding on top of the general increase in state revenues was needed to do new things. Measures were intended to promote professionalisation. Bureaucratically, the process was competitive as well as linear: the boards’ money might be coveted by other branches of government, as when the Public Works Department proposed they should be required to contribute to the costs of inspectors of works. The reply was that ‘If District Boards are to be a reality, the charges debitable to their funds should be only those over which they can exercise some control’.20 District funds were thus not merely another attempt to swell the general coffers. Rather they represented a division of government into constituent parts with distinct responsibilities. That goal offered some protection to new institutions as they emerged. In the case of local boards the principle of responsibility was an awkward one for a colonial government. It could lead as it did between 1915 and 1919 to more extensive adjustments of power within state structures: during discussions of the Government of India’s proposals for reform of the Indian constitution, an influential argument was that Indian legislatures should not merely be critics without responsibility but should be given some powers over the executive.21 The reinvention of public involvement is still an unfinished project in India today even though vast amounts of information are gathered. Effective reform and reinvigoration of local agency were more than a generation away in the period on which this book focuses. The conclusion must be that at that time popular mobilisation was inevitably limited and state initiatives for development likely to be distorted or misdirected.

Involving government with trade The British in India always wanted to encourage international trade—their trade—and by the second half of the nineteenth century state investment to repair private neglect was an accepted principle of political economy, remembered as such by leading officials from their reading of John Stuart Mill.22 As noted already, there had always been interventions. They ranged from early surveys of agricultural production to the promotion, improvement and sale of particular crops.23 But despite revenue-producing tariffs in the 1890s, free trade remained an article of faith. John Strachey’s proud boast was that ‘at one time there was no country in which trade was so free from all burdens as India’.24 It was quite a journey from nineteenth-century interventions to the close mutual involvement of government and trade that had begun to emerge by 1920, exemplified in the setting up of the Central Cotton Committee in 1921 on the basis of a cess on all cotton milled in or exported from India. That Committee still looked radical to the Royal Commission on Agriculture in 1928, but mainly from a reluctance to divide agricultural research, as the report put it, ‘into longitudinal sections’. The objection was no longer to the principle of a state-funded body ‘concerned 135

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with all questions . . . from the field to the factory’. The Commission suggested just such an arrangement should be extended to jute.25 Acceptance of the principle marked a major departure: both acquiescence in a demand for intervention and acceptance of arguments set out by Albert Howard and others. For Bihar and to a large extent India one indication of this shift in policy was the state’s attempt to rescue the indigo industry, which was being destroyed by competition from German artificial dyes. The planters appealed to patriotism. The secretary of the Indigo Defence Association, formed in 1899, believed ‘the German Emperor supports the artificial Dyes as they are German’.26 The government was drawn into new areas of policy by worries about the international competitiveness of Indian products. Where did this lead? George Watt followed the principle through in 1901 while criticising the official neglect of cotton production: ‘The doctrine of supply and demand’, he declared, ‘has been preached as an all-sufficient governing principle. By this means special interests have been allowed to obscure and ultimately destroy others of greater value.’ Evidently the state’s role was to intervene in the market to promote the wider interest and the greater good. In America and British colonies of settlement, according to Watt, that ‘duty’ had been ‘freely accepted’. This radical outburst was dismissed as ‘not altogether to the point’: some problems could ‘only be removed by the trade’.27 Yet Watt was heading a new branch for ‘Economic Products’ in the Revenue and Agriculture Department and a little later was told by his superiors on a related matter: ‘Why should traders in this country be denied what is open to traders in England? We want practical results—not the strict observance of official routine.’28 In the scientific endeavour prompted by the indigo interest there was more than a whiff of partnership between government and trade. Leather had written a report on indigo in 1899 at the request of the Planters’ Association. At the time he had been employed at Poona College; it happened to be closed because of plague.29 Watt was involved in further inquiries in 1900, claiming ‘I have . . . for many years identified myself personally with every aspect of the indigo industry’.30 Three other experts were also recruited: W.R. Dunstan, whose scientific study (1900) denied that natural indigo was superior to artificial; Christopher Rawson, author of such papers as ‘The Valuation of Indigo’ (1885) and ‘The Cultivation and Manufacture of Indigo in Bengal’ (1900); and Bernard Coventry, an experienced, innovative indigo planter who became Inspector-General of Agriculture. Coventry was first recruited to Pusa and, according to D. Prain, Director of the Botanical Survey of India, was ‘that rara avis in terris a Behar planter who actually knows and takes an intellectual interest in his real business’.31 Later the indigo planters contributed to the salary of another expert, R.S. Finlow, who actually worked on jute except for an interlude in 1905. However, for several years the Bengal government subsidised the planters’ 136

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research, paying out between Rs.50,000 and Rs.60,000 annually. They allowed one scientist at Pusa, W.P. Bloxam, to study the process of manufacture while his bitter rival, the Agricultural Bacteriologist, C.J. Bergtheil, devoted his time to aspects of the crop itself. Bloxam had earlier been Professor of Chemistry at Presidency College, Madras.32 He had a public disagreement with Bergtheil at the London Society of Chemical Industry in November 1907 over the best method of measuring indigotin. Raphael Meldola of Finsbury Technical College in London sided with Bloxam, believing he had identified an improved method of extraction under laboratory conditions and that the planters would be well-advised to adopt it. He also claimed he helped persuade the Bengal government to assist the planters.33 They decided to prefer Bergtheil, encouraged by Coventry, who thought Bloxam’s work based on unreliable data, measurements from undried indigo used to pay cartmen. Properly speaking, if Bergtheil were needed by the indigo planters, he should have given up his work at Pusa; but in 1908 Bengal proposed he continue his work on indigo even after being appointed at a high salary as their Deputy Director of Agriculture. When that was refused they allowed him to resign from Pusa and transfer to the planters’ own establishment at Sirsiah. There he benefited from the local government’s subsidy while still investigating indigo. His efforts were supplemented by those of Christopher Rawson, employed by the planters.34 The planters tried with less success to persuade the government to develop an official purchasing policy to support their industry. At this time natural indigo was still used for all government purposes. The planters made an unproven and later disproved claim that natural indigotin was superior to artificial. By 1907 the Revenue and Agriculture Department was ready to oblige until pulled up on grounds of cost by E.N. Baker in the Finance Department and Kitchener for the army.35 The Secretary of State in London had already refused to use government funds in support of particular crops, a ruling endorsed by the Government of India. In 1900 some in government thought the indigo industry beyond help, a view articulated by J.E. O’Conor, Director-General of Statistics and Assistant Secretary, Finance and Commerce Department. T.W. Holderness wrote in regard to indigo that ‘very strong evidence will have to be adduced . . . before we depart from our usual policy of not subsidising industries’.36 Caveats remained. Government appointees were thought preferable to grants to the planters or to producers’ associations, which did not ‘always work well with experts’. In the central government, Charles Tupper reacted to the idea of a sugar expert as would be expected from one steeped in the ma-bap generalism of the Punjab service: he refused to agree to this ‘flock of specialists’.37 But the government was gradually shifting ground. Other exceptional support had already been permitted in defiance of orders ‘with kind permission of the Inspector-General of Agriculture’ (Coventry).38 In 1909 W.M. Hailey in the Government of India took the view that Bengal’s grant to 137

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indigo research was ‘one to which we would expect that an Audit officer would ordinarily object’, but his senior, W.S. Meyer, argued that (whether or not it was wise) it was not ‘per se illegitimate’ for ‘Expenditure on agricultural research is a normal function of government in India’. Officials were then divided between those who thought the subvention necessary to save an industry that was being destroyed and those who took a contrary view only by arguing that it was wrong to concentrate on indigo at the expense of other industries.39 Official attempts were made to assist with the export of indigo to Japan and Persia.40 As early as 1908 officials considered supporting indigo research and promotion through a cess on exports such as had already been provided in the Tea Cess Act of 1903. During the First World War the thought was once again of using an official appointment (the replacement for Leather, who was retiring) to revive the indigo industry while it was free from German competition.41 Earlier the government had backed the planters’ attempt to divert to sugar, with a special enquiry of 1901, ‘experiment on a very large scale’ in 1903 and calls in 1905 for yet another expert to oversee manufacturing.42 Such involvement with traders and manufacturers was new in emphasis and purpose. That was not in any absolute sense of principle—which had always left room for manoeuvre—nor because it achieved significant results except in helping for a time to expand the sugar industry in north Bihar. The Secretary of State suggested as early as 1880 that special legislation would be legitimate to ‘guard the country from the misfortune of losing one of its most valuable export trades’ although not to ‘protect exports’ or individuals. It was a delicate distinction. Officials became involved, for example, in trying to improve the purity and hence price of Indian wheat, cotton and jute. No one was sure whether problems lay with British factories tending to clean all materials rather than check what was necessary or with middlemen and cultivators adulterating produce to inflate their profits. Intervening in such matters, a distinction was made between legislation and investigation. For wheat the result in 1908 was a change in contracts to penalise impurities at 2.5 instead of 5 per cent.43 Was that investigation or involvement? Bending principles had cumulative effect. State involvement with indigo was significant because it became more than a search for knowledge such as was going on at the same time on government farms. It was a project designed to solve a particular problem in north Bihar, reflecting a new kind of official ambition: to manage economic welfare in a region by assisting and if necessary replacing its chief item of trade. It was a new dimension to what had already begun in connection with irrigation, communications and famine. It helped prepare the way for yet greater state action on the economy, leading ultimately to attempts to manage trade and plan development. It represented also a bureaucratic logic, the process whereby the unthinkable slowly became commonplace and reluctant concession gave way to ready endorsement. 138

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Naturally, trends in India were affected by practical and ideological changes in other countries. Certainly too the involvement with indigo had a European bias because of the planters and a political edge: in 1908, E.A. Gait, later to be Governor of Bihar, wrote on behalf of the Government of Bengal that there was ‘no doubt that the planters have been a great power for good’ and it was ‘very sad’ to see them forced to leave or change their occupation. The planters were even more explicit: ‘In Behar the planters have been of recognised assistance to the civil officers in many ways and the volunteer corps organised by them has shown itself of the highest efficiency.’44 More general measures had political motives too: the British were trying to secure the prosperity of potential supporters and answer critics of economic policy. But the incentives were not merely imperialist. Work parallel to that with indigo was carried out in regard to silk and cotton, the latter including a small contribution from the British Cotton Association.45 We have just noted the worries about wheat. These were not all crops of Europeans but were crucial to India’s exports and the well-being of parts of the country.

National agenda Gains were small, alterations in attitude slow and incremental; but again changes since the eighteenth century were telling. The aim was now greater involvement to tap funds for development and generate a sense of public responsibility. Why? I think improvements sought by local government were not really directed at perceived problems for the rulers. They were desired mostly because of an idea of what government should do. The deep arguments were about states’ duties—to provide policing, protect health, promote development and so on. The list may seem axiomatic today but is never constant and was far from entrenched anywhere in the nineteenth century, let alone in British India. In the case of chaukidars there was a need to combat law breaking in the countryside,46 but it was the general requirements of governance, not crime statistics, that were advanced in the departmental notes that devised and advocated the reforms. Measures were intended to promote professionalisation as well as raise taxes; it was the improvement that required the money. The idea was to enlist local government and popular agency to help improve social and economic conditions. The preferred means owed little to an impartial assessment of Indian norms and potential and much to the corporate and municipal philanthropy that emerged in Victorian Britain. At least as an ideal it aimed to reduce extremes of deprivation and exploitation that accompanied the industrial revolution: measures to improve housing, education, public health and conditions of labour, for example, encouraged though not required by such measures as the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act or the Public Health Act of 1848. Some officials in India called for ‘administration on the English 139

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model’. Rich ‘public-spirited’ Indians were appointed to legislative councils.47 Local self-government was tentatively extended.48 Amid such arguments the modernisation of government was almost bound to become anti-colonial. Even in the nineteenth century astute observers realised that Indians would become more interested in public affairs once they had greater powers over resources and decisions. In British opinion, such incentives had to be balanced against fears of dishonesty and oppression by Indians who were placed in positions of responsibility.49 Local selfgovernment in India was controversial, both because it diminished direct British control and because of the fears at the supposed lack of public life in India. The complaint was regularly heard that in India and especially in Bengal there was nothing comparable to the English local gentry or parish to provide building blocks for such development. But financial and policy imperatives encouraged extension of local government loosely on the model of municipalities and local councils in Britain. In the search for resources one problem was agitation against local cesses that surfaced intermittently over 50 years or more. Opposition to those for roads and public works, calling them a breach of the permanent settlement, had been the stock-in-trade of politically active zamindars such as Peary Mohan Mukherji; they can be interpreted as being in favour of an earlier view of government as minimal or decentralised. The result was organisation both at the local level and within representative institutions, themselves part of the process of involving Indians more with government and taxing them more heavily. Notable in the twentieth century too was the effect of agitation against the chaukidari tax when the British tried to revive village panchayats to provide and pay for local policing.50 But in 1907 the Government of Bengal created an ‘outburst of hysterical gratitude’ in the Indian press and a flutter of indignation in the central secretariat by suggesting local taxes might be earmarked for particular popular purposes.51 In marked contrast, in 1885 the Road Cess, an earmarked tax, had been merged with the District Fund as part of a Local Self-Government Bill: presumably an extension of the representative principle reduced the need for earmarking as was also the case at the provincial level after 1919 when dyarchy was introduced as a step towards self-government. The British were trying to complete the project of building a government in touch with and responsible for the people, trying in short to create a nation-state without really being aware of it, merely because that was how they assumed states should be. In the same way (as said) they would build legislatures inadvertently on the Westminster model even in 1909 when they professed to be doing nothing of the kind and in 1917–9 when reforms were accompanied by elaborate accounts of why the Westminster model was inappropriate for India.52 This was not only a failure of imagination; it was a legacy of 100 years and more of gradual changes in what government 140

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meant in India, including the creation of Indians who had the professional skills after all (as some had predicted) to run a state along new lines. The travails of the indigo trade brought us to another element in British policies and their legacy. When a cess was suggested to help the industry, a ‘fatal objection’ judging from contemporary memoranda was that outside Bihar most indigo production was in the hands of ‘very conservative and old-fashioned’ raiyats or smallholders too numerous and isolated to be consulted. On the other hand, it was argued a cess was practicable because it would be applied only to exports and hence largely production by planters.53 The general lesson was that the policy was designed for the organised export sector: best-suited for not only one kind of product but also one mode of production. Focusing on items intended for international trade was a conscious development strategy. It was appropriate to a small, densely populated island that had to trade if only for reasons of climate; naturally British theorists of development emphasised exports. Applied to India the idea survived various changes of policy and ignored that the exports in question were largely raw materials to which value was added in Europe. Such trade, the Government of India announced in 1860, had ‘done more to improve the condition of the ryots in India than all other causes put together’. Expanding exports was (interpreting the Stracheys in l882) the key to civilisation.54 Their importance was an assumption embedded in a system, the exact equivalent, in regard to trade, of the emphasis on property in relation to land or capitalist agriculture in the context of production. By such apparently trivial steps in state responsibility, local agency and ‘national’ trade policies, a new state was being constructed in India, a state with responsibilities within a bounded territory in Bengal as in India. Though relatively little attention has been paid to administrative borders, except for the partition of Bengal in 1905 and of India in 1947, they were of general significance not least in generating loyalties.55 There was even an idea of national property held in trust for the people or in what government construed to be their interests. Thus nationalist demands did not arise in isolation but in the context of thousands of unwitting concessions to its fundamental premises. Imperial policy changes were associated with political philosophy, practical and technical possibilities and the development of the state. Brought to India during British rule, the approach was endorsed by Indian public pressure as in the press campaign against the ‘water ­famine’ in Bengal—relevant to the alleged foreign-ness of imperial rule and ­institutions. There are problems when state structures and functions run ahead of or fall behind developments among the people or arise from priorities and norms that are not publicly shared, not even among powerful elites. Imperial rule was bound to be out of kilter with Indian conditions; it produced or reproduced institutions that were an inexact match with the society they inhabited. But then they influenced it. This account 141

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shows how the British Indian state was being indigenised. Initiatives built institutions and changed attitudes in India; the effects are apparent today. I question, however, whether they had much effect at the time in mobilising local support for government-backed improvements. In many policy discussions among officials there was talk of respect for indigenous custom, but the files on popular involvement make virtually no reference to utilising local expectations and practices. Elsewhere in India a later officer claimed districts were not ruled by passing orders but by ‘cajoling’, ‘making arrangements that suit the people generally’, lest ‘the administrative machine .  .  . stop at once’. But he admitted it was ‘not generally recognised’.56 The 1903 Police Commission preferred ‘village agency’ to low-paid subordinate police. But few attempts were made to co-opt existing social power on its own terms. That was true also of development projects and their management. It was evident when measures supporting exports were thought best-suited to European enterprise. Indians who followed Western ways too closely were suspect, and when activists tried to promote reform they were not trusted. Relevant personnel (here chaukidars) were expected to be remade in line with British priorities and assumptions. A  development agenda was to be sold to Indians by reforming them. As strategies these had obvious limitations. In time, institutions and goals might become indigenised, as did great swathes of British Indian administration, law and policy by the time of Indian independence. In the meantime, however, a development agenda based upon local leaders and public service was likely to be hard to implement.

Notes 1 John Graham to Henry Verelst, 30 September 1766, Select Committee Papers 1766–7, Foreign Secret Proceedings, British Library, p.  205. On the importance of surveys, see Verelst to Col. Richard Smith, 23 September 1766, loc.cit., pp. 189–90. C.A. Bayly stressed the importance of intelligence and information to the survival of empires; see ch.6, this volume, and Bayly, ‘Knowing’. 2 Fort William Consultations, January-June  1764, Foreign Secret Proceedings, British Library. See 2 January 1764 for the demand that English factories should not interfere or weaken the Nawab’s authority; 19 March  1764 for worries about security and the need for a ‘Sufficient Army on the Frontiers of Bahar’; and 21 July  1764 on the recall of European agents, to reach Calcutta by 31 December, in order to preserve peace. 3 Ramsbotham, Studies, pp. 135–97; quotation (p. 160) from Cornwallis’s minute, May 1793; J.D. Patterson’s report on the office of kanungo, 18 May 1787 (pp. 162–97) from BR Consultations. 4 Yang, Limited Raj, pp.  228–9: a system ‘geared toward the maintenance and enhancement of the prevailing indigenous system of superordination and subordination’. On the character and shortcomings of local administration under the East India Company, see Robb, Ancient Rights, pp. 36–75. 5 The Champaran Collector, when head of another Bihar district, claimed he was able to influence their appointment and conduct; PCR 340 12/4 1884/5.

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6 Officiating Secretary, G/Be, to Secretary, R&A, 10 June  1891, R&A Famine A31–38 November 1891. Yang (n.4, this chapter) describes official praise of the chaukidars as aspirational rather than realistic. 7 The quotations are from district replies to consultations, H. Police B99–156 September 1892: G.A. Grierson to PC, 2 August 1891; W. Dunbar Blyth, Champaran District Magistrate (DM), to PC, 7 September 1891, with note by F.M. Beamish, Champaran District Superintendent of Police, 17 August  1891; B.T. Dalton, Darbhanga DM, to PC, 8 August 1891; J.A. Bourdillon, Saran DM, to PC, 21 January 1892. 8 Gaya Coll to PC, 15–16 May 1893 (LR Report 1892/3), PCR 358 12/9 1893/4. Bengal was criticised for its high revenue arrears and remissions, ranging from 4 to over 7% of demand, 1875 to 1890. Bihar also had among the worst road cess collections, despite several revisions of operations, typically below 90% of current dues and 80% of arrears in Shahabad and Saran; slightly better, for arrears only, in the other five districts of Patna Division; R&A Rev A88–92 June 1890, A12 June 1891, B10–11 June 1899; also Agric A14 June 1890. 9 On police in Bihar and Bengal see Robb, ‘Ordering’ and Evolution, ch.2, especially pp. 29–37, 44–5, 48–9, 51–5. See also H. Police B99–156 September 1892. 10 Englishman, 29 August  1876, Indian Mirror, March  1870, H. R&A A41–67 May 1881. 11 H. Police B99–156 September  1892. Elliott also claimed he was constantly having to disagree even with the ‘most highly trained and scientific’ sanitary commissioners. His objections to Indian agency were rather odd in that he had been a notably enthusiastic supporter of Ripon’s local self-government laws and, when Chief Commissioner in Assam, had sought the largest possible expression of local (Indian) responsibility and the electoral principle. At just this time when he was in charge in Bengal, however, Ripon exclaimed of him, ‘what a fool’. See Peter Robb, ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: an Example on the North-east Frontier in the 1880s’ (paper presented to the conference on ‘Identity, Society and Politics in India’, University of Calcutta, 28–30 March 1994) in Ray and Taylor, Politics and Identity, pp. 1–40. 12 G/I Education Proceedings A18–26 April 1891, quoted in H. Local Boards A2–5 February  1893. Bayley, member of the Viceroy’s Council from 1882, became Political and Secret Department Secretary (India Office) in 1891 and LieutenantGovernor of Bengal, 1887–90. 13 See Misra, Administrative History, pp. 363–72. 14 See n.6, this chapter. On Indian elections compare Antony MacDonnell’s refutation of the ‘foreignness’ of elections, still interesting for its essentialism about institutions and cultures, characteristic of this period, and the wish for ‘appropriate’ laws for India; Robb, Evolution, p. 12 & also 142–3. 15 See H. Local Boards A6–20 September  1896: in 1894–5, Madras provided 3.54% of their expenditure, Bombay 21.4%, NWP 32.5%, Punjab 0.17%, and Bengal 7.53 or 11.1% (both figures are given). 16 For this and the following paragraphs, unless otherwise shown, see notes by Claude Hill, 19 June, L.M. Thornton, 22 June, J. Woodburn, 28 June, and J. Westland, 8 August  1896, H. Local Boards A6–20 September  1896. See also H. Local Boards A2–5 February 1893 &, for background, A4–6 March 1889, A2–5 December 1889, A14–20 January 1891 & A1–3 February 1892, H.Public A272–3 March 1882, A250–3 July 1883, A100–3 October 1883, A65–8 February 1884, & A12–13 August 1903. See also H. Police B99–156 September 1892. 17 For an example of a district board in action, see Robb, Evolution, pp. 172–80 (on Darbhanga). For comparison, see Washbrook, Emergence, pp. 166–73.

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8 See n.16, this chapter. 1 19 Officiating Secretary, G/Be, to Secretary, Revenue and Agriculture Department, G/I, 10 June 1891, R&A Famine A31–8 November 1891. 20 See H. Local Boards A2 January 1904, including the note by E.N. Baker, Finance Department, 8 November  1903, and also one by H.G. Stokes, 24 November  1903. This principle of government accounting is one that might be welcomed in the public sector in many countries today, not least in Britain. 21 On constitutional reform see Robb, Evolution, pp. 184–93, 211–13, and Government of India, pp. 57–8, 64–6, 78–85, 87–90. 22 See the quotation from Mill’s Principles in Strachey, India, pp. 209–10. 23 Early surveys included H. Colebrooke’s Remarks on the Husbandry of Bengal (1804) and the famous ones of Buchanan. Under the Company, Charles Grant made efforts as commercial agent and chairman to encourage the production and export of indigo, silk, hemp and cotton. The first cotton shipment was from Bombay under his orders. European producers, having argued against the Company’s monopoly, were then eager to press for government assistance, as was provided from the 1820s. By the late 1850s, when Britain’s imports of Indian cotton had increased fourfold after technical and other official guidance, the government considered what else to do to extend production and improve marketability. Bentinck’s government encouraged tea and coffee from the 1830s; the opium monopoly always implied some involvement in agriculture. Dalhousie imported a Chinese supervisor for tea plantations in Punjab and boasted that the Company ‘was not as inert as is supposed’. See Embree, Charles Grant, pp. 266–70; Barber, British Economic Thought; Baird, Private Papers, pp. 329, 337 (G/I Revenue Despatch no.1, 26 August 1859 & no.14, 7 October 1859; Dalhousie to George Cooper, 22 October 1864, & letter, 5 February 1855). 24 Strachey, India, p. 185. 25 Royal Commission on Agriculture, Pt.A, pp. 32–3, 46–8, 62–4. 26 F.A. Shaw to Arthur Godley, 15 March 1899, R&A Agric B4 June 1899. 27 R&A Economic Products A4–7 October  1901. The dismissal was by R.E.V. Arbuthnot. 28 R&A Agric A6–15 December 1901. 29 R&A Agric B1–6 April  1899  & C 3–5 May  1899 (Leather) and R&A Agric A6–8 August l900 (Watt). 30 Even by 1900 some in government thought the industry beyond help; R&A Agric A4–7 October 1900 (note by J.E. O’Conor, 2l September 1900). See also n.38, this chapter. 31 R&A Agric A6–9 July 1903. See also Kumar, Indigo. 32 H. Education B4 July 1901. 33 R&A Agric A58–9 January 1908 & A7–8 April 1908. 34 On Finlow, see R&A Agric A1–5 August 1905, & A29–39, September 1906, & on Bloxam and Bergtheil, A19–24 May 1904 (including Ibbetson’s opposition), A19–26 April 1907, A7–8 & A1–10 November 1908, A19–21 February 1909 & A37–43 June 1909. 35 F.A. Shaw to Arthur Godley, 15 March 1899, R&A Agric B4 June 1899, B11 September 1899, A22–5 July 1900, B9 December 1901, A18–19 September 1907 (A.H. Bingley note, 24 April, on expense) & A16 May 1909 (on the Admiralty withdrawing its requirement for natural indigo). The question of natural versus artificial indigo was discussed by the celebrated chemist A.G. Perkin, who had been supervising Bloxam; R&A Agric A58–9 January  1908. See also Perkin, ‘Constituents of Natural Indigo’, Journal of the Chemical Society 20 (1904), p. 172; 22 (1906), p. 199; 91 (1907), pp. 435–40; ‘The Indigo Question’, Nature

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78 (15 October 1908), pp. 604–5, commenting on Meldola, ‘A Contribution to the Indigo Question’, Nature (30 July  1908), p.  296. Perkins was sure indigo manufacture could be improved, contrary to T.R. Filgalt, general secretary of the Bihar Planters’ Association, quoted as saying ‘nothing further can be done’. 36 R&A Agric A11–21 July  1900. The occasion was a request by the leading planter, Hudson, for assistance with the shift from indigo to sugar. Holderness’ attitude held out some prospect for such assistance with ‘pioneer’ industries. On this occasion, though personal loans were refused, the government went on to set up an enquiry. 37 Notes by F.G. Sly, Acting Inspector-General of Agriculture, 31 May, Tupper, 6 May  & 26 June,  & Curzon, 9 May  & 7 June  1905, R&A Agric A12–44 November 1905. 38 R&A Agric A4–7 October 1900 (note by J.E. O’Conor, 2l September 1900). 39 R&A Agric A37–43 June 1909. 40 G/I Commerce & Industry A1–3 October 1905 & A1 April 1906. 41 R&A Agric B14 July 1908, A33–44 April 1915 & B12 March 1916 (proceedings duplicated in G/I Commerce and Industry). 42 See Report of the Committee appointed to inquire into the Prospects of the Cultivation of Sugar by Indigo Planters in Bihar, Calcutta 1901, R&A Agric B9 May 1901; B6–8 July 1903 & A3–4 January 1905. On this occasion Bengal’s proposal was rejected by the Secretary of State. For later suggestions for an all-India sugar expert, see A4–16 March  1912. See also B.C. Basu, ‘Note on the Manufacture of Sugar and its Probable Improvements’, A9–11 July  1892. Similar but less successful cotton experiments were also made in north Bihar, on four indigo concerns, under the auspices of J.W. Mollison, Inspector-General of Agriculture: see B10–11 June 1903, A1–8 July 1906, A33–40 December 1909; R&A Economic Products June 1904. 43 R&A Agric A2–3 December l905 (including note by J.P. Hewett, 25 August 1905, quoting the Secretary of State in March 1880). 44 Bengal to G/I, Commerce and Industry Department, 8 July 1907, R&A Agric B14 July 1908. 45 On cotton, including the Long-stapled Cotton Syndicate’s work at Maniarpur in Bihar, see R&A Agric A23–31 March  1908 (expressions of doubt about the policy, by J.O. Miller, Mollison and Minto)  & A3–6 August  1908; also, on manufacturing techniques, A12–44 November  1905. On silk, see A24–7 February 1908. 46 See n.10, this chapter. European interests and colonial trade might seem imperilled by a gang ransacking indigo factories, allegedly with the ‘consent and connivance of the police’. 47 Robb, Liberalism, pp. 43–9. 48 See ch.12, this volume, on codes of conduct encouraged for indigo planters in Bihar in the hope of curbing their excesses. Under imperial rule, voluntary and parochial initiatives were thought better-suited to India and less risky—at least for Europeans or Indian elites allowed discretion for political reasons—than the alternative of regulated minimum standards and central state intervention, the other widely adopted ‘modern’ approach. 49 See the discussion of the ‘Shahabad’ system of subdivisional committees (one attempt at setting up local structures) in E.J. Barton, chairman of the Jehanabad subdivisional committee, to PC, 5 April 1880, PCR 333 26/1 1880/1. The two positions on Indians’ capacity are analogous to those identified by Edward Collins on British political parties: ‘A Tory is a man who believes England should be governed by gentlemen. A Liberal is a man who believes any Englishman may

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become a gentleman if he likes’ (quoted by Hopkins and Cain, British Imperialism, vol.1, p. 32). Here we have conservatives who believed India could only be ruled by Englishmen and progressives who thought Indians might become sufficiently like Englishmen to rule themselves. For the ideal of the gentleman as for British supremacy the First World War was a watershed. 50 See, for example, Bose, Agrarian Bengal, pp.  235–6, on the Local Self-­ Government Act of 1919 (setting up union boards), 50% increase in existing chaukidari taxes and the ensuing agitation in Midnapur. 51 G. Fell note, 29 May 1907, H. Local Boards A2–4 September 1907. 52 Minto thought the British held their position ‘by the sword’ and it would be ‘mad’ to think India could have ‘Colonial’ (that is, devolved responsible) government; Minto, India, p. 305 and p. 217 (Morley to Minto, 10 September 1908); Wolpert, Morley, pp. 129–30, and also Morley, Recollections, vol.2, p. 301: Morley’s view, at least in Parliament, in a speech in the Lords on 17 December 1908 (Parl. Deb., H.L., vol.198, 1908), was that the 1909 reforms were not intended to lead to Indian parliaments. However the theme of the Montagu-Chelmsford report was that of James Mill, that ‘the character of political institutions reacts upon the character of the people’, but also conversely (unlike Mill): ‘This fact, that the exercise of responsibilities calls forth the capacity for it, is the best ground for confidence in the working of self-government in India’ (Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, 1918, Cd.9109, para.130). Compare the Report of the Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform 1934, vol.1, pt.1, para.20: ‘Indians have shown, since 1921, a marked capacity for the orderly conduct of parliamentary business, a capacity which has grown steadily with the growth of their experience. We cannot doubt that this apprenticeship in parliamentary methods has profoundly affected the whole character of Indian public life.’ The Report went on nonetheless to conclude that ‘safeguards’ were needed as India had yet to show the necessary capacity for majority rule: willingness by the minority to accept majority decisions, political parties divided on policy rather than as sectional interests and a mobile and responsible public opinion. 53 Notes and papers with R&A Agric B14 July 1908. 54 G/I Revenue letter no.11, 17 April  1850, L/E/3/69, British Library; John and Richard Strachey, Finances. 55 I discuss this in Robb, Evolution, pp. 72–4, 90–5. 56 H.C. Beadon, Officiating Chief Commissioner of Delhi, to Lord Chelmsford, 2 September 1918, Chelmsford Papers, MSS.Eur.E.264, vol.21, British Library.

146

9 FAMINE, BORROWING AND DEBT

The divisive effects of British rule may be observed most poignantly in regard to famine, which prompted the push for large-scale canals, concern to improve agriculture and belated public measures to protect the people most affected.1 In Bihar scarcity and relief policies were particularly relevant to those without land. Some claimed wages had not kept pace with food prices; the standard allowance of 1½ to 2½ annas a day had altered very little in 20 years before 1896, and was low by comparison with other regions. It was the amount customarily thought appropriate, not an average of actual wages. They may have been more responsive to prices: most labourers were paid in kind at a level sufficient to provide some food daily. This is important for interpreting famines. Bazaar prices mattered little to the bulk of the population (cultivators and labourers) so long as there were stocks of food in the villages. When scarcity pushed up prices those on fixed incomes suffered first: many of the artisans, most town-dwellers, widows and other dependents, beggars. Agricultural labourers were affected when the minority of cultivators who kept personal stocks of food and the majority who survived between harvests on credit could no longer afford to employ them. Hardship became acute among the landless or semi-landless when ground was too hard to plough or there was no crop to transplant or harvest. These considerations render meaningless the official claim that cultivating classes enjoyed substantially increased income under the British but the average was depressed by the plight of the labouring population.2 In Bihar famines of the late nineteenth century, when they were unusually frequent, were at root scarcities of work (or money in towns and other marginal cases). The most severe were sparked by drought, inability to till land and failure of the rice crop, a mainstay of income even more than of food. Official accounts of relief measures bear this out. The practice was to open test works once scarcity was suspected. The results cannot provide a comparative gauge of distress between districts or even famines as the conditions that determined the numbers in receipt of support varied greatly; but they are a useful measure for one area or period provided no significant changes of personnel or policy intervened. The death rate too is a fair indicator though 147

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not uncontroversial given that the British largely refused to report deaths from starvation, attributing many to cholera, fever and general unhealthiness of the season.3 The weekly returns shown in Table  9.1 suggest rapid reactions to changes in conditions not a consistent response to previous harvest failure. The table demonstrates that numbers on relief and death-rates were responsive to rainfall, the main determinant of demand for labour, affecting as it did both opportunities for the cultivator and the confidence of the moneylender. There is poor correlation between the numbers on relief and the major food prices, rice being shown because it was the affected area’s main crop and marwa (finger millet) because it was the standby of the poor. The picture would have been even clearer except that distribution of June rainfall in 1892 was uneven and that month there was an influx of people from an area where there had been no rain but little previous movement to relief works. In other parts of the district numbers had fallen very rapidly. So too the rabi harvest failed in Champaran in 1892 and in June works were opened in the worst-affected area; about 500 attended on two days but numbers dwindled as soon as heavy rain fell. In Gaya at the same time relief works were unsuccessful, regardless of harvest failures, allegedly because of works undertaken privately on the basis of government loans.

Table 9.1  Relief Works in Muzaffarpur in 1892 Date

Relief (male units)

2 April 2533 9 2967 16 3444 23 4324 30 3793 7 May 4104 14 5759 21 7462 28 11120 4 June 12726 11 8426 18 6595 25 4806 2 July 1803 9 286 16 26 23 0

Prices Rice

Deaths

Rainfall

Marwa Month

Rate

12

19.8

April

39.95

11.3

18

a b c

0 1.46 0

0.58 1.18 1.19

11.3

18

May

75.34

a b c

0.73 1.81 0.26

2.72 2.66 1.99

June

44.49

a b c

8.39 12.46 4.79

7.53 8.03 6.69

July

30.89

a b c

10.44 18.16 9.35

11.81 10.59 11.85

12.4

11.4 11 .7

18.9

12

18.4

12.3

19

Pargana 1892

Normal

Note: The numbers on relief are weekly averages in hundreds. Prices are in seers per rupee. The death-rate is per 1000 inhabitants. The rainfall is monthly and in inches for three parganas (a, b and c), with a normal monthly total. Source: R&A Fam A2 January 1893.

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The importance of work reflected the region’s social composition: the dominant Rajputs and Brahmans almost invariably employed field-workers. Some estimates in 1897 suggested 90 per cent of those on relief were from cultivating classes and 75 per cent were actual cultivators. Another report claimed the number of cultivators was small. In 1892 those who appeared on relief works in Darbhanga were mostly from the lower classes though ‘Here and there a few Brahmins may be found’. Given the vagueness of the term ‘cultivator’ we should conclude that people wholly or partly dependent on selling their labour made up the majority receiving famine relief, at least for crises of relatively short duration such as those of the 1890s. Similarly, indications support the corollary to this, the insignificance of price. In Darbhanga the cost of grain changed relatively little over eight months of scarcity in 1892, at 14 to 12 seers per rupee for common rice although marwa hit a peak 30 per cent above normal. When the highest weekly number on relief exceeded 47,000 in an affected population of 150,000 the official explanation was that wages were set too high and attracted workers from outside the affected area; the suggestion is reasonably persuasive given that other districts returned much smaller proportions on relief. In Patna town and district prices were at least as high but officials found no evidence of distress.4 Again the phenomenon is no doubt explained by the character of the region. For example, in a tract northwest from Bettiah in Champaran rather more than half the people were said to have no personal stocks of grain, yet grain dealers of Bettiah had no agents in the area and such trade as there was flowed outwards. In quantitative terms, the most significant exchange in the local economy was the well-todo providing the poor with means of survival in return for their labour. In such circumstances bazaar prices did not measure distress; they would not rise, however great the need, where purchasing power was low. In Bettiah in 1896 prices were much as they were in other regions and thus the direction of trade was not readily reversed; yet it was said that the poor were in danger of dying for want of food. They were so, probably, even without absolute shortage. In Muzaffarpur, for example, as many as 14,000 reported for relief works although a net 120,000 maunds of food-grains were imported over 3½ months; somewhat over a million people lived in the affected area. The relative importance of price and work was not reversed by famine. Persistent scarcity showed up the inequities of the social and political system, in which according to some theories they might be expected to have generated a crisis. Humanitarian efforts by the British, if at all successful, would therefore have had the indirect but partly deliberate effect of perpetuating inequality. The truth is probably more complicated. It follows from an emphasis on the importance of work that distress was likely to be seasonal and short-term. Rain would soon provide a demand for labour and revive credit that drought had dried up. Unless famine were widespread, labourers would travel to find work; many from Bihar and Benares went 149

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every year to the eastern districts of Bengal to help with the harvest (and swelled relief problems when rains failed there). By the same token a single harvest would not cause distress sufficient to force itself on the attention of government. In Darbhanga, for example, despite failures at three successive harvests since the bhadoi of 1891, ‘distress’ appeared for the first time in March 1892. Earlier, work had been available in desperate attempts at irrigation. Scarcity, in short, was more a chronic than a traumatic illness. It had the capacity to enervate but not transform. The grim consequence, given the augmented death-rate in most years of scarcity, was probably that the effect of a rising birth-rate was reduced disproportionately in respect of one section of the population. That is not the same as saying its standard of living was generally depressed. Loss of life would limit how far labour could be underpaid by reducing the available pool. It well may be that, even with a surplus on average, there was effective shortage of labour in the best seasons, inhibiting the expansion of labour-intensive agriculture such as sugarcane or winter rice cultivation.5 Famine relief did channel some resources towards the very poor. Total wages paid over two decades are set out in Table 9.2. Four pice (1 anna) a day was supposedly sufficient to enable a labourer to survive without loss of physique. The government laid down rates of pay for famine relief-work—4 to 6 pice a day in rice districts and 3 to 4 pice elsewhere. The higher limit was the sum needed to buy 24 ounces of cleaned rice at a rate of 10 to 12 seers per rupee or an equivalent amount of a poorer grain, plus four ounces of pulses, one ounce of condiments or vegetables, one ounce of ghee or oil and half an ounce of salt, the amounts required by the Famine Code.6 Clearly the relief provided for survival and little more. On the other hand the payment of famine-relief wages may be represented as 16 days’ work a month over ten months for the recipients in 1888/9 and nine days over eight months in 1892. (In practice it was rather less as the payments in Bihar tended to be 50 per cent above the minimum of 1 anna per day.) To this must be added agricultural and improvement loans, which will be discussed shortly. They are relevant to famine relief because they created private employment. Five rupees per bigha were supposed to provide

Table 9.2  Famine Relief in Bihar, 1873–92

Affected Population Numbers on relief Relief wages (Rs.) Wages per worker (Rs.) Period (months)

1873–4

1888–9

1892

17,764,650 2,520,675 166,000 1.5 9

1,049,147 45,802 476,888 10.41 10

2,531,555 87,715 392,322 4.47 8

Source: R&A Fam A2 January 1893.

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cultivators with means to buy seed and labour for one harvest: such loans in the three periods shown on the table amounted to Rs.46,000, Rs.291,655 and Rs.142,485, or supposedly enough to cultivate (in the same order) 9,200, over 58,000 and almost 28,500 bighas. Important though they may have been to individuals at the time, the sums involved are clearly too small and too irregular to represent a significant input over a longer period, in the way that public-works expenditure or the incomes of army personnel and migrant labour may have done in some parts of India including Bihar. The operation of policy offers a fair illustration of the impact of British administration. Famine relief was open to abuse. As Alexander Mackenzie conceded in 1897, in Bihar it was loose and lacking in discipline. The Government of India generally thought Bengal’s measures profligate: works were opened there more readily than elsewhere and payments made at a higher rate. The policy was carried out in a ‘lordly way’ as James Westland put it. In 1897, T.W. Holderness described the expenditure as ‘wild profusion’.7 Bihar was supposed to be out of line not only with contemporary practice elsewhere but with previous Bengal policy. However, features seem likely to have been constant, especially in regard to supervision that could not be undertaken as elsewhere by experienced officers of the Public Works Department; it was not highly developed in Bengal. Civilians trying to cope found their instructions were not always carried out. In Champaran, those in immediate charge—‘for the most part young men straight from the Bihar School of Engineering’—were ‘too timid to resist the pressure put upon them to record on the muster roles bodies of people . . . coming too late in the day’. In Saran, where the Collector admitted famine work might have been overdone, the lists of people to receive aid were drawn up by village panchayats. Strikes occurred on these works when attempts were made to enforce a full task.8 Exacerbating this problem, works undertaken in Bihar were far more numerous than elsewhere—40 or 50 to a subdivision in ­Shahabad and Saran in 1897. Much effort was directed towards tank construction because conditions and supplies were unsuitable for road-building. This increased the difficulties of supervision and also the attractiveness of the works. It was said Bihari peasants would not leave their homes and live in relief camps; in many cases it must have been unnecessary for them to do so. In Muzaffarpur alone the disbursements were in the hands of 300 officers scattered over the district. It is hard to see how their reports could have been properly scrutinised. It could not even be guaranteed that overseers sent in accurate reports.9 Finally, the practice in Bengal was to employ able-bodied workers on piece-work at attractive wages given a good workload. The rates were thought too high for all except professional labourers, who presumably benefited from the fact that, as the Government of India concluded, ‘in similarly distressed areas much more relief has been given in Bengal than in the North-Western Provinces’. The old, many women and young children were 151

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less frequently employed than elsewhere (it was illegal to employ children under ten on the relief works) but, in 1897 at least, the ineligible were often given gratuitous relief in their homes. Government also tended to take over relief of the very poor, those normally subsisting on charity, in both badlyand lightly-affected villages. Up to 55 per cent of those on relief were in these categories in 1897. The suspicion was that no proper test of need was being applied in Bihar. Some 4 per cent of the entire population in affected districts received payments in 1897.10 The point here is not that money was necessarily much diverted from the working population: the famine-circle officer who absconded from Madhubani with a thousand rupees in 1897 was presumably an exception.11 The point is that famine-relief works were able to be manipulated: the chance for the village panchayat or its head to decide who received relief was obviously a weapon in any battle for political and social dominance; the ability of petty officials to influence which village received a tank as a result of relief work was another; the capacity to affect payments within the labour force by intimidating overseers was, at a different level, a third. Such opportunities were multiplied if relief for agricultural labourers were channelled through grants to families in separate villages rather than through camps, which was the implication of the policy of gratuitous relief plus the level of task required on famine works. Thus famine policy may have supported the status quo in Bihar not just by providing for the survival of some of the poor but also by reinforcing socio-economic and political positions. Sectors of the population seemed more vulnerable than before. ‘Normality’ meant an end to starvation but that obscured endemic poverty and ill-health. Inadequate normal food supply raised questions about morbidity and wealth distribution. Famine-relief payments may be typical of the impact of official expenditure in Bihar. Redistribution of wealth by the state was minimal and incidental; it seems payments, greatest in emergencies, were at best a mild prophylactic against a revolt that structural features already made unlikely. Uneven administration rewarded the ruler’s collaborators, agents and intermediaries. Increasing intervention probably did establish or re-establish popular belief in the ultimate responsibility of the state for their condition. But weak controls were most likely to strengthen those who were already strong. Other people possibly became more vulnerable.

