This chapter is about what colonial rule meant to the people who actually lived in the countryside, in three very different places: the zamindars of Bengal, the Paharias and Santhals of the Rajmahal hills, and the ryots of the Bombay Deccan. It is also about the sources historians use to reconstruct these histories, revenue records, surveyors’ journals, traveller accounts, enquiry commission reports, and the care needed to read each of them.
1 Bengal and the Zamindars
1.1 An auction in Burdwan
In 1797 estates of the Raja of Burdwan were auctioned to recover unpaid revenue, since the Permanent Settlement (1793) had fixed each zamindar’s payment. The Collector discovered a twist: most buyers were the raja’s own servants and agents, buying on his behalf. Over 95 per cent of the sale was fictitious. The estates were publicly sold, but the raja stayed in control.
1.2 The problem of unpaid revenue
Over 75 per cent of Bengal zamindaris changed hands after the Permanent Settlement, so Burdwan was no exception. British officials had introduced it to fix a permanent revenue demand, hoping this would secure property rights, guarantee the Company a regular income, and give entrepreneurs confidence to invest, producing a loyal class of improving landowners. The Permanent Settlement was made with the rajas and taluqdars, now classified as zamindars: not landowners in a village, but revenue collectors for the state, holding as many as 400 villages, contracted to pay a fixed total demand and keeping the difference between that and what they collected.
1.3 Why zamindars defaulted
The demand was too high
Fixed “for all time to come”, so the Company pegged it high from the start, expecting the burden to ease as production and prices rose.
Timing was bad
The high demand hit in the 1790s, exactly when agricultural prices were depressed, making it hard for ryots to pay the zamindar in the first place.
No flexibility
Revenue was invariable regardless of harvest, and under the Sunset Law a zamindari was liable to auction if payment did not arrive by sunset on the due date.
Weakened authority
The Permanent Settlement limited zamindars’ own power: their troops were disbanded, customs duties abolished, and their courts (cutcheries) placed under a Company-appointed Collector, who became an alternative centre of power.
Rent collection itself was a constant struggle, with bad harvests, deliberate delay, and rich ryots (peasants) and village headmen, jotedars and mandals, happy to see the zamindar struggle since it weakened his hold. Legal recourse was slow: Burdwan alone had over 30,000 pending suits for rent arrears in 1798.
1.4 The rise of the jotedars
Francis Buchanan’s survey of Dinajpur (north Bengal) describes rich peasants called jotedars, who by the early nineteenth century held thousands of acres each, controlled local trade and moneylending, and had far more day-to-day power over poor villagers than the often absentee zamindar. Much of their land was worked by sharecroppers (adhiyars/bargadars), who supplied their own plough and labour and kept half the harvest.
Buchanan: “Landlords do not like this class of men, but it is evident that they are absolutely necessary… The jotedars who cultivate large portions of lands are very refractory, and know that the zamindars have no power over them. They pay only a few rupees on account of their revenue and then fall in balance almost every kist… Should the zamindar’s officers… summon them to the cutcherry… they immediately go and complain at the Fouzdarry Thanna for imprisonment… and instigate the petty ryots not to pay their revenue…”
Jotedars were strongest in north Bengal, though similar figures appeared elsewhere under names like haoladars or gantidars. Their rise steadily weakened zamindari authority.
1.5 The zamindars resist
Zamindars fought back with a strategy of fictitious sale: transferring some property to a female relative (Company rules protected women’s property from seizure), then deliberately withholding revenue to force an auction, where the zamindar’s own agents bought the estate, refused to pay, forced a resale, bought it again, and repeated the cycle until the state and other bidders gave up, letting the zamindar reclaim it cheaply. Between 1793 and 1801, such benami purchases at four major Bengal zamindaris, Burdwan included, totalled around Rs 30 lakh; over 15 per cent of all auction sales were fictitious.
Outside buyers also faced real resistance on the ground: a former zamindar’s lathyals (armed strongmen) might attack their agents, and ryots themselves, bound to their zamindar by loyalty and self-identity as his proja (subjects), often resisted an outsider’s entry. Once prices recovered in the early nineteenth century and revenue rules loosened, zamindari power actually strengthened again, and it was only the Great Depression of the 1930s that finally broke it, letting jotedars consolidate control.
