Class 12 History Chapter 9 Colonialism and the Countryside NCERT Solutions in English

Q. Why was the jotedar a powerful figure in many areas of rural Bengal?

Answer: Jotedars were rich, resident peasants who, by the early nineteenth century, had acquired vast landholdings, sometimes several thousand acres, as Francis Buchanan’s survey of Dinajpur district describes. They controlled local trade and moneylending, giving them a hold over poorer villagers that went well beyond their own land. Much of their land was cultivated through sharecroppers (adhiyars or bargadars), who brought their own ploughs and labour and handed over half the harvest. Unlike zamindars, who often lived in towns and were therefore absentee landlords, jotedars lived in the villages and exercised direct, everyday power over a large section of poor cultivators. They fiercely resisted any zamindari attempt to raise the village’s revenue demand, blocked zamindari officials from carrying out their duties, mobilised dependent ryots against the zamindar, and deliberately delayed revenue payments. When a zamindar’s estate was auctioned for non-payment, jotedars were often themselves among the buyers. Their power was strongest in North Bengal, though similar rich peasants existed elsewhere under names such as haoladars, gantidars or mandals, and their steady rise correspondingly weakened zamindari authority in the countryside.

Q. How did zamindars manage to retain control over their zamindaris?

Answer: Facing an exorbitant fixed revenue demand and the constant threat of auction under the Sunset Law, zamindars devised the strategy of fictitious sale. A zamindar first transferred part of his zamindari to a female relative, since Company rules protected women’s property from seizure. He then deliberately withheld revenue payment, letting arrears accumulate until part of the estate was put up for auction. At the auction, the zamindar’s own agents bought the property, outbidding other purchasers, and then refused to pay the purchase money, forcing a resale; the same agents bought it again, and the cycle repeated until the state and rival bidders gave up, letting the zamindar buy his own estate back cheaply. Such benami purchases at four major Bengal zamindaris, including Burdwan, totalled about Rs 30 lakh between 1793 and 1801, with over 15 per cent of all auction sales being fictitious in this way. Outside buyers who did succeed in buying an estate often still could not take possession: their agents could be attacked by the former zamindar’s lathyals, and ordinary ryots, who saw themselves as the zamindar’s proja (subjects) bound to him by loyalty, often resisted an outsider’s entry into the village. Through these combined strategies, zamindars were not easily displaced even when their estates were formally auctioned.

Q. How did the Paharias respond to the coming of outsiders?

Answer: The Paharias considered the entire Rajmahal region their own land and the very basis of their identity and survival, and they resisted the intrusion of outsiders from the start. Their chiefs maintained group unity, settled disputes, and led raids on the plains, both for survival in years of scarcity and to assert power and negotiate political relations: plains zamindars often paid a regular tribute for peace, and traders paid tolls to use passes the Paharias controlled. When settled agriculture began expanding aggressively into their territory in the late eighteenth century, the British first tried a brutal policy of outright extermination in the 1770s, hunting Paharias down. When this failed, Augustus Cleveland’s 1780s policy of pacification offered Paharia chiefs an annual allowance to keep order among their own people; many chiefs refused it outright, and those who accepted it usually lost the respect of their community, being seen as paid subordinates of the colonial government. As pacification campaigns continued and Santhal settlers took over the fertile lower hills, the Paharias withdrew ever deeper into the more barren upper hills, remaining suspicious and hostile towards every outsider, which is exactly the wary, evasive reception Buchanan himself recorded when he travelled through the region in 1810-11.