Rural credit and the expanding state Contradictions between British interventions and the situation in Bihar are also evident in regard to borrowing—essential for agricultural production because of the seasonal rhythm, the time a crop takes to mature and fluctuation between good and bad years. This section starts with government loans and ends with cooperative credit. 152

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It is often supposed that the British reneged on the government’s responsibility for lending in support of agriculture, an error compounded by their more rigid collection of high land-revenue and withdrawal of the grants and revenue privileges of religious and other foundations.12 However, in the later nineteenth century the government, already spending more than before on public works and famine relief, began turn towards what it thought its traditional role in rural credit. By this time the land-revenue demand was generally less onerous but worries about Indian poverty were prominent.13 The first major attempts at improvement were two forays in law, already mentioned in passing: the Land Improvement Act (XIX of 1883) and the Agricultural Loans Act (XII of 1884). In theory redistributive but in practice unsuccessful, these advances were unpopular. That was not primarily (as might be thought) because government was ruthless when recovering its money. The terms supposed to be offered allowed a first repayment to be delayed for two years and for linking the period of a loan to the likely time before the borrower received a return. Collections were very imperfect. The Public Demands Recovery Act provided a certificate procedure under which a defaulter’s property could be bound for satisfaction of a debt; but collections were moderated according to agricultural conditions and sometimes seem to have been avoided. Large balances were run up in most districts. In 1892 in Saran execution was stayed for one year even in respect of arrears for which certificates had been issued, while the entire balance of embankment grants was outstanding. In Gaya some government tenants had failed to repay loans after nine years.14 The low interest charged was considered an inducement to allowing the debts to run on. There was little sign of official zeal in demanding payment. Resistance to government loans, undermining hopes of economic advance, did not depend on terms of repayment but on altering the culture of borrowing and overcoming legal and administrative difficulties. Especially in Bengal, loans often proved ineffectual because of lethargy and misapprehension at the point of supply, where they differed most from other credit. Government loans involved contact between parties neither of which was eager or well-known to the other. Their availability was not publicised. Higher district officers were responsible for them and were not as familiar with intricacies of the Acts as they might have been. It was hard to distinguish between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ loans: cultivators habitually took annual or harvest loans to finance agriculture and more formal loans to tide over bad years or provide for exceptional, especially social expenditure. Official commitment mattered; even the amounts available depended largely on local initiative. Budgets were strictly in proportion to estimates, differing from area to area. (Patna division was allowed more than twice as much as any other Bengal area in 1895.) Outlay seemed unrelated to anything. The Revenue and Agriculture Department protested at Finance Department cuts in the budget, but in Bengal it was regularly underspent. Patna Division’s gap 153

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was as little as a third in a high-spending year or as much as two-thirds in others. In 1892, during the scarcity, Brahmans and Rajputs were said to be crying out for loans and yet in Darbhanga (an extreme case criticised by the government) 85 per cent of applications were refused. Sometimes the reason was insufficient security. Unusually, about 10 per cent were from groups of ten or more people applying on mutual security; all were refused. In other cases would-be borrowers declined a loan because unacceptable conditions were proposed. Some missed out because their papers were not processed in time—the Gaya Collector admitted several such cases while returning part of his allocation in 1893. An instructive comparison may be made with North-Western Provinces where improvement grants totalled nearly Rs.100,000 in 1887/8, with outstanding balances nearly 4½ times as great, and agricultural loans running at about Rs.175,000 with a balance of some Rs.120,000. Within these provinces too one might compare temporarily-settled Allahabad division with permanently-settled Benares: in the former new improvement loans totalled Rs.751,606 and balances were over Rs.120,000, while in the latter they amounted to Rs.4,500 and Rs.2,000. About the same time Patna division gave out Rs.2,400 in loans.15 These differences reflect policies and revenue systems in the various regions and perhaps also their economic character. In Bihar, either the cultivator was more unwilling or less able to stand the scrutiny of officials interested in ‘genuine’ motives for loans and proper security to back them; or both security and motives conformed poorly to British expectations. One factor was administration by minor officials. In the absence of a record of rights, Bengal authorities were encouraged to complicate their rules. Relatively few revenue-payers applied and the investigation of most of the securities offered took officials into that disputed territory, the transferability of tenant rights. Another reason was probably the Bengal officials’ sour reflection that many of the applicants were merely trying to profit—an odd position to take about a system intended to protect and improve agriculture. Opium advances were supposedly applied to general agricultural purposes with the connivance of officials; but were recovered by deductions from payments for the crop. If agricultural and improvement loans were granted for buying cattle or implements, there was thought to be no guarantee, given troublesome collections, they would not be ‘wasted’ on marriages or litigation or ‘squandered’ on food to save the borrower from work. Even in Gaya where loans were more freely given than elsewhere, chiefly on government estates, the Collector was convinced in 1895 that zamindars applied only when pressed for money and not when they intended to improve their property. In 1892 the government required the Agricultural Loans Act to be restricted more or less to famine relief and use of the Improvements Act encouraged instead. Ironically, the latter was less well-suited to the needs of petty agriculturists than the former with its simpler procedures.16 154

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Clear security was the major administrative need. The multitude of separated holdings, complex legal titles and doubts about the transferability of tenancies (which the law left effectively to local usage) all implied that responsible officials had to conduct detailed investigations before agreeing to a loan. In the 1870s and 1880s Bengal was criticised because, in the absence of effective local agency, its procedures gave precedence to safety over utility. In 1908 the local government proposed to do away with most checks, following advocacy by the Irrigation Commission of 1903; new instructions were meant to increase take-up and even provide free loans in precarious tracts. Official caution was quickly reinforced. According to an under-secretary in the Revenue and Agriculture Department, it was ‘impossible to be quite happy about the position’. Problems of title in Bengal still necessitated that ‘elaborate enquiry .  .  . precede the grant of a loan, however undesirable elaboration may be on other grounds’.17 Also significant was the social context of borrowing. In 1892 the Commissioner of Patna Division wrote: ‘It is doubtful whether the cultivators will ever be willing to take loans for improving their lands. They are under the impression that works of improvement should be carried out by their landlords.’ During an exchange of notes in 1908, J.H. Kerr (once a settlement officer in Bihar) claimed ‘people who pay land revenue seldom take loans from government’. Between these contradictory remarks was a gap into which government loans were bound to fall even had they been wholeheartedly pursued. Explanations for lack of interest in improvement loans included the following: embankments, irrigation and so on were too expensive and involved many interests with a likelihood of quarrels and litigation; where such works were agreed they were readily carried out by villagers without much need for cash; even big agriculturists’ fields were too scattered to be much improved by individual effort and capital; landlords were unable to profit from improvements without ‘troublesome rent enhancement suits’. By contrast, opium advances helped the building of wells as did some zamindars, for example the Maharaja of Hathwa who provided wood for the necessary brick-making.18 The key determinant of credit in general was not its cost or availability but the circumstances, expectations and perceptions that surrounded it. There were consequences. The local bania sufficed in many instances; government was a risky alternative. In the mind of the borrower, a loan served agricultural reproduction or met non-productive needs. No other attitude was possible in most cases: the cultivator could seldom apply capital to improve his land without cooperating with others and affecting their land; he risked providing a bonus to some intermediary or his landlord. A lender might encourage or improve cultivation and processing of a particular crop but was unlikely to initiate fundamental improvements to productivity: borrowers’ dependency effectively rested upon unproductive borrowing. For 155

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most people the pre-condition for capital investment would be a change in patterns of landholding and social control as well as in credit and trading systems. Who was likely to surmount the difficulties and obtain loans? We may disregard agricultural advances after harvest failures in so far as they represented credit for those distressed in proportion to their need; such aid would have little impact on improvement. Other aid was not distributed evenly. Those seeking loans had land: petty zamindars on their own holdings, planters as sub-proprietors or secure tenants paying money rents, particularly on government estates. Readiness to seek government loans depended on tenurial security and practicality: government estates in Gaya with a need for irrigation channels were an example of a favourable match. Take-up also depended on the cultivator’s willingness to involve an official in his affairs. Petty administrators might not relish leaving their offices to journey through the countryside, but were reputed when they did so to take the opportunity for oppression and self-aggrandisement. Finally, policy tended to favour those with excellent individual standing, loans on joint security being rare. Thus, whether or not the loan was wanted for improvements, it would be best suited to dominant groups and the allies of minor officials. Once again a government policy had unintentional effects: to consolidate the existing distribution of wealth, to provide a means for establishing disputed rights and so on. Comparison with, say, partition proceedings implies that (even if all applications had been successful) government loans were not important in Bihar except in famine years. Features distinguishing public from private lending were a disincentive in themselves. The reverse may also be true: non-official moneylenders were resorted to because they did not make intrusive investigations. Ignorance and availability would have reinforced such a preference as would purposes for which loans were required. As will be discussed later, many private loans were oppressive for the debtors, but presumably met the needs of dominant lenders and elite borrowers.

Cooperative societies Experience with government loans led to attempts to introduce cooperative credit. It was believed a revolution was needed: the unlikely sentiment emanating from the Finance Department in 1901 was that ‘such Co-­operative Societies are quite foreign to Indian soil; as yet very few joint stock companies, formed by natives of the country have succeeded, and unless the fostering hand of Government gives the push at the first launching of these Societies, the result will be shipwreck’.19 Official opposition came from those opposed to extending the state’s role or meddling with Indian practice. Nationalist thinkers were important in encouraging state involvement: a host of Indian leaders, especially from western India, made the case for 156

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agricultural banks and sought to establish British responsibility for economic progress.20 Cooperative credit was taken up in the 1890s after some 20 years of advocacy by enthusiasts, influenced by British friendly societies and the work of Friedrich Raiffeissen in Germany.21 The Madras government took the initiative, appointing Frederick Nicholson to compile a report on agricultural banks. In 1896 that government decided, opposed by its Board of Revenue, to try to secure cheaper credit for raiyats by any means short of making government grants. Nicholson was told to experiment by setting up a few banks, a policy taken up in North-Western Provinces through the agency of Henry Dupernex, author of People’s Banks for Northern India, and a little later in Bengal, employing P.C. Lyon. The central Finance Department thought the Bengal move premature; Revenue and Agriculture were also unenthusiastic; but Bengal was allowed to go ahead because some success had already been achieved in Punjab.22 By 1900 officials in the Government of India were eager to graft cooperative credit on to what they thought the ‘natural’ social unit, the village community. That assumption, colouring much agrarian policy under the influence of Denzil Ibbetson and other Punjab officials and on this occasion backed up by Dupernex, ruled out beginning the movement on the basis of existing supposedly town-based credit. Later, introducing legislation, Ibbetson hoped moneylenders would participate and urban cooperatives lend to rural ones; but the core of the schemes was always the independent village society. Because villages were to be made financially self-sufficient, state help would be needed. In the central government the start was a conference and an enquiry dominated by supporters of cooperation followed by the usual lengthy consultations with officers at all levels, at the insistence of the Viceroy (Lord Curzon) and Charles Rivaz, Revenue Member.23 Two key debates took place, one in 1901 and another in 1904. Curzon wanted full discussions to decide if government should provide capital and whether loans should be allowed for agricultural purposes alone. He thought unproductive borrowing the ‘spring of the thriftlessness of the Indian cultivator’. He was sceptical of a proposal to register moneylenders who agreed to charge no more than 12 per cent interest. Thomas Raleigh, Legal Member, also found that idea ‘rather startling’; in 1901 he joined those unable to contemplate partnership with indigenous lenders, held responsible for many evils. The unspoken dispute was between different political philosophies: on one side were minimalists and on the other interventionists. The former admitted few cooperative societies would be founded without official aid but believed they had to be independent of the state to ‘attain success and to be of any real use’. The others asserted India was different: people ‘look very largely to Government for the initiating of measures of reform’. Partly because of the alleged ‘peculiarity’ of India and consensus on the evils of state intervention, minimalists had the better of the argument at first. Their 157

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case had three elements: general suspicion of government involvement that bureaucrats had to appear to share; fear of misuse and distortion of state action; and underlying criticism of Indian society. E.R. Ellis, Military Member, opposed involvement because Indians were very conservative and did not ‘always appreciate the benevolent intentions of a paternal government’: interference was ‘unsettling’ and ‘generally misinterpreted by . . . disloyal persons.’ The Home Member, A.T. Arundel, cited Nicholson in a plea against ‘bureaucratic interference in the every-day affairs of life’, adding that Indians had an ‘already overwhelming tendency . . . to look to the State’ for everything. Sharing a gloomy view of Indian institutions, Curzon could not see how government could oust the moneylender (anyway a counterproductive ambition) and was ‘more than doubtful’ cooperation could succeed in India. In the Revenue and Agriculture Department, J.B. Fuller, the Secretary, agreed people expected government to initiate reforms. He pressed for more haste than Rivaz or Curzon would accept—he had attended the pro-cooperation conference in 1900—but merely argued that a little preliminary assistance would not demoralise the people. He too doubted cooperation could succeed and described Dupernex’s results as a few rupees risked by zamindars to please the government. In the Finance Department, Edward Law (also a member of the 1900 conference) was largely practical: government funds would be needed because any society had to have a minimum capital beyond the means of raiyats for whom the scheme was intended. Most Members accepted government assistance would be needed, though only a minority (not including Curzon) wanted to make financial contributions.24 All that was achieved at first was a permissive bill. It was soon overtaken by the greater authority of the Famine Commission of 1901 that advocated more positive measures, catching the current vogue from Nicholson. The 1904 Act embodied this active approach under the influence of Denzil Ibbetson. Government loans were to be permitted as a symbol of goodwill to help societies whose members had already deposited some of their own funds and, more important, full-time registrars were to encourage and oversee the movement. Edward Law thought borrowing for marriages and funerals was too ‘deeply rooted in the country’ to be ‘extirpated’ but the Act should ignore the fact. Curzon and Arundel, who wanted to restrict the purpose of cooperative loans, admitted the necessary role of the moneylender. Underlying the victory for intervention were the original arguments about the nature of India. Again officials shared attitudes and drew different conclusions. Opinions did not so much change as support different proposals. The minimalists skirmished to limit the consequences. Their foremost argument was now Indian misuse of government provision. The Secretary of State, frequent protagonist of rearguard actions, worried about the chances of fraud. To meet his objection, R.E. Arbuthnot, now Revenue and Agriculture Secretary, suggested restricting funds that would be at risk. ‘What 158

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we really want to get’, he claimed, forgetting the developmental motives behind the project, ‘is a dozen societies in each province established on a genuine basis of mutual self-help. We do not want a lot of mushroom societies springing up merely in order to get Government aid.’25 In practice a registrar, faced with the difficulty of supervising societies, might opt to restrict numbers in the ‘experiment’. Such qualms, not least about the probity of petty officials, often stood in the way of wholehearted pursuit of objectives the government professed. In some provinces government pump-priming loans were soon phased out. When Bengal asked to be allowed to double the limit of Rs.50,000 on its loans, the Government of India agreed reluctantly so as to fulfil promises, but only because W.R. Gourlay, Bengal’s first registrar, told C.A. Innes he was entirely opposed to such advances and promised not to institute further societies except ‘where there is a keen desire due to an honest wish to give the cooperative principle a trial’.26 Another issue, although Ibbetson designed the 1904 Act to be ‘as simple and elastic as possible’, was what one note in 1915 referred to a ‘general tendency to increase restriction and control’.27 Instead of a transformation of rural credit came scrutiny, auditing and other niceties. Perhaps indicating that priority, manpower was closely monitored by the Government of India. Jamini Mohan Mitra was twice sanctioned as Bengal’s acting Registrar but only for a few months at a time and because unofficial oversight was being sought to avoid the need for such secondment: repeated temporary appointments might discourage a permanent one, presumably meaning of a more ‘qualified’ European, given that the registrar had to devote most of his energy to supervision.28 Once again need for European attention helped explain (paradoxically) lack of effective initiative. At first officials were sanguine about results. In 1909, Innes considered that the 1904 Act had stood the test of its first four years in a ‘remarkable way’ showing ‘few serious defects’. R.W. Carlyle thought it had a ‘great future’. Gourlay thought it was ‘getting on quite smoothly’.29 His promise to Innes had been somewhat disingenuous. Evidently warming to his post he described a grand design of revolutionising rural finance by bringing ‘the little villager into a position to deal with the large banker on the same terms as the man who wants a large loan’. He wanted to cut out the middleman; wiser counsel might have been to enlist his support. In 1906, he reported 67 societies in Bengal (and 15 or 20 in process of being formed). Already 18 of these were in Bihar. But they highlighted a major limitation: inadequate official response to the context of policy. Most Bihari societies were in government or Court of Wards villages; even a majority of seven that were private were associated with European planters. There was no breakthrough to people unused to working with government. Gourlay was handicapped not only by the bureaucracy’s habitual passion for control, especially when money was involved, but also by the difficulty of persuading people to join. 159

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According to Fuller when commissioner of Jabalpur Division, it was ‘out of the question that villagers will deposit money with village banking institutions’ because of the ‘complete absence of the feeling of trust’ and the lack of education among them.30 Social obstacles were matched by the officials’ own limited imaginations. Fuller had suggested joint security bonds for takavi (government loans) initially on caste lines. Gourlay assumed ‘panchayat customs’ would prove a good foundation and also took for granted that zamindars would have to spearhead the movement in Bengal. He considered the ideal village for a cooperative society to be one with a single rent-receiver well-disposed to the movement and people all living in a single basti (settlement) so they were prepared to become jointly responsible for debts. The village also had to have someone with enough education to keep accounts to the government’s satisfaction. These were sound and practical requirements except that in areas within Gourlay’s remit they did not conform to social conditions and, perhaps worse, implied circumventing all the existing providers of credit. The appeal was to ‘acceptable’ allies. The purpose and manner of rural borrowing were not closely considered. The registrar was mainly reaching people already familiar with government credit arrangements. Paradoxically the aim was to free cultivators from debt and encourage them to invest. As we have seen already, administrative difficulties placed limits as did financial stringency. But government intervened progressively in India as it gained the capacity to do so. Growing bureaucracies played their part; over a widening range of activities experts and enthusiasts were provided with personal advancement while their speciality was thought important. With its registrars, the Cooperative Credit Act instituted a small body of officials dedicated to extending an aspect of government. Gourlay went on leave to Europe to study cooperation and claimed he saw what it had done for ‘agriculturists not a whit in advance of our raiyats’. He became convinced that by ‘impressing upon it the stamp of Indian conditions’ a new type of cooperative movement could be introduced.31 Such advocates furthered a norm of state intervention. The tendency was for more and more ambitious proposals, expressing each official’s view of the importance of his field. Bengal, converted at last to the cause of agricultural improvement, presented the Government of India in 1905 with a scheme to extend the cooperative principle away from providing credit to individuals and towards the joint purchase of seed, manures and so on. Such measures were already proving successful in United Provinces. The money involved was Rs.2 million earmarked by Curzon for setting up provincial Agricultural Departments. Charles Tupper, Revenue and Agriculture Member, had designs on some of this money for initiatives from the centre. The Viceroy had already vetoed his efforts to retain some of it to support an agricultural journal (according to Curzon that showed the ‘danger of slackness of principle’) or 160

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to increase the pay of the Inspector-General of Agriculture (which Curzon thought ‘almost immoral’). But there was no longer any real debate about the principle of state interference. The first effect of an Act such as the one in 1904 was thus chiefly on government itself: it moved the starting-point of debates. The state crept inexorably towards intervention, led by popular and practical demands. As the 1904 discussions show, pessimism about India’s fitness and fear of disorder and resistance only partially supported laissez-faire. Officials putting such arguments were likely to be conservatives imbued with the comparative method, believing in social evolution. Such men, seeing themselves as benevolent paternalists, could hardly refrain from trying to bring India to what they thought their own level of civilisation. Arguably, they was even more likely to change the role of the state than predecessors who believed in universal principles and one natural order. State involvement posited what one official called the ‘perverse nature of the Indian’ who would rather be ruined by the moneylender than make more regular repayments of debt to someone else.32 But it also implied belief in British responsibility to make improvements. Of course, the path of state intervention was not smooth; nor was its direction consistent. In 1915, the conservative William Meyer, then Finance Member of the Government of India, professed himself a wellwisher of cooperative credit but opposed the development of cooperative savings banks: they would add to government liabilities and diminish the resources available for other programmes such as railways and irrigation.33 The Government of India continued to whittle down the costs of provincial projects. Fashions and political priorities varied but, despite reservations, a colonial bureaucracy was inviting intervention that built upon itself, as it did with investigations at government expense into indigo, sugar and also jute. The origins of the process lay partly in the convictions of officials, partly in the demands of Indians, partly in the hope of wooing supporters but also partly in the logic of bureaucratic experience and structures. Among these influences, at least the last was likely to outlive British rule. Its impact was not neutral. In providing credit, what began as an attempt to reverse the subordination of one section of the population to another (agriculturists to moneylenders) emerged as a means of perpetuating existing systems of control.34 The character of government loans policy restricted or distorted its impact. The accepted verdict on the co-operative societies is that they did not so much challenge as assist the professional or agriculturist moneylenders and their role in the social and economic order.35 If British policies effected change the reason was (once again) their indirect and unintended consequences. In this case, the most damaging feature was perhaps not the inappropriateness of the state’s efforts—for example, the refusal until after Independence to finance consumption—but their diversion into mere ­reinforcement of the existing order, even the part they had rejected, local credit. 161

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Loans and the culture of borrowing My suggestion that existing credit arrangements met the interest of dominant groups in Bihar was not a conclusion often drawn by contemporary officials; we cannot hold to it on negative pleading alone. Let us consider it further through an example of a zamindar in debt, Amir Ali of Patna. His property comprised seven estates held from government and five mokarari (perpetual, fixed rate) tenancies from Tikari raj. Of these 12 mahals only two were directly managed, yielding an annual income of less than Rs.590. The remainder were leased and produced some Rs.4,480. One already mortgaged was let to an indigo concern; the nine others were let on usufructuary leases (zerpeshgi) in return for loans of over Rs.7,600, maintained by an annual sacrifice of Rs.1,500 in rent. The regular administrative costs of the estate as a whole were over Rs.2,600 and the revenue demand was Rs.1,340 or 20 per cent of the rental. Table 9.3 summarises Amir Ali’s debts in 1894.36 The example was perhaps atypical for the extent of debt. Ali had additional sources of income, including government service, and incurred extra

Table 9.3  Unsecured Debts of Nawab Amir Ali of Patna Lender

Year

Principal (Rs.)

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N Totals

1888 1889 1889 1891 1892 1892 1893 1893 1893 1893 1891 1893 1893 1893

9844 2000 61075 1000 1000 3000 3000 8000 1225 2000 2000 20000 7000 8000 147144

O

1894

7544

Interest (Rs.) Rate %

Total

Per annum

Owing

Months owed

10.5 9 6 0 12 12 12 0 6 15 15 12 13.5 13.5

3659 6372 5969 − 230 545 536 − 73 425 1250 5309 2047 1710 28128

1033 1800 3664 − 120 360 360 − 73 300 300 2400 945 1080 12435

2625 4572 23205 − 160 185 176 − − 125 950 2909 1102 603 15742

30 30 7 − 16 6 5 − − 5 38 14 14 7

0 to 12

293

Key to lenders: A & B—Biseswar Prasad, Patna; C—M.M. Chaudhuri, Calcutta; D—Bhagwad Prasad, Patna; E—B.K. Mowar, Patna; F & G—Altaf Hussein Khan, Patna; H—Akbar Ali Khan, Patna; I—Mirza Khalil Shiran, Calcutta; J—R.K. Payne, Hooghly; K, L, M & N—B.B. Mullick, Hooghly; O—Others (zerpeshgi leases). Source: R&A Rev A30–1 July 1895 & A1–4 November 1894.

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liabilities through his management of the affairs of the former Nawab of Awadh. It seems typical, however, in that the estate was let out rather than directly-managed; extra income was sought in further alienation rather than closer control; a majority of the debt was unsecured; and attempts were made to diversify sources of credit. It reveals an extraordinary capacity to borrow—in extreme cases it seems a man could secure a loan merely on the strength of his other borrowing. The hand-to-mouth or rather hand-to-hand existence that is implied is less generally interesting, however, than what the liabilities suggest about those with money to lend. Ali showed great enterprise, with signs of desperation in the partial alienation of his property towards the end, but his finances as opposed to his standing would not have borne examination after 1888. At his death his liabilities for interest alone were nearly three times his maximum income from land, quite apart from unknown dues in respect of two secured mortgages; no doubt the balances would have been worse without the expedient of the zerpeshgi leases. Ali achieved this partly by deepening his debt to existing creditors. It is true that some lent to gain the lease of an estate or without interest: the latter may have been a technicality on religious grounds (it was a common ploy for Muslims to record a principal larger than the loan) and in either case Ali may not have received the full amount for which he admitted liability. Two creditors, M.M. Chaudhuri and Mirza Khalil, were sufficiently commerciallyminded to go to law to recover their dues. But the others, representing half the liability, persisted in lending without security in spite of outstanding debts in respect of their own earlier loans. It is difficult to see any economic calculation in such behaviour. It is as if, after initial commitment (a mere Rs.2000 for B.B. Mullick and perhaps mortgages on Ali’s estates for Biseswar Prasad), lenders felt themselves bound to continue advancing money with what must soon have been very little expectation of recovering interest or even the principal. The impression given by this one example is that for lenders a borrower’s socio-political standing was more important than his financial. What did that mean for borrowers of low status? Only someone with a very poor record or reputation would fail to obtain temporary credit without security, according to a report by the sugar manufacturer, L.H. Mylne. In his view, the mahajan though seemingly a ‘veritable Shylock’ was usually ‘a fair-dealing man’ and ‘very frequently’ much of a fool melting ‘into rupees when an over-whelmed debtor from whom he could not possibly recover all his dues, cringes before him and invokes his aid as “Sahuji” ’ (roughly meaning ‘honourable merchant’). Mylne described the system as one in which the general rate of interest worked out at not less than 30 per cent but the mahajans were usually of the cultivating classes and seldom had better security for their loans than a day-book kept in a very irregular fashion. It is no wonder economic viability was an issue mainly when social status was low. 163

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Mylne’s experience of running an agricultural bank gave him insight into several of the features usually considered objectionable about the way moneylenders operated. For example, they were known to collect dues from the harvest, usually at a discount on market prices, which effectively raised the cost to the borrower. After a few years Mylne too found himself on the threshing floor because otherwise, he explained, his borrowers would conceal a good deal of the produce that should have been sold to meet their commitments. Being present had another advantage too, for future transactions: it enabled Mylne to observe exactly the margin against which the tenant could borrow. This link between lending and the agricultural cycle is crucial to understanding the relationships that arose around credit. Mylne’s key problem as an agricultural banker seemed to be that debtors simply did not take repayment of debts very seriously, which is equally a comment (contradicting the colonial animus against moneylenders) on the bania’s mode of operation to which borrowers had been accustomed. Mylne attempted to secure the release of some tenants from existing debts by allowing the alienation of parts of holdings on usufructuary mortgages in the hope that cultivators would then be induced to save to recover possession of their land. He had found that when instalments were due the debtor usually defaulted, incurring what ‘might be called penal rates of interest’ on the balance; such accumulations of debt were seldom paid off. Some proportion of them would have been lost to the moneylender. What of the blame placed on banias who did acquire land? Mylne’s borrowers would say to his tahsildars (rent collectors): ‘why . . . be anxious, is not my land worth’ so many rupees? It was in such a way, Mylne speculated, that lazy and reckless men ended up as serfs paying high rents or as mere sharecroppers on what had been their own lands. Yet he himself found that the tendency among the great majority was for debit balances to increase even though his bank was trying to ‘save’ the tenants from themselves and refusing loans they were unlikely to be able to repay. The greed of the bania seems not to have been crucial to indebtedness or land- alienation.37 The moneylender’s popular image coloured accounts of his impact. His iniquities fuelled indignation first because he was presented as a rapacious parasite: the poor cultivator forced by famine to borrow in order to survive would, as one pamphlet put it, receive Rs.15, execute a bond for Rs.20 and admit liability for interest at 63 per cent.38 From then on his fate was sealed. It was not clear why prosperous regions tended to be the most indebted or how the debts of the poor grew year-by-year when on the one hand credit was supposed to dry up in hard times and on the other raiyats were rapidly enmeshed and the bania was greedy for their land. Second, the moneylender was objectionable because his operations were thought very much a creation of the nineteenth century although there was no detailed explanation of how credit was organised in earlier times. Third, according to a strong current in British official thinking the bania stood in the part later to be 164

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played by the ‘disloyal agitator’: he subverted the existing order; he was an interloper against whom the cultivators needed protection; his hold had been strengthened by British legal innovations (in this case laws on property and contract). In north India the tribes of Thakurs, Jats and others settled on the land were said still to owe allegiance to chieftains who had become their landlords. They would abhor the intrusion of the bania (as of Muslim purchasers of land); it would be a ‘fertile source of disturbance’ and far greater evils in future. Such predictions were attractive and not always inconvenienced by the need for evidence.39 The moneylender was not a single category: there were specialists; traders who gave out advances; zamindars and raiyats who lent to their fellows. If the British were critical of the accumulation of land other than for direct cultivation that was a moral not an economic judgment. They were in a confusing impasse between a welcome for self-maximising individualism and fears of anarchy due to social change. In discussing the impact of the Bengal Tenancy Act (supposed to have increased the alienation of smaller holdings) the Commissioner of Patna Division concluded that there were those, often of low caste, who purchased land because they wanted to extend their cultivation. Regions where such men were found (Saran and parts of Muzaffarpur) were ‘advanced’. There were also people who acquired land only to sublet it and who were thus ‘landgrabbers pure and simple’. Regions where they predominated (such as Champaran) were ‘behind the times’. The Commissioner proposed legislation to permit transfer only to a bona fide cultivator or at least a tenant of the same class as the transferor, the very aim attempted in the Punjab Alienation of Land Act in 1900.40 Evidence was gathered against moneylenders. In the Central Provinces it was thought bania castes were extremely numerous, becoming wealthier and punctuating their progress with extravagant celebrations; often they had ousted the ‘old cultivating mulguzars’. In 1891, some 20 per cent of land was supposed to have changed hands since settlement, half to moneylenders; many proprietors held ‘the lands still left to them only at the discretion of their creditors’, which illustrated the severity of the problem. Indebtedness was greatest among agriculturists who occupied good soils with low rent and revenue demands. Even if a mortgage were expected to be redeemed, credit would be better on more fertile lands because of greater security. Were the banias aiming to take the best land, tempted even more when revenue-assessment was low? Often that was their illegitimate purpose, Ibbetson claimed. Larger owners could be ruined when a canal plus a railway improved land-values and credit-ratings, encouraging idleness and extravagance. Yet banias did not all maximise their commercial advantage. One of the richest moneylenders in the Central Provinces claimed to be owed Rs.400,000 by cultivators and expect to recover only Rs.150,000. Creditors often seemed reluctant to take possession of property mortgaged 165

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to them. They would control land not manage it, profiting as proprietors not through rents but by squeezing their tenants for interest payments.41 For Bihar, it seems misleading to equate borrowing with loss of land. It was hard to distinguish between alienation to outsiders and neighbours; and the visiting bania-trader was often no more an outsider to the bulk of his clients than the dominant cultivator-moneylender was to his. Why did anyone lend? Some were professionals and some opportunists. Some grabbed land and made it more productive; some took it to rack-rent; others redistributed from the slothful to the thrifty, creating more efficient units of production. Some brought harsh realities home to richer cultivators; some took advantage of the poor while allowing them to survive in situ, producing in the old way. And if moneylenders did not operate strictly on their bond or lend solely on the basis of commercial judgment they were presumably extending their influence through socially-conservative behaviour. Their profits often came from control that debt gave them on favourable terms over villagers and their produce—a key disadvantage for those with few social or economic resources. The amount of debt (lower in poorer districts) was immaterial to such control, or rather what mattered was the ratio between it and the borrower’s resources. Missing in all the official condemnation was an appreciation of why people borrowed. Credit was vital to agriculture; it was available for ordinary costs between harvests even to poor tenants. It was used for occasional expenses, such as dowries or funerals, a luxury and maybe a trap for the better-off. Sometimes it was sought for investment in land, but there is little evidence of credit deployed to increase output or profits. For the British, enlisting the bania might have been more useful than opposing him. They erred in trying to curb the operation of a commercial instinct that was but imperfectly at work. Once again they did not so much bring about radical changes across a wide spectrum as intensify some trends and exaggerate or ossify social characteristics. Moneylenders might provide useful insurance for cultivators but reduce total spending power and thwart development. Later, putting credit in a more sombre light, I shall reach similar conclusions on commercial agriculture in poor districts.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter are based on Robb, ‘State, Peasant’, where Tables 9.1, 2 and 3 first appeared. Famine will be presented as an opportunity to assess British policy; another book would be needed to analyse the undoubted impact of famine on poverty in Bihar. On canals, see Sharma, Famine, pp. 216–26. Pouchepadass, Land, Power and Market, has much information about (1) a ‘succession of advances and regressions of cultivation . . . [because of] war, banditry, famines, epidemics and the resultant demographic decline’ (pp. 64, 98); (2) the 1896–7 famine as ‘a decisive blow’, indeed a sharp reversal, to Champaran’s large-scale inward migration (pp.  84–5); (3) the food crisis and excess deaths

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in 1866, reported to be over 62 per thousand among nearly 12,000 ‘cultivating families’, some 47 per cent children, 50 per cent more women than men, figures thought exceeded among the landless (pp. 366–71); (4) ‘extreme social inequality’ in 1896–7, rich peasants having ‘stocks in hand’ (pp.  371–4); and (5) landlords’ reluctance to help, except under government pressure as in 1874 (pp.  294–6). In Saran, similarly, the most vulnerable were those in debt and with smaller holdings or no land; see Gupta, Saran SR, pp. 154–61. A contrasting sanguine report came in Stephenson-Moore, Muzaffarpur SR, pp. 357–65, comparing eighteenth-century distress with only 1% of the population (approximately) receiving famine relief in 1891–2 and 1896–7 (75% landless labourers). He declared widespread distress would not occur unless the rice crop failed; 90% of people normally lived ‘in a very moderate state of comfort’; and landless labourers, 9% of the population, earned Rs.10/9 per head in agriculture, compared with ‘cultivating labourers’ on Rs.15/5, tenants on Rs.18/9 and landlords on Rs.43/7, the ‘average cost of living in a fair state of comfort’ being Rs.14/5. On Champaran, Stephenson-Moore (SR, pp. 156–71) recorded ‘appalling mortality’ in 1866 but took comfort in 1896/7 when, again after a failure of the rice harvest, ‘only’ 10% of the population received official relief. Some 30% of people were labourers whose wages had not risen in line with prices. A report by D.J. McPherson, Collector during the famine, found such people’s economic condition ‘far below’ that in adjoining districts; and yet optimism prevailed. It was said a labouring family could earn Rs.118 per year and live on Rs.75. But see Robb, Peasants, Political Economy, pp. 49–57. 2 J.B. Fuller, 7 February 1902, R&A Fam A22–4 February 1902. See R&A Fam B19–28 December 1896 & A104–8 January 1897. 3 Of course famine did increase disease-related mortality, but this motive for attributing deaths to epidemic disease does not seem to have been considered. See for example Whitcombe, ‘Famine Mortality’, pp. 1169–79, noting increased mortality in crowded damp famine camps after rain. 4 R&A Fam A12 June 1892. A petition for relief was received from Patna; R&A Fam B52 March 1892. 5 For the foregoing see R&A Fam A6 January l892, A20–1 May  1892, A12 June 1892, A35–6 July 1892, A1–2 November 1892, A2 January 1893, A71– 81 & 101 January 1897 & C16–20 May 1897. 6 R&A Fam A26 March 1892, A1–2 November 1892 & A2–15 September 1893. 7 R&A Fam A101 January 1897, A71 April 1897, A17–18 June 1897 & A26–7 November  1897. Mackenzie was Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal; Westland, Finance Member of the G/I; Holderness, Secretary of the North-West Provinces government, and about to become R&A Secretary. 8 R&A Fam A101 January 1897, A101 July 1897 & A27 October 1897. 9 R&A Fam A39–41  & 88–9 February  1897, A80–3 June  1897  & A114–17 August 1897. 10 R&A Fam A26–9 April  1897, A122–4 June l897, A12l-6 July  1897, A101 July 1897, A114–17 August 1897 & A27 October 1897. 11 R&A Fam B3–4 July l893 & B1 February 1899. 12 See Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen for discussion of the British contribution, through their impact on local credit and money supplies, to the economic depression of the 1840s. 13 See elsewhere in this book, or the article on which parts of it draw: Robb, ‘State, Peasant’. 14 As for revenue and road cess dues, recovery-rates were poor. In 1891 Champaran had Rs.20,000 unpaid from 1888 and Rs.43,000 due; by 1892, Rs.67,000

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were owed. In 1890 in Muzaffarpur Rs.9000 were paid of Rs.40,000 due; in Darbhanga, Rs.12,000 of Rs.21,000. Saran’s total was Rs.60,000. See n.16, this chapter. 15 R&A Rev B38 October 1890. 16 Patna division spent Rs.6500 of 17,500 allowed for loans in 1894, Rs.33,850 (31,000 for floods in North Bihar) of 57,000 allowed for advances. In 1893 it spent Rs.111,500 of 142,000; Shahabad approved 180 of 260 applications. On loans see R&A Rev B44 & 52 October 1890, B16 November 1891, B61–2 March l893, A54–5 September 1893, A8 October l895; Fam A20–1 May 1892, A12 June  1892  & A2 January  1893; Pioneer, 31 March  1890  & 14 December 1892; PCR 353 35/7 1890/1; 354 12/7 & 355 22/6 1891/2; 357 12/9 1892/3; 359 23/2 & 57 1894/5; 361 23/2 1894/5; & 363 12/6 1895/6. 17 C.A. Innes, 5 April, and J.H. Kerr, 13 April 1908, R&A Rev A33–4 October 1908. 18 PCR 357 12/9 1892/3. 19 P.K.M. note, 15 October, R&A Rev A1–10 November 1901. 20 See Catanach, Rural Credit, pp.  49–50. For advocacy of takavi (government loans) and against agricultural banks, there were prolific pamphlets by John Murdoch of Madras from the 1880s; and see Jagat Chandra Bose (a member of the Bengal provincial service), ‘Village Banks in India’, on the danger of state intervention; R&A Rev B28–30 April 1901 & B18–19 July 1901. 21 For the influence of British friendly societies, see R&A Rev B16–17  & 47 May 1901 & A8–15 April 1901. Pamphlets, such as one by Henry W. Woolf placed before the conference on agricultural banks in 1901, also publicised the experiments in Britain; R&A Rev B12 June 1901. 22 W. Gourlay, Report for 1904–5 on Co-operative Credit Societies in Bengal, R&A Rev B14 June 1906 & also A64–5 August 1901. 23 For the main debate over procedure, between Rivaz and Law, with Curzon supporting Rivaz, see R&A Rev A11–24 February 1901, and, for local replies A1–13 September 1903. See also the next note. 24 R&A Rev Al-10 November 1901, & also A64–55 August 1901 (Bampfylde Fuller’s note, 1 August 1901). He argued (12 August 1901) about gaining ‘public attention’ rather than the merits of cooperative credit, on which silence in Fuller, Studies, suggests a lack of real interest. 25 R&A Rev A3–4 March 1904. 26 Gourlay, Report for 1905–5. 27 Note by F. Noyce on the report of the committee on cooperation, 31 August 1915, R&A Rev A22–4 January 1916. C.A. Innes remembered Ibbetson’s intention, 13 March 1909; R&A Rev A41 March 1910. 28 See R&A Rev A15–16 January 1910. Mitra was usually styled Assistant Registrar. It may or may not be significant that in the G/I he was identified as Deputy Collector and Personal Assistant to the Registrar of Cooperative Credit Societies. He officiated for W.H. Buchan (on leave) in 1909 and for Gourlay for 8 months in 1910 when the latter acted as secretary to the Bengal Government (the permanent secretary being on leave); R&A Agric A36–7 March  1910 including notes by C.A. Innes (R&A Under-Secretary), 12 March, and W.M. Hailey (Finance Under-Secretary), 17 March. Buchan returned as Registrar for Cooperative Societies in 1912 with Mitra still Assistant Registrar. 29 R&A Rev A41 March 1910 and R&A Agric A21–2 January 1910. Carlyle, who had been Collector in Darbhanga, Inspector-General of Police in Bengal and chief secretary to the Bengal Government, became R&A Secretary and joined the Executive Council in 1910 as Member in charge of that G/I department.