1.6 The Fifth Report
Submitted to the British Parliament in 1813, the Fifth Report ran to 1,002 pages (over 800 of appendices: petitions, collectors’ reports, statistical tables). It emerged from British political debate over the East India Company’s monopoly, critics wanted it revoked for private traders and manufacturers, and Company misrule was widely publicised, forcing Parliament to demand regular reports and appoint enquiry committees.
Do not treat the Fifth Report as a neutral record. It shaped historians’ picture of rural Bengal for over 150 years, but its authors were building a case against Company maladministration, so it exaggerated how completely traditional zamindari power had collapsed and overstated how much land zamindars actually lost, when in practice, as fictitious sales show, they often kept control.
“The revenue was not realised with punctuality, and lands to a considerable extent were periodically exposed to sale by auction. In the native year 1203 (1796-97), the land advertised for sale comprehended a jumma… of sicca rupees 28,70,061, the extent of land actually sold bore a jumma… of 14,18,756… Among the defaulters were some of the oldest families of the country.”
2 The Hoe and the Plough
2.1 In the hills of Rajmahal
A physician in the Bengal Medical Service (1794-1815), briefly surgeon to Governor-General Lord Wellesley, who organised the Calcutta zoo and ran the Botanical Gardens. On the Bengal government’s request, he surveyed Company territories in detail; after inheriting his mother’s estate he took her family name, becoming Buchanan-Hamilton.
Buchanan’s early-nineteenth-century travel journal shows the Rajmahal hills as impenetrable and dangerous to outsiders; people fled their villages rather than talk to him. Late-eighteenth-century revenue records identify these hill folk as Paharias: forest-dependent, practising shifting cultivation with hoes, cutting and burning patches, growing pulses and millets in the ash-enriched soil, then moving on once fertility declined. They gathered mahua, silk cocoons and resin, cut wood for charcoal, and grazed cattle on fallow undergrowth.
British artist William Hodges, who had sailed with Captain Cook, visited the Rajmahal hills in 1782 with Augustus Cleveland, Collector of Bhagalpur, and painted them in the Romantic “picturesque” style, wild, irregular, idyllic. A landscape colonial officials called dangerous and its people “turbulent” appears in his paintings as exotic and beautiful, a reminder that a picture is never a neutral record either.
Paharias saw the whole region as their land and identity, and their chiefs led raids on the plains: for survival in scarcity, to assert power, and to negotiate political relations, since plains zamindars often paid tribute for peace and traders paid tolls for safe passage through Paharia-controlled routes.
2.2 The Santhals: pioneer settlers
This negotiated peace broke down in the late eighteenth century as settled agriculture expanded. The British wanted forests cleared, seeing them as sources of revenue and export crops and forest peoples as “savage” and needing to be “civilised” into settled farmers.
If the Paharias’ hoe symbolised shifting cultivation, the Santhals’ plough symbolised settled farming, and the two lived in real, sustained tension. Losing access to the most fertile lower slopes, now inside the Damin, crippled the Paharias’ shifting-cultivation cycle and their hunting economy as forests vanished; the Santhals, by contrast, settled permanently and grew commercial crops for market and moneylender alike.
That, in turn, created a new problem: heavy state taxes on their newly cleared land, high-interest moneylenders (dikus) seizing land over unpaid debt, and zamindars pressing claims into the Damin. By the 1850s the Santhals concluded rebellion was the only option, leading to the Santhal Revolt (1855-56), after which the Santhal Pargana was carved out, 5,500 square miles from Bhagalpur and Birbhum districts, with special laws meant to conciliate them.
Do not describe the Santhal rebellion using only images of “savagery”. British illustrated papers first showed peaceful Santhal villages (before the revolt), then, after 1855-56, images of Santhals fighting sepoys, villages burning, and prisoners marched off under British escort. These are propaganda choices as much as records, meant to show British power restoring “order”, not a neutral before-and-after.