Q. Why did the Santhals rebel against British rule?

Answer: The Santhals had originally been welcomed as ideal settlers: from around 1800 they cleared forest and ploughed land for rice and cotton in the Rajmahal foothills, and by 1832 a large area was formally demarcated for them as Damin-i-Koh, with Santhal villages growing from 40 in 1838 to 1,473 by 1851. But settling this land soon created a new set of grievances. The colonial state levied heavy taxes on the land the Santhals had newly cleared, high-interest moneylenders known to the Santhals as dikus charged ruinous rates of interest and seized land whenever debts went unpaid, and zamindars also began asserting claims into the Damin area. By the 1850s the Santhals concluded that these combined pressures, from the state, the moneylenders and the zamindars together, left rebellion as the only way to create a world in which they themselves would rule, leading to the Santhal Revolt of 1855-56. The uprising, led by Sidhu Manjhi, was eventually crushed, but it did lead the colonial state to carve out the separate Santhal Pargana, 5,500 square miles from the districts of Bhagalpur and Birbhum, with special laws intended to conciliate the Santhals afterwards.

Q. What explains the anger of the Deccan ryots against the moneylenders?

Answer: The ryots’ anger was not simply about being in debt, since moneylending had existed in the countryside long before colonial rule; it was about the moneylenders abandoning the customary norms that had once regulated lending. The chief such norm was that interest could never exceed the principal, and this norm broke down completely under colonial-era moneylending: in one case investigated by the Deccan Riots Commission, a moneylender had charged over Rs 2,000 in interest on a loan of just Rs 100. Moneylenders also refused to issue receipts, entered fictitious figures in account books, took over harvested produce without crediting its value honestly, and used the 1859 Limitation Law (meant to cap loan-bond validity at three years) to force ryots into a fresh bond every three years, folding the unpaid principal and all accumulated interest into a new principal each time, so debt compounded rather than being checked. Peasants who could not repay were made to sign deeds of hire, formally selling their own bullocks and carts to the moneylender and then paying monthly to hire back the very same animals. When, after the 1861-65 cotton boom collapsed, moneylenders abruptly refused all further credit just as a new revenue settlement raised demand by 50 to 100 per cent, ryots at Supa and elsewhere responded by attacking sahukars and burning the account books and bonds that symbolised this whole oppressive system.

Q. Why were many zamindaris auctioned after the Permanent Settlement?

Answer: Over 75 per cent of Bengal’s zamindaris changed hands after the Permanent Settlement of 1793, and the reasons lay in how the settlement itself was designed. First, the Company pegged the initial revenue demand very high, reasoning that since the demand was fixed “for all time to come”, it would never again be able to claim a share of rising agricultural income, so it front-loaded the burden expecting it to ease as production and prices rose. Second, this unusually high demand was imposed in the 1790s, precisely when agricultural prices were depressed, which made it difficult for ryots to pay their own dues to the zamindar in the first place; if the zamindar could not collect rent, he could not pay the Company. Third, the revenue was invariable regardless of the harvest and had to be paid punctually, and under the Sunset Law a zamindari was liable to auction if payment did not arrive by sunset of the due date, leaving no room for a bad year. Fourth, the Permanent Settlement had itself weakened the zamindar’s own capacity to enforce collection: his troops were disbanded, customs duties abolished, and his cutcheries placed under a Company-appointed Collector, so rich ryots and village headmen such as jotedars and mandals could delay payment with little fear, and Burdwan alone had over 30,000 pending suits for rent arrears in 1798. Together, an impossibly high demand, bad economic timing, zero flexibility, and a weakened zamindar meant defaults, and therefore auctions, were common. As the chapter also shows, however, an auction did not always mean real displacement, since many zamindars used fictitious sales to buy their own estates back.

Q. In what way was the livelihood of the Paharias different from that of the Santhals?

Answer: The Paharias practised shifting cultivation, symbolised by the hoe: they cleared forest patches by cutting bushes and burning the undergrowth, scratched the ash-enriched soil lightly with hoes to grow pulses and millets for a few years, then abandoned the plot once its fertility declined and moved to a fresh patch. Alongside this, they hunted, gathered forest produce such as mahua, silk cocoons and resin, made charcoal, and grazed cattle on the undergrowth of fallow land, so their whole way of life stayed intimately tied to the forest and depended on the freedom to keep moving across it. The Santhals, by contrast, were settlers symbolised by the plough: from around 1800 they cleared forest permanently, ploughed the land, and grew rice and, later, commercial crops such as cotton for the market, settling down in fixed villages rather than shifting. This meant the Santhals also entered into regular relationships with traders and moneylenders that the more mobile, forest-based Paharia economy did not require in the same way. When the fertile lower hills were enclosed within the Damin-i-Koh and given to the Santhal settlers, the Paharias, confined to the poorer, drier upper hills, found their shifting-cultivation cycle could no longer be sustained, since it depended on access to fresh, fertile land exactly of the kind they had now lost; the Santhals, having chosen permanent settlement over mobility, did not face this particular problem, even though their own new crisis, heavy taxation and diku moneylenders, arrived soon after.