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30 Gourlay, Report for 1904–5. For Fuller, see his letter to the Chief Commissioner, Central Provinces, 1 December 1900, R&A Rev A11–24 February 1901. 31 Gourlay, Report for 1904–5. 32 A.P. Palmer note, 29 October 1901, R&A Rev A1–10, November 1901. 33 Note, 9 October  1915, R&A Rev A22–24 January  1916. The resources were chiefly bureaucratic in this instance. 34 Many other examples could be offered, some in other chapters here. For an example of support for local command structures in ideas, ritual and mythology, see Prakash, ‘Reproducing Inequality’. 35 See Catanach, Rural Credit, and Kumar, Cambridge Economic History, pp. 801–3. 36 R&A Fam A2 January 1893. Table 9.3 and its analysis first appeared in Robb, ‘State, Peasant’. 37 R&A Rev B52–3 June 1895. Chaudhuri, Peasant History, p. 461, remarks, as I do more generally in ‘Peasants’ Choices’ and in this book, that a factory was ‘only partly a “capitalist” organization of sugar production’. Mill-owners, while making producers dependent upon them, played no part in cultivation, did not often lend to cultivators or invest in technology. An apparent exception was Thomson & Mylne, both for technology (the Behea sugar mill often features) and even, as here, for advances to cultivators. 38 ‘The Growth of Debt among Cultivators of Oudh etc.’, Church Mission Congregational Press Lucknow 1891, R&A Rev B26–7 May 1891. 39 R&A Rev A43–6 September 1894. 40 PCR 358 12/9 1893/4. For the view of the moneylender as an interloper and subversive see for example Denzil Ibbetson’s remarks, R&A Rev A72–3 October 1895; also A1–8 May 1891. 41 R&A Rev A9–14 May 1891, A20 May l893 & A5–6 September 1894—some echoing Darling, Punjab.

169

10 THE SON CANALS AND NASRIGANJ ESTATE

Irrigation in context This chapter and the next focus on one of the major impediments to improvements in Indian agriculture in the eyes of most nineteenth-century experts, namely the irregular and unreliable supply of water. Both chapters are concerned with the relationship between official policies and the agrarian economy in both success and failure. They provide examples of the extent to which (quite apart from the many instances of colonial error or bad faith) British measures were inherently unsuited to providing solutions to some problems the Indian people faced. As said and is well known, irrigation was a major field for British intervention, though large projects were less significant in Bihar than in some regions.1 Measures were not wholly imposed from outside. Nor were they inflicted upon an India innocent of and unmoved by earlier state involvement in irrigation. The colonial state’s activities (though in some ways novel) grew through gathering-together functions long carried on—in dispersed hands, imperfectly responsive to central direction but performing what might be described as ‘state’ roles in society. Indians already had expectations of rulers and sometimes, especially as British power incapacitated local agency, redirected their hopes to political structures set up by the British. A leading official complained the public believed ‘in the endless possibilities of irrigation’.2 The colonial state did more—to secure revenue, increase commercial agriculture and reduce famine—but also because more was called for by the growth of new Indian interests and opinion. Much has been written about the impact of irrigation from British-built canals. This chapter will consider just one example, the system connected with the river Son in south Bihar. These canals and their institutions represented new actors and criteria for state policy after the mid-nineteenth century. To assess them, we must relate irrigation and official water policies to environment, climate, cropping patterns, landholding, political authority and economic power—the full range of influences upon agriculture and cultivators’ decision-making. Insights into these matters, especially patterns 170

T he S on canals and N asriganj estate

of tenancy, rent and crops, will also elucidate subjects considered in other chapters. By the 1890s the officials knew that canals, however successful in semidesert areas, were no universal panacea. They knew that indiscriminate flow-irrigation could result after only two or three years in serious depletion of the soil, the spread of usar (barren land) or problems with weeds.3 The cultivators knew so too—it was common belief in south Bihar that the Son canal system was ‘injurious to soil’.4 Disease was an issue. As the Collector of Shahabad wrote in 1894: ‘whatever may be thought of the effect of the Canals on the health of the District by their altering the drainage, there is but one opinion of the malarious effect of the great increase in wet cultivation, especially in the immediate vicinity of the villages’.5 The officials and the raiyats identified a host of factors reducing the value of the irrigation canals. They included a want of distribution and village channels; obstruction or appropriation of water by villagers between more distant fields and the main canal; rules requiring minimum acreage for the supply of water when patterns of landholding, zamindari interests and disputes about cost all made it difficult for individuals to cooperate. It was said cultivators who willingly paid zamindars enormously enhanced rents after a good season were afraid to take on an extra water-charge that might or might not increase the return on their land but would certainly be collected rigorously. If the return were good it would be at best shared and at worst entirely taken up by the zamindar in the form of enhanced rents, the same zamindar who might have refused to sign the application for water and avoided responsibility for the canal charges. The cost often seemed too high, especially when added to that of labour and materials involved in irrigation. In one sense, it was deliberately so. There had been a long dispute between officials about the proper level of charges. It was won in the main by those who argued that for ‘productive’ works the government must levy a commercial rate and at least guarantee a return on capital. The distinction being made was with famine-relief works. Some officials wanted to moderate all demands according to the farmers’ ability to pay in the wider interests of public welfare and food production.6 Finally, the canal engineers’ desire for a predictable consumption of irrigation water was incompatible with irregular rainfall that caused demand to fluctuate year-to-year and month-to-month—the farmer preferred to wait until the last possible moment before resorting to canal water. Its impact on his crops was smaller than it would have been with steady application, further reducing the popularity of canal water in average conditions. Then, in particularly bad seasons, supply in the Son system was inadequate to demand.7 Government-sponsored irrigation was nonetheless important in parts of Patna, Shahabad and Gaya districts. From the 1880s, it probably improved local productivity and well-being. Too much may be made of contemporary 171

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criticisms. But in the admitted problems with canal water we also see some of the major obstacles in the way of benefits from government enterprise. Development objectives were compromised by commercial calculations. Incompatibility between the canal system and Indian conditions might be presented as inevitable conflict between ruler and ruled, the alien and the indigenous. The following case offers more precise forms of these disabilities.

The Nasriganj estate The government constructed the canals from the river Son in the later nineteenth century.8 By 1891, 883 miles of canals and 2,228 miles of tributaries had been completed. The area irrigated varied between 305,282 acres in 1888/9 and 355,909 acres in 1889/90, depending on the seasonal rainfall. Charges were just over Rs.2.25 per acre, amounting to Rs.692,162 in 1888/9 and Rs.808,790 the following year.9 In the context of mixed reports from other scholars on the impact of British irrigation canals,10 this chapter studies effects on production and people through a case study of an unimportant estate named after the town of Nasriganj in Shahabad district. Details from this estate provide, as promised, an illustrative basis for more general assessments of rural conditions and economic change. The estate escheated to government in 1867 on the death of Mussamat Maula Baksh, widow and former concubine of Saiyid Abdul Nasir. It contained one small town and 13 villages. I consider 11 of these settlements in detail. Of the reminder, two were in Bhabhua subdivision, away from the immediate area of Nasriganj and Sasaram, and one was farmed-out during the period under consideration. Other villages too were farmed out when the government assumed control, but by the 1880s all but one were directly managed. In the same period crop-sharing (bhaoli) rentals were almost universally replaced by money rents without other major revision. The cultivated area and gross rental increased, a considerable pressure of population began to be felt and irrigation became available from government canals. Because of unusually full and detailed records preserved by the Commissioner of Patna Division, it is possible to analyse several of the possible inhibitors or stimuli of progress on this estate.11 Relevant data for the 11 villages are summarised in the appendix to this chapter, Table 10.A.1: ‘Eleven Villages of Nasriganj Estate, 1868–82’. Canal water was a key input but it will be considered in the context of other features. Because of the canal and for other reasons, there might seem to have been a potential here for economic growth. Possible stimuli included opportunity from waste lands and irrigation, and incentive from levels of population, commutation of produce rents and high but limited and steady demands from the landlord. The government was an ‘improving’ zamindar trying to encourage agricultural efficiency and maximise its own profits, but also distant and lax in its financial supervision. Presumably it did not disturb existing interests and influences. 172

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The Nasriganj estate reflected features peculiar to the region and instrumental in its present poverty. Its agricultural conditions and methods were typical for the eastern Gangetic plain. In the 1880s the average size of a holding for a raiyat who cultivated his own land was 20 bighas (one bigha here being five-eighths of an acre, 0.324 hectares). This, a contemporary estimate, is higher than the arithmetic average of all holdings and I assume it refers to the mode rather than the average of holdings intended to support a cultivator and his family. We may assume units of economic size existed. In addition a few raiyats held between 75 and 150 bighas. A good deal of land in some villages, notably Sillari and Ghordiya, was cultivated by people from neighbouring areas. Many such pahikashta (non-resident) raiyats lived in Nasriganj town. Tenancy with occupancy rights was the rule and there was no true undertenure. Some occupancy holdings were sublet at cash rents, generally at a rate enhanced by 50 per cent. Parts of some large holdings were sublet at virtually no advance on the basic rental. From 10 to 15 of such sub-tenants were found in each village; the number varied each year. None of the raiyats on the estate had acquired the right (recognised locally) to hold at a fixed rent after 20 years’ continuous occupancy but about 19 acres in Kothra and 17 in Chanka were held at low fixed rents (Rs.22 and Rs.17) in respect of malikana (residual payment to a former zamindar). The government also paid malikana at 10 per cent to some raiyats in Taraon. In Amiawar two or three Rajputs held land at unduly low rents as did other influential raiyats elsewhere. This was believed to be the result of successful intrigue but may also have been a long-standing marker of social status. Rent-free tenure was enjoyed by village officers in addition to customary dues in all villages except one. Most common were the goraits (or watchmen) whose duty it was to collect the raiyats when the tahsildar came to receive their rents. Patwaris held land rent-free in Taraon and Gamhariya and in Nasriganj there were service jagirs (land grants) for a gardener, a sweeper and a shoemaker. In Amiawar a relative of the former malik’s wetnurse held 11 acres rent-free. The total area of such holdings was 107 bighas (67 acres) representing a loss or redistribution of rent at average rates of about Rs.200. The villages may be divided into three categories according to soil type— four had a significant proportion of sand, one was wholly loam and a majority had various types of clay. The best sandy soil (balmat) was suited to barley and rahar (pigeon pea) but inferior types were fit only for millets. Deanriya’s soil (gurmar) was particularly poor. The loam (doras) of Chanki could grow rain crops, opium and vegetables and was usually doublecropped. The loosest clay (kharail) was suited to winter rice, wheat and other grains, oilseeds and pulses. The blackest clay (kewal) was best for transplanted winter rice and, of other heavy clays, matiyar, though difficult to till and not as productive as other kinds, was best for early rice. Sillari’s 173

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soil was mostly bharki, a clay suited to wheat and linseed. With an excess of water it could grow early rice. The sub-soil was universally clay. The villages with the poorest soils—Nasriganj, Shahbadla, Deanriya and Amiawar—had long had money rents. The great diversity of rates in these villages (columns 21 to 28 of Table 10.A.1) may be taken as the ‘natural’ state of affairs. The relative uniformity of rates in the other villages was not a reflection of their less diverse soils in the main but the outcome of official rent-fixing. These villages had had bhaoli (produce) rents under the danabandi system (appraisal of the standing crop) except for sugarcane, opium and fruit trees, until after the government takeover. Pre-British money rents conformed to no fixed principle—or rather they seemed to result from social rather than economic judgments—and such diversity was intrinsic to the bhaoli system. Theoretically rent was half the produce (itself variable) but in practice the zamindar’s share was calculated after a liberal allowance for raiyats’ costs (assessed by a special adjudicator) and after pilferage in the absence of the zamindar’s watchman, inevitable on a widely-dispersed estate. It was further reduced by one seer in the rupee to compensate the raiyat for selling the crop. Such customs left space for influence and oppression by those who managed the collections. Extraneous factors could thus affect real rent, one element of an important point about the pre-canal situation: it was not one of equilibrium or stasis. By insisting on a smaller number of different rates, the British reduced the subtlety of the distinctions that could be reflected. Nevertheless, even in villages where rents had been recently commuted to cash, the best land did not necessarily pay at the highest rate. This is obvious enough between villages. In addition, within Kothra commutation was supposedly carried out the basis of a demand for Rs.5/8, later reduced to Rs.4/8, per bigha of kharail (the best clay) producing rice worth an estimated Rs.20. All fields were ostensibly assessed in this way, but each raiyat’s total payment was kept as near as possible to the average he had paid over the preceding three years. Thus, even where government had commuted produce rents, they continued in the absence of a full survey to reflect the status or influence of the tenant and indeed of the village as a whole. It was the rates per bigha not per raiyat to which the fixed principles supposedly applied. Moreover, as Table  10.A.1 shows (columns 17 to 20), the rents were generally most severe on the poorest lands and increased markedly during the 1870s. Money rents were originally a measure of tenants’ weakness when facing the unwillingness of the zamindar to gamble on the worst soils. Money rents on more favourable land could have a quite different effect. The tahsildar in Kothra declared that bhaoli land was ‘carelessly cultivated’ so that its rent was equivalent to only a quarter of the value of gross product from similar lands with money rents. If this were true, then commutation on the Kothra basis, while penalising those who had been industrious in the past, offered rewards for industry in the future. 174

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Caste or community was certainly a consideration in rent rates. But if commutation favoured the industrious, caste itself could be a mixed asset. It was generally believed in this area that some groups were more ‘enterprising’ than others. In Nasriganj itself, for example, Muslims concentrated in one ward, Harikarganj, were not flourishing; they engaged in sugar-refining, papermaking and cultivation. On the other hand, Hindu Telis and Sunris in the same areas of business were becoming more prosperous. Among cultivating classes the regional stereotypes apparently applied. Brahmans, Rajputs and Bhumihars (or Babhans) were considered very careless about tillage, unwilling to hold the plough, prone to leave all fieldwork to hired servants and reluctant to grow crops that required much attention. They considered it derogatory to market their own crops though they would attend the Berhampur fair. On the other hand, Koiris and Kurmis, who were fairly numerous on the estate especially at Nasrisanj, Amiawar, Shahbadla, Chanki and Chanka, were considered pre-eminent as farmers particularly on smallholdings, though (as we shall see) they still regarded rice as the most advantageous crop. Kurmis were known for mixing dung and village refuse with clay to make it lighter. The impact of rent was therefore complicated. Though the total had increased it was not always obviously exorbitant. On one hand there is evidence that if necessary some tenants could pay at a much higher rate. In 1870 some Nasriganj raiyats, in order to keep out the Ballia indigo factory, bid over Rs.7,000 for the lease of land rented previously for under Rs.3,000. On the other hand, there were evidently rates that raiyats could or would not pay. In 1873 a dismissed patwari in Sillari left a false jamabandi (rentroll) on which rents were collected until the mistake was discovered in 1876. In the interim 27 Koiri families left their holdings and the cultivated area was reduced by 14 per cent. The increase in cultivated area on the estate as a whole was probably a mark of the overall moderation of the demand. However, it did not impinge equally. For those in an insecure position cash rents were made more onerous by at least two general features: the large proportion of the crop retained for subsistence and the government’s requirement of equal quarterly instalments. Payment was easier after the winter or rabi (spring) harvests than at other times of the year. Such difficulties were most important for those whose viability was precarious, given that rent seems not have been related to profitability. Marketing followed a consistent pattern in all the villages, Nasriganj itself being excluded. The area was not without commerce but processed few foods for local consumption. The thriving braziers in Nasriganj had customers throughout the district but the products of its major industries—sugar and paper—were almost wholly exported to other regions. Raw material in the latter case was mostly brought in from Benares. Only a proportion of local agricultural produce reached the market and purchase of articles of 175

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trade was a low priority in rural areas. Produce was sold primarily to provide cash for rent. The first claim on the crop was food for the village which in normal circumstances accounted for winter and early rice, maize, barley, millets and most of the pulses. Much of the wheat and virtually all the sugar, oilseeds and opium were sold as was any surplus winter rice. Applied to a tahsildar’s estimate of out-turn and area per crop on a representative 20 bighas in 1882 (see Table 10.A.2, appended) this would imply marketing no more than 45 per cent of the produce by value from 26 per cent of the area. The buyers were almost wholly beoparis (traders) travelling with pack bullocks; they brought produce to local markets, from which it could be moved on by carts. Goods from Chanki were brought in this way five miles to Nakha village; from Chanka one mile to Taraon; from Kothra five miles to Sasaram; from Deanriya four miles to Dehri. Nasriganj provided the focus for the remainder of the villages. The distances were no doubt greater than they appear because of the very defective communications of the region. A  metalled road ran from Arrah to Dehri; though fair after annual repairs its condition was very bad in the rains. Near Nasriganj, Amiawar and Shahbadla the road was not even raised above the farmland. Taraon was connected to Nasriganj by a village road that was impassable in wet weather. Deanriya was only half a mile from the grand trunk road between Dehri and Sasaram but had no road connection. Kothra could be reached along the raised canal bank but had no access for carts. Ghordiya was 1.5 miles from a road over the river Kao (fordable except in the rains) and Chanki was somewhat further on. Sillari was three or four miles from a road. Because in general communications were so bad the cost of cartage was heavy. Few cultivators had carts even in villages accessible by wheeled transport. For economic and also social reasons—the prejudice among higher castes against marketing—there was as yet no sign of villagers selling their own produce wholesale except in Nasriganj itself. There they would argue a price with the beopari but did not watch the market. Cultivators did not depend on selling the bulk of their produce and must be assumed to have been partly insulated from price fluctuations (especially rises if they were selling) and relatively little influenced by the market in their agricultural decisions, at least directly. Nearly 80 per cent of the land was cultivated with hardly any culturable waste. The remainder was mainly either village sites or wide strips (chawar) between fields used as paths and for grazing cattle. Groves—almost entirely of fruit trees—made up 127 acres; plantations for fuel were unknown. Nor was any fodder grown for livestock; the cultivators could not afford to spare the land. In the southern-most villages cattle were kept in the Kaimur plateau at a charge of 2 annas per head until October; elsewhere they were fed on straw from winter rice or rabi cereals. Otherwise, a very wide range of crops was cultivated as indicated in the tahsildar’s report already mentioned. His estimates referred to the crops he believed usually cultivated in 176

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a Nasriganj village where both winter rice and rabi crops were grown, with about 60 per cent having access to canal water at the time of reporting. For reasons discussed already and from internal evidence, the figures are not useful for purposes of comparison nor reliable with regard to the returns to actual cultivators but they do demonstrate the relative importance of different crops and seasons (at least in this one snapshot) and leave no doubt of the complexity of cropping patterns and annual cycles. They show a season when autumn and winter crops together were worth about twice as much those harvested in spring and the most valuable crop (transplanted winter rice) occupied well over 40 per cent of the cultivated area. Other valuable crops such as sugar and opium took up tiny fractions of land, a little over 2 or 3 per cent. Relatively valuable oilseeds (in great variety) were also mostly restricted to small, even tiny areas.12 Naturally, the table does not illustrate an additional complication: responsiveness and flexibility of practice year-by-year. Generally the weather between July and August decided if the year would be dominated by the winter or rabi crop—an example of limited flexibility in the system. In addition, in seasons of excessive rain early rice would be grown: it was best on loose dry soil. However, overall the snapshot of Table  10.A.2 is borne out by more general accounts of the region’s agriculture, subject to these annual fluctuations and various strategies for reducing risk or surviving climatic disaster. Broadly speaking, some rain crops were harvested in October mainly for food: maize, urad (a vetch) and the millets sanwa, marwa and kangani. The valuable winter crops in December, notably rice and kodo (another millet), were also grown for food except jute and the oilseed til (sesamum); in extremis even jute could be gathered early so that the seed could be eaten in place of millet. As well, there was a market in rice and some evidence that it was developing by the end of the nineteenth century. The rabi cereals harvested in March were wheat and barley—more food—and, rarely, oats or chinna.13 Wheat predominated on the clay soils and barley where soils were lighter. Each of them accounted for about 8 per cent of the estate’s cultivated area as did peas. Oilseeds together represented about the same: linseed about 5 per cent and mustard about 2 in addition to some castor. A limited quantity of vegetables was produced. There seems to have been relatively little double-cropping. Of the crops grown for cash, opium was notable on loamy soils in Nasriganj itself and indigo was taken up in rotation with other rabi crops, though it carried certain disadvantages because of demands by indigo factories; they competed for the best land, impounded cattle and required a ‘customary’ supply of labour, carts and ploughs. Of all the commercial crops sugarcane was by far the most valuable and it alone generally received special care in tillage and manuring. It was grown over two seasons on all types of soil though best suited to the finest loam. Each village tried to maximise production but a limit was set by the time and labour required. 177

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Ploughing began as soon as the monsoon rains came (usually mid-June) and seed was sown the same month for rain crops, most winter crops and a few rabi crops (most of which were sown in October or November). Sugarcane and jute were sown in February or March for harvesting the following year. Except for rice, mixed cropping was the rule. Ploughing that was carried out did not fully turn the soil as advocated by some European agricultural experts of the day. The heavy sub-soil of the area would have made that a doubtful procedure. Nor could ploughing start before the rains; before June it required prior irrigation. No attempt was made locally to breed plough-animals; cattle were mostly obtained from the Berhampur fair. Cattle disease was prevalent each year until April. Poor cultivators procured the use of plough animals by working two out of three days without wages. Members of high castes employed ploughmen at an average of Rs.2 a day plus about two bighas of rent-free land and food on ploughing days. By comparison male ‘coolies’ made about 2 annas a day; village artisans about 4. Almost all wages were actually paid in kind. Some workers, probably on lower rates, were considered the responsibility of the cultivator throughout the year, a position often marked by small allowances of land, while others (paid more) would have to fend for themselves in seasons or years when there was little or no demand for labour. Manure was applied to sugarcane, opium, cotton, potatoes and the seedlings of marwa and rice. Ashes and sheep dung were preferred; cow dung was thought to make sugarcane unsuitable for gur (jaggery, a solid mix of molasses and sucrose). The demand for manure had of course to compete with the need for fuel—only in villages on the banks of the Son could driftwood replace cow dung. Crop rotation was not practised nor was selection of seed. Sowing was mostly broadcast, the exceptions being marwa, sugarcane and most winter rice. Seed was spread too thickly in the opinion of the British observers.

Applying water Artificial irrigation was not an invariable practice in this region. In most cases irrigation depended on annual decisions by the cultivator. We have noted how he could opt for a different pattern of crops in response to rainfall. Before deciding to irrigate he could wait in most seasons until September for rain crops or October for rabi crops. Then, for between Rs.3 and Rs.10 he could dig a rough well to a depth of 12 to 30 feet especially in soils that were not too loose. Lift was mostly provided by the moti, a leather bucket attached to a rope over a pulley and drawn by a pair of bullocks. Only in Nasriganj and Deanriya were there many permanent wells; they cost between Rs.100 and 300.14 The Son canals affected these choices. In the early 1890s, the canal engineers claimed five-year leases were ‘very popular among the people’, 178

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partly because they reduced the need for inspections. They were popular with Thomson & Mylne. In 1888/9 there were 200,275 five-year leases and 145,407 annual ones; the corresponding figures in 1889/90 were 224,268 and 84,760. Seasonal rainfall made the difference, a major reason why the canal department preferred longer-term agreements. But three-year leases had already been deemed a failure. There was a want of suitable local channels, apathetic zamindars left all arrangements to cultivators, villagers disagreed about canal-irrigation amongst themselves and people from other villages interfered with the supply of water. Longer leases implied zamindari involvement or collective decisions by those warring villagers. In 1883 zamindars on the Son system were estimated to have spent nearly Rs.50,000 on feeder canals. Other indications of elite involvement were 7,445 complaints about water-rate assessments leading to 3,313 reductions in 1890/1; these dropped by about half the following year.15 In considering their main sources of water, the villages may be divided according to whether or not they had access to the Son canal (see Table 10.A.1, column 10) or other public sources. Sillari and Ghordiya each had an ahar (tank) to impound rainwater as it flowed from south-east to the west and north at a fall of three feet per mile. In Deanriya there was a pyne (channel) constructed by a local malik; it ran through several villages from the river Kao. Deanriya gained access in the early 1880s after resolution of a dispute with three other villages. The Son canals transformed the irrigation prospects of the remainder of the estate. Nasriganj, Amiawar and Shahbadla adjoined the Arrah Branch canal; Taraon and Gamhariya had access to the north-west canal and a distributary channel; Chanka and Kothra were reached by other branch canals and Chanki by a distributary. The canal mostly provided flow-irrigation. Kothra had originally been too high for the nearby channel but in 1882 an embankment was built to allow flow-irrigation there too. The cost was Rs.5 per acre for sugarcane, Rs.3 for early and winter rice and Rs.2/8 for rabi and rain crops for a season lasting from 25 June to 1 April. From April to June when water might be needed for sugarcane the additional cost was Rs.4 per acre. The cost of lift-irrigation was lower but 2 annas per bigha were added when the government had built the distributary channels (as at Nasriganj).16 As said, there was significant impact from the opportunity to take canal water. Winter crops came to be preferred to rabi. Rice—60 per cent of which was irrigated—was substituted wherever possible for wheat. Table 10.A.2 (columns 29 and 30) shows the comparative acreage of winter rice in 1877/8 and 1882/3 in villages that had access to the canal. Excluding Shahbadla that proved unsuitable for the change, winter rice acreage increased by a remarkable 385 per cent. In addition, villagers took the opportunity to increase the area under sugarcane, made possible because water was available in the dry season when plants were growing. (It was a problem that the canals were closed every third summer for repairs.) 179

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But government irrigation did not revolutionise the range of options available or the cultivators’ methods and decisions. Ian Stone, for example, suggested that technical innovation represented by the canals in the Doab affected agricultural decision-making by introducing new options to a dry area. That was not the case on the Son. The impact of its canals was not straightforward. An extended acreage of winter rice had already been achieved in favourable seasons on all but the highest lands. The canals tended to make this permanent. But local habits did not change: recourse to canal-water was mainly to save crops that were otherwise doomed. An indifferent crop might be preferred to a better one using canal water. When in arrears for water-rates villagers reverted to rabi crops rather than incur further debt.17 This was understandable: though there was no distinction in rent between wet and dry villages that did not mean a windfall when canal-water was taken—charges on average more than doubled a cultivator’s minimum liability. One early claim was that raiyats would refuse canal water with a direct charge on them of Rs.2/8 and use it sparingly even at Rs.1, but ‘allow the zemindar to enhance rent enormously’; or, we might say, were unable to prevent him from doing so.18 Permanent irrigation channels were rarely built locally. Villagers preferred to construct temporary channels when needed just as they mostly dug temporary wells. Sillari did not bother to secure access it could have had. Individual decisions were seldom involved here: the village as a whole or its dominant families would decide whether or not to take canal water. Disputes resulted. In a typical case across the Ganges in Saran district, canal water had been provided by two indigo concerns. The raiyats refused to pay, claiming they had not taken it.19 The Maharaja of Dumraon also refused, claiming he had declined to sign up for water from the Buxar canal and his bhaoli raiyats had taken it regardless. He was supported by a court ruling.20 Secondly, as said, supply was unreliable. The agricultural expert, J.W. Leather, reporting on Dumraon experimental farm after a drought in 1897, remarked that water was lacking because the cultivators needed more than usual and less was available from the canal. A ‘good pukka well’ would be ‘infinitely preferable’, he suggested, to make the cultivators ‘independent of the canal’.21 Thirdly, even apart from these factors, canal water did not guarantee improved out-turn. I remarked that villagers believed it bad for rabi crops and not as good as well-water for sugarcane. Officials thought flowirrigation led to over-watering and less careful cultivation. One early caustic conclusion was that water-rates were far too high, canal engineers wanted steady demand, raiyats wanted canal-water only when rains failed, opium hated it, rice loved it and ordinary rabi crops were indifferent.22 Experiments in three villages on the Nasriganj estate confirmed that in almost all cases wheat and barley produced a lower out-turn of grain and a higher proportion of straw when using canal-water: the average was roughly 9 180

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maunds of grain to 10 of straw on the canal compared with 15 maunds to 9 with water from wells. Other extensive trials found average wheat output could be increased by 48 per cent, from 11.5 maunds per acre with ordinary watering to 17 maunds with canal irrigation; but straw increased even more at 53 per cent, from 17 to 26 maunds. Barley was worse off on average: 18 maunds under normal conditions (with 24 of straw) as against 16 maunds (and 17). Improvement wrought by the canal was greatest for transplanted winter rice which could not be over-watered. Rice grew best on sandy soils with continual irrigation, at least twice a season. In 1891/2, the Son system irrigated 505,904 acres of rice, 76,845 of wheat, 44,369 of barley. Sugarcane, often grown in the midst of rice in ground that was too wet, occupied some 20,139 acres watered from the canals. The high value of sugar compared with cereals meant that increased area would compensate for any fall in its out-turn per acre but, as said, labour constraints limited its cultivation, however liberal the water supply. No new staples were introduced. Finally, the shift to higher-value crops was at some cost to returns. The price for gur fell in the 1880s as a reflection of both quality and supply. The shift to rice involved clear profit when transplanted winter varieties were substituted for or additional to early rice; that is, particularly if canal water enabled double-cropping. Observers agreed, however, that the change to winter rice was largely at the expense of rabi or other winter crops, some of which were almost as valuable as rice—wheat, indigo and vegetables and spices intensively cultivated on the smallholdings of Kurmis and Koiris. More rice was entering the market but seems to have come mainly from those who were already surplus producers. Smaller cultivators or the landless and semi-landless who increased production of winter rice seem to have taken the opportunity to eat some or all of it. Perhaps they made the change as much for social as for economic reasons, regardless of whether rice was the optimum crop for given soils or holdings. Rice-growing and rice-eating carried prestige. Throughout the area high-caste raiyats (Brahmans, Rajputs and some Kayasths) ate rice and dal and some wheat twice a day. Those of lower status in the east (near Nasriganj) ate a mash of peas and barley-meal in the daytime and coarse rice in the evening. In the west of the Sasaram subdivision (near Sillari) poorer people’s main staple was an inferior millet (kodo) and wheat; only about a sixth of their food was rice and peas. If one consequence of the canals were to divert village consumption away from poorer grains as rice became more readily available, that may have reduced the value of food-grains sold by smaller producers. (The same social consideration did not apply to wheat.) Possibly increased sugarcane cultivation was a response to that decline and did little more than maintain villagers’ money income. The result would be improvement in living standards and nutrition for some but not necessarily any surplus for investment. 181

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In short, changes made as a result of the canal fell within existing patterns of information and custom. Rice and sugarcane, crops that became more common, were already familiar as items of sale, for consumption, for prestige and in their practicalities: methods of cultivation were little affected. There was some suggestion in the 1880s of more ploughs and more careful tillage and weeding than before; but only one major technological change accompanied the development of the canals. It occurred in other areas as well: universal adoption of the Behea iron sugar-mill—described as ‘almost a revolution’23—allowing the earlier harvesting of a heavier crop. It became available by being purchased by substantial raiyats who hired it to their fellows for 6 to 8 annas a day. The capital cost would have been recouped from the larger cultivators’ own crop or from control over marketing the crops of others. As will be explained in Chapter  13, the overall cost and complexity of sugar-processing put that beyond the capacity of most raiyats from their own resources. Capital investment would have been one indicator of multiplier effects from the canal but the pattern of investment and borrowing seems to have owed relatively little to the greater availability of water. Impressionistically, in the 1880s the estate’s landed cultivators were moderately prosperous except in the over-assessed villages, especially Shahbadla, Deanriya and Amiawar which were in dilapidated condition. Their impoverishment was marked by indebtedness. Credit was available from mahajans but these villages were no longer considered creditworthy in their nearest market, Nasriganj. They turned instead to moneylenders from north of the Ganges. For 10 or 12 years, charging ruinous rates of interest, they had come annually to the poorest villages to settle accounts—only to lend more while arrears remained, another instance when loans were not for direct profit but a way of controlling cultivators and their produce. In Nasriganj itself raiyats did show signs of enjoying surplus. They were raising money by mortgaging occupancy holdings (that the government, as zamindar, did not consider transferable) with the apparent intention of providing land for those who wanted it and relieving the occupancy-raiyat of the need to cultivate—again implying a preference for social over economic goals. In Nasriganj there was pressure on land from expansion of the town and its industry. Raiyats whose lands were absorbed were anxious in the 1880s to be compensated with a fresh holding rather than money. Ten years before the reverse had been the case. Ultimately these changes implied increasing pressure on the land (though Shahabad’s rural population does not seem to have risen markedly over these decades) and increasing economic differentiation due to comparative advantages for most effective farmers (whether tenants or landlords). While some raiyats appeared to pursue leisure or non-agricultural incomes, many smaller landed proprietors were sinking to the position of tenants through numerous partitions and mortgaging of property. Proprietors of four or five 182

T he S on canals and N asriganj estate

villages lived the life of mere cultivators in Deanriya; in Sillari one family had owned 14 villages, all of them sold or mortgaged. With the land-revenue fixed under the permanent settlement, income from rent had been the most common basis of wealth. It was evidently under pressure even in the 1880s. Instead, landlords were eager to secure zirat land in order to cultivate it directly with hired labour or by share-croppers. Overall, cultivated area was increasing. In Sillari, 45 new holdings were taken up by pahikashta raiyats in five years before 1882. There was little alienation of raiyats’ land, the number of new holdings being more than double that of relinquishments. Ian Stone argued that regular application of canal water impacted on labour efficiency in the Doab by spreading agricultural tasks more evenly across the seasons than was possible with irrigation from wells. It also (perhaps paradoxically) increased total labour demand, attracting workers to the irrigated tracts and spreading benefits amongst labourers, carriers and artisans in neighbouring, unirrigated areas.24 Such efficiency savings would not have applied with force in Shahabad where canal water was treated more as a last resort. Benefits for labourers and artisans seem to have been few, possibly because agriculturists could draw on a large body of landless workers, as Table 10.A.1 suggests in columns 2 to 4 and 7 to 9. If 20 bighas were needed to sustain a cultivator (as supported by other accounts of Bihar) and an average household numbered seven persons (the usual guess), then the estate contained many with too little land to be independent and far too many to be subsumed into landed households. The point is reinforced by the many pahikashta raiyats and because powerful households might have several holdings. Even the five villages that had around seven persons per holding (see Table 10.A.1) almost certainly also had many landless. Two of them were noted for non-resident tenants and one had a sizeable area taken up by a single household as malikana. A usual Bihari proportion of between 30 and 40 per cent landless seems plausible. The proportion would be higher if raiyats with too little land for subsistence were included. Such people seem to have suffered over this period. Competition from neighbouring villagers would only have made their position worse. Manual wages increased locally because of canal works but these largely employed migrant labour from Mirzapur. For workers near Nasriganj town alternative non-agricultural work might be available. Elsewhere most artisans and labourers depended wholly on local landholders. On the whole, the landless were reportedly ‘wretched’. They were disadvantaged by growing population and a contraction of unexploited village resources through the take-up of waste land and legal controls over landed property. They were disadvantaged by increasing prosperity for some lower-caste cultivators who worked their own fields and appear to have expanded their holdings, often as pahikashta raiyats. They were probably disadvantaged by relativelydeclining fortunes for some high-caste families who employed labour. With canal irrigation, farm-work may have increased along with the cultivation 183

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of sugarcane and transplanted rice; having fewer years when ploughing or harvesting was impossible may have spread demand over the seasons. But extra work under the control of social superiors (as in so-called jajmani systems) did not necessarily mean extra income. Workers might be paid a proportion of the crop on certain fields; it remained the same even if the out-turn per acre were reduced and, as said, money wages were usually paid in kind. The expansion of rice cultivation led to payment of ploughmen at a customary rate of two seers of rice per day instead of 3.5 seers of other grains—a change of doubtful advantage to the workers whether they ate the rice or exchanged it for cash at local markets in order to buy cheaper grains. Any measure that improved viability of smaller holdings could widen the divide within each village and depress the prospects and status of the landless. Arguably canals did this in Shahabad for all their limitations. At the bottom of the cultivating peasantry in Deanriya were raiyats who worked as ploughmen in one year and took back their own holdings in another, a sign of their marginal status and also their preference for social over economic goods. A holding might be a safeguard against starvation in bad seasons when ploughmen were not required, but those were the seasons it was most likely to be insufficient. If ploughmen were needed every year because of canal water their position might still be undermined by marginal cultivators prepared to work without payment so as to have the use of plough-cattle on their holdings; they would have neither means nor need to employ labour themselves. Even among the landless any security the canal provided against absolute deprivation might increase competition by diminishing the pressure that forced labourers to migrate or starve in bad years. The canal could perpetuate the wretchedness of the poor rather than ameliorate it.

A panacea? The idea of progress Detailed profiles of Nasriganj villages suggested canal irrigation changed cropping patterns. In six villages with access to canal water for which there are data (Table  10.A.1) the increase in rice acreage from 1877 to 1882 was startling: an average of nearly 390 per cent; 150 per cent in Taraon, evidently already suited to rice, but vastly more in other villages that had ranged from modest production to almost none. It is hard to know if this change were typical of other cash crops and other canals, but there is no reason to think the Son system an outlier. The increase in income from rice alone must have been large, although impossible to quantify without knowing the proportion of the crop sold and the price received by the cultivators.25 But such major change may have deepened not relieved economic division. In canal tracts as elsewhere, improvement was enjoyed by agricultural castes and pressure felt by those living solely from rents: protest and claims about social status are suggestive of both. The landless were still 184

T he S on canals and N asriganj estate

bereft. Continuous progress or multiplier effects were not clearly traceable to the canal. The region remained poor in comparison with many others in India. Turning again to Eric Stokes’ list of possible explanations for that contrast,26 it seems population and the size of holdings were not decisive at the micro-level. In the Nasriganj estate there is no indication that different densities of population influenced economic performance between villages. Rather, the poorest were those with worst soils and highest rents, overassessed because of early and disadvantageous money rents. The sole exception was Taraon, evidently saved by its ability to grow rice. Moving to a broader perspective, land in the villages with the lowest population density was being sought by cultivators even in the absence of irrigation—witness the expansion of pahikashta holdings in Sillari and Ghordiya. This implies the expansive spirit of some agricultural castes but also that cultivable land was already scarce, absolutely or effectively as cultivation was shifting into less favoured areas. In an area with canal irrigation it may imply a preference or capacity for extending rather than intensifying agriculture. Either way, average productivity might decline over the longer term. In the 1880s one British observer attributed want of innovation in this area to the fact that existing agricultural methods fed the population. The canals would have improved that ability without preventing a future crisis if population expanded. They may have reduced willingness to risk innovation and investment. Their impact was not observable in individual villages. Sillari, which had not bothered to claim a distributary channel, was among the most prosperous. Shahbadla and Amiawar with canal irrigation were as depressed as Deanriya with none. State investment in canals (and military expenditure) gave advantages to Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh. In the Bhojpuri and Mithili regions of eastern U.P. and Bihar such redistribution of public resources was paltry and results unimpressive. The difference may have been scale alone, because social disadvantage occurred everywhere. In Nasriganj estate some could not benefit however grand the improvement scheme; others took the agricultural decisions. Some holdings supported, through a mortgage, both the legal owner and a cultivator; others were inadequate for a single family. All villages had experience of marketing and were relatively close to weekly rural haats and bazaars in the small town of Sasaram or the overgrown villages of Dehri and Nasriganj. Yet poor communications and an indirect marketing system limited regional integration. Trade was decentralised, small-scale and peripheral: beoparis passed goods to mahajans for local redistribution or to aratdars (commission agents) who traded among themselves until the goods reached a handful of individuals exporting beyond the region through boatmen or by rail. Social attitudes played some part. Even lower castes were not immune to prevailing mores; higher castes were inhibited by custom—tending not 185

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to reinvest surplus but distribute it for prestige. The Nasirganj example, however, does not merely reinforce that old stereotype. Nothing directly contradicts Stokes’ conclusion, echoing Edmund Leach, that constraints of economics were prior to those of morality and law. But changes provoked by the canal followed a line of least resistance demarcated by both social and economic norms. Here superior landholding was not obviously an impediment: a zamindar (the government) moderately raised rents while providing opportunities, limited admittedly by the canal department’s relatively high charges. Those able to make an effort, cultivators or others, might take advantage. But would better out-turn be usurped by others through enhanced dues or unfair trade? Change depended on incentive and opportunity. Here the incentive to maximise income was reduced by preference for social over economic goals supported by probable abundance of under-employed but dependant landless workers. The canal, size and relative security of landholdings and incidence of fixed money-rents offered opportunities, reduced by want of alternative farming-methods or crops, lack of affordable capital and difficulties of direct marketing—ignorance of market fluctuations; inability to take advantage of them. Some villagers and zamindars preferred moneylending to developing agriculture on their own holdings. For others the travelling merchant was the source of credit; he was interested in maintaining his trade not investing in improved methods to increase returns to the cultivator. Apart from rice and wheat where the tradition of marketing was centuries old, the only cash crops to gain a major foothold in this area were those that brought credit facilities with them—sugar, opium and indigo. Subdivisional officers might extol the virtues of, say, the potato but could only extend its acreage (as under the influence of one British enthusiast) by bringing in seedcrops and providing them free. They had even less success with manuring, crop rotation, ensilage for fodder, improved ploughs or seed selection. The Behea sugar-mills—rare technical innovation—were an exception because they increased the margins for the intermediaries (brokers or rich peasants). The variables were interdependent. Artificial irrigation may have mitigated climate but local conditions decided whether it gave incentive to progress or a rapacious landlord. Individual ideas of progress were limited by collective decisions (for example, over irrigation), which may be why improvement in Nasriganj seemed to consist in eating rice rather than millets, satisfying both stomach and status. Rice, like sugarcane, also met cash commitments; but, even in Doab villages analysed by Stone, subsistence took priority over commerce, reducing crop specialisation. In Nasriganj evidence of enterprise and upward mobility was matched by what the British criticised as ‘unproductive’ spending. Social ceremony, followers, field-labour and even moneylending dispersed assets in the interest of social power. As said (it will be further discussed), the Behea mill was also an incident of social power.27

186

T he S on canals and N asriganj estate

The contexts were not just moral but also material and institutional, showing less sensitivity to economic than social values. Soil type, irrigation and market proximity were not reflected in rent-rates between villages; incentives on the best land were reduced by other easily-achieved benefits. A challenge would not come from indigenous elites or the British, both most concerned for income and security, strengthening systems they exploited. A conjunction with ecological influences was unhelpful too. Subsistence had to be the first aim in a society largely at the mercy of weather, with complex land-rights and interdependent production. Early in the nineteenth century the reports of Buchanan, usually taken as confirming the consistency of high-caste attitudes, emphasised divergence between theory and practice in hard times.28 Similar heresies were also reported occasionally in the late nineteenth century. If anything, therefore, the British provided a degree of security and stability among higher castes. Somewhat improved communications helped institutionalise regional caste networks that reinforced social attitudes. Commercial agriculture (as will be argued) favoured intermediaries in marketing (beoparis, manufacturers’ agents and moneylenders) and in managing land and production (zamindars and planters). Bihar villages were hierarchies better designed to deliver control over surplus than development.