2.3 The accounts of Buchanan
Buchanan was a Company employee travelling with a large retinue of draughtsmen, surveyors and coolies, funded by the Company because it needed his information, so villagers naturally saw him as an agent of the sarkar. His observations of rocks, soils, minerals and iron ore all served the Company’s search for exploitable resources, and his descriptions of landscape routinely asked not just what it looked like but how it could be made more “productive”, a colonial, commercial idea of progress quite different from how the Paharias themselves valued their land.
Buchanan, in the lower Rajmahal hills: “The view of the country is exceedingly fine… all that is wanted is some appearance of progress in the area and a vastly extended and improved cultivation… Plantations of Asan and Palas, for Tessar (Tassar silk worms) and Lac, should occupy the place of woods to as great an extent as the demand will admit; the remainder might be all cleared, and the greater part cultivated…”
3 A Revolt in the Countryside: the Bombay Deccan
Revolts are useful to historians precisely because the enquiries that follow them, alarmed officials trying to understand what happened, produce detailed evidence otherwise unavailable.
3.1 Account books are burnt
On 12 May 1875, ryots at Supa (Poona district) attacked local shopkeepers and moneylenders (sahukars), demanding and burning their bahi khatas (account books) and debt bonds, looting grain shops and torching some sahukar houses. The revolt spread from Poona to Ahmednagar and across 6,500 sq km, more than 30 villages, always the same pattern: attack the sahukar, burn the books. With memories of 1857 fresh, British officials rushed in police and troops; 951 people were arrested before order was restored, months later.
Native Opinion, 6 June 1876: “They (the ryots) first place spies on the boundaries of their villages to see if any Government officers come… They then assemble in a body and go to the houses of their creditors, and demand from them a surrender of their bonds and other documents, and threaten them in case of refusal with assault and plunder.”
3.2 A new revenue system
The Permanent Settlement was rarely used outside Bengal. Post-1810 price rises had grown Bengal zamindars’ incomes while the Company’s fixed revenue stayed frozen, a lesson colonial officials did not want repeated. They also worked under the influence of David Ricardo’s economics: a landowner deserved only the “average rent”; anything above it was surplus the state should tax, or landowners would become unproductive rentiers, exactly what British officials believed had happened to Bengal’s zamindars.
The ryotwari settlement, introduced in the Bombay Deccan, fixed revenue directly with the individual ryot rather than a zamindar, based on estimated soil income and the ryot’s paying capacity, resurveyed every 30 years with rates revised upward. Unlike Bengal, this revenue demand was never permanent.
3.3 Revenue demand and peasant debt
The first settlement (1820s) set demand so high that peasants deserted villages, especially where soil and rainfall were poor; collectors, keen to look efficient, enforced payment harshly, seizing crops and fining entire villages for one defaulter. Conditions worsened after 1832: prices fell sharply and stayed low for over a decade, and famine in 1832-34 killed a third of Deccan cattle and half the human population, leaving survivors with nothing to fall back on and unpaid revenue piling up.
Peasants inevitably borrowed to survive, but repayment was hard, and mounting debt deepened dependence on moneylenders for even routine needs. By the mid-1840s prices began recovering and officials moderated the earlier harsh demand, encouraging cultivation to expand into former pasture, though that expansion still needed loans for ploughs, cattle, seed and land.
3.4 Then came the cotton boom
Britain’s cotton industry depended heavily on American raw cotton (three-fourths of imports before the 1860s), a dependence manufacturers worried over; the Cotton Supply Association (1857) and the Manchester Cotton Company (1859) went looking for alternatives, India among them. When the American Civil War (1861) cut US cotton exports to under 3 per cent of normal, panic sent frantic demand for Indian cotton: prices soared, and Bombay export merchants advanced cash to urban sahukars, who advanced it further to rural moneylenders promising to secure cotton for them.
The boom’s gains were uneven: some rich peasants prospered, but for most, expanded cotton cultivation simply meant heavier debt.