Q. How did the American Civil War affect the lives of ryots in India?

Answer: Before the 1860s, Britain depended on America for three-fourths of its raw cotton imports, a dependence British manufacturers had long worried about; the Cotton Supply Association (1857) and the Manchester Cotton Company (1859) had already begun looking for alternative sources, including India. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, cotton exports from America collapsed to under 3 per cent of normal, from over 2,000,000 bales in 1861 to just 55,000 bales in 1862, and British cotton merchants turned urgently to India. Bombay export merchants advanced cash to urban sahukars, who in turn advanced credit to rural moneylenders who promised to secure cotton for them, and Deccan ryots suddenly found access to seemingly unlimited credit, being given Rs 100 as advance for every acre they planted with cotton. Cotton acreage in the Bombay Deccan doubled between 1860 and 1864, and by 1862 over 90 per cent of Britain’s cotton imports were coming from India. But these boom years did not bring prosperity to most cultivators; some rich peasants gained, but for the majority, expanded cotton cultivation simply meant deeper debt. Once the Civil War ended in 1865 and American cotton returned to the market, Indian exports and prices collapsed just as sahukars, no longer confident of repayment, cut off further credit and demanded repayment of outstanding loans, at the very moment a new revenue settlement raised the demand on ryots by 50 to 100 per cent. Unable to borrow, unable to pay, and stripped of the customary protection that interest should never exceed the principal, ryots’ accumulated resentment against the moneylenders finally erupted in the Deccan riots of 1875.

Q. What are the problems of using official sources in writing about the history of peasants?

Answer: Official sources such as the Fifth Report and the Deccan Riots Commission Report are invaluable to historians because they contain evidence, petitions, statistics and eyewitness testimony, that is available nowhere else. But both were written by officials for specific institutional purposes, and their evidence and conclusions cannot be accepted uncritically. The Fifth Report was produced by a Select Committee in the middle of a British political battle over the East India Company’s trade monopoly, with critics eager to publicise Company misrule; researchers using zamindars’ own archives and local district records have since shown that the Report exaggerated how completely traditional zamindari power had collapsed and overstated how much land zamindars actually lost, when in fact, through fictitious sales and benami purchases, many zamindars kept real control of their estates. The Deccan Riots Commission was specifically asked whether the government’s own revenue demand had caused the 1875 revolt, and it concluded that it was the moneylenders who were to blame, not the state, a pattern that recurs frequently in colonial records: a persistent official reluctance to admit that popular discontent could ever be a response to government action itself. Official reports also record events through the vocabulary and preoccupations of the officials who wrote them, so the peasants’ own voice survives, if at all, only filtered through petitions collected for an official’s purpose, such as a Riots Commission enquiry. The lesson for historians is that official archives remain essential sources, but they must always be read carefully, cross-checked against newspapers, unofficial accounts, legal records and, where possible, oral sources, rather than accepted simply at face value.

Q. On an outline map of the subcontinent, mark out the areas described in this chapter. Find out whether there were other areas where the Permanent Settlement and the ryotwari system were prevalent and plot these on the map as well.