187

Appendices

Table 10.A.1 Eleven Villages of Nasriganj Estate, 1868–82 1

2

3

Village

4

Population Hindu Muslim Total

Nasriganj 4256 Amiawar 1676 Shahbadla 423 Deanriya 508 Taraon 727 Gamhariya 185 Chanki 304 Chanka 205 Ghordiya 378 Kothra 540 Sillari 504

1807 210 0 60 114 11 21 0 0 27 40

6063 1886 423 568 841 196 325 205 278 567 544

5

6

7

8

9

Cultivated Holdings area Per mile2 (bighas) Number Persons Area 5164 1485 720 1954 880 1003 533 705 475 1305 299

1190 1300 601 552 977 200 624 297 814 444 1862

142 113 53 46 55 14 47 35 66 24 95

42 17 8 12 15 14 7 6 6 24 6

8.4 11.5 12 12 17.8 14.2 13.2 12.3 12.3 18.5 19.6

Table continued— 1

10

Village

­ Irrigation

Nasriganj C Amiawar C Shahbadla C Deanriya Taraon Gamhariya Chanki Chanka Ghordiya Kothra Sillari

P C C C C A C A

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Soil (%)

Rent (Rs.)

Rent (Rs.) per

81 69 66

19 23 34

3887 3749 2841 2666 2432 2172 1419 1511 1444

26.4 21.5 28.5

0.6 1.3 3.6

3.3 2.1 2.5

2.5 1.8 2.4

19 14 6 0 53 18 0 100 94 5 99 1 100 0 100 0

68 94 28 0 1 0 0 0

1085 n/a 334 980 n/a n/a 398 n/a

27.1 24.9 24.1 29 13.8 21.1 31.4 30.9

2.2 1.6 1.7 4.2 2.3 3.7 1.4 5.4

2.4 1.4 1.9 2.1 1.8 1.8 1.9 1.6

1.8 1.4 1.7 2.0 1.6 1.6 1.6 1.7

Bigha Clay Loam Sand 1868 1882 Roll Holding Capita Bigha (on roll) 0 7 0

1265 1371 337 1362 482 1392 764 2936

188

950 1313 311 1269 431 1254 660 3130

T he S on canals and N asriganj estate

Table continued— 1

21

Village

Rates (number)

Rates (% area)

Rice (acres)

Waste (%)

a

b

c

a

1877 1882

C

6 4 5 8 1 0 1 1 0 2

7 3 6 3 1 1 0 1 2 1 1

10 6 63 35 41 7 13 5 2 44 8 8 7 31 40 6 5 16 5 62 2 3 1 11 39 2 5 0 16 6 2 1 4 0 68 2 4 4 5 29 4 11 0 5 88 2 2 6 5 57 2 1 1 1 11

Nasriganj Amiawar Shahbadla Deanriya Taraon Gamhariya Chanki Chanka Ghordiya Kothra Sillari

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

d

b

c

d

29

30

18 0.5 370 50 37.5 560 22 13.7 20 14 n/a n/a 49 243.5 580 79 22.1 110 29 89.7 290 63 n/a n/a 7 n/a n/a 32 n/a n/a 18 70 n/a

31

32 33 34

U

V

G

0 6 19 3 1 4 10 4 0 11 13 0 0 39 7 2 0 5 10 3 0 6 9 3 0 4 8 1 0 2 10 1 0 4 3 0 3 12 13 0 n/a 0 4 8

Notes: Column 5. Population density per square mile is calculated from resident population (columns 2 to 4) and cultivated area (conversion from column 6). Sillari’s density per square mile would be 473 per square mile excluding 428 acres held by pahikashta (non-resident) raiyats. Column 6: the cultivated area is shown in local bighas; it is larger than the rent-paying area in most villages. Columns 7 to 9 show number of holdings, resident persons per holding, and cultivated bighas per holding. Notes: Column 10 gives the main source of artificial irrigation available to each village: canal (C), pyne, temporary channel (P), or ahar, tank (A). Columns 11 to 13 show the proportions of different kinds of soil in each village, according to a measurement of 1873. Percentages, here and elsewhere, are rounded up or down. Columns 14 and 15 show rent receipts in 1868 and 1882 (where available), including official cesses and ground rents in Nasriganj. Column 16 gives totals calculated from the jamabandi (rent roll). The difference between these totals is attributable partly to cesses (notably in Nasriganj), but in some cases possibly also indicates recovery of arrears in 1882. Columns l7 to 19 show rent receipts in 1882 per holding, head of population and rent-paying bigha. Column 20 shows rent in rupees per rent-paying bigha, calculated from the jamabandi. ‘N/a’ is ‘no data available’. Notes: Columns 21 to 28 show distribution of different rates of rent, columns 21 to 24 by number of holdings and the remainder as a percentage of total area. The rates per bigha are: (a) from Rs.3/10 to 5/8; (b) Rs.2/10 to 3/8; (c) Rs.1/8/6 to 2/8; (d) 4 annas to Rs.1/8. Columns 29 and 30 show the acreage under winter rice in 1877 and 1882 (where available). Columns 30 to 34 show waste (uncultivated) land in 1882/3 as a percentage of the total, in four categories: cultivable (C), uncultivable (U), village sites and paths etc. (V), and groves (G). These and earlier calculations omit the diara land available from time-to-time in the bed of the river Son, for Nasriganj, Amiawar and Shahbadla, which about doubled cultivable area of those villages. ‘N/a’ is ‘no data available’. Sources: See ch.10, n.11, this volume and Table 10.A.2. Some figures shown were calculated from raw data.

189

Makai (maize) Sanwa (millet) Marwa (millet) Urid (vetch) Kangani (millet) Early rice

Bhadra (Aug.Sept.)

Kharif (early), bhadoi or rain*

190

Ukh (sugarcane) Sarisa (mustard oil) Reri (castor oil) Tori (mustard seed) Mattar (pea) Posta (opium & oil)* Masuri (lentil)

Magha (Jan., Feb.)

Rabi or spring

Phalguna (Feb, March)

Bawag dhan (rice) Kodo (millet) Til (sesame) Ropa dhan (rice) Mothi (vetch) Kurthi (pulse) Peta (jute)

Kartik (Oct.-. Nov.) Aghahana (Nov.Dec.)

Kharif (late), aghani, or winter

Ashvin (Sept.-Oct.)

Crop

Month

Harvest Names

3.24 2.03 1.81 0.41 8.11 2.43 0.65

2.43 2.13 2.02 44.60 2.85 0.81 2.03

2.03 0.97 0.41 0.41 0.32 2.03

Area %

Out-turn maund/bigha

Rs./maund to cultivator

Value per bigha

Total value to cultivator

40 25 10 5 100 30 8

30 25 25 550 35 10 25 32 5 5 0.75 5 3 4

7 4 1.5 12.5 8 8 1.5 1/08 2/03 2/08 2/08 1 218 1

1 0/12 2 1 1 1 1/12

48 10/15 1/14 1/14 5 24 4

7 3 3 12/08 3 3 2/10

1920 273/07 9/06 9/08 500 720 32

210 75 75 6875 105 30 65

175 7 1 7 23 35 8 0/08 6 12 28/12 5/10 0/12 7.5 5 15 3 1/08 2 5 10/08 2/10 0/14 8 4 75 3 0/12 4 25 *Fields harvested in bhadra could be later sown with rabi crops.

Area in bighas

Table 10.A.2 A Tahsildari Report: Harvests and Crops in a Nasriganj Village in the 1880s

A grarian B ihar

Zira (carraway) Souf (aniseed) Gohum (wheat) Jao (barley) Tisi (linseed) Rahar (pigeon pea) Butor chanu (gram) Khesari (gram) Kusum (safflower) Jai (oats) Chinna (millet) Kapas (cotton) 0.32 0.08 8.11 8.11 4.87 2.03 0.81 0.41 0.24 0.16 0.16 0.24 4 1 100 100 60 25 10 5 3 2 2 3 34 5.25** 5 8 3

1.5 2.5 10 9 5 6 2 2 1/02 0/12 2 1 61 0/12 18/08 1 0/14 3/10 3 5 12 7 10 6 6 2/04 14/02 5 7 10/14

12 5 1200 700 600 150 60 11/04 42/06 10 14 32/10

Most of the poppy out-turn by weight was oil, only about one-twelfth being opium. The former was worth Rs.2 per maund to the cultivator, and the latter Rs.216. ** Kusum flowers provided 0.25, worth Rs.16/8 per maund to the cultivator; and oilseed the rest, worth Rs.2.

*

Notes: The month names are local variants. For more general terms, see pp. 219–20, this volume. In the figures for outturn, Rs per maund, pice were deleted in two instances.

Jeth (Apr.May)

Chaitra (March April)

T he S on canals and N asriganj estate

191

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Notes 1 Roy and Swamy, Law, p. 45, referring to Gaya district, suggests the permanent settlement reduced the incentive for state-assisted irrigation. No doubt there were also social, ecological and engineering factors. 2 T.W. Holderness, 1 February 1901, R&A Fam A7 March 1901. The complaint was that the ‘recent life of Sir Arthur Cotton’ (the General and much-lauded engineer) went uncontradicted because of this public belief. A  commission on canal irrigation was appointed under Curzon, related to famine relief; R&A Fam A7 March, A24–5 September, A13–14 June & A30 July 1901. 3 Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions, reflected these contemporary views; but the Son canals also had positive results. Usar was not thought extensive in Bihar; B.C. Basu, October 1893, R&A Agric A9–10 February 1894. 4 B.C. Basu, loc.cit., referring to the Sone Canals Commission report and other sources. He concluded there was no proof that properly-applied canal water was as beneficial as well-water, though its evident inferiority was often attributed to extravagant use. Compare Gaya Coll to PC, 9 May  1881, PCR 336 12/4 1881–2. Another initial loss was by raiyats or landlords who had had access to regularly-exposed beds of rivers that were later canalised. The Legal Remembrancer thought no compensation due; small amounts were paid for lost crops in Saran in 1882. PCR 334 2/9–10 1881/2. 5 Shahabad Coll to PC, 1 May 1984, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. The Collector welcomed efforts by Thomson & Mylne to get ‘good cultivators of the Koeri class’ to refrain from turning rabi into rice lands and to restore to rabi some areas already given over to rice because water was available, matters discussed later in this chapter. He admitted that the change might ‘cause some discontent at first among the cultivators’ but thought it well worth the attention he believed it was being given by the Superintending Engineer of the Son circle. This bureaucratic circumlocution meant he hoped for official pressure to back Thomson & Mylne. The change would be ‘in the interest of the District’ for health and because the loss of so much land to wheat and other cereals was to be regretted. 6 The distinction caused continual tensions over water rates among people and in government. Late in our period one conclusion was that ‘productive works do not pay their way’. Works were ‘managed with very commendable economy’ but ‘the burden’ predisposed the local government to consider enhancing rates. See J. Benton, 16 December 1909, R&A Rev A1 December 1910. 7 Superintending Engineer, Son circle, to PC, 10 May 1880, PCR 334 11/4 1880/1; Gaya LR report 1884/5, PCR 347 12/4 1885/6; PC to G/Be, 1 February 1881, R&A Rev A25–32 August 1883. See also Inspection note on Dumraon Farm, 6 February 1897, R&A Agric B4 February 1897; also R&A Fam A8 July 1905, A4–5 February 1906 & R&A Rev B24 April 1907. 8 A plan of 1850 by Col. C.H. Dickens for the East India Irrigation Company was not carried out as the government refused to underwrite the cost. In 1869 official works started with a dam at Dehri. Operation began in 1874, though the eastern and western branches of the system were not built until later. F.C. Danvers, Report on Irrigation Works in India 1875/6, India Office Records, British Library, L/E/5/69; Buckley, Irrigation, p. 17. Irrigation was deemed important and later smaller schemes were also cautiously developed, such as the Tribeni canal drawn from the Gandak river; Indian Irrigation Commission letter, 4 December 1902, R&A Fam B9 December 1902. It was financed by central government which was thought to reduce local focus and urgency; R&A Rev A1 December 1910.

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9 R&A Rev B22 April 1891 & B21 May 1893, and for comparison B11 May 1892, B7 March 1895 & B42 April 1898. In 1882/3 there were 143 miles of distribution canals in Patna and 169 in Gaya, and the main Patna canal was 79 miles long, irrigating 128,000 acres in Patna and 184,350 in Gaya; PCR 338 12/5 !883/4. 10 The best-known difference is between Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions; Stone, Canal Irrigation. 11 Unless otherwise stated this chapter relies on PCR files, especially PCR 356 10/15 1892/3. See also PCR 342 10/63 1883/4, 360 10/23 1894/5, 362 5/10 1895/6 & 367 10/4 1897/8. For the wide range of zamindari and non-agricultural incomes see a heated dispute between canal engineers and civil officers about dues and rents (motharfa) within Nasriganj town: PCR 358 10/12 1893/4 & 367 120/14 1897/8. 12 Linseed in particular was liable to injury and so was not grown where rents were high but mixed with (for example) barley, wheat and gram in shaded areas; R&A Agric A20–2 January 1891. Til (sesamum) was also delicate and sown as a border plant more often than broadcast; R&A Agric A7 May 1890. 13 Chinna was a small millet (panicum frumentosum) boiled and parched for food. In Saran, chana was another food grain, gram (cicer arictinum). Grierson, Bihar Peasant Life, pp. 223–32, lists names, variants and uses of maize, pulses, peas and gram, including bajra (here a variety of the large millet, holcus surghum), kangani (foxtail millet, setaria italica or panicum italicum), kodo (paspalum frumentaceum), makai or maize (zea mays), marwa (the most important millet, a staple food, eleusine coracana), sanwa (panicum mileaceum) and urad (phaseolus roxburghii or radiatus). 14 Away from Nasriganj estate, see LR Report 1892/3, PCR 358 12/9 1893/4, on well-irrigation using a ‘lever’ (latha or dhenkul), iron pot (kunr), bucket (kathnahi) or skin basket. 15 In 1875/6 annual rates on the Son canals for flow-irrigation (always higher than for lift, not allowing for other costs) were Rs.2/8 per acre for rice, wheat, barley and cotton, and Rs.5 for sugarcane, indigo and opium, with reduced levels for three-year contracts. After June 1881, annual flow-rates varied by crop and time of year. Between 25 June and the following 1 April, they were Rs.3 per acre for rice, Rs.5 for sugar and Rs.2/8 for other bhadoi and rabi crops. Between 1 April and 25 June the same year they were Rs.4 for all crops but only Rs.2 on five-year contracts. Rs.1 per acre was charged regardless of crop for water from government canals in Saran. See R&A Rev A25–32 August 1893. See also R&A Rev A26 August 1883 for similar figures, and C.W. Odling note, 26 March 1883, on five-year leases somewhat reducing the ‘unprofitability of the canals’. He thought zamindars had to give written consent for canal-water supplied to bhaoli lands; P. Nolan (31 March  1883) said they would not have to pay if they had not agreed. There was also occasional compensation for losses caused by a canal, such as flooding; see H. Cotton, Secretary, BR, to PCR 18 April 1884, PCR 242 10/63 1884/5. 16 The confusion of measures reflects that in the sources. The bigha was nowhere a fixed area, even within the one region. In this case, it would presumably have been calculated by the canal department at about 60% of an acre. The rough cost of this irrigation in relation to the value of different crops may be gauged from Table 10.A.2, with the proviso that the exact size of the bigha is not known for that example either. 17 Stone, Canal Irrigation, e.g. pp. 340–7. The Son system was deltaic with more silt than expected. Flow was restricted to 6 inches per mile to facilitate navigation.

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That meant fertilising silt was not deposited on fields as it might have been and, in the canals, water-supply was interrupted when it was most needed. Dredging was constant in autumn; a few weeks closure was needed each slack season; Buckley, Irrigation Works, p. 39. 18 H.A. Brownlow note, 19 January  1883, quoting F.B. Halliday, PC, 1 February 1881, with R&A Rev A25–32 August 1883. Reluctance to take canal water was seen as early as the third full year of operation (1881), allegedly because abundant rain softened the ground for ploughing; PCR 336 12/4 1881/2. 19 The Maniara and Sadhowa factories had temporarily leased a canal from the Public Works Department. Saran Coll to PC, 8 May 1894, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. For these and other reasons, including unsatisfactory collection systems, there were many arrears in payments of water rates. 20 PCR 334 5/127 1886/7, on Babu Boolak Chand v. Secretary of State (1887). The government pleader wanted to appeal, arguing the Maharaja had benefited from produce rents. 21 Report, 6 February, R&A Agric B4 February 1897. 22 John Boxwell, Gaya Coll, to PC, 21 May 1885, PCR 338 12/4 1885/6. 23 Watt, Dictionary, p.  268. See its lengthy informative discourse on sugar and its production. See also p. 257 calling the mill an ‘immense improvement’. By 1902 the mills, reported to cost Rs.125 to Rs.135, were described (in reply to an inquiry from Hong Kong) as ‘the only instance in which an approved agricultural appliance of external origin has been adopted’ by Indian cultivators; note by J.W. Mollison, Bombay Inspector-General of Agriculture, 14 April 1902, R&A Agric B23–4 April 1902. 24 Stone, Canal Irrigation, pp. 92–101, 114–22. 25 A guess would a gross value above Rs.12 per bigha for the crop and Rs.1 for canal-water per acre, a cost of perhaps 5% (see Tables 10.A.1 & 10.A.2, and ns.15 & 16, this chapter). 26 See chs.2 & 7, this volume. 27 B.B. Chaudhuri argued sugar factories made cultivators dependent upon them without investing in technology. Exceptions were Thomson & Mylne with their iron mill and other sugar factors who developed similar improvements; but there was ‘only partly a “capitalist” organization of sugar production’. See Chaudhuri, Peasant, p. 461. 28 Buchanan, Account of . . . Shahabad: ‘It is only a small part of the sacred order that is able to secure a subsistence by their proper duty, 97 or 97 per cent at least hire land, and 70 per cent at least do every kind of labour on these farms, except holding the plough’ (p. 134); for Bhumihars (military Brahmans) ‘greater poverty induces them to be less scrupulous, and a very great proportion of them hold the plough’ (p. 185).

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11 VILLAGE IRRIGATION AND EMBANKMENTS

Previous discussions illustrated a disparity between knowledge of India and remedies applied to it. This chapter continues that theme. The first of two case studies describes a conflict within government: the revenue officer versus the irrigation engineer, a disagreement over goals and methods between different government departments. It represents different development strategies and problems with interventions validated by science rather than local awareness. A second study considers similar themes in a different context: river management and embankments. Again officials held opposed views, but the basic contradiction was between technological intervention and Indian conditions.

Indigenous irrigation In the late 1880s the well-known Collector of Gaya, G.A. Grierson, considered two government estates, Sarawan and Sonsihari, to be badly in need of irrigation. Gaya’s crops were irrigated in the main from small embanked reservoirs called ahars fed from the floodwaters of rivers through channels known as pynes. This irrigated cultivation was ‘an excellent example of a surviving rent-based production system’.1 Its upkeep was the chief responsibility of Gaya zamindars and supposedly justified the large share of the crop that they enjoyed under the prevailing produce-sharing tenures—higher and variable rents remunerated the landlords and ensured they maintained the water supply.2 Their ‘earth-moving’ (gilandazi), as it was called, was a capital investment in a technical sense, richly rewarded, but in large part the ‘capital’ consisted in social prestige and organisation to enlist un- or lowpaid labour and strike and enforce agreements between villages. In his capacity as zamindar of the government estates Grierson proposed constructing a pyne to link Sonsihari with the Khuri River and another, more elaborate, to join Sarawan with the Lilajan. He estimated the cost to government at Rs.3,000 and Rs.15,000 respectively. To gain approval Grierson had to apply to the Commissioner of Patna Division, who had to approach the Board of Revenue to solicit the sanction of the Government of

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Bengal, which first would consult the Public Works Department, which in turn would call for a report from Grierson’s neighbour at Arrah, the Superintending Engineer of the Son circle. Grierson and his successor presented various proposals. In 1891 the Bengal Secretary allowed himself the sneer of describing one as ‘yet another’ of Grierson’s schemes.3 For Sonsihari the outcome of this process seems to have been initially favourable. Work was not carried forward, however, because a neighbouring zamindar whose servants had acquiesced verbally later refused to cooperate. Plans had to be changed and renewed sanction sought every time. The Public Works Department’s view was that ‘financially it would certainly be preferable to make any reduction in rent’ than to carry out the improvements. Eventually the idea of a new pyne was abandoned. Instead the estate would take water on three days a month from another pyne already serving seven villages but in a ‘bad state’ due to ‘want of cohesion’ between the proprietors. They lived ‘at considerable distances from the locality, some at Patna, some at Gaya, but many of the minor proprietors . . . near Nawada’. In return for water for Sonsihari the government would arrange and pay half the cost of clearing and repairing this pyne and thereafter contribute half the annual expense of up to a maximum of Rs.100. This proposal was finally approved in May 1895. The Sarawan scheme was less fortunate. Proposed by Grierson in 1888, it was reported on by C.W. Odling, the Superintending Engineer, in September  1891. He objected, and it is easy to see why. He found that two canals would be needed, one 15 miles long, the other 10. The area irrigated would be about 33,000 acres, the likely cost Rs.377,174. Recurring expenditure could well be Rs.3,000 a year. If this were regarded as a ‘productive’ work then a water rate of Rs.13 per acre would be needed to give a sufficient return on capital. The usual local rate ranged between Rs.3 and Rs.5. Odling concluded: ‘from a commercial point of view the scheme has from the first been reported to be hopeless, and no person interested in laying out his money to advantage would dream of undertaking it’. The only thing to be said for it was that it would provide employment (on earthworks) for 8,000 to 10,000 people for six months in the event of famine. Grierson responded vigorously. He now estimated the cost at Rs.23,000— Odling’s figure was 17 times higher—with benefits over a larger acreage. Grierson pointed out he had not asked for a canal but for a pyne and that these irrigation channels obviously did pay as they were everywhere constructed by private enterprise. If we examine Odling’s estimate in detail (as Grierson’s successor did in 1896) we can see the degree of misapprehension. Odling allowed Rs.30,870 for land which would be virtually free for a pyne as it was already government-owned or belonged to zamindars who would co-operate for about Rs.500. For the canal itself Odling expected Rs.8,000 for regulation, Rs.21,000 for falls, Rs.3,400 for drainage, Rs.5,000 for escapes—all scientific devices or masonry not necessary for a pyne—and 196

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Rs.14,500 for bridges when only a couple of culverts (for Rs.2,000) would be needed. For a canal, buildings would cost Rs.2,200, establishment Rs.68,848, tools and plant Rs.8,981; but if the pyne were built it would be by local labourers who needed no buildings and would provide their own tools and be organised by existing establishment at no extra cost. Above all, Odling calculated Rs.208,255 for earthworks for a canal 20 feet wide with sides sloping one-in-one and requiring over 41 million cubic feet of earth to be moved. A pyne would reduce this by more than half and have either no slope or a slight slope of one-in-four at the deepest point. For Odling too this earthwork would be paid for at rates between Rs.2 and Rs.4/8 per 1,000 cubic feet; local workers would move the earth for as little as Rs.1/8 or Rs.2. The irrigation expert had spoken, however, and the matter lingered in the files until reopened from the district in 1896. Then, wisely shifting their emphasis, the revenue officers argued that some 10,000 acres now waste would be brought into cultivation—and even on 5,000 acres of producesharing land the government’s share of the crop would be increased by 50 per cent or Rs.4,000. That would represent 9 per cent on outlay as the maximum cost was now estimated at Rs.44,213. The revenue officers were pitching on their expertise: the implication was that on matters of rent they ‘must be better informed than the engineers of the Public Works Department’. The Superintending Engineer (now R.B. Buckley) replied three months later. He criticised the revenue officers for ‘arbitrary’ cuts in the estimate, especially for the earthworks. He asked how the water rate could be collected. He worried about claims for compensation and generally proposed to multiply the local estimate of cost by three even for a pyne. Buckley was not wholly unsympathetic—he admitted that pynes as built in Gaya did ‘a great deal of good’—but he argued that ‘such kutcha systems cannot be worked except by the people themselves’. The Gaya Collector replied in turn, in May 1897, that his purpose had not been to show that the Public Works Department could build a canal more cheaply than estimated but that unscientific agency could do so for a pyne. Government in its zamindari capacity could make (and had made) pynes as well as anyone without complaints but also without any idea of collecting water rates. Finally, Buckley withdrew his opposition on the understanding that the work was to be ‘private’ and not ‘official’, presumably meaning that it would be carried out by government as landlord and on ‘kutcha’ principles, not by ‘proper’ engineering. The Patna Commissioner recommended the scheme again to the Bengal Board of Revenue. The Board, accepting that from a Public Works point of view the objections were ‘unanswerable’, agreed to apply to government for sanction directly after the rains. In the meantime there was no money for such a project.4 Here we have a clear illustration of the difficulty faced by large bureaucracies with general rules when adapting to specific conditions. It was the difficulty faced by ‘science’. Also significant was the distinction between public 197

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and private—sharper because it was also between foreign and indigenous. Similar disabilities were found more generally in official development efforts. One lesson of the Sonsihari and Sarawan pynes is that the government was too large and too slow to be an effective force for improvement even where it had diagnosed a need and had some idea of the remedy. On the other hand the Sonsihari difficulties also suggest that complexity of landholding and especially the high percentage of absentee proprietors, including petty zamindars, could make intervention by an outside or coordinating force necessary even to maintain existing irrigation. These problems were not peculiar to imperialism—absenteeism was common in this area even at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were a feature of ‘modernisation’: growth of technical expertise and standards, broader regulated systems of rule, diminishing local responsibility and changing public expectations. Public investment in Gaya’s irrigation was becoming more ­necessary—and not only on government estates—because private efforts were under threat and in decline. The failures of government in its zamindari role exemplify some of the shortcomings attributed to private landlords in the circumstances of this time. They also indicate disabilities to be found more generally in official development strategies. First, Public Works engineers, primarily responsible for improvements in irrigation, were likely to be limited by ideas of their profession—in particular, to be ill-equipped to assess small-scale projects and prejudiced against ‘kutcha’ remedies not only from doctrine lurking behind science but because their experience was on large-scale projects. Buckley could admit the virtues of customary irrigation but argue against government intervention. As he wrote, of another proposal, ‘small local projects can be much more cheaply constructed and much more efficiently worked by local agency’ and then ‘People will accept many inconveniences . . ., but, if Government makes the works, they will not be content without bridges and other works they would not make for themselves’. No doubt it was true government works were more likely than private ones to become politicised and subject to litigation; they also had to counter popular desire to keep government and its coercive arm out of private affairs if possible. But Buckley’s remarks followed his investigation of an earthen bund (dam) across the Durgaoli in Shahabad district that he found was ‘certainly more efficient than a permanent weir’ because, as it was washed away each monsoon, it could be made watertight to raise water almost to the level of the fields, saving on loss from leakage or percolation and absorption along a canal. This weir irrigated about 220 acres per cubic foot per second of discharge, compared with 130 acres on the government’s Son canals.5 Therefore a possible result of the irrigation officer’s intrinsic shortcomings—a feature showing the limited effectiveness of modernisation when imposed from above—was to deprive the country of government assistance on the very projects which were likely to be most useful. 198

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Second, it is apparent that government effectiveness was seriously impaired by another feature of modernisation, division of responsibility between departments. In regard to Buckley’s Shahabad bund, the sugarfactory owner Ernest Mylne was trying to interest government (even lobbying officials in Calcutta). He argued that works would be justified ‘even if no interest is earned on the outlay’ because ‘failure of either Rice or Rubbee, not infrequently both, is the normal condition of the Bhabhooa SubDivision’; its people lived ‘perilously close to want’, were unable to borrow for lack of security and had ‘a strong claim upon Government’ for assistance.6 Similarly, Gaya Collectors had reported Sonsihari was growing poorer, needed repeated remissions of rent and was the despair of generations of officials. The claim in 1894 was that the tenants ‘are a discontented lot but they will never make good’.7 Of Sarawan, the officials argued that the pyne was needed to rescue government tenants from ‘chronic poverty’—while officials talked people were deserting their lands; before long all would be jungle. In Gaya, revenue officers were worried about rents on government estates, but also they alone had general responsibility for the condition of the population. They could not afford (they believed) to ‘damn with faint praise a system of irrigation which .  .  . secures daily food for more than a million people who but for it would at this moment be on the point of starvation’. The crucial question for irrigation engineers was what should be done instead of schemes they criticised; how government could help the vulnerable. As Mylne put it, officers who rejected his proposal should suggest alternative protection against famine.8 That imperative was not part of engineers’ brief.

Embankments, exemplars of state intervention The second example also concerns engineers, discussing limitations of technical solutions to damage caused by over-much water in north Bihar.9 Flood protection had been primarily a local matter, but there were extensive debates over state intervention in north Bihar in the later nineteenth century. In the final analysis, those who were its advocates reflected colonial priorities of trade and order but were also reacting to an increasing population’s greater marginality and exposure to risk. State involvement grew because the nature of the problem was changing.10 Pressure on land was felt in North Bihar in the late nineteenth century. Agriculture became more intensive in low-lying areas liable to flooding. Commercialisation, notably of indigo, extended cultivated area and attracted people to parts of north Bihar. Flooding was not sufficiently frequent or severe to preclude settlement and cultivation; but government was asked repeatedly for embankments to increase productivity and improve conditions of life. A  regime accepting responsibility for public well-being and employing water engineers was bound to become concerned. It could be 199

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involved by proclaiming all or part of a river under the Embankment Acts (usually meaning assuming total responsibility) or by piecemeal works and maintenance mostly paid for by zamindars who benefited.11 In the early 1890s, Bihar’s embankments were investigated and detailed descriptions given by R.B. Buckley. He concluded neither flooding nor embankment was ever an unmixed disaster or boon. Upper levels of floodwater carried fine silt that could greatly benefit soil if an embankment were overtopped. Lower levels carried sand that would ruin crops if the embankment were breached. Run-off too was very important. A flood lasting two or three days was quite likely to result in a good crop, but one that remained for a long period, with water unable to escape, could mean no crop at all. Embankments usually protected one area at the expense of another, and, though advantages might outweigh disadvantages while the embankment held, the reverse would be true if it were breached and a sudden rush of water carried away villages and crops.12 Ambivalence characterised official attitudes. Officials did think up some new projects. For example, in 1882 a boat journey in Darbhanga inspired an idea of three embankments to turn the Kamla back onto its old course. Nothing happened; impetus had to come from public pressure. After flooding, a public bund (embankment) was said to be the ‘unanimous demand’— one government generated by existing and that only government could satisfy. After floods in 1883 the response was to raise 65 miles of embankment on the left bank of the river Gandak by a height of 3 feet. Further heavy expenditure constructed retired lines and tried to hold a crumbling bank in Champaran. But many other plans were opposed, because embankments gave immediate relief to vulnerable areas but had incalculable longterm effects. Sometimes local meetings were called to seek consensus, as in 1889 when zamindars, indigo planters and raiyats petitioned government urging embanking of the Gogra in Saran district; quite an extensive campaign ensued.13 Moreover, protection was the common aim, with no unanimity about means; the variety of petitions about embankments left officials in no doubt their impact was complex. In 1891 cultivators from a number of villages on the Sikrana (or Burhi Gandak) petitioned against a new embankment they believed caused flooding. They proposed an opening in the bund and new embankments along the Sikrana and one of its tributary streams. It was problematic that an opening would benefit those above the existing bund and damage interests of those below. It was serious that further embankment, likely to create similar conflicts of interest, was the only solution suggested. Buckley insisted government should not undertake this work and worried about ‘prescriptive rights’ that had grown up around the existing bund.14 By the 1890s the Public Works Department was suspicious of proposals to build or extend embankments, given their serious and long-term disadvantages. Engineers saw themselves as trying to preserve the status quo, 200

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even though rivers were constantly in flux and patterns of cultivation were changing. Reactions to floods and petitions were timid and inconsistent. Officers even thought about undoing existing works despite concern about tampering with existing rights, for example calling for the removal of an extension of the Gandak embankment built in 1885. Buckley declared it a ‘mistake’, writing in March 1891.15 The dilemma was evident also in discussions in the 1890s concerning Champaran and Muzaffarpur between the Burhi Gandak and Bagmati rivers, seriously affected by floods in 1889. Two major embankments were involved, the Turki and the Tikaha. The former was built in 1805 and extended to the north in 1885 by order of the Patna Commissioner (not the Public Works Department). In 1889 it was cut by local people; serious damage resulted. The latter, the Tikaha bund in Muzaffarpur, was intended to confine the Burki Gandak to its course. It had never been secure except against ordinary high water. In 1889 it was breached, as every two or three years, destroying about 100,000 acres of crops, including indigo belonging to the factory at Seraha. The reaction included various proposals to government about Turki and Tikaha and rapidly increased building of private embankments. One-third of 28 miles of the Tikaha bund were constructed after the 1889 monsoon, a point made in later discussions. For the Turki bund, there were rival proposals: to increase protection to the south by raising the road to Titurea or improve drainage on the north by installing a 600-foot weir in the extension or even by levelling part of the embankment. Buckley’s response was that drainage was interrupted by the Tirhut State Railway and a ‘tangled network’ of roads to the north of it. Culverts and escapes would ‘alter’, not prevent, flooding. The problem was not just worsening floods downstream. Since 1805 the Turki embankment had greatly raised the level of the land between it and the Bagmati’s right bank. Flooding rivers had a worrying tendency to deposit silt on the shallow portion between their banks and embankments, reducing available waterway until it no longer contained the floods. Embankments would have to be built up until eventually they reached a dangerous height.16 Faced with these difficulties the Bengal government found it impossible to be decisive. They bowed to strong pressure from planters and others against levelling the Turki bund although officials condemned it and the Collector of Muzaffarpur reported that even local raiyats would have preferred no bund at all, believing they received little protection in return for the cess they paid. The government agreed a sluice should be provided and the Titurea road raised but declined to contribute towards the cost, which local residents would have to bear. Buckley argued that government should pay, as it would be impossible to apportion the cost according to benefit: those protected by the bund would be injured by the weir, and people to the north would be helped by it but much more injured by raising the road. In 1892 the Titurea indigo factory petitioned government against the 201

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proposed alterations, also arguing (as did another petition from several villages) that their damage would not be justified by any benefit to others. The Titurea manager suggested advantage to the south would be confined to the Kauti indigo factory, ‘in whose sole interest, it was argued, the scheme is proposed’. The engineers calculated that the result to the north could be flooding over about ten and a half square miles, whereas protection would be provided over some 68 square miles. The clinching argument in favour of the works was that they would reduce the chance of a ‘sudden rush of water’ that would cause ‘immense damage’, much worse than gradually rising water levels even if those lasted as they might for five days instead of four (as in 1899 and 1890). After a breach, crops would be totally lost because the area could not be drained in time to be of any use. Accordingly the Collector and then the Commissioner on appeal dismissed the petitions.17 In regard to the Tikaha embankment, W.B. Hudson, the influential planter from the Seraha factory, argued that government should take over control from the district road board. He claimed the bund was a government responsibility, which officials denied, and wanted it made secure. J.M. McNeile, Bengal’s Chief Engineer, said that in his view Hudson ought to be told that if he went ahead with his own works he would risk incurring claims for damages. Allowing a system of embankments to ‘grow up on the banks of these rivers’ was ‘sowing the seed of additional trouble hereafter’.18 The government refused to undertake any work but decided it would not object if Hudson strengthened the embankment at his own expense and risk. Buckley reported that land tended to be flooded to a depth of 5 or 6 feet to the north of the Tikaha bund; if it held, villagers there would breach it so their fields would be drained before a crop became impossible. They argued their losses were due to impounding of water not flooding. To the south, villagers were equally emphatic that in their interests the embankment should be made secure, a breached bund being worse than no bund at all. It was then being repaired by the Champaran District Board. Buckley was in favour on balance of strengthening it. Better alignment would prevent flooding to the north, and the only other bad result would probably be another six or eight inches on the floods downstream. The Calcutta officials were more cautious. Despite the doubts, public repairs and maintenance continued. In 1891 retired lines were constructed on the Gandak at what Buckley called a heavy cost; in 1893 a short break between embankments was almost closed and a sluice built.19 In 1895, the Darbhanga Collector argued for an embankment on the Ganges in Dalsingsarai thana (police division) where many productive acres had been abandoned, ‘great and seemingly preventable damage .  .  . done’ and ‘a very old and respectable family’ deprived of nearly all its land.20 On the other hand, when the question

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arose of bringing the Burhi Gandak under government control without taking responsibility for existing bunds, Hudson, Buckley, C.W. Odling (now Chief Engineer of Bengal) and the Patna Commissioner all objected— Hudson calling the idea ‘hardly tenable’. Local Collectors and a majority of non-officials were in favour. They wanted the whole of the Burhi Gandak brought under the Embankment Act so as to prohibit all new works because of problems caused by private construction at the main points of risk. The Bengal government agreed and in July 1891 proclaimed the river under the Act.21 Three principles of government policy may be discerned amid repeated ambivalence: first, reluctance at all levels to entertain projects for new embankments in North Bihar; second, equal unwillingness to override interests that had grown up around existing bunds; and third, concern that any government involvement be even-handed, although the balance of advantage might be weighed in deciding official attitudes to private works. Thus extension of the Turki bund in 1885 was generally condemned as wrong, but new works were not removed. Buckley, arguing against government participation in the Tikaha bund, explained: ‘The function of Government would be to try to benefit all without injuring any—a task which I think is almost hopeless.’ For embankments, suspicion of small projects was complemented by belief that large were impractical: the first instanced by the Turki bund, the second by the Tikaha. The direct result was profound. For existing bunds, acting on the balance of advantage implied leaving some people worse off than others. There was no guarantee that the balance seen by the government would be the same as the interests of the country as a whole, given the importance placed on vested interests that had grown up under the protection of embankments plus the obvious fact (as admitted by Buckley in the Tikaha case) that inhabitants of some areas were ‘as a rule . . . more influential’ than others so that ‘their complaints have been heard’. Six villagers were convicted of cutting the Turki bund, and the magistrate was required to adjudicate on compensation they should pay. Finding their combined assets amounted to Rs.4,820, he thought it ‘rather hard to sell them up entirely leaving them destitute’. The Patna Commissioner argued it was ‘still harder that the innocent persons should have to pay for them’. In this context, ‘innocent persons’ were those who had benefited from the embankment for years at the expense of villagers to the north who were to be considered guilty—all of them. The Legal Remembrancer recommended ‘persons to be sued [for compensation] should be selected independent of the conviction’, hoping ‘perhaps some wealthy persons might be found’.22 The policy of being even-handed in government actions did not work very well either. Government was responsible directly or indirectly (through its sanction) for many existing embankments with which it later declined to

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interfere. Buckley summed up the approach. Although government dared not completely embank the river Gogra, We like nibbling at the matter and trying, first here, then there, how far we think we can go without raising the general question. In this case, as in most embankment cases, the benefits to be derived are so obvious, so undisputed, so immediate; while the disadvantages (which the cautious ones suggest) are so problematical, so indefinite, and need so much proving that the advocates of the embankment have far the most plausible case to put forward, and the reasons given for the embankments, so far as they go, are so good in themselves that it is impossible not to sympathise with the objects of the promoters of the embankment scheme.23 Government was also involved even more widely through its other works— roads, railways, canals—that disrupted natural drainage, supposedly in the public interest. On such works too an even-handed approach was impossible. In the Burhi Gandak area floods were obstructed and, as said, increased in some places by a plethora of railways and highways. The road from Muzaffarpur to Sitamarhi was embanked at right angles to the flow of floodwater. Any such embankment increased the depth of flooding on one side and on the other gave protection to some but greatly increased damage to others because of flow under bridges or through breaches. Downstream floods were reduced because the road had created a reservoir. The government response in such cases, expressed in 1890 by McNeile, was: ‘we certainly should not make (or leave) an embankment in such a state as to aggravate the flooding in one direction while acting as a protective embankment in the other’. The answer was to provide ‘largely increased waterway’ under the obstruction. But that principle was inadequate. Though many culverts were built in this period none could wholly remove the effect of an embankment. McNeile agreed the problem would recur wherever an embankment stopped and it was impossible and undesirable to embank the river all the way to the Ganges.24 The difficulty appeared strikingly in another case involving the NorthWestern Railway and flooding from the Ganges, when the Government of Bengal pronounced that: The Railway Company created an obstruction which causes loss to the raiyats and damage to their property and crops, and His Honour thinks it clearly the duty of the railway to remove this obstruction or take such measures which may be efficient to put an end to the present unsatisfactory state of things. It is quite clear that the proper remedy is to provide sufficient waterway.