3.5 Credit dries up
Once the Civil War ended (1865) and American cotton returned, Indian exports and prices fell fast, and sahukars, no longer confident, cut off further credit and demanded repayment of what was owed. At exactly this moment the next revenue settlement raised demand dramatically, by 50 to 100 per cent, and moneylenders now refused new loans, having lost faith in ryots’ ability to repay at all.
3.6 The experience of injustice
What enraged ryots was not debt itself, moneylending long predated colonial rule, but the moneylenders’ abandonment of customary norms, especially the old rule that interest could never exceed the principal. One Deccan Riots Commission case found a moneylender charging over Rs 2,000 interest on a Rs 100 loan.
“The sowkars… have of late begun to oppress us… we are actually forced to beg of them to provide us with money, clothes and grain… The prices asked from us are generally twenty-five or fifty per cent more than demanded from customers making ready money payments… The produce of our fields is also taken by the sowkars, who at the time of removing it assure us that it will be credited to our account, but they do not actually make any mention of it in the accounts. They also refuse to pass us any receipts.”
Losing everything to debt, peasants often signed deeds of hire: they legally sold their own bullocks and carts to the moneylender to clear the debt, then hired the very same animals back, paying monthly for what had been theirs.
A November 1873 deed: “I have sold to you, on account of the debt due to you, my two carriages… and four bullocks… I have taken from you on hire under (this) deed the very same two carriages and four bullocks. I shall pay every month the hire thereof at Rupees four a month, and obtain a receipt in your own handwriting.”
The 1859 Limitation Law, meant to stop interest piling up endlessly, said loan bonds were valid for only three years. Moneylenders turned it against ryots: every three years they forced a new bond, folding the unpaid principal and accumulated interest into a fresh principal, so interest compounded rather than reset.
A ryot’s petition: a Rs 100 loan at a stated monthly rate, renewed as a new bond every three-odd years, folding interest into principal each time, “at the end of 12 years… his interest on Rs 1000 amounts to Rs 2028-10 annas-3 paise”, more than double the principal in interest alone.
Deeds and bonds themselves became symbols of oppression, since British law trusted only written, legally enforceable contracts over the informal understandings common before colonial rule; peasants signed with thumb impressions, often not understanding the clauses moneylenders had inserted, yet had no real alternative if they needed a loan at all.
4 The Deccan Riots Commission
The Government of Bombay initially dismissed the revolt, but the Government of India, wary after 1857, pushed for a commission of enquiry; its report went to the British Parliament in 1878. The commission interviewed ryots, sahukars and eyewitnesses, and compiled statistics on revenue, prices and interest rates, an invaluable body of evidence for historians.
Do not take the commission’s conclusion at face value. Specifically asked whether government revenue demand caused the revolt, it concluded the moneylenders alone were to blame, not the state, a pattern that recurs throughout colonial records: a persistent official reluctance to admit that popular discontent might ever be a response to government action. Official reports remain invaluable, but need reading against newspapers, unofficial accounts, legal records and oral sources wherever possible.
5 Timeline and Revision
| Key dates | |
|---|---|
| 1765 | East India Company acquires the Diwani of Bengal |
| 1773 | Regulating Act passed by the British Parliament |
| 1793 | Permanent Settlement in Bengal |
| 1800s | Santhals begin settling in the Rajmahal hills |
| 1818 | First revenue settlement in the Bombay Deccan |
| 1820s | Agricultural prices begin to fall |
| 1840s-50s | Slow agrarian expansion in the Bombay Deccan |
| 1855-56 | Santhal rebellion |
| 1861 | Cotton boom begins |
| 1875 | Ryots in Deccan villages rebel |
- The Permanent Settlement (1793) fixed revenue forever, but demand was set too high, at a time of falling prices, with no flexibility, so most zamindars defaulted.
- Zamindars survived through fictitious sales and benami purchases; jotedars, resident rich peasants, held more real power in the village than absentee zamindars.
- The Fifth Report (1813) shaped historical understanding of Bengal for 150 years but exaggerated zamindari collapse to build a political case against the Company.
- Paharias practised shifting hoe cultivation and raided the plains as a negotiated part of hill-plains relations; British pacification failed, so the British turned to Santhal settlers instead.