Answer: This answer is a table and steps, not a printed map: draw it on your own outline map of the subcontinent.
Areas described in the chapter: Bengal (Burdwan, Dinajpur in North Bengal, Calcutta); the Rajmahal hills and the Damin-i-Koh, with Bhagalpur and Birbhum, from which the Santhal Pargana was carved; and the Bombay Deccan (Poona, with Supa, and Ahmednagar, with Mirajgaon in Karjat taluka), with Bombay as the cotton port.
Other areas to find out and plot: the chapter says the Permanent Settlement was rarely extended beyond Bengal, and that temporary settlements were made in territories annexed in the nineteenth century. From your own reading you will find that the Permanent Settlement also covered Bihar and Orissa (part of the Bengal Presidency) and parts of the Madras Presidency, while the ryotwari system prevailed in most of the Madras Presidency as well as the Bombay Presidency. Mark the two systems in different colours.

How to draw it: (1) shade the Permanent Settlement areas in one colour and the ryotwari areas in another; (2) mark the towns as dots and label them; (3) draw the Rajmahal hills with a hill symbol and outline the Damin-i-Koh; (4) add a key and a title.

Q. Francis Buchanan published reports on several districts of eastern India. Read one report and collate the information available about rural society, focusing on the themes discussed in this chapter. Highlight the ways in which historians can use such texts.

Answer (how to do the project): Choose one of Buchanan’s district reports (for example Dinajpur or Bhagalpur). Collate what it says under the chapter’s themes: zamindars and jotedars, ryots and sharecroppers, land and crops, forests, hill people and settlers, trade, moneylending, minerals. Then show how a historian can use it: as rich, first-hand detail about a moment in time, but read with care, since Buchanan was a Company employee, travelled with a large retinue paid for by the Company, looked for commercially valuable resources and judged landscapes by how they could be made more “productive”. Cross-check it with other records (revenue records, petitions) wherever you can.

Q. In the region where you live, talk to the older people within a rural community and visit the fields they now cultivate. Find out what they produce, how they earn their livelihoods, what their parents did, what their sons and daughters do now, and how their lives have changed over the last 75 years. Write a report based on your findings.

Answer (how to do the project): Prepare a short list of questions under the headings the project gives: crops and produce, sources of livelihood, the work of three generations, and the main changes. Visit the fields, note what is grown and how (tools, irrigation, sale in markets), and record the answers carefully with names and ages. In the report, compare the three generations and explain the changes (for example credit and debt, cash crops, land holdings, migration, education), linking them where you can to themes of this chapter such as revenue, moneylenders and commercial crops. Remember that such oral sources are valuable because they give the people’s own view, which official records often leave out.

Q. Why had the raja failed to pay the revenue? Who were the purchasers at the auction? What does the story tell us about what was happening in the rural areas of eastern India at that time?

Answer: The raja had accumulated huge arrears because the revenue fixed under the Permanent Settlement was very high, prices were depressed in the 1790s and his ryots were not paying their dues. Many of the purchasers turned out to be the raja’s own servants and agents, buying on his behalf, so over 95 per cent of the sale was fictitious. The story shows that zamindars were under great pressure from the new revenue system and that estates were being auctioned on a large scale, but also that zamindars were devising clever ways to keep control of their lands.

Q. Describe the ways in which the jotedars resisted the authority of the zamindars.

Answer: According to Buchanan, the jotedars paid only a few rupees of their revenue and then fell into arrears almost every kist (instalment); they held more lands than their pottahs entitled them to; if the zamindar’s officers summoned and detained them at the cutcherry, they complained at the police station and the munsiff’s court of being dishonoured; and while such cases were pending, they instigated the petty ryots not to pay their revenue. The chapter adds that they resisted efforts to increase the jama of the village, prevented zamindari officials from doing their duties, mobilised dependent ryots and bought zamindars’ estates at auctions.

Q. Read the text accompanying Fig. 9.5 carefully and insert the following terms in appropriate places along the arrows: rent, revenue, interest, loan, produce.

Answer: Zamindar to Company: revenue. Ryot to zamindar, and jotedar to zamindar: rent. Under-ryot to ryot, and under-ryot to jotedar: rent. Jotedar to ryot: loan. Ryot to jotedar: interest on the loan and produce (which the jotedar bought and sold).