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It was easy enough to demand compensation from a commercial enterprise, even one so closely allied to the British goal of improving infrastructure and expanding production and trade. But the ensuing inquiry reported: The effect of the construction of the main line . . . has been . . . to protect a large area to the north of it from inundation . . . [and] raise the flood level to some extent on the land lying to the south. . . . It is by no means improbable that the persons injured exaggerated their actual grievances in consequence of the advantages which have been conferred on their neighbours. . . . To entirely restore the former condition of affairs, it would be necessary to provide almost unbounded waterway . . . with some advantage to the residents in the deara [flood-plain] and great injury to a much larger number . . . now protected.25 It was not primarily doctrine that discouraged the government from interfering with embankments, and its other interference actively prevented it from being even-handed. The numbers and influence of those harmed or advantaged were part of the calculation. Finally and most important, the problem of flooding was not static or even perennial in the way that problems of rainfall were in much of India. The tract of country between the Burhi Gandak and Bagmati mostly drained internally into low ground, sometimes three to five feet lower than the river banks. Embankments had been built to fill in occasional low parts of the banks. Further drainage was confined to a much silted-up depression known locally as the ‘Ruttia’ that led into the Bagmati. That river entered India 2,117 feet wide with a section of 18,363 square feet and a fall of 27 feet per mile, but 50 miles downstream it was only 410 feet wide with a section of 4,854 square feet and 6 inches of fall.26 In short, more water could enter from Nepal than could escape downstream, which was why embankments along the river merely transferred flooding from one place to another. Many observers thought floods were becoming more severe. They blamed deforestation in Nepal and extension of cultivation in India, changes that increased run-off and in the latter case reduced the area available as upstream reservoirs. Buckley (with some support from Odling) argued that the newly introduced distortions had been exaggerated and the problem of flooding had increased in terms of numbers affected as cultivation spread to more vulnerable areas. On several occasions Buckley expressed this uncertainty: was flooding worse or was more extensive cultivation the problem? Whichever explanation was correct, a remedy seemed increasingly necessary: wasteland was continually being brought into cultivation, and no longterm relaxation of the pressure of population could be expected. Floods continued to attract public interest, as they have ever since. Newspaper

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reports in Bangabasi and Amrita Bazar Patrika led the central government to ask Bengal about serious floods in Bihar in 1893.27 When two high floods in 1895/6 seriously damaged embankments on the Gandak and Burhi Gandak, the countryside was protected by ‘retired lines’ constructed where there were breaches; but no other government works were carried out, and even regular maintenance cost less than the year before.28 Again, in 1906 flooding caused ‘serious damage’ and ‘distress .  .  . aggravated by high prices’ throughout Patna Division. Prompt and adequate help was allegedly provided to victims but, in the Government of India, Denzil Ibbetson remarked complacently that crops were often better after a flood.29 Ibbetson was perhaps also realistic. Engineers applied their expertise to predict the balance of advantage for different works and between areas. The calculations were often controversial even among engineers or inapplicable for political and practical reasons. The problem was intractable given existing capabilities. In parallel with McNeile’s warning at the time of the Tikaha proposals, Buckley declared of the Gogra that to embank these rivers without greater knowledge would be to tamper with one of the great forces of nature, with no certainty as to the outcome. Similarly, writing of the Burhi Gandak, he admitted that some of the problem was due to mistakes by government and therefore he ought to suggest remedies. He regretted he could not. Again, he argued that people would simply have to adapt both their dwellings and their cultivation. Leave them ‘to fight their own battles’, he advised.30 The ultimate solutions were impractical and unwise: embanking the entire length of the Burhi Gandak and Bagmati or cutting new channels to relieve them would bring water more rapidly to the Ganges and cause great damage there, as McNeile had warned. He remarked, ‘All this, I know, cannot but be eminently unsatisfactory to the planters and other residents in this part of the country, as it is a distinct confession that we cannot avert the flooding.’31 It was a confession indeed. This was not a conflict as in Gaya between goals and types of expertise or even a refusal to intervene on doctrinal grounds. It had more in common with the failure over chaukidars and local taxation. Western-style policy had few clear answers to worsening circumstances in 1890. What was true even when those were partly of the government’s own making was also true in a wider perspective. Engineers, apparently modernising agents, had no great confidence in their ability to manage the environment. Perhaps ‘nature’ and ‘India’ were simply too big and complex, for all the stereotypes about Victorian technological confidence. Local environment prevailed over the reformist West.32

Notes 1 Robb, Peasants, p. 130. The origins of the system were supposed to be extremely ancient. Neglect was reported in the early nineteenth century by Buchanan, Account of . . . Shahabad, pp. 322–3. Inadequate provision, deficiency or decay

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were due to zamindari debt, ruin and dissension, some of it worsened by the subdivision of estates. The arrangements were typical of government estates in Gaya and Shahabad, unlike those in Saran, which were mostly sandy diara with pahikashta raiyats; Saran Coll to PC, 8 May 1894, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. 2 Among many sources relating to this system and agriculture in Gaya, the most useful is Grierson, Notes. See also Sengupta, ‘Indigenous Irrigation’. There is a general all-Bihar account in Rorabacher, Bihar, ch.4, pointing out rightly that the dominance and vagaries of the monsoon made artificial irrigation important. 3 The following descriptions are an amalgam drawn from many files. See with special but not exclusive reference to particular documents cited: Gaya Rev administration report 1883/4, PCR 340 12/4 1884/5; Gaya Coll to PC, 19/21 February 1890, PCR 352 10/[no file no.] 1890/1; G/Be to Superintending Engineer, Son circle, 9 September 1891, & C.W. Odling note, 16 September 1891, PCR 354 4/4 1891/2; Bengal PWD to G/Be, 24 March 1893, & Report of Superintending Engineer, Son circle, 27 January 1893, PCR 358 10/13 1893/4; Gaya Coll to PC, 29 August 1893, PCR 359 30/12 1893/4; PCR 360 10/6 1894/5, 361 30/9 1894/5 & 362 10/10 1895/6; Gaya Coll to PC, 6 December 1896, PCR 365 10/21 1896/7; Superintending Engineer, Son circle, to Chief Engineer, Bengal, 13 March 1897, Gaya Coll to PC, 10 May 1897, PC to BR, 10 May 1897, & BR to PC, 8 July 1897, PCR 367 10/11 1897/8. 4 For the preceding paragraphs see the previous note. 5 PCR 352 4/4 1890/1. 6 Note on proposals by Mr. Mylne for irrigation by weirs in Bhabua, June 1897, and Mylne to PC, 29 May  1897, PCR 367 6/2 1897/8. Compare Brailsford, Subject India, pp. 36–7. 7 Gaya Coll to PC, 8 May 1894, LR Report 1893/4, PCR 359 12/5 1894/5. 8 See ns.6  & 7, this chapter, on Gaya and Mylne. Similar things could be said about large-scale government-sponsored irrigation; see the preceding chapter. 9 Problems and reactions may be judged from Hill, River of Sorrow, on the river Kosi in Purnea district. Rorabacher, Bihar, ch.3, gives a similar account to mine of British policy and its shortcomings but claims the British abandoned the idea of state embankments between 1869 and 1918. 10 Again, this and following paragraphs are drawn from many files, including R.B. Buckley, Superintending Engineer, Son circle, to Champaran Coll, 18 June, to Saran Coll, 18 June, to Muzaffarpur Coll, 19 June, PCR 342 6/21 1885/6,  & to Champaran Coll, 8 July  1891, PCR 354 6/6 1891/2; Diary extract, 19 August 1882, PCR 337 37/2 1882/3; and Darbhanga Coll to PC, 25 February 1895, PCR 360 6/5 1894/5. See also PCR 352 6/1–3 1890/1, 354 6/1–3 1891/2, 356 6/4 1892/3; 358 6/2 1893/4, 356 6/4 1892/3, and R&A Rev B10 February 1895. Only specific quotations will be referenced again in later notes. 11 The attempt to ‘tame’ rivers marked the confused approach to temporary cultivation and pasturage in riverine tracts (diara), playing an important economic and social role where river courses were seasonally mobile. Sinha ‘Fluvial Landscape’ described issues this raised under the permanent settlement. See also Hill, River of Sorrow. 12 Detailed descriptions were given by Buckley, especially in notes or letters of 12 December 1890, 18 January, 18 March, 1 & 2 April 1890, PCR 352 6/1 & 3 1890/1. 13 PCR 352 6/1 1890/1 & 354 2/6 1891/2, including proceedings of a meeting on Chapra, 4 January 1891.

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14 The petition was recorded by the Bengal Public Works Department, 6 March 1891, PCR 354 6/1 1891/2, including Buckley to J.M. McNeile, Chief Engineer, Bengal, 12 February 1891. 15 Buckley to McNeile, 13 March 1891, PCR 362 6/3 1890/1; note by Odling, 21 October 1892, PCR 356 6/4 1892/3. When the Saran Collector proposed a bund on the Gogra after 600 square miles had been flooded, there was a conference attended by the Lieutenant-Governor and McNeile (who objected to the plan). 16 Buckley note, 1 April 1890, PCR, and to McNeile, 12 February 1891, PCR 354 6/1 1891/2. 17 Judgment of the Court of the PC, 15 September 1892, PCR 356 6/4 1892/3. 18 J.M.M. note, 22 May 1890, PCR 352 6/3 1890/1. This and PCR 352 6/1 1890/1 detail the two cases. 19 Buckley to Champaran Coll, 8 July 1891, PCR 354 6/6 1891/2; Resolution of the Irrigation Department, 19 January  1895, R&A Rev B10 February  1895. The latter file is one of many with an Embankment and Drainage Report, this one for 1893/4, recording the small annual spend on embankments for works under contract for private landholders, in return for a maintenance charge, or by means of a government advance. On the contract system for repairs along the Gandak, and decriptions of bunds in Shahabad, Saran and Muzaffarpur see the Superintending Engineer’s letters to Colls, 18–19 June 1885, PCR 342 6/21 1885/6. 20 Diary entry, 19 March 1882, PCR 337 37/2 1882/3; PCR 360 6/5 1894/5. 21 G/Be, 28 July, confirming announcement of 23 June 1891, no ‘valid objection’ being lodged; PCR 354 6/1 1891/2. 22 Office note, 30 July 1891; Champaran Magistrate to PC, 22 July 1891, PCR 534 6/1 1891/2. 23 Buckley to McNeile, 13 October 1893, PCR 358 6/2 1893/4. 24 Notes by Buckley, 1 April,  & McNeile, 22 May  1890, PCR 352 6/3 1890/1. See similar views more generally in LR Report 1889–90, R&A Rev A7–11 June 1891. Further flood-protection measures were undertaken in 1898 on the Burhi Gandak. Works were carried out annually to mitigate against flooding worsened by canals in Shahabad, Gaya and Saran; R&A Rev B22 April 1891, B21 May 1893 & March 1898. Canals were especially damaging if breached as in Gaya in 1901 (and since) from high water in both the Son and Ganges; R&A Fam B21–7 October 1901. The Tribeni canal from the Gandak, aligned at right angles to the area’s main drainage, was built with syphons and aqueducts to avoid disrupting streams—doing that from the start was cheaper; Indian Irrigation Commission letter, 4 December 1902, R&A Fam B9 December 1902. 25 The G/I had set up a committee to report; Bengal letter, 10 April 1890, PCR 356 6/4 1892/3. A similar complaint in the same file over floods in a basin admittedly formed by the Patna canal in Dinapur led to compensation, though the works had benefited other larger areas; Bengal to Janak Dhary Lall, 2 May 1890, and Inglis note, 5 May  1892. The Bengal and North-Western Railway ran from Sonpur, with a ferry connection to Patna. It was built and managed by a company registered in Britain in 1882. It had state support from free land rather than a guaranteed return on capital. It took over the Tirhut railway company in 1890. It began to redeem its capital after legislation in 1914. It was not wholly state owned until 1943, only three years before the controlling company was disbanded. 26 Buckley note, 18 January 1890, PCR 352 6/3 1890/1. 27 Bagavasi, 19 August and Amrita Bazar Patrika, 6 September, R&A Fam B1–9 October 1893.

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28 G/Be resolution, 15 March  1897, R&A Land Rev B33 April  1897. Only one sluice was constructed at a cost of Rs.1,775 paid for by an indigo company. The total cost for maintenance was Rs.150,970 in 1894/5 and Rs.120,595 in 1895/6, plus Rs.102,315 for contract work where there were no government embankments. All these sums were recoverable. Compare R&A Rev B8 April 1896. 29 J. Wilson, 11 September, 6  & 19 October; Ibbetson, 14 October  1906, R&A Fam A1–7 December 1906. 30 Buckley to McNeile, 18 March 1891, & Buckley note, I April 1890. PCR 352 6/3 1891/2; 31 Note, 22 May 1890, PCR 352 1/6 1890/1. 32 Hill, River of Sorrow, argued officially encouraged settlement on riverine (diara) lands exemplified colonial inability to understand environment (old river systems) or support adaptive agriculture during commodification and commercialisation. He castigated official incapacity facing ‘vast and unpredictable rivers of Bengal’ (p. 160) and ‘brutality, starvation, land alienation, and death’ suffered by cultivators (p. 163). More bluntly, Rorabacher, Bihar, ch.3, said official preoccupation with flood control increased poverty—government thought it should protect cultivated lands; cultivators’ attitudes were more nuanced. D’Souza, Drowned, thought the Orissa delta ‘transformed’ from ‘a flood-dependent regime into a flood-vulnerable landscape’ by ‘capitalist private property’ and the ‘decision to insulate the cultivated area through embankments’, ‘aggravating hydraulic volatility’, making ‘colonial administration’ unsure whether to permit floods or extend protection (p. 216). Agreeing more or less over Bihar, I argue ‘ecological paternalism’ failed mainly by not adapting to local conditions. There were parallels with the litany of decline in the Sundarbans, partly blamed on official errors; Iqbal, Bengal Delta. See also Adas, Burma Delta, attributing the reversal of successful economic expansion to labour supply, socio-political factors, world depression and other issues as well as ecology and major errors of government policy.

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12 INTERPRETING AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION

Indigo, 1877–1917 This chapter sets out features of commercial agriculture in Bihar in the decades before and after 1900. It makes two main contributions to a discussion of development policies. First, it bears on the limited improvement and intensification that accompanied some commercialisation and the expansion of international trade. Second it relates to shortcomings in official and scientific development efforts. The character of Bihari cultivation and marketing has been indicated already in this book, in detail for villages near the Son canal. There will be further discussion later in this chapter. Important features included interdependence of cultivation and coercion by elites and agents, implying control by intermediaries rather than individual enterprise or investment.1 The main example here is indigo. It was distinctive in its reliance on mainly European management in areas where patterns of landholding and cultivation were well-established. Its processing and sale were focused on international markets in which Indian production came to dominate. Other crops might have been considered. Rice, wheat and oilseeds were grown commercially, and their production, processing and marketing had some of the common characteristics. But they raise other issues that cannot be detailed here. Cotton could have been included but was not significant in Bihar. The mode of production for tea and coffee was distinctively different, and those crops also were not important in Bihar. On the other hand features similar to those for indigo can be illustrated for opium and sugarcane, subjects of the next chapter. Their commercial production also expanded during British rule. The distinctive feature for opium was that the agents who promoted its production were directly recruited by the Company and the colonial state also disciplined its growers, controlled its marketing and took its profits. Sugar in Bihar sometimes involved European enterprise but was less integrated into colonial systems of production and especially marketing than opium or indigo. 210

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In the decades before and after 1900, Bihar provided a distinctive chapter in indigo’s history.2 The plant, indigofera tinctoria, had been an ancient source of blue dye, made in India from time immemorial. Though laborious to produce, the dye was easy to transport in a dried form as it was light and durable; it was also simple to use after the addition of an alkaline solution. Following establishment of British rule in Bengal, the crop came to be widely grown under European auspices. It was important for Britain’s expanding textile industries that increasingly used linen and cotton (readily dyed by indigo) in preference to wool. In nineteenth-century Bengal, as is well-known, conditions under which indigo was cultivated and produced were violently resisted—in the so-called ‘blue mutiny’—and became controversial.3 In Bihar production continued under a somewhat different system, though there were organised protests against it in the twentieth century.4 The crop was important in all districts of Patna Division north of the Ganges, as it had been in Shahabad until the development of the Son canals. In the later nineteenth century it occupied an estimated quarter of a million acres and involved large capital investment. Indigo factories were a major source of employment for the landless, providing in one district alone an average of over 600,000 man-days of work per month and more than twice that in the busiest month, November. One district, Saran, had 53 factories in the 1880s. Even in 1895/6 when production had begun to slacken off, output from Bihar totalled over 660,000 factory maunds sold at an average of Rs.247 per maund.5 The government paid close attention to indigo in Bihar. Officials originally became concerned after the popular disturbances in Bengal proper and in the context of worries about the poverty and restiveness of Bihar’s rural population. They saw indigo as an otherwise successful industry troubled by poor agrarian relations. Later, as the industry declined the government became troubled by shortcomings of agricultural methods and involved in chemical and botanical questions relating to cultivation and manufacture. By the turn of the century, the crop itself and optimal growing, harvesting and processing strategies were established as a major focus at the government’s new research centre at Pusa. The emphasis was so great that it was regarded as a political embarrassment given the major European interest in indigo production. The final act, centred on Champaran in 1917, is famous because of Gandhi’s involvement. By then and in much intervening political activity, agrarian relations again predominated. Eventually the rights and interests of the indigo raiyats were swallowed up like the declining industry itself in broader issues including political reform.6 Indigo received attention from government and the nascent scientific establishment in British India, from Indian political leaders and latterly from historians. The industry has been seen as a single system and special case. Yet its most interesting features in Bihar may be how it changed over time and what it had in common with other agricultural production. 211

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Blair Kling identified indigo as a mercantilist trade shamefully dependant on forced labour. It prompted official interest in rural welfare and peasant ‘capitalism’ and a ‘Whiggish assertion of judicial supremacy’. He described the industry as having ‘to take refuge’ in Bihar and regretted that peasants then exchanged planters’ tyranny for that of moneylenders. Bengal’s experience may have convinced Europeans in Bihar that a plantation system would run into labour difficulties. The power of great zamindars and their protection by government also made plantations less likely in the districts involved.7 The broad outline of Bihari indigo production can be briefly described.8 With no true ‘plantations’, it was managed by tenure holders in the main and mostly grown alongside or mixed with other crops on relatively small proportions of large areas of land. Indigo was processed in central factories before being exported from the region and from India. In these aspects, production was a powerful commercial interest apparently in alliance with government and the landowners. It helped make Bihar vulnerable to international price fluctuations while bringing few agricultural improvements. But there was possibly unexpected but continual reluctance to adopt fully capitalist modes despite the involvement of European capital. Local methods of production persisted with relatively little innovation or crop development and indirect forms of control similar to those in many industries.

The indigo system Cultivation was encouraged or forced by European and sometimes Indian capitalists. On suitable estates they acquired the status of thikadars or more rarely zamindars. There was a directly commercial alternative system known as ‘khuski’ in which there was no tenurial relationship between the planter and cultivators, but it was relatively rare during most of the nineteenth century. Thikadari arrangements were usually in one of two forms. The first was zirat. It covered about half of the area under indigo. Planters took possession of the zirat of an estate in place of the zamindar. For indigo cultivation they appointed their own agents and workers but as zamindars did, preferring indirect to direct management. The second strategy covered most of the rest of the cultivation; it was called asamiwar. The planter engineered written contracts that required tenant cultivators to grow indigo on part of their holdings. In return the planter provided seed and at least one advance payment. He paid for indigo either according to the area cultivated, with a minimum even when the crop failed, or by weight after the harvest. The latter was increasingly common from the 1880s. Any defaulting raiyat was liable to pay heavy damages. Contracts were almost always for a single harvest. But the system shackled raiyats to indigo and those who financed and manufactured it. By the 1870s it was known that Bihari raiyats objected to indigo cultivation, especially on their best lands (as was required), when other crops might 212

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be less onerous and more rewarding. Some government officers believed oppression suffered by cultivators to be pre-modern or ‘Asiatic’; European planters should behave in a ‘commercial’ and indeed a ‘British’ fashion. Others disagreed, claiming zamindars benefited as well as planters, being paid far more than they could get from rents or even from zirat because planters received their indigo cheaply; and cultivators did not lose out as they had low rent for an entire holding in return for growing indigo on a small proportion of it.9 The crop, though unprofitable in itself in comparison with, say, wheat, was not grown as an alternative to other cash crops; it did not dominate the cultivator’s production strategies. It required little or no manure, was ‘far from exhausting’ to the soil, occupied the ground ‘when nothing else could be there’ and was commonly preceded or followed by a rabi crop.10 C.T. Metcalf, when officiating Commissioner of Patna Division, proposed an inquiry, but Richard Temple, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, thought the discontent exaggerated; abuses could be stamped out by careful and impartial British administration. In late 1876, Steuart Bayley, then Commissioner of Patna, again emphasised the distress among raiyats. Senior officials were now becoming more concerned about local resentment over comparatively low returns when planters repeatedly commandeered the best lands. Temple’s successor, Ashley Eden, took up the question at the end of 1876. He wanted the thikadari and asamiwar systems discouraged. He thought cultivators’ occupancy and other rights should be protected. He wanted planters to end their arbitrary allocation of raiyats’ lands, forced-labour demands and extensions of zirat by trickery. He proposed self-regulation as a first step: the Indigo Planters’ Association was formed at his instigation. Planters complained they could hardly deal on a purely commercial basis with raiyats who lacked any security to back the loans they received; but in 1877 they increased the contract rate at which they bought the crop, introduced a uniform standard for measuring lands and officially gave up demanding raiyats’ labour and other produce in addition to indigo. District officials, including Antony MacDonnell, reported a marked change for the better in relations between planters and raiyats. D.N. Reid declared higher payments were matched by greater insistence on the best lands for indigo; and none of Eden’s other reforms was carried out.11 A period of high profitability followed for the planters. This, in combination with legal developments, led to changes and intensification in control over raiyats and their cultivation. With one possible exception—payment by weight of produce rather than area under cultivation—planters sought to improve supply the easiest way: increased acreage. Even some opium lands were given over to indigo in the 1880s. Existing concerns, taking advantage of a run of good seasons, established branch factories to corner the production in new areas; long-established factories complained ‘interlopers’ were entering rival bids for leases from zamindars, even offering improved terms 213

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to cultivators. At this time many planters were enthusiastic about extending the khuski system. It ceased to be their goal to obtain thikadari leases and bring as much land as possible under zirat management. The Tenancy Act of 1885 brought official discouragement of the old practice of illegally seizing raiyati land to form factory zirats and raised the possibility of greater independence for some raiyats. A  better plan seemed to be to convert or extend indigo agreements directly, cutting out the zamindars. Khuski enabled planters to reach raiyats they did not control as thikadars and holdings too tangled and scattered to be managed directly or through the tenurial structure. Several factories tried a fully fledged commercial system. Bahrauli in Saran paid no advances and made no agreements but at harvest offered double the prevailing price. It saved interest charges on the usual outlay on seeds and advance payments and sidestepped arguments with zamindars because tenants remained responsible for their own rent. However, although khuski considerably reduced the importance of zirat, it never replaced asamiwar. The reasons were ecological and socio-­political. First, despite making savings early in the season the factories were left with too little leeway to cope with varying agricultural conditions. A high price margin was needed to attract voluntary supplies; quantity and quality could not be guaranteed. The Bahrauli experiment was seen off by a poor crop the factory had to buy at a loss. Second, many zamindars opposed the changes. In the Gopalganj area of Saran, where khuski agreements became very common, one of the factories involved was at Maniara managed by D.N. Reid. His real opponent was the Hathwa raj. He attempted to deal directly with raiyats, advancing them money on the security of their holdings. Hathwa raj (to which the villages belonged) vigorously contested this interference. The raiyats reneged on the agreements with Reid under inducement from Hathwa (or otherwise), and when Reid tried to foreclose, the estate resisted by denying the transferability of the holdings under the 1885 Tenancy Act. (Section 183 left this issue to local custom.) Reid filed 300 suits for breach of contract; it was necessary to set up a munsif’s court in Gopalganj. Such quarrels and a host involving less prominent protagonists were really about the control of production. Reid was not interfering directly with the payment of rent. But the Maharaja of Hathwa and other zamindars were trying to achieve more direct and complete management of their estates, seeking (like the planters) more effective ways of tapping profits from agricultural production. Planters’ shift from exploiting a tenurial relationship to using commercial weapons was symbolic of a more general movement in socio-economic oppression. Increasing rivalry between planters and zamindars was sufficiently acute for British officials to fear disorder. Finally and most important, it was dangerous for any one interest to rely solely on market forces to deliver a particular crop when cultivators were not generally independent in their property or agricultural decision making. 214

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Khuski did not necessarily countermand social or economic power or even advance payments. Government tended to favour the planter in possession and occasionally raiyats. Heavy fines were imposed on one malik when, having opened an indigo factory in opposition to an existing company, he claimed the indigo lands as his zirat. But official backing was not enough to insulate khuski production from troublesome challenges. The failure was instructive. Planters soon realised they needed control over raiyats to extend indigo cultivation. If they relied less on thikadari rights, they had to make more use of mortgages or harvest loans at higher rates: financial compensation replacing the control from smaller loans plus tenurial subordination. A further development soon compensated for the failure of pure khuski. Factories had always consolidated relations in times of hardship by offering credit on more favourable terms than professional moneylenders. Quite suddenly there developed an extension of the thikadari system applied to raiyats directly—a kurtaoli lease whereby a planter would technically become an undertenant on a small part of an occupancy holding. He would use this subtenancy as zirat on which workers would cultivate indigo. From the 1880s kurtaoli increasingly meant the notional subletting of entire holdings. Raiyats would receive a loan and remain in occupation in return for growing indigo on the usual proportion of land with the usual annual advance payments. The initial (but temporary) advantage to raiyats was money borrowed on easy terms, to settle old debts, replace bullocks, marry off daughters or survive a poor season. (Bad harvests of 1883/4 gave impetus to these agreements.) Raiyats at first had some defence against the planter from the complexity of holdings being brought under indigo. They gained a possible ally in disputes with zamindars, some of whom were trying similarly to manage more directly, turning tenants into oppressed sharecroppers on their supposed zirat. An advantage to a planter was that he could invade another’s sphere of influence, even undermine the usefulness of a rival’s thikadari status, without having to come to terms with a zamindar. The second advantage, more important in the longer term, was that for a single outlay—perhaps Rs.20 per bigha—a planter could capture occupancy raiyats virtually in perpetuity: liability for unredeemed loans extended over years and from one generation to the next, and, though kurtaoli leases typically ran for between 7 and 21 years, they were based on usufructuary mortgages (zarpeshgi) redeemable only by repaying the original loan. Obviously, their spread risked further weakening the cultivators. Even the assumption that they would remain in possession of their holding was tacit, not explicit. Kurtaoli also ran counter to the intended effect of the Tenancy Act of 1885. Its provisions would apply to the lease-holding planter, not to raiyats now technically his undertenants. Superior tenure would help him enforce oppressive or contested agreements. Cultivators lost rights over lands they farmed and had their labour annexed by the factory.12 215

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In the colourful phrase of D.N. Reid, planters were ‘like a herd of elephants in a field of sugar-cane’. They could make returns of at least 60 per cent annually, judging from Reid’s own factories in 1890/1, but opposed any measures that might conflict with their large profits such as railway construction in north Bihar (in case it raised the cost of labour). Reid claimed a sum of Rs.450,000 was lost every year even to Gopalganj, his own small corner of Saran district, and, though from his own calculations Rs.300,000 were brought in, most of that (he said) went to zamindars as loans or payments, not to defray the cost of buildings and machinery and certainly not as payments to cultivators or labourers.13 This was an intriguing measure of economic benefit and loss, regionally and within each village, though others pointed out that the outgoings claimed from Gopalganj were from profits and hence notional (no one there had possessed any of them) while the inward investment was real. Reid also did not ask whether or not an inequitable apportionment of profits and resources was new or peculiar to the indigo system. Another of his claims was that planters joined with local officers in a conspiracy of greed. He quoted William Hudson, head of the planters’ association, advising him to make friends with District Collectors because it paid ‘better than any amount of fair dealing’. Collectors would improve a planter’s standing with zamindars and the educated classes and ignore the condition of raiyats so long as they were quiet. Such alliances, Reid argued, were thwarting independent enterprise of the cultivators and preventing improvement of Bihar’s agriculture, which was in a hopeless condition. Behind his attack lay the commonplaces of a libertarian political economy.14 The indigo industry was an evil because it was socially regressive, distorted the ‘natural’ betterment of production and placed restraints upon trade. Reid went on to propose a solution that was unorthodox in his day. Instead of ‘trying to rectify matters with the aid of a theodolite’ (a reference to survey and settlement operations), government should step in and manage the indigo trade, guarantee a 3 per cent return on costs and capital by law and direct any excess profits to a famine insurance fund. It could encourage investment from a large numbers of shareholders. Reading this, one official (E.D. Maclagan) commented laconically that it was ‘an arrangement we are not likely to initiate’.15

Production under scrutiny There were different degrees of peasant autonomy; cash crops could be sponsored without dictating cultivation methods. Agreements used by the Indigo Planters’ Association gave a misleading impression. They provided that land to be sown with indigo should be of a suitable quality, chosen by the planter and his agents, devoted only to indigo and the bhadoi crop, makai (Indian maize). The land was not to be used for cotton or arhar (an 216

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oilseed, cytisus cajan), thought damaging to the soil and (as a cash crop) likely to divert effort and involve other outside brokers. Planters would normally provide seed and could specify methods of planting and cultivation. Raiyats had ‘to conduct the kerowni [weeding] once or twice and bidah [light ploughing] under the orders of the planter and his amlah [official] as necessity may occur’. They had to do this again after the moshan crop (presumably marhan, the first cutting of indigo, the second being khunti) and to plough and weed fields in which there was no second cutting so ‘that the outturn may be a good one’ in the second year, the third cutting called katam. Finally, the agreement stipulated that the planter would decide when the crop was ready and raiyats would undertake the harvest ‘when indigo shall be fit for manufacture, and carriage sent by the factory for its conveyance’. Another agreement, from Saran, required similar promises from raiyats: not to sow other crops, to prepare the field after irrigation as approved by the factory, to use the factory’s seeds, to ‘perform the first and second weeding’ and so on. Yet another similar form, in Champaran, was more precise about dates when various stages would be reached.16 No doubt agreements provided useful technicalities for a factory’s local Indian agents. For planters they were a convenient fiction, used if necessary to ‘prove’ raiyats negligent and reduce what they were paid but mainly intended to relieve planters of day-to-day responsibility. Other agreements reveal their lack of informed involvement: a planter could choose alternative land in the same season if his first choice proved unsuitable; his rights continued on the previous year’s land when he made no new selection; there were financial adjustments when he failed to provide seed. Scientific observers later reported that planters knew very little about indigo or its cultivation. In the 1880s, when they were competing with opium and likely to incur the wrath of the Opium Department, they were not sure if the two crops were compatible. They had a vague idea that indigo with its long tap-root derived nourishment deep in the soil while opium (like chinna and makai) was a surface crop. Local opinion may have been that they were incompatible: indigo grown after opium was given a special name, called alawa, not lil. Planters disrupted but did not replace village or household decisions. They imposed minimal change in production methods even when increased efficiency seemed their only salvation in the face of competition from artificial dyes. If they did interfere in production decisions, it was from a very narrow perspective. They did not think it their role to husband the soil or organise a range of crops. They wanted to be able to choose lands because they expected more than one crop per season and repeated harvests from each raiyat, while suspecting that indigo exhausted the soil—they usually grew only one crop a year on their zirat land even though it was the main or sole beneficiary of indigo seer (refuse) as manure. They had no influence over many aspects of production. 217

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It was not mere insouciance. There was a context. First, planters were limited in terms of land. Typically, each village observed distinctions in land-use arising out of its needs, related to ecological and practical considerations. In Saran, for example, fields could be classified generally in six ways, a pattern more or less repeated everywhere under different names. There was korar, land adjacent to the village used for the main cash crops—this was well-guarded, readily tended, best-fertilised and hypothecated largely to the production of rent, a reminder of the first call on rural resources. In nineteenth-century Saran it was devoted particularly to poppy, indigo and sugarcane. Then came the much larger area of general farmland or chour, cultivated with bhadoi and rabi crops in ordinary years or with paddy when there was abundant rain. In Saran, this meant that it was used above all for makai, the predominant bhadoi crop, and some millets, or (at the rabi) chiefly for barley and other cereals and pulses. A similar category was bharsi, the distinction being that it was even further from the basti. After that came choum, low-lying land used only for paddy. It was the mainstay of the winter rice crop that in Saran around 1900, for all the expansion of non-food crops, still occupied almost 35 per cent of the area under all bhadoi and rabi crops, including rice. Finally there were bagh lands with fruit and other trees and parti (waste or pasture).17 Using this classification, we can say that planters competed in effect mainly over the allocation of korar. There, production decisions were affected by their influence and that of others who sought to encourage cash crops. Over time they reduced the chances of growing food crops in these areas and could alter the relative importance of different cash crops. But considering India’s long history of cash rents they did not introduce the connection between korar and the market, nor did they fundamentally change land use. Some food crops had always been marketed—especially best-quality rice. The amount and almost certainly the proportion grew over the period. Second, agriculture took place within the orbit of reciprocal agreements. Raiyats exchanged labour, calling the arrangements badialya, paita or painch, or shared ploughs and ploughed their fields in turn, a custom generally called bhanj. They might cooperate in providing water. Some large works were associated with a great ruler, such as very large tanks at Rajokhari and Bhopai in Darbhanga; eventually there were British schemes; but most irrigation depended upon collective effort for construction and upkeep. Exchanges between patrons and clients were pervasive. In some Shahabad and Patna villages each tenant was required to lend his plough and bullocks to the landlord for two days per year. Ploughmen might be hired annually or on a daily basis but also could be working to pay off a debt or have the use of the plough and bullocks for their own fields, usually one day in three. In north Bihar the usual word for ploughman (harwaha) meant one who worked after taking advance payments; a different word (uttha) was used for ploughmen who worked without them. Similarly, 218

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agricultural labourers, paid in cash or kind, were expected to work a certain number of days for nothing (begar, a practice supposedly derived from services owed to the state) and were often bonded through advance payments or as customary serfs of landlords, paid merely with their food. Accordingly, shares of each harvest were owed by custom or agreement to a range of workers and also artisans and village officers or for religious purposes. Such a complex system of interdependence and subordination was a web in which agricultural decisions were caught.18 Third, a cultivator’s decisions were hedged in by his own experience and customs. He operated, as revealed in the linguistic record compiled by Grierson, within a rich tapestry of distinctions. It implies standards of behaviour and ecological norms. For many of hundreds of types of soil, names seemed to define appropriate use. Relatively few terms, such as the family of synonyms around parti (fallow) and abadi (cultivated land), suggested an element of choice; most distinctions related to intrinsic characteristics. They were not just descriptive, as with kinds of clay or soils that were stony, gravelly, salty or water-logged. They were prescriptive, indicating methods of cultivation or restrictions on use. Terms relating to water retention were borrowed for modes of cultivation and kinds of crop they suited. There were words denoting land producing more than one harvest per year and habitually or necessarily used for a particular crop. Agricultural processes also had a linguistic framework. Distinct names were given to first, second, third and fourth ploughings, several kinds of reploughing after sowing and styles of ploughing (straight, diagonal, circular, cross). While the same word might generally be used for hoeing and weeding, there was a range of words for deep or superficial weeding or for the first hoeing given to sugarcane in Magh (January–February) or the special one given in Asarh (June–July). Such terminology seems not only to describe but to generate actions. Such terms also followed practice; at least one example referred to presumed human agency—Koiri, the caste name, provided the root for most words for land suited to garden crops. But if the same term referred to land employed in a particular way and land appropriate to such use, then local knowledge was being delineated and behaviour encouraged to conform. In Shahabad, for example, a different soil was thought appropriate to each of four varieties of cotton. Such precise and elaborate terminology must have shaped production decisions. Conversely, restriction of vocabulary marks greater control over the environment. The Bihari lexicon seems more than technical; it is like snapshots of an attitude of mind.19 Proverbs took over where vocabulary left off. They too implied perceptions and value judgments. Many recorded agricultural information—that the sathi variety of rice ripened in 60 days or it was dangerous to plant rice except in Aradra (a phase of the moon in June–July). Effort required to cultivate different crops was compared in the hyperbole of a rhyme from Gaya calling for 100 ploughings for cane, 50 for wheat, 25 for rice and half 219

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that for oilseeds. A couplet from northeast Bihar advised those wanting a good harvest to plough little, harrow often and keep field boundaries high. Behind such popular wisdom lay a broader corpus of belief. The agricultural calendar exemplified memories embodied in dogma and ritual so as to circumscribe practice. In Patna, the sowing of winter rice followed the first fall of rain in Jeth (May–June), a decision relating mainly to the weather, but transplanting of rice customarily began according to ritual, on the fifth day of Sawan (July–August) after a special festival. Religious observance and sacred texts added their sanction to the unavoidable rhythm shared by heavens, time, seasons, the cycle of crops and hence by man. Divisions of time were imagined as rajas bestowing gifts. The recipient—or sufferer— was defined by his part in the transaction. A farmer not only grew crops but performed according to norms. A host of customs and rhymes reminded the cultivator of the expected character of the season. They provided a timetable to anticipate heat or rainfall and carry out tasks at once social, religious and agricultural. Labels were complex but precise: the year was divided into 12 months with light and dark halves and also 28 lunar asterisms each associated with important agricultural activity.20 Songs and sayings celebrated rains in lunar Aradra (June–July), most important for field preparation and sowing, or Hathiya (September–October), vital for transplanting winter rice and sowing rabi crops though supposedly damaging for sesamum, kodo and cotton. Rhymes set out other best phases of the moon: Krittika (May) for planting chinna or Chitra (October) for mustard, barley and peas. They offered an impression of predictability and ability to respond to the environment. They told of likely consequences of climatic events—for months excellent paddy from good rains in Baisakh (April–May), urad ruined if it rained in Phagun (February–March), and for asterisms plentiful harvests if Mirgsira were hot but it had rained in Rohini (May–June). They reminded cultivators to watch for portents on particular days—such as the seventh day of the bright half of Sawan (the January–February asterism)—or that wind in certain months or lunar aspects promised drought or floods. As seasons were variable vocabulary also suggested adaptations according to need; one set of words described cutting unripe plants and the food they could provide. Proverbs implied awareness of abstraction: seasons as an idea, images representing expectations. Crops too were perceived in a social as well as an economic hierarchy. In proverbs as well as profitability, rice was a power in the land, its numerous varieties compared with the clans of Rajputs or Babhans, the dominant castes. In contrast the millets, particularly marwa, were associated with poverty and lowliness—how those who depended on them starved between harvests, having used their reserves for seed, or that millets were not really food just as weavers could never be cultivators.21 If food illustrated status, cropping decisions could not be socially neutral. A value system informed cultivators’ strategies and inhibited change. 220

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It suggested resistance to intermediaries who wanted to influence production and extract produce. Accommodation to custom as well as complex landholding help explain why most commercial agriculture—rice, sugar, oilseeds, opium and indigo—did not even attempt capitalist production in the true sense in Bihar. In the longer run, that complicated supply and could be costly for middlemen and manufacturers. The obvious arenas for indigo planters to exploit were processing and marketing, as also observed for smallholdings or dispersed manufacturing: capitalist concentration on and profits from credit and distribution rather than production.22

Improvement? Lessons for development Two conclusions follow from this brief history of indigo in Bihar. They are related, each helping explain the other. One is that the system of production oppressed the cultivators. Protests of indigo cultivators in Bihar have rightly received much attention as a twentieth-century variation on what happened in Bengal in the nineteenth. The other, also pertinent to this book, is that the system inhibited improvement. A  major reason was that planters did not manage cultivation closely; they paid it very little attention. Production systems revealed limitations in planters’ power. For all their European capital, official allies and attempts at hegemony, they could not choose a system at will. They had to work through rules and customs governing landed property; they had to collaborate with zamindars or suborn raiyats. They could not just set up factories and hope to attract raw materials in an open market—because they needed to repay their financial backers, wanted to maximise profits and were reluctant to pay high prices but also because they faced a confusing nexus of power and practices they were unable to transform. They competed over land use, village-by-village, plot-by-plot, against landlords, tenants and intermediaries. None of this mattered to planters while profits were easy. But the industry was vulnerable. At the end of the nineteenth century its markets collapsed due to competition from artificial substitutes made in Germany. Indigo production was hit throughout India, but the decline was particularly acute for European enterprise. There was no permanent fall in output or area under cultivation in Madras where smallholders predominated; cultivation increased in Punjab between 1902 and 1907. But European-influenced production was at risk: it was export-orientated, price-sensitive and depended on external capital. It was also inefficient. Its cultivators were oppressed and grudging. Planters had not sought significant improvements in crop, cultivation or processing. Their impact on agriculture had been, as in other cases, one of extension rather than intensification. European capital increased vulnerability and export dependence.23 Planters in Bihar did not begin to seek expert advice until 1897, when dangers were already imminent. The crucial measure was yield of dye 221

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not weight of the crop. Planters could only speculate how yield could be improved. They thought more dye obtained after dry weather than wet and greater quantity from raiyati than factory lands. They knew little for certain. The botanists (J.W. Leather and George Watt) decided their real failure was ignorance of the plant. No one had ‘made the slightest effort to follow the time immemorial usages in seed production’. Planters had taken what was on offer in Kanpur, Delhi or Multan in hope that if seed were expensive it would be good. Naturally experts insisted little could be done without experiment and investigation. It would be necessary to compare strains of the plant, soils, seasons and methods of cultivation and processing. Six years later, work had hardly started on improving strains of indigo through crossbreeding and selection. All that had happened was that, contrary to Watt’s advice against imports, Java or Natal varieties had largely replaced the old Sumatra or indigenous ones. Vindicating Watt, the Java indigo then proved susceptible to disease and eventually succumbed to an insect pest.24 He thought rotation with other crops might be beneficial, including tobacco, groundnuts, linseed, arrowroot, rhea and (prophetically) sugarcane, produce suited to European investment. (Therefore he excluded rice, wheat, barley and gram that might have had similar effect.)25 Meanwhile, scientific work, discussed in Part II, proved little more than that existing methods of manufacture extracted only 50 or 60 per cent of the dye produced by indigo plants. It was claimed an improved process had been devised to extract as much as 85 per cent, but investigation was slow and expensive and outcomes uncertain.26 The age of easy profits had passed. The indigo industry had not been ‘modern’ after all—neither scientific and maximising in methods nor commercial and capitalist in relation to growers. Planters had financial and marketing connections and manufacturing capacity. They had social and economic control over cultivators and labour. They did not have the need or means to generate improvements. Accordingly, when indigo let them down they looked for other ways to exploit their assets, including local influence. Early in the twentieth century they tried changing to sugar and cotton. In 1901, 1,500 acres of cane were planted on indigo lands in north Bihar, with a goal of 5,000 acres by 1903; a sugar factory was built. The tendency, against advice, was once again to invest quickly without investigation, using readily imported canes. Similarly in 1903, long-staple cotton was introduced experimentally on 50 acres with the aim of reaching 500. J.W. Mollison, Director-General of Agriculture, arranged for the services of three experienced cultivators, two trained bullocks and necessary implements. A  competitive experiment at Manipur was run by a syndicate of Calcutta merchants connected to the British Cotton-Growing Association. It was reported a costly and hopeless failure, with problems including frost, floods, insect pests and unsuitable strains of cotton.27 222

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Indigo production strategies changed in expansion and then in decline; but, despite attempts to improve productivity and transform production, changes paralleled those in agriculture generally. The reasons include short-term costbenefits to the planters and also complexities of landholding, lack of a free labour market and competition with other cash crops. A less obvious resilience and autonomy of indigenous methods also played a part. A key problem from a development perspective was that indigo was grown by large numbers of raiyats along with other crops, using existing methods. The crop was bought by the landlord or moneylender who had ensured it was grown, meaning a coercive thikadar or the provider of a harvest loan. When it came to production methods or quality, planters tried to impose rules but were unable to enforce them. The cultivator had little or no incentive to make improvements— presumably less for indigo, an often-resented commitment, than for other marketable crops or even those for his own consumption. European investors were markedly foreign to Bihar but had limited impact on cultivating practice despite decades of involvement. The indigo planter of North Bihar was a special case (as was the opium agency) because he linked the countryside directly to international trade; but he did not deviate from the norm in dealing with cultivators. He was an instrument of social and political hierarchy as well as of external involvement. The persistence of local command structures accounted for the pluralistic economic system existing in Bihar in 1920. Perhaps elites were broadened through commercialisation; at least they were maintained. But modern capitalists were old-fashioned or newly fashioned controllers using land tenure and debt because of strong systems that confronted them. The context for indigo planters in Bihar was unlike those for tea planters in Assam or Sri Lanka or sugar planters on Mauritius. Land-based social power was a greater obstacle than labour supply. Planters attempted capitalist farming using zirat and landless labour, but that was hard to expand given local competition, value systems and British law. The line of least resistance, the best opportunity for quick increases in indigo acreage, was coercion of raiyats on their own holdings. That made sense too for flexibility and because, once control had been achieved, it needed very short-term seasonal advances rather than land purchase. Indigo also did not transform ways raiyats connected with markets. Harvests were shared out within villages and a proportion directly sold to meet obligations; the poor commonly exchanged higher-value production for coarser grains through patrons or traders and at local haats. Other extralocal marketing relied on itinerants (beoparis)—general or specialist traders and agents, often trying to encourage cash crops, dealing (as said) in villages with cultivators or local controllers and in towns with merchants and exporters. Direct links between exporters and village controllers were rare. Reports of increasing marketing by the end of the nineteenth century meant a few villagers, including banias, expanding their commercial activities. Beoparis 223

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still flourished in the 1920s; the growing number of carts, in proportion to population, roads and volume of trade, did not indicate wider direct access to markets even for rice.28 Planters had not challenged these norms. They had no need to attempt a difficult social transformation. On the contrary there were advantages for them in their methods. One is evident in their preference for dispersal over consolidation; that is, for the cultivation of indigo in a small proportion of many holdings rather than in a few concentrated farms. Planters did not have to pay enough for the crop to provide a living wage to the producer. A similar strategy was applied by rural elites as they sought to benefit more directly from commercial agriculture (and even by jobbers when paying for semi-rural labour in cotton mills). Raiyats found subsistence of a kind from cultivation as they had always done while meeting demands for rent and revenue; or, probably more correctly, food, labour and wealth were still distributed inequitably in villages as a whole. Rural labour was not unambiguously a commodity, and profits supporting the rentier class did not arise from a single exclusive relationship between landowner and agriculturist, employer and worker. Instead, profit margins were widened because farmworkers had small plots of land or other local employment. The income of cultivators, even the semi-landed, was not just a proportion of produce retained or sold for subsistence. It was subject to a ‘tribute system’.29 One aspect was exchanging superior for inferior food grains—by smallholders to meet demands upon them and elites when paying for labour. Dependants retained more and better food if their overlords were weak. Conversely, as well as being poorly paid for cash crops, they retained less as means and incentives for exploitation increased. Important lessons are implied about agricultural improvement in Bihar. Indigo seems an anomaly in comparison with the familiar trajectory of economic modernisation: capitalist investment was not increasing productivity; arguably it was reducing it. For planters over many years, a low-cost, low-quality system produced high profits. Its weakness became obvious at the end of the nineteenth century. Neither success nor failure was met by informed attempts to improve the crop or the efficiency of production. There were ‘colonial’ reasons for this: alliance with local officials, use of law and penalties, the industry’s management and financial structures. Some reasons were indigenous: conditions of agriculture and socio-political complexities affecting access to and uses of land. The outcome was that cultivators did not enjoy the benefit of profits or new methods and opportunities. Instead, their conditions worsened and their vulnerability increased.