- Damin-i-Koh (1832) gave the Santhals land but pushed the Paharias into the poorer upper hills, and Santhal debt and land loss to zamindars and dikus led to the 1855-56 rebellion.
- Buchanan’s surveys are richly detailed but shaped by Company commercial priorities, not a neutral outsider’s record.
- The ryotwari settlement (Bombay Deccan) fixed revenue directly with each ryot, revised every 30 years, unlike Bengal’s permanent fixed demand.
- The 1861 cotton boom (driven by the American Civil War) brought easy credit and expanded cultivation, but its 1865 collapse plus a doubled revenue demand triggered the 1875 Deccan riots.
- Ryots burned account books because moneylenders had broken the old norm that interest could never exceed the principal, not simply because they were in debt.
- The Deccan Riots Commission (1878) blamed moneylenders alone, a pattern of colonial reports avoiding blame for the state’s own revenue policy.
- 1 markIn what year was the Permanent Settlement introduced in Bengal?
- 1 markWhat is a jotedar?
- 1 markWhat was Damin-i-Koh?
- 1 markWhat is the ryotwari settlement?
- 1 markWhat event triggered the 1861 cotton boom in India?
- 2 marksWhat was the Sunset Law?
- 2 marksExplain the term benami with an example from the chapter.
- 2 marksWhat was the customary norm on interest that colonial moneylending broke?
- 2 marksWhat was the Deccan Riots Commission asked to investigate, and what did it conclude?
- 3 marksWhy was the jotedar a powerful figure in many areas of rural Bengal?
- 3 marksHow did zamindars manage to retain control over their zamindaris despite auctions?
- 3 marksHow did the Paharias respond to the coming of outsiders?
- 3 marksWhy did the Santhals rebel against British rule?
- 3 marksWhat explains the anger of the Deccan ryots against the moneylenders?
- 3 marksExplain how the Limitation Law of 1859 was turned against the ryots.
- 3 marksWhat is a “deed of hire”, and what does it reveal about peasant-moneylender relations?
- 5 marksWhy were many zamindaris auctioned after the Permanent Settlement, and why did this not always mean the zamindar lost control?
- 5 marksIn what ways was the livelihood of the Paharias different from that of the Santhals?
- 5 marksHow did the American Civil War affect the lives of ryots in the Bombay Deccan?
- 5 marksWhat are the problems of using official sources such as the Fifth Report or the Deccan Riots Commission report in writing about the history of peasants?
- 5 marksCompare the revenue systems of Bengal (Permanent Settlement) and the Bombay Deccan (ryotwari), and discuss why they differed.
- 5 marksDiscuss the role of Francis Buchanan as a source for the history of the Rajmahal hills, and the limitations of his account.
- 5 marksOn an outline map of the subcontinent, mark Bengal, the Rajmahal hills and the Bombay Deccan, and the regions where the Permanent Settlement and ryotwari system respectively applied.
- 1 markThe Permanent Settlement was made with which two groups, now classified as zamindars?
(a) rajas and taluqdars(b) jotedars and mandals(c) ryots and asamis(d) sahukars and mahajans - 1 markThe Fifth Report was submitted to the British Parliament in:
(a) 1793(b) 1813(c) 1832(d) 1855 - 1 markAugustus Cleveland’s policy towards the Paharias in the 1780s was one of:
(a) extermination(b) pacification(c) forced conversion(d) total isolation - 1 markDamin-i-Koh was demarcated in:
(a) 1800(b) 1810(c) 1832(d) 1856 - 1 markThe economist whose ideas influenced the ryotwari settlement was:
(a) Adam Smith(b) David Ricardo(c) Karl Marx(d) John Stuart Mill - 1 markThe Deccan riots of 1875 began in the village of:
(a) Ahmednagar(b) Supa(c) Poona(d) Mirajgaon
Choose: (a) both A and R are true and R explains A; (b) both true but R does not explain A; (c) A true, R false; (d) A false, R true.
Reason (R): It was written by British officials intent on criticising Company maladministration, and recent research shows it exaggerated the scale of zamindari land loss.
Reason (R): Colonial official reports consistently avoided attributing popular discontent to government action.