Q. From the tone in which evidence is recorded, what do you think is the attitude of the report to the facts narrated? What is the Report trying to say through the figures? Can you think of any problem in making long-term generalisations from these figures of two years?

Answer: The tone is one of alarm and sympathy for the zamindars: it stresses that revenue was not paid punctually, that lands were “periodically exposed to sale”, and that “some of the oldest families of the country” faced “poverty and ruin”. Through the figures it tries to show that very large amounts of land were being sold and that the old zamindari order was collapsing under the Company’s revenue system. The problem is that two years (1796-97 and 1797-98) were a time of depressed prices and are not typical; they cannot show the long-term trend, and they do not show that many sales were fictitious and that zamindars often bought their estates back.

Q. Compare the account of the zamindars you have just read with that in Chapter 8.

Answer: In Chapter 8 (Mughal India) zamindars were powerful landed proprietors with personal milkiyat lands, forts and armed contingents; they collected revenue for the state, spearheaded colonisation of land, set up markets and had a relationship of reciprocity with peasants. Under the Permanent Settlement (this chapter) they were treated as revenue collectors of the state, not landowners; their troops were disbanded, customs duties abolished and their courts put under the Collector; they had to pay a very high fixed revenue punctually or lose their estates at auction, and they faced a challenge from the jotedars. In both, however, they were not easily displaced and used their local influence to survive.

Q. Look at the painting and identify the ways in which it represents the traditions of the picturesque.

Answer: The painting shows the hill village as a calm, beautiful idyll untouched by modern civilisation: a few thatched huts and a tiny human figure set among huge, spreading trees, with the landscape dominating the people. It plays with light and shade (bright light breaking through the trees and dark foreground shadows) and shows rough, irregular, varied nature rather than flat, ordered fields. A region colonial officials called dangerous and wild appears exotic and peaceful.

Q. Look at Figs. 9.8 and 9.9. Describe how the pictures represent the relationship between tribal people and nature.

Answer: In both pictures the people are small and almost lost in nature: in Fig. 9.8 the huts stand under towering trees and a single figure sits at the edge of the forest; in Fig. 9.9 a tiny figure sits by the water below a rocky hill surrounded by thick forest. The tribal people appear to live in harmony with nature, as part of the landscape, not as its masters; the forest shelters them and they do not disturb it. This is the romantic, picturesque view, not how officials saw them.

Q. Contrast this image of the Santhal village with Fig. 9.12.

Answer: Fig. 9.10 shows a quiet village of thatched huts under large, shady trees, with a few people going about their work: peaceful, calm and idyllic, unaffected by the outside world. Fig. 9.12, published after the rebellion, shows Santhals as fierce fighters with bows, arrows and axes, attacking sepoys, with dead and wounded bodies on the ground. The same people who had seemed peaceful settlers are now shown as violent and savage; the rebellion changed the British perception of the Santhals.

Q. Imagine you are a reader of the Illustrated London News in England. How will you react to the images depicted in Figs. 9.12, 9.13 and 9.14? What image of the Santhals would these pictures create in your mind?

Answer: A reader in England would probably feel shock and fear at the violence in Fig. 9.12, then relief and pride at Figs. 9.13 and 9.14, which show Santhal villages burning and the rebels being led away in chains while British officials ride triumphantly on an elephant and a horse. The pictures would make the Santhals seem savage, violent and dangerous people who had to be controlled, and the British seem powerful rulers who had crushed the rebellion and restored order.

Q. What does Buchanan’s description tell us about his ideas of development? Illustrate your argument by quoting from the excerpts. If you were a Paharia forest dweller how would you have reacted to these ideas?

Answer: For Buchanan, development meant turning forests into settled, commercial agriculture. He says “all that is wanted is some appearance of progress in the area and a vastly extended and improved cultivation”, and wants “plantations of Asan and Palas, for Tessar … and Lac” in place of woods, while “the remainder might be all cleared, and the greater part cultivated”. Progress was measured by how productive and profitable land could be made for the Company. A Paharia would have opposed these ideas, because the forest was the basis of Paharia life (hunting, gathering, shifting cultivation, pasture) and of their identity; clearing it would destroy their livelihood and push them out.