Notes 1 See also Robb, ‘Peasants’ Choices’. For indigo see pp.  25–34; some of that material will be repeated or summarised here for convenience. See Kerkhoff, Colonising Plants, ch.4 and passim, for background on European involvement

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with indigo, opium and tobacco—framed by Scott, Seeing like a State, on the risk of ‘radically simplified designs’ for social and natural environments, in line with other analyses of colonial categorisation (including mine). Interesting findings not pursued by Kerkhoff (nor alas by me in this book) were (1) Bengali immigrants as managers and agents of European opium and indigo enterprises in Bihar; (2) Kurmis predominating as cultivators of opium and (3) Koiris of indigo. Of these (1) was attributed to Basak, Socio-Cultural Study, pp.  24–7; (2) to Chowdhury, Growth, vol.1, p. 49; and (3) to G.S. Henderson, Director of Agriculture, Bihar and Orissa, in 1931. 2 See Kumar, Indigo, on the exploitative nature of production (‘local context’), ‘market and trade networks’ and information and ‘modern science’ broadly defined, ranging back to Jean-Baptiste Labat in the eighteenth century (quotations from pp.  19–20). Kumar’s analysis is original, differing somewhat from mine, stressing indigenous knowledge of indigo but also (as will be discussed here) planters investigating and experimenting when faced with competition from synthetic dyes. See also Balfour-Paul, Indigo. 3 See Kling, Blue Mutiny. 4 Apart from the resistance in Champaran famously taken up by Gandhi in 1917, there were many earlier protests. Newspapers reported among other smaller demonstrations a gathering of 15,000 against the planters when King George V passed through Champaran by train in 1912; Beharee, 28 September, 1 & 25–7 October & 23 November 1912, and also a pro-planter paper, Behar Herald, 7 December 1912, Native Newspapers Report II, 5 October, 2 & 23 November & 21 December 1912, G/I H. Political Proceedings B57 November, B108 & 111 December 1912 & B76–9, March 1913. The wartime protests were probably as much against rent increases as against indigo, though planters were attempting to resume and increase production. See R&A Rev A13 April & A51–9, November 1917; G/Home Confidential Proceedings A323 July 1917; Robb, ‘Officials and Non-officials’, pp. 199–202, 209–10. 5 See n.8, this chapter. 6 The decline will be briefly discussed later. It was attributed to competition from analine and sulphur dyes first produced in Germany. They competed with indigo and also made possible a wide range of fast dyes in other colours. Other problems according to Bihar planters included the advent of military khaki, changes in clothing fashion and the use of leather upholstery for seating in motorcars (rather than cloth in carriages); J. Thomas & Co. to C.R. MacDonald, Daulatpur, 13 December 1908, and also a memorial of the general committee of the Bihar Planters’ Association, R&A Agric B14 July 1908. Internal competition for natural indigo came from more efficient regions (judging from comparisons of output per acre)—slowly declining production in Madras and minor but growing production in Punjab. See ns.10 & 23, this chapter. 7 Kling, Blue Mutiny. 8 There are extensive sources in official records, as well as in secondary works, on indigo cultivation. For some details of indigo acreage and out-turn see R&A Agric C12 & 20 January & C8 October 1898. A convenient summary, unintentionally revealing about changes between the 1870s and 1890s, is used here unless otherwise stated: R&A Agric A17–18 January 1891. 9 PC to BR, 7 April 1888, PCR 350 21/5 1888/9. Fisher, ‘Planters and Peasants’, claims debt servitude was not the basis of planters’ control over raiyats (as it was seasonal) but the system transferred profit away from cultivators towards zamindars as well as planters.

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10 Appendix B, G/I Revenue Despatch no.8 (1889), R&A Agric A30 February 1890. That there was ‘nothing in the cultivation of Indigo which need make that cultivation distasteful to the Ryot’ was a commonplace in official thinking, though this phrase referred to production in Madras: No.113 of 1860, 12 October 1860, List of Despatches, H.Public June-December 1860. 11 Reid to Under-Secretary of State for India, 25 September 1894, R&A Rev B18 December 1894. 12 It is claimed good harvests improved the raiyats’ situation in the 1890s; Fisher, ‘Planters and Peasants’. 13 Reid to Chas. Bernard, 14 August  1894, R&A Rev B18 December  1894. Returns were calculated on Reid’s factories at Sadowa and Maniora in a year when average prices were the ‘very lowest on record’ and after paying to raiyats and labourers what was claimed to be 25 or 50% more than other estates. Evidence for corrupt collusion included two accusations: first, Hudson, ‘honoured and petted’ as president of the planters’ association, was involved in the worst practices of the indigo system; second, the district judge permitted the acquisition of a large number of villages in farm (as thikadar) and imposition of the assamiwar system on them, trebling indigo production at the Belsund factory (run by an enemy of Reid’s) in Sitamarhi, Muzaffarpur. 14 See for example Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Harmondsworth 1976, p. 488: ‘if great improvements are to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen’. 15 R&A Rev A3 December 1894 (including Reid’s letter of 25 September). Edward Maclagan was Under-Secretary of the Revenue and Agriculture Department. Born in Punjab, he was later its Chief Secretary before returning to Revenue and Agriculture as Secretary, then becoming Punjab’s Governor. Reid also wrote to the India Office in London: Reid to C. Bernard, 9 August 1894, R&A Rev B18 December 1894. He declared recent disaffection in Bihar had been ‘poohpoohed’ by planters’ friends, officials who ‘ought to know’ how the raiyats were ‘crushed under the combined evils of the thikadari and indigo systems’. Indigo again attracted attention in a Parliamentary inquiry in 1890 after being highlighted in the preliminary survey of Muzaffarpur by E.W. Collin in 1886; Muzaffarpur Cadastral Survey Report, Parliamentary Papers, HC188 of 1892. Collin also published Report on the Existing Arts and Industries in Bengal, Calcutta 1890. 16 Translations of Hindi agreements appended to R&A Agric A17–18 January 1891. The term bidah referred to a light reploughing while crops, usually millets, were growing. See also W.C. Macpherson, 4 February 1889, with Muzaffarpur Coll to PC, PCR 345–6 24/10 1888/9: ‘The documents generally declare that the executant . . . will cultivate for a specified number of years in a particular manner (set forth in the documents); that the outturn of the crop will be valued at a certain named rate per bigha’, subject to the deduction of all advances; that ‘the cultivator will pay the landlord’s rent’ and, in default of the agreement, damages to the factory. Sometimes it was provided that if the cultivator grew cotton or arhar on the land, the planter had the right to plough it up. Planters might go on cultivators’ land or exchange plots for others belonging to them. 17 G. Roy, Deputy Coll, to Saran Coll, 30 September/October 1889, PCR 350 2/472 1889/90. This description was also referred to in Robb, ‘Peasants’ Choices’. 18 Grierson, Behar Peasant Life, pp. 177–8, 197–201, 313–20. See also R&A Agric C2 May, C2 October & C7 & 9 December 1898. This and the next five paragraphs expand on three in Robb, ‘Peasants’ Choices’. 19 Grierson, Behar Peasant Life, especially Division III.

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0 Ibid., Division VI. 2 21 Ibid., p. 216. On millets and weavers: Kodo marua an nāhiñ, Jolha dhuniya jan nahiñ. On castes, rajpūt o dhān ke or nāhiñ hai (Rajputs and rice are unlimited) and dhān bābhan keñ ekke hai (rice and Babhans are one and the same). On seasonal effects (ibid. pp. 226–7): Jab marua a ke gāchhi bhel/Dhiya puta sukh sukh mācchi bhel/Jab marua meñ bāl bhel/Dhiya puta ke gāl bhel (When the marwa began to sprout the children dried up like flies; when it came in the ear, the children got fat cheeks). 22 See Friedman, ‘World Market’ and Harris, Rural Development. 23 R&A Agric B14 July 1908. My own indices, taking 1902/3 as 100, show areas under indigo in 1906/8 as 54 in Bengal (mainly meaning Bihar), 100 in Madras and 148 in Punjab. In more detail, Bengal indices were 98 by area and 145 by amount in 1903/4; 87 and 111 in 1904/5; 63 and 62 in 1905/6; 54 and 73 in 1906/7. There were other changes. In 1906/7 the equivalent to 88% of 1902/3 output was obtained from only 70% of the area. Exports from Bihar declined 40% between 1904/5 and 1906/7; those from Madras by 10%. 24 R&A Agric A4–16 March 1912; Mishra, Agrarian Problems, p. 104. 25 Notes by Leather, R&A Agric C3–5 May 1899, and by Watt, R&A Agric A6–8 August 1900. Rhea or green ramie (boehmeria nivea), a plant of the nettle family, was grown for fibre and food. 26 Note by Christopher Rawson, then also employed as a chemist by planters, 17 June 1907, R&A Agric A26–7 June 1907. See F.G. Sly’s note, 31 August 1905, R&A Agric A29–39 September 1906. 27 R&A Agric B9 May 1901, B6–8 July 1903, A9 September 1903 & A3–4 January 1905; Reid to Hamilton, 20 March 1899, R&A Agric B3 May 1899; Mollinson, ‘Note on Cotton Experiments in Bihar’, R&A Economic Products A1–16 June 1904. 28 Fisher, ‘Planters and Peasants’. See also the comments in ch.13, n.24, this volume. 29 Bhaduri, Economic Structure, pp.  8–9. Bhaduri’s theoretical statement of features of agrarian society included growing importance of forced commercial production rather than rent to extract ‘surplus’, primitive accumulation relying more on ‘compulsions . . . created by the mechanism of debt’ than on competition through efficiency (such as larger farms) and developmental detriment from ‘involuntary market involvement’.

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Opium Having considered indigo from a development perspective, we now turn to opium, with the focus more on poverty.1 Later I  discuss sugarcane, in its own right and because many cultivators and controllers of production turned to it in place of indigo and opium. But first, the chapter explores how and why Bihar’s comparative impoverishment may have been related to the collapse of opium exports in the twentieth century. There were strong parallels between opium and indigo. The latter was a victim of competition and changing demand, the former subject to a legal embargo. To assess opium’s economic impact we need to ask who had been prospering when it was at its height. In the absence of detailed comparative data, deductions from what is known about rural production provide an indirect way to assess conditions for cultivators and rural workers, ways in which production was managed and benefits enjoyed, or not. In Bihar, unlike some other regions, opium cultivation was a fixture.2 The areas heavily involved changed little, though output, price and acreage varied. In the mid-eighteenth century Bihar produced the most and the best opium in India. The Patna agency predated the East India Company monopoly of 1773. Until the 1820s Bihar accounted for 80 per cent or more of the Company’s production; it was almost as important again in the late 1840s; generally it represented about 60 per cent. The area under cultivation was extended more than 2½ times between 1840 and 1880. The cost to government of opium production remained fairly constant irrespective of out-turn or total receipts until the l820s. The price of opium fluctuated and therefore also the ratio between profits and charges, which averaged about 10:1 while ranging from near parity to 20:1. From the mid-1820s costs rose, with output and in proportion to profits (the ratio falling to 2:1 or 3:1), until the 1840s, when output and costs were cut dramatically while profits continued to rise. Between 1845 and 1880, the ratio of net receipts to charges was consistently 20:1 or better. Payments to cultivators for crude opium remained between Rs.3 and Rs.4 per seer from 1820 until 1860 and 228

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between Rs.4/8 and Rs.5 from 1860 to 1880. The government profited. The trend over most of the nineteenth century was a huge increase in the value of the crop while crude opium prices to the cultivator remained stable. The key to production was an advance-payments system already established in essentials during the eighteenth century and later embodied in Regulation VI of 1799. In 1831 a scheme to abandon advance payments was ruled out as impracticable. In the early period raiyats were said to welcome opium advances in preference to the exactions of zamindars. Even much later, in the 1880s, zamindars were still allegedly hostile to opium cultivation because it promoted independence among raiyats. The system comprised three distinct levels above the cultivators. At the top were the Collector as Deputy Opium Agent and his sub-deputies, 11 of them in Bihar. Next were minor officials, a gomashta who received the opium and was paid a salary and commission and a ziladar on salary only, responsible for groups of 20 or 30 villages. An important task of the minor officials was to prevent the growers from retaining any opium or disposing of it privately. At the third level was the lambardar or khatadar, ostensibly representing the cultivators, paid only by a commission on the opium. In the 1880s there were 25,000 khatadars with an average of 32 cultivators each. They had replaced local agents under various titles including a second tier that disappeared after 1840. They probably derived from them and those described early in the century as ‘principal cultivators’. The khatadar was the lynchpin. He recruited cultivators or assamis. He alone was signatory to agreements they supposedly made. He arranged with the ziladar to receive and distribute cash advances up to three times each year. He organised irrigation loans and their repayment. He brought the assami with his crop to the ziladar and gomashta and distributed final payments for opium. In practice (though not in regulations) he issued the taidad or estimate of the crop that the gomashta presented in February or March to decide on the second advance-payment. Some suspected the remarkable congruence between the taidad and actual collections after harvest, which the Opium Department thought a matter for congratulation, in reality indicated the level of fraud. Illicit profits could stick at any level, but the khatadar was best-placed: dominant over raiyats, out of view for senior opium agents and engaged in a large number of petty transactions. He was one of the relatively powerful and solvent intermediaries, village officials and rich peasants who benefited from becoming agents for commercial undertakings or assisting with rent collection.3 Opium seems to have brought some economic benefits and probably contributed to an improvement for some of the agricultural castes, as well as increasing the dominance of the khatadars, particularly after the 1880s when attempts were made to prevent more obvious abuses of the system. Its chief value was in providing ready money through advance payments and loans for rent and agricultural investment. Over loans, opium agents were 229

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more relaxed than district officials, worrying less about security for repayment (because of their control over the poppy crop) or about purposes to which the money was to be put, though still insisting on prompt repayment. The sums involved were not inconsiderable. At the beginning of the century resources of local Collectors were inadequate to meet the investment, and money had to be borrowed from local mahajans at rates of at least 12 per cent. That ended in the 1820s as local finances began to be placed on a more regular footing; thereafter, money came from government and profits of the trade itself. The usual advances were Rs.5 per bigha initially, enough to prepare land and sow the crop, then up to Rs.4 in January and perhaps as much as another Rs.3 in March. Not much below 500,000 bighas were under opium cultivation in the 1870s and 1880s. A well could cost between Rs.10 and 12 or as much as Rs.200; over three years from 1879 to 1882, 790 masonry wells were built and 305 repaired while 9,222 ordinary ones were built and 155 repaired. Advances of more than Rs.89,000 were made in one year. This effort was concentrated in relatively few areas of Saran and south Bihar because the light alkaline soils in the north were thought unsuitable for irrigation. Elsewhere in the south the Son canals interrupted and superseded well irrigation and to some extent poppy cultivation. In all, known annual inputs with no allowance for fraud totalled between Rs.25 and Rs.40 per bigha under the crop. Moreover, opium was a cash crop at times and in places where few alternative cash crops were available. In Bihar only limited areas grew cereals of quality suitable for marketing and local prices were very responsive to out-turn, reducing returns to cultivators from good harvests. Much of the rice, wheat, barley and maize was poor. and millets and pulses were mostly ‘not much superior to the seeds of wild grasses’; even in the dearest seasons they had limited market value.4 Opium, though cheap in relation to government profits, was a valuable crop locally and paid for at a fixed rate; it could provide a source of capital or credit for the development of other crops. An opium cultivator was also a man closely involved with agents of government. That might have benefits in dealings with landlords and other dominant people. He tended to pay money rents on all his land at a time when some zamindars were trying to extend their zirat and the arena of informal unregulated rents so as to extend produce sharing or sharecropping. Moreover, even if the raiyat were already secure in his right to pay a money rent, if he produced opium he had a regular source of money instead of being forced by rent demands to sell his crop by a particular date regardless of price. He should also in theory have had less reason than most to borrow at usurious rates to meet short- or long-term personal needs. Thus a raiyat might be a willing party to the opium agreements, for example to escape a debt to a zamindar. People with existing obligations were not supposed to be enlisted, but no effective checks were made. 230

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On the other hand, such raiyats were likely to find that they had merely exchanged one master for another; they were still subject to a control system. It is instructive that the opium loans were very regularly repaid; khatadars deducted instalments from payments for opium and were no doubt unwilling to invite official interference by getting into arrears. For a glimpse of this less favourable aspect of opium cultivation we can turn to a report in the early 1880s by A.C. Mangles, Opium Agent in Bihar. He was becoming anxious about competition from other crops and waning interest in opium. He complained that very many legal cases were being instituted, especially in Gaya and Champaran, whereby cultivators were punished for having very small quantities of opium in their possession. Almost all prosecutions followed a police search of property in response to information laid against a raiyat and consequent discovery of a rag impregnated with opium or tiny quantities in a pot used in its manufacture. In one case at least the informer, allowed to accompany the police on their search, was suspected of planting the opium himself. The government did buy the cloth and residue from processing, but in Mangles’ view it was to be expected that even the most honest cultivator would keep back small quantities for his own medicinal purposes. Such a man was obviously different from an illicit dealer in the drug. Mangles complained that indiscriminate persecution by police or excise officers was bound to discourage opium cultivation.5 Mangles did not ask why there should have been a rash of informers seeking police intervention, usually steadfastly avoided in villages. The strict laws governing opium offered a weapon to any enemy of an opium raiyat, but the most likely person to have made use of it was the man already wellconnected with officials, a man seeking to control cultivators. Who would have more reason to involve the police than a khatadar making an example of a troublesome assami, perhaps one wanting to escape his clutches and give up opium? One zamindar provided evidence to the Opium Commission in the 1890s that this was happening. The ziladars, he said, coerced unwilling tenants with the assistance of native police and trumped-up charges. A  zamindar was arguably not a neutral witness, and Arthur Forbes, the Commissioner of Patna, was sceptical about collusion between ziladars and police. But then, Forbes too had a reason for his conclusions: he was concerned to show opium was still grown under a voluntary system as required by Regulation VI of 1799.6 By the l890s opium production was becoming a political issue, largely because it was in government hands. Particular allegations now substantiated the claim that state agents were coercing cultivators. Forbes still denied the charges. In 1893 he toured four Bihar districts with other members of the opium enquiry, visited places where opium was weighed and asked large numbers of cultivators about their grievances. They were many: low prices paid, exactions by native staff, stern collection of outstanding loans. No one suggested he had been forced to produce opium, claimed Forbes. He had 231

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a comforting vision of British officials as all-knowing benefactors. ‘Every native knows’, he said, ‘that he is perfectly free to come and present himself before us, and they take every advantage of the liberty. . . . The people look upon the Collector, the Commissioner and the district officer as their natural protector.’ His position was not only paternalistic but also defensive. Officers on tour, he claimed, received complaints, even against other departments of government, but never that raiyats had been compelled to grow poppy. His evidence might be convincing if judged solely from the acreage given over to opium. In 1890/1 only in two areas was less land sown than had been agreed—in 11 cases there was slightly more. Opium did decline in fields adjoining towns or near railways with opportunities for cash crops such as tobacco or potatoes and other vegetables. Well-placed raiyats could decide against opium, and khatadars too could choose to take it up or become involved in a more profitable crop. An earlier chapter noted the preference for rice in areas served by the Son canals. But these exceptions are far from showing that when the cultivator chose opium he did so for economic reasons without any pressure. Whatever the general advantages to cultivators and a possibility the system was better regulated by the end of the century, those who controlled it locally were bound to enjoy the largest share of any local benefit. Poppy was difficult to grow. Methods of cultivation were exhausting to the soil. In Saran, for example, it took the best land and used up most of the cultivators’ small supply of manure, sown in mid-November on copiously irrigated plots from which a crop of chinna might also be taken in May and another of wheat and barley in September. Poppy was labour-intensive. Cultivators had to water it continually until it was two or three inches high and then thin it two or three times. Harvest began with removal of petals and involved repeated lancing of opium pods, a process lasting over several weeks. The drug was dried in cloth. As said, both cloths and liquid residue were collected by opium agents. The flowers were made into opium cakes packed in the leaves and stalks of the plant. That was considered women’s work and was undertaken mainly by Koiris and Kurmis; higher castes preferred to forgo the small additional payment involved. Also bearing on the issue of coercion, disadvantages of opium were increasingly felt in the later nineteenth century while the area under cultivation was maintained or extended. For years before the 1880s, cultivation expanded as government profits grew (along with additional costs). But in Bihar total production measured in chests of opium remained remarkably stable over nearly two decades to 1883. Cultivators were paid a price per seer: returns per acre must have declined. If cultivators wished to give up opium, there were opportunities: the agency constantly battled planters who offered the alternatives of sugar or indigo on similar terms. Why then should opium acreage have been greater as returns fell? Why should it increase when many zamindars opposed it? Pressure must have been exerted. An 232

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onerous crop was cultivated because of raiyats’ dependence and khatadars’ profits. Agents of the opium department were well-placed to bear down on growers. As far as the state or exporters were concerned compulsion was indirect. But even Forbes gave compelling testimony about the petty tyranny of the department’s local subordinates—a commonplace of official thinking, applied also to police or the irrigation department. Forbes was convinced ziladars and khatadars—being badly paid, the latter at one rupee per maund—were bound to derive illegal income from their office. ‘The Government’, he explained, ‘promises the ryot 5Rs a seer for his opium, but it distributes the money through unpaid subordinates and thus makes itself an accomplice to their peculations.’ Most abuses were hidden. Ill feeling was shown in repeated complaints about the crops’ unprofitability and its oppressive agents, starting with cultivators’ petitions in the early nineteenth century. Isolated conflicts came to official attention but only between levels of management. In a typical incident, a European opium officer ordered the uprooting of a crop of potatoes on a small plot of land and sowing of poppy instead. The cultivator was a khatadar who had taken an opium advance but disagreed about the area of land that he had sown; he was supported in his story by three or four other khatadars. By comparison, specific oppression of assamis was unlikely to reach officials. Their attention was directed towards khatadars’ depredations from time to time after 1818, but no one ever seems to have been successfully prosecuted in Bihar. In effect, oppression was the system. The state’s monopoly was a great tyranny matched by petty exploitation. Khatadars would have preferred higher prices, but their profits depended not so much on what was paid as on how many could be drawn into the net and what proportion of agency loans and payments could be withheld from raiyats.7 Zamindars and planters also sought control over rural society but seldom offered a better alternative. Advance payments (as Forbes pointed out) were used by mahajans, indigo planters and by analogy ‘even in private matters such as hiring a palky’ (palanquin). They suggest complex, even parallel systems of control and a dynamic within society. In agriculture, they led to dispersed cultivation and indirect management. Tenurial relations implied authorities at different levels: overarching eminence of state or great raja; closer power of the thikadar, ijaradar or small zamindar; influence of jeth raiyats and patwaris. These were powers ranged in mutual dependence along a chain of command over rent and land allocation. Alternative influences, probably increasingly important during the nineteenth century, were commercial intermediaries, agents potentially competitive with those who controlled people through land. I  have discussed indigo thikadars in that role. Any village powers who did not provide credit and engage in the market could lose out to those who did. 233

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Hence an already-established system fostered commercial agriculture. Agents were important partly because there was no breakdown of existing structures nor their replacement by capitalist relations. The prerequisite was differentiated peasantry, various kinds of controller and different routes to village-level control. Not all merely assisted the same high castes, landlords or village officers; some promised benefits to successful agriculturists and traders. But all represented advantages for a few, developing out of an existing order and its intrinsic inequalities. The opium khatadar was not important because he caused upheaval in society. He mattered because he perpetuated existing patterns of advantage and disadvantage.8 The international ban on the trade in opium after the international convention of 1912 (effective from 1915) had an immediate effect on the opium agents. Cultivators too lost a source of income that was crucial, albeit limited. A major occasion for investment in the countryside was lost. The same was true when indigo exports were crippled by artificial dyes. Bihar’s agrarian system had to adjust after a sudden double shock: sharp decrease in income that had dripped down from the profits of these trades and withdrawal or redeployment of external capital that had sustained much agriculture from season to season, bridging between investment, cultivation and harvest. Necessary adjustments were made within existing parameters. They were an opportunity for renewed oppression and deeper poverty.

Sugar There have been extensive studies of cane sugar production in north India, and there is no need to go over the same ground here.9 But the industry is relevant for what it too illustrates about continuities over time, inflexibility of method and vulnerability to competition characteristic of Bihar’s agricultural production. It was not a monopoly like opium, nor like indigo a product manufactured mostly by modern factory methods and for export. But it shared features with both these crops. It developed as a cash crop alongside them. Sugar ventures were set up in Bengal as early as the 1820s. The East India Company had been looking for profitable commodities to expand its revenues and trade. Despite many failures, European and Indian capital continued to be invested in cane sugar throughout the nineteenth century.10 No doubt there would have been yet more expansion except that Indian production could not compete with sugar from slave economies nor, later, with plantations where fieldworkers were indentured migrants. However, Bengal’s problem was not mainly higher labour costs. It was low yields per acre and high rents and interest charges. Sugar continued to be cultivated mainly on very small plots. Entrenched property interests and social controls meant that outside investors found it virtually impossible to set up plantations or recruit labour. Even central factories had difficulty purchasing cane in a 234

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competitive market. In Bihar, Thomson & Mylne were repeatedly unable to persuade Shahabad raiyats to specialise in sugar or supply either canes or part-processed sugar directly to their factory. Cultivators, subject to oppression by landlords, merchants or moneylenders, were more likely to pilfer from their own fields than have independent means to invest. Conditions reduced the opportunity for economies of scale and development. From the 1880s various attempts to introduce improved canes had some help from the local government. Results were mixed. Among other factors, higheryielding canes could prove less resistant to disease and drought. Even if production had been been increased and streamlined, the market for Bihar’s sugar remained limited. It was uncompetitive internationally. Sugarcane was another troublesome crop.11 It had the reputation of needing care including (according to a Bihari proverb) three waterings and 13 hoeings. Actual practice was less assiduous, especially south of the Ganges, but possibly became more careful from the later nineteenth century. Cultivation extended over more than one season: planting took place in February; harvesting and processing began between January and April of the following year and often continued into the hot weather. By contrast indigo was sown in March and processed between July and September. Land intended for cane was ploughed at least twice and often more. Cuttings were placed in shallow furrows, watered once and hoed once and allowed to grow into an impenetrable mass. That was thought to reduce damage from pests and drought but also kept output low. The estimated average was at best 30 maunds per acre of gur, about half that obtained in Bengal. Until the 1880s, the first stage of manufacture was laboriously crushing canes in a kolh or kolhu, a large wooden pestle-and-mortar device similar in design to ones used for oilseeds. Work began with a ritual to anoint a round idol, makhar bir.12 Cultivators usually took it in turns to operate the mill themselves or with hired labour. There were specialist workers, typically paid (in north Bihar) only with leaves and stubble they could use as cattle fodder. They cut canes, divided them into lengths, drove and fed the mill and removed the debris. The kolh consisted of a straight-sided cylinder to hold short lengths of cane and a pestle in the form of an adjustable lever attached to an upright above a narrow platform that was drawn around the cylinder by bullocks. Cane was crushed as the pestle moved down and around; juice flowed out through an opening in the base. On one side of the platform sat the bullock driver; usually another man stirred the cane, help force it under the pestle and cleaned out the bowl where juice collected. This design with local variations was common throughout much of Asia over long periods. However, by the time of Grierson’s linguistic survey of Bihar, no working examples could be found in the Sadr subdivision of Patna district. Everywhere the old press was being replaced, as already noted, by the Behea iron mill that crushed the cane between rollers. It implied investment and though it saved on manpower was still powered by bullocks. 235

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Details of sugar manufacture indicate the scale of equipment, manpower and cooperation involved. The need was obviously considerable for the traditional kohl; the Behea mill did not reduce interdependence. Substantial raiyats and brokers always funded and managed production; they employed cultivators when it suited them. Ordinary raiyats were unable to master techniques or gather resources to carry out full or even kachcha (crude) processing as was necessary for a product that could be sold. The Behea mill became another asset shared among cultivators in return for enhanced dominance of its owner. The number of mills increased exponentially from the late 1880s. Around 250,000 were sold between 1874 and 1891 including (after 1880) an improved model with two rollers. They lowered costs and increased output and quality of gur and the proportion of crystallisable sugar. They were purchased by enterprising landlords, rich peasants, merchants and moneylenders—in short the people concerned about improved returns and reduced inputs of labour and animal power. When they came to be universally used, poorer cultivators had to hire or share those belonging to others. As they were labour-saving, like many of the agricultural improvements sought by scientists, they provided another advantage for their owner but hardly for displaced men, women and children who had earned their subsistence by working the old wooden mills.13 External intervention was needed even more in later stages of sugar production. The juice (ras) had to be boiled until it formed a liquid (rab) from which gur would be obtained after further boiling. For kanchi chini (coarse sugar) the cultivator was required to keep sample pans boiling for a week after the sugar-maker had clarified the juice; the granulated mixture was then drained and resultant gur weighed to calculate the payment to be made. The bania set a price and took away the juice or rab in earthen vessels. He then repeated the same procedure of clarification and boiling, poured the mixture into further containers (called nad) and allowed liquid molasses to drain for two or three days. After scraping away a few inches, he added a layer of semwar or sewar, a river grass, on top of the gur. Two days later granular sugar would have formed on the surface; it was removed and the process repeated until there was no further heat from slight fermentation developed by sewar, indicating that the molasses had all drained away. By the late 1880s this method too was beginning to disappear, replaced by sugar turbines that separated liquid from rab within hours rather than days. But again they represented a capital outlay beyond the means of ordinary cultivators. Methods of the karkhanadars, larger and more professional intermediaries, were similar but more elaborate.14 They preferred to buy gur that they expected the cultivators to produce themselves. They diluted it with water until it was approximately the consistency of cane juice, placed it in shallow iron pans about 8 feet wide and boiled it for about six hours while adding large quantities of milk and water and drawing off scum from the surface. 236

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The mixture was then removed and strained into earthen nads; the pan was cleaned, and similar quantities of syrup were added to it with an emulsion of crushed caster seeds and boiled vigorously for a few minutes. The resultant spongy mixture, called kiman, was then ladled successively into five cooling pans, each larger than the last, and finally poured into deep nads and left for a week. When the nads were unplugged, molasses was allowed to drain off, now-solid kiman was broken into large lumps and sewar was applied repeatedly to form granules of sugar. In the final stage sugar was spread out on drying platforms in the sun and kneaded with bare feet. The molasses was stored until the rainy season, when it was reboiled and processed to produce a small amount of additional sugar. No technical innovations seem to have been made in this manufacture in the late nineteenth century. These detailed descriptions show first that raiyats did not escape the burden of manufacture altogether for cane, as also for opium and to a lesser extent indigo. They had to crush cane and boil juice to produce rab or (for the karkhanadar) gur. Second, elaborate, specialist and drawn-out processes and economies of scale related to necessary items of equipment and to manand animal-power. They necessitated cooperation between raiyats over timing of planting and harvests as well as processing. They also required close involvement by intermediaries, notably moneylenders, producers and wholesalers. These relations derived from needs of production and were mirrored in agrarian hierarchies. They reflected social and physical barriers between producers and sellers. They were not fundamentally altered by technical improvements such as the Behea sugar mill or sugar turbines. Coercion was implicit. Cultivators needed a little cash and were hardpressed to secure it. Sugar like opium and indigo provided money directly or indirectly, as credit or cash. Again, this does not mean cultivators freely entered into agreements to cultivate particular crops. They agreed when they could hardly refuse. Some British observers thought sugar cultivators barely covered their expenses or supplied cane effectively below cost. One estimate from a planter’s representative was that it cost a cultivator 6 to 8 annas to produce a maund of cane for which he received 5½ annas plus some allowances, including one for carting, bringing the total to 7½ to 8 annas. Other figures implied that the raiyat made a small profit; but, even so, allowing for an out-turn of 150 maunds and 10 rupees in rent, the return per acre would be under 20 rupees over two years. The calculations were made in money terms, though a small cultivator spent little cash on production. Hence prices for cane could fall well below what would have been sustainable if village labour, daily food and other expenses had all been paid for in cash. A question is thus once again why the area under cane expanded in line with marketing opportunities throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, especially given that it had a long season and was usually grown as an alternative, not in addition to other cash crops. The driver of expansion 237

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was profit available to independent producers and brokers, as was also the case for opium. For the karkhanadar in the 1890s profits were thought to exceed 20 per cent. They can also be judged from later calculations by European manufacturers. In 1900, Ernest Mylne (from the company in Shahabad) put costs at almost Rs.52 per bigha and value of average out-turn at Rs.71/8. North Bihari planters thought cultivation would be much cheaper at Rs.30 or Rs.40 per acre plus manufacturing costs of Rs.16 and transportation expenses of Rs.30, which would produce a profit between 80 and 100 per cent at current Calcutta prices. A crucial difference was the relative cost to kharkanadar and raiyat. A kharkanadar enjoyed economies of scale. He might pay Rs.3/8 per maund for gur, a standard rate, and only 12 annas for fuel and labour. An individual raiyat would have to share or hire equipment, bullocks and men on the basis of his own output alone. The mechanism for the intermediaries’ profits was social or economic control over the majority of cultivators extending beyond the commercial transaction. Production relations in Bihar were not identical with the bel system of Rohilkhand in which advances were based on annual stamped and registered agreements to supply cane at whatever price the refiner subsequently set. But the part played by advance payments was generally as true of Bihar as elsewhere and of both kachcha and pakka (high-quality) production; all ‘took place within a complex system of indebtedness and dependence’. In Shahabad, as already mentioned, Thomson & Mylne concluded it was impossible to institute a central factory system based on steam-driven machinery, partly because raiyats refused to grow cane for them or sell standing crops at ‘fair valuation’. The obstacle was the price paid under existing local arrangements even for gur or rab of poor quality and cultivators’ obligations to landlords, banias or karkhanadars. In short, pervasive managers and brokers of sugar processing were an impediment to alternative means and relations of production.

Varying trends in southern and northern Bihar The features just outlined did not imply stasis. There were significant changes in the decades before and after 1900. Southern Bihar saw an expansion of kachcha production and petty manufacture of gur, associated with technological changes and increased consumption. The change was even greater in comparison with a decline in pakka chini. New mills and turbines prompted a revolution in sugar production for small-scale producers. They spread at a remarkable rate, sponsored by intermediaries already discussed. In Shahabad, to which new centrifugal machines were initially confined, 15 were sold in 1884, 85 in 1885 and 150 in 1886. By then they already dominated kachcha production in Nasriganj, Jagdispur and Raghunathpur. The market for kachcha sugar, especially for various sweetmeats, was protected by cultural and social preference for less-refined products. For pakka 238

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chini, competition came from imports that were significantly cheaper and in certain respects better. Their impact was initially limited by prejudice against machine-made sugar on grounds of flavour and sweetness and due to a suspicion that bone-charcoal was used in its manufacture. However, it kept drier in damp weather and could profitably be added to many cooked or manufactured items. Sugar production increased, especially in Shahabad with the Son canals, but also changed in character. Fully refined production was ousted from the Calcutta market by imports from Mauritius and began to decline more generally in comparison with demand for less-refined sugar. The change was not as dramatic as with the date-sugar industry of Bengal proper, for cane sugar continued to be sent to inland areas not yet invaded by imports and consumption increased within Bihar itself. But change was inexorable nonetheless, eloquently summed up in 1891 by B.C. Basu, the Bengal government’s sugar expert. He reported foreign sugar had ousted native sugar wherever its ‘cheapness and superiority’ was recognised and its use ‘not affected by religious prejudices’. ‘On the other hand,’ he went on, ‘our exports have died out, not because we cannot spare sugar for export, but because we cannot produce sugar cheap enough to be able to compete in the world’s market.’15 The expansion of lower-quality production in Shahabad made the industry dependent upon the tastes, isolation and poverty of the local market and reduced the value added to local cane. Such a restriction of markets and profits in the context of increasing production and consumption is a familiar feature of long-term decline, most often associated in nineteenth-century rural India with the cotton industry. The threat of competition could only spread. By 1910 foreign sugar had become so much cheaper that it was being mixed with molasses and sold as gur. Bihar production was at a disadvantage but not passive in response to this challenge. During the later nineteenth century local taste gradually began to value white sugar despite continuing suspicion about it; the balance changed gradually in favour of more refined output. Sugar from Indian factories competed with imports, and by the end of the century even khandsari sugar came to be nearer industrial quality.16 In Bihar, Thomson & Mylne played a part. They took the view that the only practical improvements were those that could be made in raiyats’ ‘method of manufacture’, as through Behea sugar mills. In addition, the company sponsored widespread substitution of shallow tins in place of traditional earthenware pots.17 The moral of the example was a very general one: many conditions impeded improvements in crops and methods but could be overcome when it suited those making relevant agricultural decisions. North Bihar was generally similar, with an additional factor, the collapse of the market for indigo. The dominant change was that indigo planters turned to sugar production. They did not need to oust existing controllers of production and marketing. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when 239

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Europeans failed with sugar, the main reasons were overcapitalisation, poor communications and uncertain markets. They diverted their efforts to indigo and adapted local methods of cultivation and procurement already used to ensure supply of other high-value produce such as opium. Forced to return to sugar at the turn of the twentieth century, they at last embraced scientific research, but now their major asset was their existing production system. Using that, indigo planters could readily diversify into turmeric, ginger, chillies or oilseeds as well as sugar, provided conditions of manufacture and marketing were right. Thus, in the twentieth century sugar production expanded in northern Bihar, although natural conditions were not as good as in the south. Planters transferred capital and dependent raiyats away from indigo. Planters did compete among themselves and with brokers for other crops; most factories could not obtain as much cane as they wished. But many cultivators were already beholden to an indigo factory. It would act as its own broker, advancing seed and sometimes money short term. Its raiyats had little choice but to change to sugar, even though it competed directly with other crops and required manure, unlike indigo.18 And once a cultivator had elected to grow sugar he had virtually no choice but to sell to the factory that sponsored him; seldom could he seek out a buyer who would pay a better price or encourage other crops. Even a substantial man with education and urban connections would not always be able to identify outside buyers. There were substantial producers controlling their own output, but most cultivators were not independent. Even in the late 1930s cane was sold through contractors who prevented the establishment of cooperative marketing societies. To some extent these arrangements depended upon practical conditions. Support for cane had to start earlier than for other crops because of the growing period and involve someone ready to support processing. Also alternative markets for cane, apart from local gur production, were limited by the short life of the harvested crop and by transport problems. This gave a former indigo factory a comparative advantage. It would have regular collections during the season and possibly its own light railway. By contrast, independent middlemen had to cope with public roads or railways. Bullock carts were confined to dirt tracks and banned from metalled surfaces at this time; peons of the district board were ready to levy fines for breaches of the rule. Railway stationmasters often had to be bribed to allow access to wagons and those were in short supply. The effect in north Bihar was that sugar cultivation expanded within the parameters of existing landholding and control, much of the increase being a replacement for indigo production under the same restraints.19 Factories set their price for cane in December each year, well before the harvest. They paid by weight, not sucrose content. Growers could increase income by growing more and did so, judging from their reported readiness to adopt 240

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new varieties and use more manure. The factories still had little control over the quality of their raw material. There was little or no check on whether raiyats were harvesting at the optimum time for sugar output—undoubtedly reduced by processing delays by both raiyats and factory because of the limited availability of equipment and labour and because production was usually carried out during the hot weather. Depending on the ambient temperature during manufacture, the proportion of kachcha chini to rab was thought to vary by between 35 and 50 per cent. Even setting aside problems of quality and efficiency, changes affecting sugar in the north and south for planters and karkhandars did not provide a success story. As early as the late nineteenth century Indian refineries were reported to be going out of business. Attempts were made to persuade government to introduce tariff protection or encourage improvements to make Indian production more competitive. There were mixed opinions on the damage yet sustained by cultivators, but the general conclusion was that investigation and experiment were needed. Once again official responses were confused, contested and inadequate. J.E O’Conor declared: ‘There can be no improvement in sugar in this country until money & skill are put into it’; if it were, the ‘native refiner’ would ‘collapse’. He was making a contrast between ‘applied science’ and ‘crude native methods’. In reply George Watt asked who was to blame: ‘We have done nothing and are doing nothing to improve the races of our cultivated plants’; India must ‘evolve its own B147’, a reference to a new variety of cane developed in Barbados. A problem, as W.H. Moreland later pointed out, was that cane was reproduced vegetatively in India; it was harder to produce new varieties when ‘canes did not normally arrow in this climate’.20 Some saw salvation in better machinery and methods: vacuum pans for boiling, clean metal utensils to prevent fermentation and so on. In 1904 the planters put in a plea that the government ‘engage the services of Agricultural Chemists in Europe’. Leather commented that technical rather than chemistry skills were needed, and Bengal responded that any such person would need to spend three months or more in a sugar refinery so as to learn what to tell the planters. The planters thought research was needed to sustain more efficient production. They imagined large-scale enterprises. When Bernard Coventry was Bengal’s Director-General of Agriculture, he argued it would ‘be far better and safer’ to avoid a central factory system and instead improve ‘small indigenous units’. It had been shown in NorthWestern Provinces that ‘rude processes and . . . small outturn may yield a profit, while scientific processes and high cultivation result in a loss’. But Coventry’s goal was still to have large factories when conditions and capital were favourable. Extensive experiments were restarted under government auspices by 1911. In the late 1930s officials concluded that local sugar processing was as efficient as in Java, but growers were ignorant of the factories’ needs, a perishable crop was moved long distances and its quality was 241

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lowered by lack of rotation and manuring. In north Bihar factories tried to circumvent this by moving cultivation to new areas with fewer pests and better soils.21 What general conclusions follow about the impact of sugar production on Bihar? The central point was increased vulnerability to more directly managed and more capitalised production. The cultivator was at risk because he did not benefit fully from rising profits but was the first to be squeezed if prices fell. The intermediaries were able to make him ‘continue to deliver juice at absolutely unprofitable rates’. But the karkhanadar stood to lose either way, being ruined by foreign imports or superseded by modern factories. The underlying difficulty was not one of scale. It was one of management, the extent to which the manufacturer determined conditions of production rather than merely captured the output of the producers. T.W. Holderness made two points in 1899 when the Government of India was preparing a despatch to the Secretary of State on the sugar question. Though his experience was largely of Rohilkhand, the arguments applied generally. First he argued that the petty sugar maker, though he had benefited from the Behea mill, was not well-placed to face foreign competition. It was disastrously complacent to rely on him to preserve the Indian sugar industry. Second, Holderness thought there were relatively few openings for capital to improve rather than increase production, and willingness to invest—despite new machines, canal irrigation and greater marketing— was likely to collapse quickly in the face of low-priced imports.22 A serious barrier to improvement was that, as production increased, repeated crops were expected from the same land, eventually reducing yield per acre in the absence of extra manuring and effective pest control. By the later nineteenth century, leguminous nitrogen-fixing crops were often grown in rotation with more demanding plants, an arrangement difficult for sugarcane. For Bihar, all this was worrying. Could sugar replace indigo and opium? The signs were confused. In the Son canal areas, sugar acreage decreased from its late nineteenth-century peak. If the figures are to be believed, it went down marginally from 1901 but almost halved between 1905/6 and 1906/7.23 Some districts were especially vulnerable, becoming net importers of food, a feature that spread with the railway network. An interruption of commercial trade could therefore be disastrous. Nationalist politicians had said as much. In castigating the land-revenue demand they arguably misjudged the trend as far as Bengal and Bihar were concerned. In criticising the social impact of commercialised and export-led agriculture they were close to the mark. The danger was not principally to regional food supply from the decline in food crops relative to cash crops that nationalists and others debated, especially in regard to liability to famine. The threat was to family income. The exclusive overwhelming relationships that supported much production for sale placed an emphasis on one aspect of cultivators’ activities at the expense 242

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of others. Sugar was an important variable in determining vulnerability in the face of fluctuations of climate, prices and markets. One significant point was its long production cycle. The more it was grown the greater the investment of cultivators and region in a single product. Opium and indigo were similarly distinctive, being almost wholly commercial and extending cultivators’ dependence on intermediaries. Production demands for each crop were important even though (as said) they were seldom directly altered by agents or manufacturers. Rice, wheat, pulses and oilseeds could also be commanded by noncultivators, but the alternatives were greater, even for very poor growers and workers who might be able to exchange small quantities at local markets. Others have suggested that trade dedicated to a particular crop was more oppressive than, for example, trade in rice, run by cartmen in numerous small transactions and potentially open to raiyats who had their own carts and cut out middlemen.24 It may be no coincidence, for example, that some Telis, oil-producers, were among those able to improve their lot, comparatively, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some such successful lower-caste families gained land just as some tenants secured legal rights under new laws. On the other hand, privileges were not often obtained or effective for the poor and lowly, not even in British courts and records. Land rights in themselves were insufficient unless allied to productive success and strategic control over sources of rural income. Limits to sustained advance were exposed in recent years by controversy over including Telis among ‘extremely backward’ castes in Bihar.25 Many were weakened by loss of indigo and opium and expansion of sugarcane alongside a decline in its value and competitiveness. Such damage came on top of risks from climate, pests and disease. Fundamentals were not altered. Problems were severe for those already poor. Opium showed that middlemen, like government, did not share increasing profits with cultivators and workers but bore down on them harder when profits were flat or declining. As also for indigo, the underlying problem was discrepancy between profits for exporters or agents and for primary producers. This is hardly unfamiliar in the history of capitalist relations. Sugar might seem different but not in the outcome. Opium and indigo were produced where government or Western capital installed agents or converted existing ones. Bihar’s sugar factors largely retained their power; those challenged by erstwhile indigo planters were an exception. But most cultivators of all these crops were exploited by a few large distant profiteers and many closer small ones. Ultimately the state, for all its reforms, was complicit in unequal production systems. We end where we began, with emiseration due to the falling value of agriculture to producers, compounded by power hierarchies and economic deprivation.26 British colonial development policies had no answer to these problems, any more than to the relentless challenge of rivers in spate. The pill was not sweetened. 243

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Notes 1 On opium, see Bauer, Peasant Production; Kerkhoff, Colonising Plants. 2 For this section see Report of a Commission appointed by the Government of India to enquire into the working of the Opium Department in Bengal and the North-Western Provinces. Evidence by Arthur Forbes is at PCR 364 29/8 1895/6. Shorter versions of descriptions in this chapter appeared in Robb, ‘Peasants’ Choices’. 3 See Colebrooke, Husbandry, p. 117, and Ram Chand Pandit, joint opium contractor, in Selections from the Duncan Records, Benares 1863, vol.2, p. 166. 4 Reid to A.C. Mangles, Opium Agent, Patna, 30 December 1881, R&A Agric B3 May 1899. 5 See Mangles to PC, 18 March 1883, PCR 338 7/84, 7/91 (Gaya Coll to PC) & 10 1883/4. It was agreed in April 1883 that such investigations and prosecutions were to be limited to suspected dealers, though it is not clear to what extent this restriction was applied; in August orders were issued that searches were to be carried out only by responsible officers in the presence of two ‘respectable’ neighbours of the suspect. 6 PCR 364 29/8 1895/6. 7 Report; see n.2, this chapter. 8 See n.6, this chapter. 9 Among many examples, see Amin, Sugarcane. It studies the ‘physical force, direct supervision and low prices’ that ‘accounted for the peasants’ aversion’ to sugar cultivation (p. 12), and ‘entrenched institutionalized relationships’, ‘dependent peasantry’, and ‘marketing’ and ‘production relations . . . in the countryside’ that hardly altered, although ‘not insulated from . . . global developments’ (pp. 279– 81). For a broad perspective, see also Bosma, Sugar Plantation. 10 Kerkhoff, Colonising Plants, ch.1, claims sugar production had little European involvement after the early years and Indian sugar was dominant until the twentieth century. 11 The following is based on B.C. Basu, ‘Note on the Manufacture of Sugar and its Probable Improvements’, A9–11 July 1892. See also Watt, Dictionary, and Grierson, Behar Peasant Life, pp. 50–60, 237–9. 12 Of makhar, makhar bir or makar bir, the legend was that a Dom, having been refused sugar juice, leapt into a boiler and was killed; afterwards deified, he was worshipped by workmen, with a ritual of pouring water (so he might wash) and then juice of the first five canes. Grierson, Behar Peasant Life, para.299. 13 Ian Stone put the mills’ labour-saving in a more positive light (Canal Irrigation, pp. 286–7), and perhaps that was right for the richest agricultural areas. 14 The karkhanadar was an intermediary, effectively producing and trading. Specialising in one or more products, he secured and met orders from exporters, wholesalers and retailers. His role, it is suggested, depended on a relationship of dependence between him and those who organised workers (here cultivators and rural workers, or those who controlled groups of them). See Roy, Traditional Industry, pp. 39–4. 15 B.C. Basu re Thomson & Mylne’s note on sugar in India, 29 July 1891, R&A Agric A9–11 July  1892. Much of the following paragraphs draws on Basu, ‘Notes on the Manufacture of Sugar and its Probable Improvements’, loc.cit. See also his note, Proceedings of the Agriculture Conference, October 1983, R&A Agric A9–10 February 1894. For experiments by Muhammad Hadi in NWP see R&A Agric A1–23 June 1899 and note by J.O. M[illler], 19 September 1907, R&A Agric A40–1 September 1907.

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6 Khandsari is unrefined white sugar, made from gur. 1 17 G/I despatch no.8 of 1889, R&A Agric A30 February  1890. Thompson  & Mylne were explaining why a central factory system would not help. See also Bosma, Sugar Plantation, pp. 62–3, 132–42. 18 See R&A Agric A22 February 1890 & A10 July 1890 (note by Francis Gill, 11 March 1890) 19 Described in ch.12, this volume. 20 Moreland to Coventry, 9 June  1911, R&A Agric A4–16 March  1911. He stressed that to produce new strains (rather than selecting the best canes) flowers needed to be sterilised, manipulated and hybridised, a ‘really difficult operation’. Moreland, later a distinguished economic historian, had become Director of Land Records and Agriculture, North-Western Provinces, in 1899. 21 J.E O’Conor, 6 June,  & George Watt, 14 June, R&A Agric B1–5 November 1901; A. Earle, Secretary to the G/Be to R&A, 29 November 1904, R&A Agric A3–4 January 1905; R&A Agric A40–1 September 1907; note by Coventry, 1 April 1911, & other papers, R&A Agric A4–16 March 1912. Bengal did not want to act, though the question had first been raised in 1905. On a later idea to find experts for United Provinces and Madras, the Viceroy wrote on 28 November  1911 that ‘in view of very strong Indian feeling on subject and of our inability to agree to protective duty we hold it very necessary to do what is reasonably possible to improve the sugar industry’. In 1912 the Secretary of State rejected the proposal. For later reports see Government of Bihar, Industries Department, No.1–18, File 18–218, January 1938 (notes by Director of Agriculture, 26 April, G.S. Lal, 17 June, & S. Lall, 13 July 1937). 22 Note, 18 October 1898, R&A Agric A1–23 June 1899. At this time H.H. Risley (note 13 November 1898) noted the ‘great impulse’ given to sugarcane by improved sugar mills. 23 North Bihar has remained more significant for sugarcane even after the twentiethcentury development of tube wells in the south. 24 Fisher, ‘Planters and Peasants’, pp.  122–3. Fisher regards relations between planters and raiyats as largely unchanged after the early introduction of hired managers in place of the planters themselves and attributes growing unrest to the uncompetitiveness of indigo with rice for sale or food. It is not clear how much direct competition there was between rice and indigo. Fisher does not examine which raiyats were likely to be able to trade on their own account. Another question is why opposition to indigo became more vocal after its cultivation declined. 25 Reported for example at http://m.timesofindia.com, Patna, 26 May  2009 (accessed 27 March 2020). 26 Despite the deliberate echo of Marx, Capital—‘in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer . . . must grow worse’ (pp. 708–9)—the cause was a complex of socio-political conditions largely unrelated to productivity or labour surplus. It was, however, an example of low returns to primary producers as a proportion of wealth created.

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14 PRODUCTION, PRIVILEGE, PREJUDICE AND POVERTY

More lessons from commercial crops In this concluding chapter we return mainly to British rule. Again asking how far government policies were misguided and damaging, the first section draws more general conclusions from commercial cropping. Bihar indigo production, for example, has been presented as ‘pre-capitalism’ in ‘symbiosis’ with capitalist trade and manufacturing. A.K. Bagchi referred to ‘nonmarket coercion’ by European planters and government opium agents when discussing the relationship between ‘pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production’.1 The description was apt but was attributed broadly to colonialism, ‘de-industrialisation’ and (paradoxically) ‘de-commercialisation’, leaving unclear how British government and European capital worked this magic. Girish Mishra argued differently. He thought the permanent settlement marked a crucial divide in Bihar’s agrarian history. Cash rents extracted to meet revenue demands stimulated production for the market. He attributed the growth of European indigo planters mainly to damage wrought after 1793 to non-zamindari land rights and intermediary tenures obtainable in Champaran from three great zamindars. Mishra’s verdict on indigo was that it helped landlords, introduced new and improved implements to cultivators, stimulated production of other crops, provided employment for large numbers of labourers, increased local money supply and helped fix rents. On the other hand, indigo cultivation was effectively compulsory. Prices were related to area (not out-turn), isolated from market forces and raised only under political pressure. Peasants were prevented from becoming agricultural entrepreneurs.2 There is much sense in these arguments, but they too seem incomplete. Why should capitalism deploy non-capitalist relations of production? They were contrary to British expectations but maintained despite efforts to change them. My argument was that systems adopted for indigo and opium were not so much a new form of management as one built on existing tenurial arrangements. Behind them lay other features explored in this book. One was the position of labour. In Bihar, European capital did not 246

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create a proletariat or a wage-labour market but adopted strategies apparently suited to labour scarcity, though the supposed economic decline of the region under British rule implied excess labour. A second puzzle concerned land as a factor of production. Some agree with Mishra that British revenue policy and tenancy law prevented its direct acquisition for commercial agriculture by rewarding landholders unduly. The indigo production system would seem appropriate to conditions of land scarcity but occurred equally in less and more densely populated areas and before as well as after extensions of cultivated area. A third, related issue was social stratification. One version proposed three classes—landlords, peasants and labourers— numbers of the last two swollen by deindustrialisation. Another saw rich peasants and moneylenders keeping poorer peoples in debt and gaining control of land through sale or mortgage.3 Did such middling people have so little independence that they could not benefit from commercial agriculture? If they found a niche in production and surplus extraction, why did they not improve agricultural methods? Threats and extra-economic constraints were one answer. Each agricultural decision maker was governed to varying degrees by more powerful participants in village life. Even within each production unit, allocation of tasks among family members or between them and employees or patrons might be subject to restriction or agreement. Raiyats might be left to decide on techniques, choose the crop on most lands and manage their labour subject to caste restrictions and other demands. But for other resources—credit, land, water, even implements and animals—they were likely to depend on others. A trader had control mainly when he became a landholder or creditor; often he did not use his power except to ensure a particular crop was grown. The zamindar or thikadar had an initial hold through landholding, jeth raiyats and other dominant villagers through office, proximity or social prestige. They all took little direct interest in cultivation but could restrict availability of labour, allocate water, animals and expensive implements, and preside over marketing, credit and hence agricultural reproduction. Part of the confusion in British conclusions arose because categories were not self-explanatory. ‘Labour’ meant all who could not survive by cultivating their own land: the wholly landless, some artisans and servants, sharecroppers and tenants also cultivating for others. ‘Raiyat’ meant all cultivators subsisting on their own holdings. The average size was only two-fifths of an acre worked by two or three persons, typically over widely dispersed plots. Access to land had major influence on economic well-being and often reflected social standing, so that the very richest and poorest cultivator households did tend to remain the same. But rent and tribute payments differed with status, and there could be annual variations in fortune within the raiyat group and no absolute divide between poor tenants and labourers, nor between rich tenants and local maliks.4 247

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After 1885, rent and tenancy were potentially subject to state law, but appraisement of crops, records of payment and ‘illegal’ dues were effectively invisible to outsiders, as were sharecropping, labour services and bondage. Much land transfer was also unseen, as was fragmentation (already far advanced). Sales were mostly between zamindars; mortgages mainly between raiyats. Contributing to varying fortunes was ‘a constant traffic’ in part holdings, some acquired by successful cultivators. Others were forced into joint cultivation managed by maliks and their agents.5 The largest landlords were indirect collectors of rent or produce from zirat managed by agents. They had great authority as symbols of a moral order. Dominant villagers were usually allied by caste or office. Sometimes able to dispose of their own production, they might also secure and market the crops of poorer villagers. Thikadars or zamindars were different mainly because of their legal possession of land. Finally, ‘traders’ included those responsible for processing and distributing agricultural produce. Agents securing opium, indigo or sugar on behalf of Europeans were not very different from those who had long brought agricultural produce to the market. They provided external capital but often depended on broader coercive relationships through debt, landholding or social prestige. Poorer food grains were of little interest to them except to sustain high-value output. Roles could be combined—village headmen might be agents for indigo factories; planters often leased whole villages—or restricted and potentially competitive. The opium khatadar and sugar factor did not always enjoy power in general. Initial processing of cash crops was often carried out by cultivators as directly managed labourers. Two different systems of extraction are implied, one rent- or tribute-based and the other trade-based. The former was evident (through a prism of government control) in the pyne-irrigated parts of Gaya. The latter was apparent in all advance payments or harvest loans. Neither system was purely a device to secure income for landlords or reduce merchants’ and processors’ costs. Both reflected engagement with social conditions. The trader ‘competed’ with subsistence and rival cash crops by ‘capturing’ cultivators, just as rent receivers cornered output through produce rents in particular. The landed did more than charge rents, make loans and demand services. Zamindars set up and taxed markets or imposed tolls on roads, bridges and river landing places. Both rent receivers and traders employed specialist go-betweens, adjudicators, assessors, weighers and measurers; they often needed accountants, watchmen, clerks and record keepers. Both systems shared out raiyats’ production and turned some of it into property or income for others. Both promoted higher-value crops, extending cultivation of opium, indigo and sugar; both might bring on new lands or provide irrigation; but neither did much to increase total output per person or per acre. Both linked commercial production to coercion and took little heed of profit for cultivators. In turn few cultivators paid attention to market prices. 248

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Circumstances but also policy limited the development needed to combat poor diet, endemic disease and vulnerability to climate. For villages, trade in commercial crops was akin to tribute transfer that on a grand scale had characterised East India Company relations with India at the end of the eighteenth century. That was, in the words of James Maitland, Lord Lauderdale, an ‘intercourse’ that did not ‘partake of the nature and character of commerce. There was no exchange of commodities.’6 More precisely (the correction applies to both cases) it was an unequal commerce in which exchange of commodities was relatively insignificant in comparison with their extraction. Demand was constricted among subject producers— an elaboration on an old theme in rural Bihar, reflecting the high proportion of locally produced items of commerce cornered by the dominant as rent and revenue and, increasingly, produce shares and interest on debt.7 These characteristics were entrenched rather than challenged under British rule. The value of output might have risen, but not per head, as population grew. Bihar society had long included rent receivers and labourers as well as family-farm producers. British rule hardened and extended these distinctions by securing the legal position of the zamindars. In theory a peasant farm employed no labour; each family was an enterprise making ‘non-capitalist’ decisions.8 In parts of India such circumstances are said to have prevailed.9 But in Bihar such autonomy was lost for most people. Only the rich were their own masters, and their production drew on labour by the poor. Commercialisation increased this interdependence. An interplay of apparently contrary indigenous and exotic forces produced a situation in which free peasant production was possible but only for some, and a large proportion of commercial agriculture was controlled by intermediaries or other ‘peasants’, through rent and credit. From outside it might seem like capitalist control because of the growing importance of markets. From below it just looked like subjection.10 For those in control, the system worked quite well. Indigo showed it was hard to expand cultivation by commercial means. It was easier to supplement a certain amount of direct production using wage labour with a larger amount of what amounted to contracting out. How should this mixed form of production be interpreted? It did represent ‘coexistence of multiple modes’, inevitable (according to one leading explanation) because of peasant differentiation and market imperfection.11 Possibly as a residue of extensive regional trade based on the interdependence of state, rural elites and merchants, commercialisation under the British extended and intensified an informal command economy. Socio-economic bondage worsened through higher rents, timing for revenue kists and laws giving security for mortgages, but also through expanding trade. Identifying such changes makes dynamic a crucial but otherwise rather static insight: that for each kind and level of rural household there was ‘a correspondence between the production status as a base and the concomitant exchange relations’.12 Rent, a tribute payment based upon superior tenurial 249

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status, was only one of two kinds of command. The other has been called ‘forced commerce’, whereby merchant capital and moneylending expropriated surplus. The two forms were not equal as the nineteenth century wore on. Rent, increasingly inelastic, existed in three ways in Bihar: formal payment for land, informal dues and zamindari take from zirat cultivation. The first became more regulated; the second, abwabs and forced labour, went largely unchecked if raiyats succumbed; and the third was encouraged when law and records did not stop redefinition of raiyati land. Agrarian disputes and court cases suggest resistance grew over the nineteenth century. Forced commerce in Bihar was subject to even fewer legal restrictions, especially when conducted by rural elites, including landlords, but even when involving professionals. This was unlike the attention paid to moneylending ‘interlopers’ in other parts of India. Only indigo thikadars got much official attention in Bihar, more often supportive than critical. Commercial intermediation was being encouraged by the expansion of trade. Inherently suited to agriculture conducted by large numbers of unfree smallholders, it could be continually extended as profits grew. It could reactivate existing dependence, translate harvest loans into mortgages or hypothecate a larger share of a marketed crop. Amit Bhaduri described the increasing recourse to debt as transforming ‘the relative importance of alternative methods of surplus extraction from agriculture’.13 Another proposition about colonial impact also receives general support— it derived partly from the pioneering work of B.B. Chaudhuri—namely that in eastern India from the later nineteenth century holdings were being accumulated by dominant peasants.14 It may be that these were holders paying above-average rents, implying success for family-farm production. But in Bihar larger landholders generally employed non-family labour; rents from regular tenancies were falling behind the value of agricultural produce. The picture was complex. First, independent producers using family labour might benefit relative to landlords, as suggested by upward mobility for several middling agricultural castes. Second, extensions of zirat preserved an arena for the old resource-based control by managers of cultivation, reproducing a system of produce sharing, labour services, additional cesses and bondage. Third, semi-independent production by smallholders and dependant labour could outperform both family-farms and zirat to primary benefit those who commanded it. In Bengal, zamindars allegedly devolved rent collection to cash-rich intermediaries to insure against consequences of non-payment of revenue.15 That occurred in Bihar but did not explain the exploitation of cultivators, for ‘subinfeudation’ was often limited and temporary (as with indigo thikadars). Status was conditional on ecological factors, family fortune, cropping and management. Brokers flourished by taking large profits from commercial production without breaking a system with relatively few independent family-farm producers or capitalist enterprises; most people gained food 250

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through dependence, not selling their labour, strictly speaking. When an indigo planter became a thikadar he was acting out an old drama of social dominance. Capitalists in the countryside were not interlopers of modernisation. Most were expanding or adapting old methods of control.16 It has also been said north Indian elites became more directly involved in agricultural production over the longer term.17 To assess that, it was necessary to make three somewhat artificial distinctions within the mix of conflict and accommodation representing society. Three routes to dominance stood out in addition to social prestige: military coercion or violence, land control and economic power. The first secured men and plunder; the second produced rent in cash or kind; the third used credit to extract marketable produce. Over time none of these disappeared, but by the early nineteenth century military sanctions were actively suppressed (or at least the British were trying to reserve them for their own use) and landownership was endorsed but circumscribed. If economic leverage gained importance by the late nineteenth century as suggested, that implies a three-way transition from military or administrative to agrarian and then commercial command. Such changes were incomplete in Bihar. Dominance over people remained the core. It could have different purposes—for prestige and military or political strength, extraction of tribute or control of production. The purposes gained or lost significance over time. Rich peasants and entrepreneurial zamindars tended to follow indigo planters’ practices that had been copied from them. All were capturing workers through socio-economic power and profiting from cultivators’ semi-independent production, controlling the producer, not the process. Importantly, control did not usually imply maximising strategies. There were high castes, stereotypically inefficient cultivators, depending on the labour of others, taking little interest in production. There were brokers and agents who paid scant attention to agricultural improvement: the bania could be vital for rural production, not necessarily the demon imagined by colonial officials, but his involvement was irregular and his self-interest lay elsewhere. The fragmentation of commercial cultivation made intervention harder still, especially for Western capital. Even most successful raiyats held relatively little land; few technical advances were available or appropriate for them. Some were richer than their fellows but, on a comparative scale, not very rich. The most enterprising, to repeat another stereotype, were smallholders of middling caste who often had many obligations and little if any surplus to invest. Many agents, brokers and moneylenders were richer than their neighbours, but in Bihar that did not mean that they were very rich. Limited agricultural improvement was a recipe for continuing poverty. The problem was not exploitation. When did development occur without that? It was exploitation without engagement. A British error was to assume that just showing the way would spark economic ambition. Taxation was too low to stimulate higher output, state input too feeble. 251

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Cultivation in Bihar did expand and became more commercially focused. There was more intensive land-use through irrigation and double-cropping and arguably through subdivision and transfers of agricultural holdings. The developments did not match the gains from extension of cultivated area over the nineteenth century but became more important in the last quarter. Agriculture was more productive in value terms. But new and more cash crops were grown in conditions that depressed rather than raised the economic condition of many people. Growth was not self-generated but imposed on existing productive processes, attributable to external demand, facilitated by imperialism and contingent upon expanding acreage and population. It did not occur alongside structural change, evolution in means and conditions, technological or social revolution. It built upon indirect methods and a preference to maximise profit rather than output. Effort was directed mainly at improving supervising and measurement, even when advance payments were stimulating production. Political or accounting skills were more important even to planters than cultivating know-how. Capital was claiming social tribute, not developing agriculture. The situation meant entrenchment of power, not its redistribution. Analysing types and the role of agricultural knowledge helped delineate limits and underlined one of the reasons science was not transformative. The demand for investigation was restricted, as indicated in take-up of the work of government farms—that is, the occasional strain of crop or improved implement but not findings from laborious agricultural experiments. Indigo planters turned to science only in desperation, and even then their aim shifted readily to new endeavours. Agricultural knowledge existed as empirical rules of thumb or language and sayings. It covered soils, seasons, crops and techniques but described rather than transformed. Both society and environment were met by ‘define and respond’ more often than ‘manipulate and control’. Failures were partly man-made. Knowledge, theoretically interpreted, could be relevant to improvement in the way that engineering, a practical and approximate skill, could acquire predictive capacity through trial and error, becoming akin to experimental science. But knowledge was often missing, misunderstood or ignored. British canal engineers imagined overcoming the environment; that was the thrust of the Stracheys’ optimism about public works and famine protection. Often their efforts dissolved into a multitude of local expedients, small-scale and sustainable—sometimes wise, sometimes based on false assumptions. Larger endeavours, needing skills of planning, cooperation and management, also sometimes failed through ignorance and error. Scientific experiments to improve agriculture were limited and late. There was little effective appetite for knowledge about modes of production, not even to the extent there was for seeds and implements. A study of varieties so as to produce crops of better quality at optimal times generated the kind of empirical awareness that was with varying degrees 252

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of sophistication at the disposal of every cultivator and in more general terms in possession of some of the elites. An attempt to improve varieties represented a different impulse. It existed in India, though not on the basis of scientific methods that would commend it to British agricultural experts, and it was impeded by dispersed structures and priorities of land control, production and marketing. These and not lack of theoretical understanding limited development of new techniques. Indigo planters’ shortcomings were their aberrations alone but typical of a partly inherited, partly colonial environment. Successful elites were also more involved with management than practicalities of agricultural production. Jacques Pouchepadass had a one-word answer to the question of why technology and output stagnated as commercial agriculture grew in north Bihar under the British. The word was ‘power’.18

Officials as investors and landlords This penultimate section starts with an overview, with some new examples, of British administration, priorities and attitudes, leading to conclusions on economic development. I have not claimed that changes in crops, marketing and transportation were without impact, legal and policy innovations were all detrimental or every attempted scientific advance a failure. On balance, though, the verdict on Bihar has been pessimistic. In the 1890s Michael Finucane, Bengal’s Director of Land Records and Agriculture, declared agriculture was not everywhere in that ‘stagnant condition . . . sometimes supposed’. He observed that ‘intelligent’ cultivators growing sugarcane on the Mauritius system in Dacca and Burdwan were unlike Bihar’s ‘ignorant’ and ‘backward’ agriculturists with their ‘insecure’ tenures.19 Context mattered. The population of Patna Division remained stationary or in some districts apparently declined in the 1890s, whereas Dacca and Burdwan were among three or four heavily populated districts where numbers increased by 10 to 15 per cent. Only ‘frontier’ regions such as Chittagong and Orissa had greater per-acre growth. Prices too rose in Bihar at a rate below the average for the Bengal Presidency.20 Perhaps the vigour and enterprise reported in Dacca and Burdwan owed something to necessity or impetus generated by jute, while the grim continuity of conditions in Bihar was associated with persistent socio-economic features. There was poverty everywhere, but Bihar seemed to swallow up the impact of interventions by scientists, government or capitalists. Effort also varied. The British encouraged production, keeping channels open for trade, but did too little overall. Priorities and prejudices reduced intervention, as did parlous state finances. As indicated in Chapter 2, government income increased over 12-fold notionally between 1858 and 1947. But the proportion from land revenue dropped sharply as average agricultural prices rose, a loss not compensated in real terms by increases in other taxes. 253

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Provincial expenditure was augmented in the twentieth century, largely to promote productive investment, but transfer of funds from the centre was flawed. Overall, as has been said, India’s experience was ‘in striking contrast’ to that of most advanced countries. England’s public expenditure rose from under 9 per cent of GDP in 1890 to 30 per cent in 1938. India’s was 10 per cent in 1900 and 11 per cent in 1940.21 The Bengal Presidency consistently spent less per head than any other administration in British India and Burma. Bihar and Orissa spent only three-quarters as much as the Presidency, as shown when those provinces were separated from Bengal in 1912. The permanent settlement introduced a stable regulated system of land revenue in place of an ad hoc one. It was designed not to respond to prices; its direct demands became less onerous over time. Once proceedings to resume revenue-free holdings had come to an end, there was almost no way of adjusting demand to expansion of cultivated area. Permanently settled areas bore a smaller financial burden that became progressively lighter during the nineteenth century. In 1899, it was calculated, an acre under sugarcane paid Rs.3 to government in much of North India, 4 in Bombay and Madras and 1 in Bengal.22 Zamindars made political capital out of what they called attempts to reverse the permanent settlement, but inroads of new taxation were relatively slight. Patna district paid Rs.356,000 in road cess, revised to Rs.462,000 in 1893/4. It was as if the government were ensuring zamindars had easy profits. It spent most on administrative and military costs and denied itself resources that might have been used to reduce poverty. Moreover, as argued throughout this book, British influence was neither even nor socially and politically neutral. It was symptomatic that Bengal’s revenue collection was notoriously lax. High balances were not due to poor harvests (that influenced them not at all) but to unpunctuality, confusion and inefficiency. The problem was administrative. Bengal’s record was far worse than that of any other province although its revenue demand was lighter. Bihari districts consistently featured among those where arrears were largest. For various cesses Shahabad collected less than 80 per cent of arrears and less than 90 per cent on current account in each of the six years after 1890. For land revenue, arrears seem to have built up from the 1880s, in Shahabad apparently because of great leniency shown over sales for default. Yet in the same period in Chainpur, poorest and worst-affected part of the district, estates that were sold fetched an average of 11 years’ purchase in 1880–3 and 33  years’ purchase in 1890–6. There were some special reasons for anomalies in other districts. In Patna instalments were collected by mistake according to the Christian calendar instead of fasli year with the result that receipts were late and temporary deficits repeatedly recorded in the returns.23 In Bengal far fewer permanently settled estates were in arrears than those that were temporarily settled (non-raiyatwari)

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or managed khas (under government)—the latter did include settled estates whose original proprietors had failed to pay. This was not an administration that bore heavily on privileged classes. Its laxity suggested it would not be transformative but impinge unevenly. Petty officials and police were notoriously venal and oppressive; officialdom was otherwise remote and often disdainful. Public cesses, to take one example, did not hurt the prosperous, who were reputed to use returns they made at revaluation to overstate their rents, the better to increase them in practice. Revenue administration, if inefficient, could also be made to work to private advantage or detriment. Where zamindars were large and dominant they could reap full benefits from the system and its decreasing share of the value of the country’s produce. Where they were small or weak and hard-pressed by dominant but non-zamindari groups, benefits were less available and advantages were enjoyed by those above them.24 My argument is not straightforward: zamindars won out and poor tenants submitted. It is complex: some profited and others lost out. Formal category was much less important than particular conditions and opportunity. On such circumstances, Nasriganj estate provided insights (Chapter 10); they can be reinforced from government estates more generally. No village was wholly in ‘private’ hands because of land revenue and the overlap between village and state authority. Conversely, on its own estates the government position approximated to that of great zamindar. It would be less familiar with local conditions than a long-standing malik but had legal authority, institutional memory and fairly regular methods of business. Official opinion was divided on how to run Court of Wards and government estates. Policy fluctuated between preference for thikadari leases and for direct management (khas), though even in the latter case favourable consideration was often given to applications for leases from residents. Private zamindars adopted similar practices. Some examples will illustrate the ways legal and administrative systems could be manipulated. The issue was the application of section 104 (record of rights) of the 1885 Tenancy Act to a number of government villages in Shahabad and Gaya. In the Shahabad villages, moderate cash rents were paid for many productive lands irrigated from the Son canal scheme, as already noted. The government wanted to enhance rents by about 12 per cent in about 22 villages. Details are available for four of them. One had 14 tenants with an average four acres paying Rs.2/3 per acre. Another had 46 tenants with slightly less land on average paying about Rs.1/5. A third had 30 tenants with under an acre each paying Rs.1/13. The fourth had 29 tenants averaging nearly 12 acres paying Rs.1/10. The raiyats in these villages were small or very small landholders faced by a very large government, and yet they refused to accept enhancement, claiming to hold their lands at fixed rates. Officials were constrained by law and had to institute formal

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procedures. A record of rights was needed to allow government to increase rents.25 Shahabad was noted for poor but high-caste tenants accustomed to resist. Though all agrarian relations gradually became more subject to law during the later nineteenth century, even under Indian zamindars with irregular means of persuasion, there was everywhere a mix of consent and coercion—social and physical sanctions, agents and records. Government interventions mattered but could often be contested: villages fought back. Gaya district also had problems of management and offered opportunities to the enterprising. In the 1880s a Deputy Collector, a Bihari, Raj Kishore Narain Singh, was thought guilty of maladministration. Again a record of rights was called for, in this case to uncover Raj Kishore’s doings in several government estates (including those that received special attention over irrigation; Chapter 11). One estate with 41 villages had been in the hands of a thikadar who defaulted on his payments. His lease was cancelled in 1884; the villages were taken into direct management under the Deputy Collector. Over the years Raj Kishore gradually varied some arrangements. He did not inform his superiors or enter into formal agreements but increased the proportion of cash rents. As the Collector explained, he was ‘making off-hand settlements with people who applied for extensive areas; and these have practically amounted to giving out a number of villages in farm again’. The details suggest an official seeking to reduce his workload while increasing his income. The Collector refused to recognise the irregular agreements but in doing so jeopardised collections of rent and arrears. He also ran the risk of being challenged in the courts. The government’s legal position was shaky. The rents and leases had been treated as temporary (chakatti) and no pattas or kabuliyati (leases and counterparts) had been prepared. As the Collector said, the agreements were effectively thikadari settlements whose jamas had probably been legally recognised through filing certificates and other such actions. In one village four brothers were given a lease without inquiry for an entire village at the rental they themselves had proposed (about Rs.1/3 per acre). Later a dispute arose in the temporary absence of Raj Kishore, when the brothers sought to reduce their payments. Control of the village was resumed for government. But officials proved unable to collect the rents because the brothers had already taken grain from the harvest. The then acting Deputy Collector made them pay the cash rent originally agreed. On his return, however, Raj Kishore accepted the brothers’ plea for a reduction of nearly 30 per cent in the rental on the ground that the cultivated area was only about 200 bighas, less than previously supposed. He claimed in justification a report from an amin sent to measure the lands. In fact the amin had not then reported, and when he did, in 1891, it was to say that the total area of the village was over 1,000 acres, of which 388 were currently cultivated (and the remainder was almost all cultivable). He also showed 256

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that the brothers were not, as they claimed, residents in the village, though they had been pahikashta tenants there. Other villages offered similar histories. One village was given predominantly to a simple tenant and subsequently at a higher but still low rent to 4 of its 17 resident raiyats. Two other villages were given to five Muslims who had no previous connection with them. They had eight tenants in 1878 who probably held more land than was recorded. They paid low rents but habitually defaulted. Some were able to build a house in one village and then had their jama reduced retrospectively for four years to Rs.1 per bigha on the area of cultivation they themselves admitted. In yet another village with 9 tenants in 1878 and 20 in 1891, two applicants who presented themselves as resident cultivators were allowed to convert their supposed 50 bighas of paddy land and 50 bighas of high land from bhaoli to nakdi (cash) rentals. That village should have been familiar to Raj Kishore, who had been personally responsible for its bhaoli management. He imposed a somewhat higher rate of rent than proposed but gave the lease for 15 years. It then transpired that, though one of the new lessees had been resident in the village, his holding had only been one bigha. The other holder was a mahant (presiding priest) from Bodh Gaya who had had no previous rights in the village. He had allegedly been the prime mover in the plot. With the collusion of Raj Kishore and a single villager he had taken over the entire village as thikadar, turning the former raiyats into undertenants.26 In such ways it was possible to manipulate laws and administration that the British publicly pretended to be incorruptible, though privately they knew they were not. Further consequences of lax administration were revealed when estates fell into official hands, as in Gaya district (Chapter 12). On one hand, the Collector was bound by a complex array of regulations mostly designed to save money; on the other, even in Gaya with its produce rents, direct management was by low-paid gomasthas under the ordinary district staff, with the exception of a few occasions when special officers were appointed. Most estates were farmed out. Tikari estate, for example, under the Court of Wards in the 1880s, consisted of about 1,000 villages, only 30 of which were held khas. An army of petty functionaries was financed by perhaps 10 or 12 per cent of locally collected revenue. Each of them was potentially an ally or an agent of locally dominant people but isolated from the bulk of the population by izzat, class and function. The Wards establishment was quite large: 23 estates in Gaya provided employment for 123 patwaris, clerks, gomashtas and so on, whose wages accounted for some 13 per cent of the rental. Similarly, in Patna in 1895/6 gross demand from government estates was over Rs.227,000, of which some Rs.35,000 was spent locally on collection and other costs.27 The power of intermediaries was manifest—and intermediaries existed in indigenous as well as colonial structures. Larger zamindars would have faced some of the same problems of control over subordinates as did the 257

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British government. Intermediaries, though they took advantage of official procedures and prestige, did not depend on the British system but rather on its imperfections. On Wards estates, there were constant disputes between tahsildars and tenants, private battles in which the strongest participants were the most likely to be able to enlist official aid. Individuals could aggrandise themselves at the expense of their fellows by working through provisions of the law and within parameters set by strategic roles and indigenous norms. Hierarchy and opportunity worked together to make some people richer than most others. The impact of high-level politics was obvious in the marked contrast between efforts to protect a few large landlords and measures to improve conditions for the majority. Court of Wards records show the preoccupation with preserving great estates, preventing social unrest and ensuring ‘loyalty’. A little tale of the Hathwa heir is a good illustration. Hathwa estate, one of the largest in Bihar, came under the Court of Wards in 1896. In 1909 local officials expressed alarm that the Maharani and her then diwan, Devendranath Dutt, were exercising an unhealthy influence over the young heir, bringing him up ‘to regard all officials .  .  . with the deepest distrust and animosity, and inspiring him with feelings of hostility’ towards the government itself. Dutt was summarily dismissed, with a pension in view of his previously distinguished service, and the Maharani divested of control over her son; he was removed to Mayo College in Ajmer under the guardianship of an English officer. The move was not much to the taste of the Government of India—members knew the Maharani personally—but objections were to clumsiness, not motives. They worried, as they modified some of the measures, over political consequences of alienating a family so important in Bihar and so long noted for its loyalty.28 The Bengal government was taking the long view. For zamindars in general, official intervention by the Court of Wards during a period of minority resulted in administrative consolidation and financial restraint, even at the risk of annoying family members. For example the extent to which relatives could draw on the estate would be limited. The shradh (death ceremony) of a Hathwa grandson was allowed Rs.1,000, when his father’s ritual had allegedly cost nine times more.29 More important, estates were fully surveyed before this was general in Bihar and Bengal, and new rent rolls were usually prepared, often with substantial benefits to the landlord. There was criticism of the failure to heed orders calling for liberal expenditure on improvements, but agricultural experiments left behind a legacy of money spent on tanks, wells, drainage and irrigation, on roads and tree-planting, all with the avowed purpose of improving the value of the property. In the 1890s, 140 estates were controlled by the Government of Bengal, 74 of them under the Court of Wards; their revenue demand stood at Rs.5 million and their rental income at Rs.900,000.30 Thus, beneficiaries were large landlords. Who were the losers? We may judge from the fact that it was thought 258

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necessary in 1895 to expostulate against a tendency of Wards management to ‘screw every rupee out of the raiyats’ for the good of the owner.31 Court of Wards cases were exceptional but revealed a tendency in policy. The driving force was more often government interests than improvement or popular well-being. The Wards procedure was not much liked in Bengal; and the Government of India, at least while under the influence of Denzil Ibbetson, did not consider there were strong political reasons for protecting most Bengali zamindars from themselves. Law was not often applied merely because proprietors were in financial difficulties, though that was permissible if requested and in the public interest. Supposedly Bengal intervened when the owner was in some way ‘disqualified’ in the terms of the Act; at one time it even opposed an amendment to allow action without consent for indebtedness.32 But what disqualified a great zamindar? When the Maharani of Dumraon, considered politically objectionable, refused to adopt an heir the Bengal government was prepared to push through legislation to allow a take-over of the estate’s management. The Government of India demurred, arguing the Maharani could not be called incompetent. (She had a life-interest and Bengal wanted to legislate on whether she was a proprietor under the Act).33 These were political, not economic, calculations; that is the point. It is hardly surprising that government often failed to challenge the powerful. Thus it was that British rule tended not to even down but to divide up the population. Reflections on this minor aspect of administration help describe the impact of British interventions more generally. Would more central scrutiny have been the answer? It might seem that the more it could be imposed the fewer opportunities there would be for new and irregular accumulations of land and power. In practice one difficulty was lack of reach so that unregulated influence could thrive. But another was that what could be achieved through intervention was also available to an effective zamindari bureaucracy: a record of rights recorded before it could transform. Greater regularity was also likely to enhance collective solidarities—class, religious community, occupational or professional organisations. These would reflect existing interests whether or not they were just and equitable. Political evolution was visible in Bihar over a couple of generations from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. Many examples in this book hint at an issue not really considered here: how far changing conditions helped create opposing groups. Rival elites organised themselves to represent ‘class’ interests, competing over labour or the conditions for sharecroppers, employing Western-influenced social and jurisprudential categories. Such politics could supplement dominance rather than defend the weak; effects were partial and mixed rather than one-directional. Somewhat earlier, some in Bihar had sought to exploit Vaishnavite traditions to achieve upward social mobility on the basis of reimagined Hindu symbols and solidarities. As William Pinch describes it, claims to Kshatriya status and a revaluation of physical labour promoted a repositioning of certain agricultural castes. New 259

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categories and innovations, including those flowing from legislative amendments, could assist or impede such processes. They operated within existing value systems just as pressures from colonial enactments or economic change were exerted within complex agrarian structures. Pressures brought about by ‘modernisation’ did eventually create new classes of interest— and further competition as between high and agricultural castes over land and labour—and hence political movements and pressure groups.34 But most of the poor remained poor.