Q. The words and terms used by a writer often tell us something about his or her prejudices. Read Source 7 carefully and pick out the terms that indicate any prejudices of the writer. Discuss how a ryot of the area would have described the same situation.

Answer: The report calls the ryots “offenders”, says they place “spies” and threaten the creditors “with assault and plunder”, and describes them as dispersing whenever a Government officer approaches, as if they were criminals and a gang. A ryot would have described the same events as a collective protest against injustice: villagers, driven to despair by moneylenders who charged unfair interest, refused credit, forged accounts and seized their land and cattle, went together to demand back the bonds and documents that were being used to cheat them.

Q. The three panels in Fig. 9.17 depict different modes of transporting cotton. Notice the bullocks collapsing under the weight of the cotton, the boulders on the road, and the huge pile of bales on the boat. What is the artist suggesting through these images?

Answer: The panels show cotton carried on bullocks’ backs, on boats and in bullock carts. The artist suggests that the old methods of transport were slow, difficult and inefficient: bullocks collapse under the load, carts struggle over rough, bouldered roads and boats are dangerously overloaded. The message is that India could supply the cotton Britain needed, but only if transport were improved, for example by building railways.

Q. Explain the complaints that the ryot is making in the petition. Why was the harvest taken by the moneylenders not credited to the peasants’ account? Why were peasants not given any receipts? If you were a moneylender what reasons would you give for these practices?

Answer: The ryot complains that the sowkars had begun to oppress them: ryots had to beg them for money, clothes and grain and accept hard conditions in the bond; clothes and grain were sold to them at 25 or 50 per cent more than cash prices; and the produce of their fields was taken with a promise to credit it, but it was never entered in the accounts and no receipts were given. The harvest was not credited and no receipts were given so that the debt stayed large and the ryot could not prove what he had repaid, keeping him in the moneylender’s power. A moneylender might say that the produce only covered part of the interest, that the ryots were unreliable and often defaulted, that prices were uncertain, and that credit sales carried risk, so higher prices and strict terms were needed.

Q. List all the commitments that the peasant is making in this deed. What does such a deed of hire tell us about the relationship between the peasant and the moneylender? How would it change the relationship between the peasant and the bullocks he previously owned?

Answer: Commitments: he has sold his two carriages with iron axles, their fittings and four bullocks to the moneylender on account of the debt; he has taken the same carriages and bullocks back on hire; he will pay Rs 4 a month as hire; he will obtain a receipt in the moneylender’s own handwriting; and without such a receipt he will not claim that the hire had been paid. The deed shows the peasant completely dependent on the moneylender, who now owns his means of cultivation and can enforce the deed in court. The bullocks, once the peasant’s own property, now belonged to the moneylender; the peasant became a hirer paying for the use of his own animals.

Q. Calculate the rate of interest that the ryot was paying over the years.

Answer: The bond is at Rs 3-2 annas per cent per month (16 annas = 1 rupee, so Rs 3.125 per Rs 100 a month), which is 3.125 × 12 = 37.5 per cent a year. Because the unpaid principal and interest were written into a fresh bond every three years or so, interest was charged on interest, so the burden grew much faster: the petition says that at the end of 12 years the interest on Rs 1000 came to Rs 2028-10 annas-3 paise, that is, more than twice the principal.

Q. Check what rates of interest are charged in the region where you live at present. Find out whether these rates have changed over the last 50 years. Is there a variation in the rates paid by different groups of people? What are the reasons for the differences?

Answer: A model answer: banks and cooperative societies today lend to farmers at relatively low rates, often a few per cent a year under government schemes, while private moneylenders may still charge two to five per cent a month. Fifty years ago, when banks were few in villages, most people depended on moneylenders at much higher rates. Rates still vary: landowners with documents and security get cheaper bank loans, while small farmers, labourers and poor households without collateral often borrow from moneylenders at high rates. The reasons are differences in security, access to banks, the risk the lender feels, and urgent need.