Colonial malaise and the problem of Bihar Apart from political calculation and self-interest, persistent denigration underlay the attitudes even of those British officials most sympathetic to and respectful of Indians. A  conscious or unconscious idea of European superiority surfaced in perennial accusations of Indians’ dishonesty, fatalism or irrationality and in repeated complaints about their propensity for intimidation, bribery or perjury. These were emotional more than empirical judgments. They reflected cultural differences and created barriers to understanding. The stereotype of the ‘untrustworthy native’ was pervasive. It was in part a British reaction to indigenous norms of duty and loyalty and to concealment and distrust that often characterised Indians’ engagement with superiors and outsiders, especially under British rule but under other regimes as well. For many Indians masters and rulers were all foreign, separated from them by wealth and power and by race, religion or caste. Such people had to evade oppression because they could not directly challenge it. Social barriers also divided neighbours and fellow-sufferers from each other. In addition, bribery was often necessary to secure a service from an unconnected person. Subterfuge or deception frequently seemed the most effective way to achieve desired or just outcomes, for example in law courts. But Europeans stigmatised all Indians as untrustworthy or unreliable and forgot those who served them dutifully. They ignored the many instances of similar traits among Europeans. My examples demonstrated limits of government control and opportunities for local officials. They cast light on conditions in the countryside. They show how opportunists allied with power could work the system to their own advantage. Such attitudes meant that British measures often exaggerated, distorted or undermined Indian practices, which British officials found it hard to understand. Misapprehension was a consequence as well as a cause of shortcomings in policy and due about equally to a priori assumptions and lack of information. As argued in Chapter 9, the British had almost no local agency in Bihar, tried to reform chaukidars and raise taxes to pay for them but did not really trust Indians or Indian ways. That left the way open for ‘experts’, discussed in subsequent chapters, contributing to policies on famine, debt, irrigation, flood protection and agriculture 260

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but also frequently falling short because of socio-economic conditions and Indian priorities and practices that were not effectively addressed. Administrative issues mattered. Conflicts between district officials and experts in the later nineteenth century indicated that centralised regulation and interference were reshaping district administration. There was confusion of roles and responsibilities between district officers, supposedly allknowing generalists, and technical and specialist departments that were growing in strength and authority. Such rival competencies in making agrarian policy sharpened the doubts that engulfed officials. Moreover, just as scientific and professional interference was taking practical form within official policies, the intellectual world was moving on. British India was no longer at the forefront of important debates in Europe. The scientific pretensions of Indian officialdom were undermined even as they were being professionalised. Finally, in the twentieth century there were further political revolutions including nationalism, Indianisation and dyarchy that altered the role of British officials in districts and secretariats. Even before Independence, responsibilities were shifting to increasingly qualified South Asians. Many Europeans carped about declining standards, but their duties and careers were changing. Recruitment to the ICS was affected. Around the same time many doubted it would ever be possible for necessary improvements to be made in India while its supreme rulers were foreign. Development policies persisted but in a troubled atmosphere, a late colonial malaise that reduced enthusiasm and diverted attention. That the fault lay with India had been asserted to justify state actions in defiance of prescribed policy and diktats of political economy. It implied a degree of helplessness in face of problems that were immense. The intractability of climate and landscape stymied embankment policy; it was mirrored by complex socio-political forces impeding agricultural improvement. Engineers were left without answers; efforts of experimental scientists were often misdirected or thwarted. Both law and science presumed secure independent agricultural management rather than interdependent risk-averse production. Curiously, the companion of state intervention was growing pessimism about improvement, and the British were even more inclined to blame India when beset by problems and failures. Bihar was said to have prevented its own reform or to have made matters worse. Why, for example, did property and tenancy laws not bring general benefits as their authors expected? In order to castigate the measures themselves, this account has had to notice the part played by underlying socio-economic conditions. It argued that the character and limitations of agricultural production persisted even for indigo and opium commanded by foreign capital or a colonial government. But the implication is not that change was impossible. It is that appropriate remedies were not often forthcoming and that fortunate conjunctions of opportunity and self-interest were rare and seldom transformative. 261

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There was continual mobility of fortune among the majority of raiyats, a general ambiguity of status and wealth from season to season, but certain castes and groups were stubbornly dominant, consistently advantaged through long-term socio-economic control over land and labour. At the other extreme there were people struggling to survive through slavery, seasonal work or crime. Those with strategic resources, especially when they could hold on to them over time, were more or less secure. But many raiyats, even those with some land, were vulnerable and exploited by landlords, traders and creditors. Many were poor, often over generations. A few contrary indicators included the relative rise of skilled agriculturists and pahikashta raiyats who could afford higher rents. They were outweighed by oppression of a majority of rural Biharis. Effective landlessness often led to bondage.35 Clive Dewey provided two explanations for the failure to remedy agrarian poverty: too little effort or nothing to be done. He then expanded on the second explanation, effectively adding a third—inadequate or inappropriate measures—and a fourth: malign effects from land-revenue policies and tenancy law that added to long-standing depredations by petty officials and others. Dewey was generally sceptical of scientific interventions in the United Kingdom as well as India, claiming there was no major breakthrough before the twentieth century. From cattle breeding to new varieties of rice the research failed, either because it was inconclusive or because it served no useful purpose for experienced cultivators, well-versed in their own situation and interests. Dewey admitted a few innovations, such as Pusa wheat, were appropriate to local producers but explained how rural poverty was exacerbated by British obsessions, first with property rights that ensured benefits for some while excluding others and second with rural credit, where would-be interventions were ineffectual or counterproductive. Alternative lending was provided on rapacious terms by moneylenders and (I would add) planters but generally without dispossessing borrowers who were in arrears. The demise of those providers in the 1930s left unchallenged the land hunger of usurious rich neighbours. Dewey traced the decline in rural well-being to the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was not universal. Citing inter alia the conclusions of Rajat Datta, he claimed commercial expansion and extensions of cultivated area characterised the earlier British period. Throughout British rule, fortunes were made by some Indian merchants and entrepreneurs. The Punjab canal colonies raised the living standards of their favoured peasant-proprietors and provided wider benefits from crops and for suppliers. Dewey concluded that the underlying cause of rural impoverishment was population rise in a context of land scarcity exacerbated by skewed ownership, partitions and subdivision through inheritance, all worsened by property laws. The longterm answer, Dewey claimed, had to be economic development that drew labour from the land.36 262

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These findings are close to my own conclusions in this book. Instances have been described when cultivators and local entrepreneurs were quick to understand and take advantage of innovations that could improve their lot. There were prosperous and innovative sectors of the population before, during and after colonial rule.37 I have referred more than once to the Bengal government’s assertion that the raiyat well understood his own business. I too relate poverty to population, while emphasising effective lack of access to land and resources rather than absolute numbers per cultivated acre, given their relative stability in the later nineteenth century in some of the poorest districts of Bihar. I also add that there was limited intensification of agriculture. On policy and science I  agree that colonial measures were inadequate and mismatched. Bihar posed challenges that were insoluble with given knowledge and capacity—because (among other things) of its geological conditions; irregular rainfall, drought and floods; difficulties of mobility and lack of information; captured or indirect marketing; limited local demand; endemic disease; and of course widespread poverty, a cause as well as an effect. If India were the problem in that sense then selected strategic reforms and opportunities would never be the solution. Politics would need to be re-engineered as well as laws, society as well as economy. It has been easy for many historians to blame all this on British rule, painting a radiant precolonial age that was cruelly destroyed and golden uplands that Independence would restore. Those demonising colonial rule offer a mirror-image to empire apologists, who also continue to exist—being only about halfway through their life-cycle in 1910 when an official, admitting the British had ‘not induced the people to adopt crops or methods . . . not recommended by long-standing custom’, also declared about policies towards revenue, rent and debt: ‘history has rarely afforded a more striking illustration of benevolent initiative and accomplishment on the part of officials’.38 British exceptionalism proves sadly resistant to evidence. But when that is considered it proves contradictory; sharp before-and-after contrasts turn out to be blurred. Could Bihar have been transformed with enough will and money? We await that denouement. The colonial reforms were too focused on British interests and seriously underfunded, but other governments too, before and after, had skewed and imperfect revenue streams and placed their priorities of security, enforcement, display, self-protection or self-interest above the general good. Neither praise nor recrimination is helpful. Both obscure possible general lessons for development from the experience of colonial Bihar: to make efforts appropriate to their environment, not doctrine, and embrace whole-society measures. Today, India, with large prosperous classes and a growing economy, still has vast oppression and poverty. Improvements have been rather like those achievable with allopathic medicine. Life expectancy has greatly increased on average in modern times but more slowly for the many than the few. General good has come from inoculation and 263

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scientific understanding, but unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, isolation and related morbidity continue to entrap the majority of the world’s people. What changes would speed up the slow advance that has occurred even for them? Unsurprisingly they include more equitable trends in education, employment, nourishment and social inclusion. Why then did the British not succeed in developing Bihar? It was because they did too little, especially across such wide fronts; and because they deliberately refrained from interference for fear of powerful vested interests, their own and those of Indians. We remain in that position today. It is not because of colonialism alone. Errors and lack of focus relate to power and greed. Some may retort that this is so obvious as not to be worth saying. I beg to differ. This book has been critical of the effects of science and colonial policy in Bihar. The intractability of the situation implies that its conclusions are specific. But in common with others I have hinted at broader implications for development, especially that undertaken by outsiders. I have not drawn general conclusions about any policy, law or science. There are parallels, however. Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur, warned in 2020 that neoliberal economic policies had saddled poor countries with debt, weakened public institutions, failed to control multinationals and violently skewed the distribution of wealth.39 British development policies in Bihar were inhibited by laissez-faire ideas, and, even when intervening, the government paid more attention to capital and privilege than labour and general well-being. Such comparisons are timely.40 International capital and nationalist fervour are still subverting efforts at equity and cooperation. They are obstructing attempts to save the planet from disastrous change. Lessons provided hundreds of years ago are also being undermined by demagogues. Claims are even made that the Enlightenment and humanist values caused the evils of unmitigated capital and colonialism.41 In such an atmosphere it is worth saying, once again, that those values are not solely or mainly ‘European’, that they create a solution, not the problem, and that dogma is a poor master and not much better as a servant. There may be little prospect that wrongs will be put right and poverty relieved under the humanist charters of the United Nations. There is no prospect at all under the bombast and bullets of religious or political fanatics. Finally, above all, we need to think into the past to prioritise the future.42 In this study of one region during a global expansion of capital and trade, two questions for development history were how far indigenous conditions had to adapt and what commercialisation meant. In Bihar as in many other places local resilience and collaboration were important in deciding the impact of policy. There was resistance too, though it has not been covered in the present discussion.43 The flow of produce to distant markets required a reduction in physical and socio-political impediments, but in colonial Bihar the necessary interventions were modified by local agency. 264

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Production and trade became more international in conjunction with the local environment, which helped shape what globalisation meant. Improvement too needed to be promoted by working through the indigenous, not simply transforming it. In policy and scientific research, that was recognised but not consistently implemented. Supposedly benign measures seeking order, trade and improvement had malign effects when accompanied by misconceptions, doctrine and self-interest.44 The outcome was that British rule, despite promising to bring development, worsened conditions in Bihar. The main instruments of that disaster were law and commerce, intensifying pre-existing inequality.

Notes 1 Bagchi, ‘Relation of Agriculture’. 2 Mishra, Agrarian Problems, pp. 95–109, 120–2, 308–10, 313, 317. 3 For example see Pouchepadass, Caste et classe: viz. Pouchepadass, ‘Les classes paysannes dans les mouvements agraires en Inde au XXe siècle’, p.  84, and Thorner, ‘Semi-feodalism or Capitalism: The Contemporary Debate on Classes and Modes of Production in India’, pp. 19–72. 4 Robb, ‘Hierarchy and Resources’. 5 Evidence of A.D. Tuckey, Director of Land Records and Surveys, Bihar and Orissa, in Royal Commission on Agriculture. See also Annual Report on the Settlement Operations in Bengal, 1895–6, Calcutta 1896. The situation might be compared with medieval England when ‘rent paid for a piece of land can be transformed . . . into services performed by the holder’ or produce regardless of output; Tribe, Land, Labour, p. 25. 6 Quoted in Barber, British Economic Thought, p. 118. 7 Modern debates consider the importance of redistribution or inequality to growth and prosperity, with one school holding that taxation of the rich, to promote welfare and the public good, impedes growth and reduces overall prosperity even for the poor, while others, more plausibly and attending more to evidence than self-interest, argue that inequality limits growth and reduces wealth, for example by depressing demand and hence investment or by lowering levels of skill, innovation and hence productivity; and so on. The Bihar economy was a testing ground for these theories and for those who attribute its poverty to British rule and policies without precisely explaining the means. 8 This is the essence of Chayanov’s concept of the peasant farm and his analysis of its economic character; Chayanov, ‘Peasant Farm Organization’. He referred to the inhibition of proletarianisation in nineteenth-century Russia: ‘while in a production sense concentration in agriculture is scarcely reflected in the foundation of new large-scale undertakings, in an economic sense capitalism as a general economic system makes great headway in agriculture’. In his concern with class formation he implied that rural non-capitalist production was passive: family-farm sectors were subordinated to the hegemony of capitalist relations as ‘a general economic system’. But local production in Bihar was not being remade by capitalism despite ‘large-scale undertakings’. 9 See Kessinger, Vilyatpur, and Bhattacharya, ‘Agricultural Labour’. 10 See Byers, ‘Modes of Production’. He is impatient with ‘scientific idealism’ and ‘over-abstract formulation’ (pp.  14–15). Like much of the Indian

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mode-of-production debate, the mixed situation in Bihar—discussing Bagchi’s ‘symbiosis’; see n.1, this chapter—appears to contradict Dobb’s Marxian assertion that ‘save for comparatively brief intervals of transition, each historical period is moulded under the prepondering influence of a single, more or less homogeneous economic form, and is characterized according to the predominant type of socio-economic relationship’ (Dobb, Studies, p.  11). Compare Marx’s dominant mode providing the ‘law of motion’ and ‘general illumination’ whereby in feudal societies all capital, including artisans’ tools, has a ‘landedproperty character’ and in bourgeois society agriculture is more or less ‘a branch of industry . . . entirely dominated by capital’; Marx, Grundisse, pp. 106–7. 11 Bharadwaj, ‘View of Commercialisation’, pp. 10–11. 12 Ibid., p. 11. 13 Bhaduri, Economic Structure, p. 10. His context, different from mine, is an economy ‘predominantly of direct agricultural producers, mostly small peasants’ with rights of occupancy (pp. 17–18), underestimating the role of commercialisation and profit and attributing to the postcolonial state a retreat from maximum land-revenue extraction and attempts to moderate landlord power (p. 11), both evident in the nineteenth century. Arvind Das makes an interesting distinction between structures of work and exploitation, arguing that during British rule usury and wage labour became more important than rack renting, shaped by social formation and social compulsions: Bihar had a ‘distorted economy based on a distorted commercialisation’; Das, Agrarian Unrest, pp.  1–78. My study elaborates on those points. 14 Chaudhuri, ‘Process of Depeasantization’. 15 Islam, Bengal Land Tenure. 16 For the preceding, compare Chayanov, ‘Peasant Farm Organization’, pp. 225, 257. 17 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, especially chs.1 & 2. 18 Pouchepadass, Land, Power and Market. 19 R&A Agric A7–11 May 1891. 20 Ibid.; Census of India I, pt.1, Calcutta 1903, pp. 47–50. 21 Dharma Kumar, ‘The Fiscal System’, in Kumar, Cambridge Economic History; the figures and quotation are from pp. 926–7. The moral is obvious, except to neoliberals who hate the state, such as one who wrote to me in amazement and indignation after reading my suggestion in Robb, History, that British India’s problem had been too little, not too much, taxation. I called it ‘a major qualification of the British Indian state’s modernity’ (p. 168). The disparity between Britain and India in the late nineteenth century was greater than might appear, in money terms because of differences in their GDP and comparatively because of British India’s allocation of public funds (to the bureaucracy, army, canals and railways) and comparative paucity of private charitable provision, especially in education. As Kumar put it (p.  937), ‘Very little was spent on other social or economic developments [after tiny amounts on education and public health], such as extensions or research in agriculture, or on industry.’ 22 R&A Rev B54–66 June 1899. 23 See R&A Rev A88–92 June 1890, B12 June 1891, A29–31 June 1897, B10–11 June 1899, A27–8 October 1908; PCR 363 12/22 1895/6. 24 A contrast is indicated with landlord power within complex political relationships in Awadh; so severe were its limits one scholar felt ‘little need to search for massive change to explain the apparently sudden collapse of the great estates in Oudh in 1920–1’; Musgrave, ‘Landlords’, pp. 273–5. 25 PCR 359 17/9 & 30/9 1893/4.

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6 PCR 359 30/12 1893/4. 2 27 PCR 345–6 10/103  & 110 1887/8, 352 10/20 1890/1,  & 363 12/6 1895–6; R&A Rev B52–3 April 1894. 28 R&A Rev A3–8 September 1910. See also, on Buxar, PCR 339 14/28 1883/4 & 341 14/28 1884/5. 29 R&A Rev B29–30 January 1903. 30 R&A Rev A29–31 June 1897. 31 See PCR 345–6 10/110 1877/8; R&A Rev B47 October  1894, B5 November 1895 & A11–12 May 1900. Rorabacher, Bihar, devoted ch.5 to very general discussions of Orientalism, religion and caste, with a few mainly post-1947 illustrations of ‘caste management’ as ‘a preoccupation for those in power’, but in ch.6 he described the success of Darbhanga raj under the permanent settlement and then the Court of Wards: large rental profits despite fraud and mismanagement; improved position for Mithil Brahmans; little investment in agricultural improvement. Hill still observed Darbhanga raj’s wealth in 1984; River of Sorrow, p. 159, after supposed zamindari abolition, on which see Jannuzi, Agrarian Crisis. 32 R&A Rev A1–4 November 1894 & A 4–24 May 1897. 33 R&A Rev A26–30 April 1897, A21–3 June 1898 & B 16 September 1905. Officials had insisted on a strong manager, said to be in line with the Maharaja’s will, to deal with matters ‘a lady in the Maharani’s position could not undertake’; PCR 367 6/2 1897/8. 34 Pinch, Peasants and Monks. For a ‘class’ model with partly Western influences, see Hauser, Sahajanand and Culture; Robb, Peasants, pp. 34–43. On kisan sabhas and politics, see Damodaran, Broken Promises. 35 Robb, ‘Hierarchy and Resources’. Dewey’s arguments were affected by this paradox. See n.36, this chapter. 36 Dewey’s arguments are made boldly and refreshingly in ‘Changing the Guard’. 37 See discussion of Tapan Raychaudhuri and Tirthanka Roy in Robb, Ideas Matter, ch.2, and also Kaveh Yazdani, India, Modernity. I first developed such ideas decades ago, reconsidered them and brought them together in this book, aware they are likely to be misunderstood as exonerating colonialism and its policies. 38 Fuller, Studies, pp. 199, 278. 39 ‘The parlous state of poverty eradication’, 44th session of the Human Rights Council, https://chrgj.org (accessed 11 July 2020). 40 Writing in Britain in 2020 during a pandemic, I was struck by how hard some find it to learn lessons even over a few months, let alone decades or centuries. The UK performance, assessed by excess deaths per capita, then seemed by some way the worst in the world, an outcome I attributed wholly to poor governance. Did this sour my assessment of British impact in Bihar, countering the impression given in official files of integrity and effectiveness as well as error and arrogance? Pace Collingwood, the past is ever coloured by the present. 41 See www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53061 (accessed 11 December 2019): Azfar Moin, H-Asia, H-Net Reviews, December 2019, on Hallaq, Restating Orientalism. The claim is that ‘secular’ means ‘value-free’, that ‘rapacious capitalism and genocidal colonialism on a global scale .  .  . brought the nonhuman world to the brink of ecological disaster’, all ‘because the West underwent the fact/value split that Islam had managed to avoid’ (ignoring the record of irrational faith throughout history). Moin, not believing this, depressingly adds: ‘When an argument is made on such a majestic scale and so deeply concerned with “foundational moral principles and ethical structures” (p. 25), it is pointless to assess it, in whole or in part, in typical scholarly terms.’ Hallaq’s

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book calls Orientalism a symptom of post-Enlightenment ‘disorder in modern knowledge’ (with liberalism, secularism, humanism, capitalism and modernity), ‘intertwined with violence’, ‘inherently incapable of appreciating . . . non-­secular non-humanist phenomena’ because of lacking the ‘benchmark’ that in nonsecular non-humanist cultures limits what can or cannot be done. Exploitative and colonial societies are effective at ‘dehumanizing the Other’ while academia has ‘an underlying structure of thought that is inherently colonialist’. Hallaq then says slogans, nativism and ideology are of little value to scholarship. 42 The reference is: ‘all history . . . is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind’; Collingwood, Idea of History, p. 215. For defining history and understanding causation, this has limitations, not least in regard to non-human agency, but is crucial to explanations peculiar to history and not amenable to scientific experiment, about motivations, opinions and persuasion. The dictum relates to interpretation of evidence: it is undesirable to pronounce on the origin, purpose or effect of something at a particular time without understanding what it meant and communicated at that time, which means thinking back into the past, not possibly misjudging it from the present. A similar process assesses the reliability and partiality of evidence, obviously for intellectual, political and social history but also more technical subjects, understanding categories and origins and limitations of data or economic theories, models and approaches. 43 That is not to underplay its importance. Ironically work on this book began long ago intending to explain why Bihar politics came to national attention after 1920. Did socio-economic conditions counter the myth that Bihar had hitherto been unengaged or apathetic? But those conditions gave quite enough to discuss. 44 For example see Misra, ‘Peasants’. When laws, taxes and aggressive trade damaged their cotton trade, Garos in Assam’s hills and valleys took to arms. Redefining them as savage rebellious hillmen, the Company then justified annexation as pacification or protection—a pattern set for ‘tribal’ borderlands and (with other stereotypes) many aspects of indigenous production, trade and culture.

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SOURCES AND REFERENCES

Note on the records of the Commissioner of Patna Division These were consulted in what was then the Bihar State Record Room, now State Archives. The staff were obliging, but the Commissioner’s records were in a very fragile condition, with many pages in fragments and files deplorably disorganised. My citations are explained in a note after the Preface, but (beyond the basta number) they imply greater order than existed. Over a hundred years ago the records seem to have been refiled; each bundle was wrapped in cloth and supplied with a descriptive flysheet. But either those charged with that task made errors or their work was subsequently corrupted. At the time of my access the only certainty was that the flysheet would not describe the contents of the basta. The most that could be said was that a basta for, say, 1882/3 would have a fair amount from that year, contain files mainly from 1880 to 1884 and not have anything from before about 1874.

Note on the proceedings of the Government of India These were consulted at both the British Library in London and the National Archives in New Delhi, but much greater use was made of the records in India. Not only do they have proceedings from series other than ‘A’ (the category of important matters of record copied to London), but also they include ‘file’ as well as proceedings volumes for most years between the formation of the Government of India in 1858 and new constitutional arrangements after 1920. After some persistence, I was able to read these ‘file’ documents from several departments. I  paid attention above all to those from Revenue and Agriculture, reading the whole series, a volume at a time, from the outset on into the early twentieth century. I used such materials extensively because, especially in ‘keep-withs’ (often voluminous), they included departmental notes, demi-official communications and other related papers, provided a surprising amount of local detail in a convenient 269

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format and offered an all-India chronology and perspective for matters concerning Bihar.

Other works consulted Archival sources other than those discussed above are cited separately in notes.

Government and related publications Annual Report on the Settlement Operations in Bengal, 1895–6, Calcutta 1896 Buchanan, Francis, An Account of the District of Shahabad in 1812–13 (from the Buchanan MSS, in the India Office Library), Patna 1934 Grierson, George A., Behar Peasant Life, being a Discursive Catalogue of the Surroundings of the People of that Province, Calcutta 1885, reprint Cosmo, Delhi 1975 ———, Notes on the District of Gaya, Calcutta 1893 Gupta, Phanindra Nath, [SR], Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations [Revision] in the District of Saran, 1915–1921, Patna 1923 Hunter, W.W., A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol.XIII (complied by A.W. Mackie), London 1877 O’Malley, L.S.S., Gazetteer, Saran District (rev. A.P. Middleton, 1930), reprint Logos Press, New Delhi 2007 Report of a Commission appointed by the Government of India to enquire into the working of the Opium Department in Bengal and the North-Western Provinces, Calcutta 1883. Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, Cmd 3132, London 1928 Selection of Papers on Agricultural Indebtedness and the Restriction of the Power to Alienate Interests in Land, Calcutta 1898 Selections from the Duncan Records, Benares 1863 Stephenson-Moore, C.J. [SR], Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the Champaran District 1892–99, Calcutta 1900 ———, . . . Muzaffarpur District 1892 to 1899, Calcutta 1901 Voelcker, John Augustus, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, London 1893, reprint Agricole Reprints, New Delhi 1986 Watt, George, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, vol.6, pt.2, W.H Allen & Co., London 1893 Wilson, H.H., Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms, W.H. Allen & Co, London 1855

Other works cited Adas, Michael, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1974 Adelman, Jeremy, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2013

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Agarwal, Bina, A Field of One’s Own, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994 Ali, Imran, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1855–1947, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1988 Ali, Tariq Omar, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018 Amin, Shahid, Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur. An Inquiry into Peasant Production for Capitalist Enterprise in Colonial India, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1984 Amin, Sonia, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939, E.J. Brill, Leiden 1996 Aquique, Md., Economic History of Mithila (c.600 B.C.–1097 A.D.), Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 1974 Baden-Powell, B.H., Land-Systems of British India, vol.1, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1892 ———, The Indian Village Community, Longmans, Green & Co., London 1896 Bagchi, Amiya K., ‘Relation of Agriculture to Industry in the Context of South Asia’, Frontier, Calcutta, VII (1975) Baird, J.G.A., ed., Private Papers of the Marquess of Dalhousie, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London 1910 Baker, Christopher John, An Indian Rural Economy 1880–1955. The Tamilnad Countryside, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1984 Balfour-Paul, Jenny, Indigo, British Museum, London 1998 Banerjee, Kum Kum, ‘Grain Traders and the East India Company: Patna and its Hinterland in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Subrahmanyam, Merchants, Markets Banerjee, Swapna, ‘Domestic Manuals on Mistress-Servant Relationships: Constructing Bengali Middle Class Identity through “Appropriate” Codes of Conduct’, Modern Historical Studies 2 (March 2001) Barber, William J., British Economic Thought and India. A Study in the History of Development Economics, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1975 Baruah, Sanjib, ‘Territoriality, Indigeneity and Rights in the North-east India’, Economic & Political Weekly, 22 March 2008 Basak, S., Socio-Cultural Study of a Minority Linguistic Group (Bengalees in Bihar 1858–1912), B.R. Publishing Corp., New Delhi 1991 Basu, Aparna, ‘The Indian Response to Scientific and Technical Education in the Colonial Era, 1820–1920’, in Kumar, Science and Empire Bauer, Rolf, The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-century India, E.J. Brill, Leiden and Boston 2019 Bayly, C.A., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996 ———, ‘Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India’, Modern Asian Studies 27, 1 (1993) ———, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars. North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983 Bayly, Susan, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999

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Beaglehole, T.H., Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792–1818, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1966 Bhaduri, Amit, The Economic Structure of Backward Agriculture, Academic Press, London 1983 Bharadwaj, Krishna, ‘A View of Commercialisation in Indian Agriculture and the Development of Capitalism’, Journal of Peasant Studies 12, 4 (1985) Bhatia, B.M., Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India (1860–1945), Asia Publishing House, New York 1963 Bhatta, Nuffer Chundra, The Principles of the Bengal Tenancy Bill Legally Examined, Hindoo Patriot Press, Calcutta 1883 Bhattacharya, Neeladri, ‘Agricultural Labour and Production: Central and SouthEast Punjab, 1870–1940’, in K.N. Raj et al., eds., Essays on the Commercialization of Indian Agriculture, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1985 ———, The Great Agrarian Conquest. The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World, Permanent Black/Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi 2018 Biswas, A.K., Science in India, Firma KLM, Calcutta 1969 Borthwick, Meredith, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1984 Bose, Sugata, Agrarian Bengal. Economy, Social Structure and Politics 1919–1947, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1986 ———, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993 ———, ed., Credit, Markets, and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1994. Bosma, Ulbe, The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production, 1770–2010, Cambridge University Press, New York 2013 Brailsford, H.N., Subject India, Victor Gollanz, Left Book Club, London 1943 Bray, Francesca, ‘Patterns of Evolution in Rice-Growing Societies’, Journal of Peasant Studies 11, 1 (1983) Breman, Jan, Of Peasants and Paupers. Rural Labour Circulation and Capitalist Production in West India, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1985 Buckley, R.B., Irrigation Works in India and Egypt, E. & F.N. Spon, London 1893 Byers, T.J., ‘Modes of Production and Non-European Colonial Societies: The Nature and Significance of the Debate’, Journal of Peasant Studies 12 (1985) Catanach, I.J., Rural Credit in Western India: Rural Credit and the Cooperative Movement in the Bombay Presidency, 1875–1930, University of California Press, Berkeley 1970 Chakrabarti, Shubhra, and Utsa Patnaik, eds., Agrarian and Other Histories. Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, Tulika Books, New Delhi 2017 Chakrabarti, Upal, ‘Agrarian Localities, Political Economy and Local Power in Early Nineteenth-century British India’, Modern Asian Studies 50, 3 (2016) ———, ‘The Problem of Property. Local Histories and Political-Economic Categories in British India’, Journal of the Economic & Social History of the Orient 61 (2018) Chakrabarty, Ratan Lal, and Kazuo Ando, ‘Revenue Survey of Bangladesh: A Source Study of Rural History’ (mimeo, courtesy of Dr Chakrabarty)

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282

INDEX

administration 39 – 41; local 127 – 35, 139 – 40, 142, 151 – 2, 159 – 61, 195 – 9, 254 – 7 agricultural improvement 11 – 12, 94, 108, 111, 116, 185 – 6, 252 agriculture: commercial 5, 9, 13, 22 – 4, 43 – 4, 69, 93, 141, 199, 247, 249; reliance on 4, 21, 24 – 7; social context of 13, 21, 31, 65 – 6, 92, 119, 218, 250; see also crops by name attitudes: British 21, 28 – 9, 81 – 6, 260 – 3; Indian 39 – 41, 113 – 14, 116; legalistic 37 – 8; see also race Babhan(s) see Bhumihar(s) Baden-Powell, B.H. 56, 65 Bagchi, Amiya 11 – 12, 246 Bayley, Steuart 130, 132 – 3, 213 Behea see sugar mill(s) Bengal Tenancy Act(s) 119; of 1859 58; of 1885 58, 69, 71 – 2, 165, 214 – 15, 255 beoparis see traders Bhumihar(s) 66, 71, 175, 220 Brahman(s) 19, 66 – 7, 71 – 2, 109, 119, 149, 154, 175, 181 British rule, assessments of 3 – 6, 11 – 12, 62 – 3 Buck, E.C. 90, 117 Buckley, R.B. 197 – 9, 200 – 6 Buxar 97, 180 Calcutta 25, 28, 30, 60, 74, 85 – 7, 199, 202, 222, 238 – 9 Champaran 113 – 14, 131, 148 – 9, 151, 165, 200 – 2, 211, 217, 231, 246 chaukidar(s) 127, 129, 131, 134, 139 – 40, 142, 206, 260

college, agricultural 41, 95, 99 – 100 cooperative credit 30, 58, 156 – 61, 240 Court of Wards 6, 57, 96, 99 – 100, 129, 159, 255 – 9 Coventry, Bernard 136 – 7, 241 creditor(s): strategies of 50, 162 – 6, 182, 223, 247 – 50 Curzon, Lord 99, 157 – 8, 160 – 1 Darbhanga district 71 – 2, 111, 131, 149 – 50, 154, 200, 202, 218 data 4, 9, 27, 37, 48, 70, 75, 86, 139; problems with 7, 21, 27, 64, 71, 89 – 91, 111 – 13, 118, 127 – 8, 134, 137, 228 Datta, Rajit 43, 262 development: policies 4 – 6, 9, 25 – 31, 38 – 9, 42, 50, 74 – 5, 81 – 2, 94 – 9, 108 – 9, 115 – 19, 139; spending 26, 131, 254 – 5; theories 4 – 6, 8 – 11, 81 – 2 Dewey, Clive 11, 82, 262 Dumraon 96 – 7, 180, 259; Maharaja of 74, 96, 180 East India Company, English 5, 28, 30, 37 – 8, 40 – 3, 48 – 51, 54, 85 – 6, 94, 128, 210, 228, 234, 249 Eden, Ashley 116 – 18, 213 famine 5 – 7, 9, 26 – 7, 29, 39, 44, 57 – 9, 89, 91, 93, 95, 117, 128 – 9, 134, 138, 147 – 54, 156, 158, 164, 170 – 1, 196, 199, 216, 242, 252, 260 Finucane, Michael 97, 108 – 9, 118, 253 Fuller, J.B. 89, 158, 160

283

INDEX

Gandhi, M.K. 73, 211 Gaya district 67, 71, 101, 113, 115, 130 – 1, 148, 153 – 4, 156, 171, 195 – 9, 206, 219, 231, 248, 255 – 7 Ghosh, Sanjukta 31, 100 Gopalganj 214, 216 Grierson, G.A. 131, 195 – 6, 219, 235 Hathwa 131, 155, 214, 258 Holderness, T.W. 89 – 90, 137, 151, 242 Howard, Albert (and Gabrielle) 100 – 2, 136 Hudson, W.B. 202 – 3, 216 Hunter, W.W. 29, 51 Ibbetson, Denzil 39, 57, 157 – 9, 165, 206 improvement grant(s) 137, 152, 154 – 5 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 40, 82, 261 indigo 9, 19, 23 – 5, 28, 41, 43, 68, 93, 110, 118, 161 – 2, 177, 181, 186, 199, 202, 210 – 11, 224, 228, 234 – 5, 237, 249, 261 indigo planters (thikadars) 43, 67, 71, 97 – 102, 113 – 15, 121, 130, 136 – 9, 141, 156, 159, 175, 180, 187, 200 – 1, 206, 212 – 18, 220 – 3, 232 – 3, 238 – 43, 246 – 8, 250 – 3, 255 – 7, 262 irrigation 4, 6 – 7, 20, 25 – 31, 38, 65 – 7, 69, 75, 90, 98, 109 – 10, 113 – 16, 119, 138, 150, 155 – 6, 161, 180 – 1, 183 – 7, 195 – 9, 217 – 18, 229, 233, 248, 252, 256, 258, 260; see also Son canals jute 9, 11 – 12, 22 – 3, 25, 27 – 8, 120, 136, 138, 161, 177 – 8, 253 karkhanadar(s) 236 – 8, 241 – 2 khatadar 229, 231 – 4, 248 Koiri 72, 175, 181, 219, 231 – 2 Kumar, Dharma 55, 65 – 6 Kurmi 175, 181, 232 labour (in Bihar) 21 – 2, 59, 75, 96, 118 – 21, 139, 147 – 52, 177 – 8, 183 – 4, 212 – 13, 215 – 18, 234 – 8, 246 – 51 Leather, J.W. 95, 98, 136, 138, 180, 222, 241 MacDonnell, Antony 90, 133, 213 Mackenzie, Alexander 117 – 18, 132 – 3, 151

Maclagan, E.D. 91, 216 McNeile, J.M. 202, 204, 206 Maine, Henry 65, 84 markets/marketing 6, 10, 13, 19, 22 – 4, 27 – 8, 39 – 44, 68 – 70, 75, 92 – 3, 95, 110, 113, 115 – 17, 175 – 7, 181 – 2, 184 – 7, 210, 218, 221 – 4, 230, 233, 235, 237 – 40, 242 – 3, 246 – 53, 263 – 4; in land 50, 56 – 7, 65 Marx, Karl 55, 59 Metcalfe, Charles 49, 85 migrant(s), migration 19, 27, 44, 70, 86, 93, 119 – 21, 151, 183 – 4, 234 millet(s) 19 – 20, 89, 94, 97, 148, 173, 176 – 7, 181, 186, 218, 220, 230 mixed cropping 13, 94, 110, 114, 178 modern(ity) 10 – 11, 13, 24, 30, 42, 53 – 4, 64, 67, 84 – 8, 198 – 9, 213, 222 – 4, 251, 260 money economy 68 – 9, 111, 147 moneylending, agricultural 152 – 6, 229 – 30; see also creditor(s) money rents 41, 67, 156, 172, 174, 185 – 6, 230 Munro, Thomas 38, 49 Muslim(s) 28, 85, 163, 165, 175, 257 Muzaffarpur 21 – 2, 113, 149, 151, 165, 201, 204 Mylne, Ernest 199, 238; see also Thomson & Mylne Mylne, L.H. 163 – 4; see also Thomson & Mylne Nasriganj 170 – 86, 238, 255 O’Conor, J.E. 91, 137, 241 Odling, C.W. 196 – 7, 203, 205 oilseed(s) 19, 43, 173, 176 – 7, 210, 217, 220 – 1, 235, 240, 243 opium 9, 19, 23 – 5, 41 – 3, 68, 93, 110, 114, 118, 154 – 5, 173 – 4, 176 – 8, 180, 186, 210, 213, 217, 221, 223, 228 – 34, 237 – 8, 240, 242 – 3, 246, 248, 261 panchayats 129, 131, 134, 140, 151 – 2, 160 partition of land 49 – 50, 69, 128, 156, 182, 262 Patna district 4, 67, 115, 171, 218, 220, 235, 254, 257; town 4, 44, 113, 149, 196

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patwari(s) 70 – 1, 129, 134, 173, 175, 233, 257 permanent settlement (1793) 48, 51 – 2, 56, 64 – 6, 74, 90, 115, 128, 140, 183, 246, 254 plough(s), -ing 20 – 1, 44, 67, 96, 98 – 9, 100 – 1, 109, 114, 116 – 17, 119, 147, 175, 177 – 8, 182, 184, 186, 217 – 20, 235 population levels 27, 89 – 91, 113 – 14, 182, 185, 253 pre-colonial conditions 23 – 4, 41, 43 – 4, 48, 55, 65 – 6 public works 26, 29, 120, 129, 140, 153, 252 Public Works Department 135, 151, 196 – 8, 200 – 1 Punjab 6, 21 – 2, 24 – 6, 28, 30, 49, 57 – 8, 116, 134, 137, 157, 165, 185, 221 Pusa (Institute) 31, 43, 99 – 102, 108, 136 – 7, 211

95 – 6, 100, 102, 108, 111, 116, 118, 252 Shahabad 30, 74, 82, 96 – 7, 99, 111 – 15, 129, 151, 171 – 2, 182 – 4, 198 – 9, 211, 218 – 19, 235, 238 – 9, 254 – 6 Smith. Adam 4, 42, 59 Son canals 43, 96, 113, 129, 170 – 1, 178 – 9, 198, 210 – 11, 230, 232, 242, 255 statistics see data Stokes, Eric 12, 29, 109 – 10, 116, 185 – 6 Stone, Ian 109, 180, 183, 186 Strachey, John 39, 90, 117, 135; and Richard 141, 252 sugarcane 19 – 20, 23 – 4, 28, 43, 92 – 3, 96, 99, 110, 138, 150, 161, 163, 174 – 84, 186, 210, 216, 218 – 19, 221 – 3, 232, 234 – 43, 248, 253 – 4 sugar mill(s) 92, 98, 118, 182, 186, 235 – 6, 239, 242

race: racial stereotypes 22, 29 – 31, 51 – 2, 64 – 5, 81, 84 – 6, 90, 175, 185 – 6, 260 Rajput(s) 66, 72, 149, 154, 173, 175, 181, 220 Reid, D.N. 97 – 8, 213 – 14, 216 Revenue and Agriculture Department 82, 89 – 90, 98, 136 – 7, 153, 155, 157 – 8, 160, 197 Ricardo, David 50, 59, 91 rice 12 – 13, 19 – 20, 22, 28, 43 – 4, 67, 89, 91 – 2, 94, 97, 100, 110 – 15, 147 – 50, 173 – 82, 184 – 6, 199, 210, 218 – 22, 224, 230, 232, 243, 262

tahsildar(s) 164, 173 – 4, 176, 258 Teli(s) 175, 243 thikadar(s) see indigo planters (thikadars) Thomson & Mylne 99, 179, 235, 238 – 9 traders: local (beoparis) 23, 50 – 1, 68, 120 – 1, 165, 176, 185, 187, 223 – 4, 248 Tupper, Charles 137, 160

salt 23 – 4, 26, 42 – 4, 150 Saran 89, 113, 131, 151, 153, 165, 180, 200, 211, 214, 216 – 18, 230, 232 science 13, 29 – 31, 37, 42, 81 – 5, 89,

Voelcker, J.A. 95, 97, 101, 117 Washbrook, David 12, 56 Watt, George 95, 99, 136, 222, 241 Westland, James 132 – 3, 151 wheat 19, 24, 28, 43, 96 – 7, 101, 115, 138, 173 – 4, 176 – 7, 179 – 81, 186, 210, 219, 222, 230, 232, 243, 262

285