Essay on the Land Systems in India

In this essay we will discuss about the land systems in India. After reading this essay you will learn about: 1. The Zamindari System 2. Ryotwari System 3. Mahalwari System.

List of Essays on the Land Systems in India

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Essay Contents:

1. Essay on the Zamindari System
2. Essay on the Ryotwari System
3. Essay on the Mahalwari System

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1. Essay on the Zamindari System:

Under the Zamindari System, land was held by one person or at the most by a few joint owners who where responsible for the payment of land revenue to the state. Actual cultivation was done by tenants who held the land under landlords.

There were two types of Zamindari tenures. In the first type, known as the Per­manent Settlement, the revenue to be paid by the landlord was fixed permanently. The landlord was however, free to raise the rent to be paid by his tenant. This system prevailed in Bengal, Orissa, part of Madras, Benares and parts of South India.

In the second type of the Zamindari System, the revenue to be paid by the landlord was revised from time to time. This system prevailed in the C.P. (Part of present Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra) where Malguzars, who were merely revenue collectors under the Marathas, were recognised as Landlords.

Evolution:

Under the Moghuls, the right of a feudal lord, called the Zamindar, could be obtained from the emperor on the promise to pay a fixed revenue. This right also carried with it the right to rule over the people living on that estate. It was called the Zamindari right. It was in the year 1667 that the East India Company obtained Zamindari rights over the estates of Calcutta, Ciobindpur and Sutanuti.

The company went on extending the Zamindari until the possession of the estate of 24 Parganas, by means of a secret treaty with Mir Jaffar in 1757, gave the company a key position in the province. In 1765, it secured the Diwani of Bengal.

This replacement of a native overlord by a foreigner caused the first breach in the existing land relations for now the over lordship of land began to pass from the class of aristocracy to the class of what Marx calls “Moneyocracy”. Previously, the Zamindar or the revenue collector was an aristocrat whose interest was not so much in money-making as in social leadership and political supremacy.

In contrast, the sole aim of the East India Company was to collect “the largest amount of money in the quickest possible time.” The company needed money for purchasing goods within the country for export abroad. It needed money to pay the fixed revenue to the Nawab. And, as Danial Thorner points out, it needed money to spread and consolidate its rule in the country.

This money was realised by selling the Zamindaris, by public auction, to the highest bidder first for a period of five years and, subsequently, on yearly basis. The speculators often made very high bids which they later found impossible to pay resulting in “large deficits, defaulting Zamindars, absconding farmers and deserting ryots.”

In order to realise the revenues, inhuman methods were used both on the Zamindar and the peasants.

The Zamindars who failed to meet the company’s demands were ex-appropriated while “the peasants were left little else than their families and bodies—the tyranny of Hastings extinguished every sentiment of father, son, brother, and husband. Every thing visible and edible was seized and sold. Nothing but the bodies remained.”

Large areas went out of cultivation so much so that by 1776, more than half of the total cultivated area had been rendered waste. Famine visited the province in 1770, 1784, 1787, and 1790. Despite the tyranny, the company failed to collect the required revenue. In-fact, its exorbitant demands were resisted by the people.

The Great Fakir and later the Sanyasi rebellion that broke out in 1772—1789 were India’s first agrarian revolts. In 1783, the peasants of Ranpur and Dinajpur rose in revolt. They were, of course, suppressed but the stipulated revenue did not come forth.

It was then that the directors of the East India Company hit upon the idea of Permanent Settlement with the Zamindars whom Burke had condemned as the ‘wickedest of human race’. By a proclamation issued on 22 March, 1793, the decennial Settlement of Bengal and Bihar was declared to be permanent.

It gave the Zamindars proprietary rights in the soil, subject to their regularly paying the revenue to the Government. As a result, the real owners were dispossessed of their hereditary claims to the soil while the Zamindars, who were merely agents of the govt. for the collection of revenue, became owners of big estates which never belonged to them.

Motives:

What could possibly be the British motives behind the introduction of this measure? The modern apologists of the British rule, like Vera Anstey, offer the explanation that the wholes settlement was an innocent mistake, made through simple ignorance of the fact that the Zamindars were not owners of land. This fairy tale is ‘plain nonsense’.

The authorities were fully conscious that they were creating a new class of landlords and, also of their purpose in doing it. A.T. Embree is of the opinion that Lord Cornwallis introduced the Zamindari System because of his “prejudices in favour of the land-owning classes to which he himself belonged.” While personal prejudices might have played a part, these alone could not have inspired so far reaching a measure.

A definite motive was to stabilise the hitherto uncertain and fluctuating income. With the introduction of the permanent settlement, the company was assured of a certain minimum, whatever the conditions of production. Besides, it was saved of botheration and expense involved in periodic revision of revenue.

A second aim was to create a class of rich and powerful landlords who, from motives of self-interest, would be “deeply interested in the continuance of the British Dominion” and would support the company in every hour of trial.

In fact, as the preamble to Regulation II of 1793 stated, a landlord who was secure “in the quiet enjoyment of a profitable estate could have no motive for wishing for a change. On the contrary, if the rents of his land were raised- he will readily listen to any offers which are likely to bring about a change.”

The revenue collectors, who overnight became landlords, clearly understood that if they were to exist as a class, it was their duty to strengthen the hands of the govt. A third aim was to divert the money capital accumulated in the hands of the new class of urban rich into agricultural channels.

Cornwallis trusted the Zamindars “to reduce the country to an agricultural land, to draw more and more people away from indigenous trade, commerce and industry.”

It was expected to secure a two fold objective. Firstly, it would keep India an agricultural country, a raw material appendage to British industry and a market for Britain’s industrial goods. Secondly, the agricultural crisis hampering expansion of govt’s revenues could be solved by investment of capital in the field of agriculture.

Critical Assessment:

Diametrically opposite opinions were expressed on the merits and demerits of the Zamindari System and the Permanent Settlement which gave birth to it. Marshman hailed it as ‘a bold, brave and wise measure, while Beveridge con­demned it as a great ‘blunder’ as well as ‘Gross injustice.

The Zamindari System was apparently modelled on the English landlordism in so far as the landlords with whom the State had settled the estates were made the sole proprietors of the soil. But while the English landlord grew out of the peculiar social conditions of England, the Indian Zamindar was artificially created by neglecting the traditional land relations.

Unlike his British counter­part, the Indian Zamindar was not so much interested in agricultural production as in making money. This had disastrous consequences for the cultivating ryots.

Previously, the Zamindar could not arbitrarily raise rents, their claims being restricted by customary rates known as Pargana Rates. The cultivator had definite rights in the soil over and above “a number of communal privileges in regard to homestead plots, to the pasture and forest lands, bunds, tanks and to the pick of fields left unoccupied.”

The Zamindari System, however, placed the ryot completely at the mercy of the ‘gentlemen farmer’ who did not hesitate to extort the last ounce of blood.

With declining cottage industries and the growing pressure of population on land, the cultivators demand for land became more and more inelastic, and this opened out to the Zamindar and other landlords new opportunities of ex­ploitation. A bad season enriched the landlord because his revenue was remitted but it ruined the tenant because he lost the crop and was still obliged to pay both the rent and the tax.

According to an estimate of Mukerjee, the landlords appropriated during the last century and a half no less than Rs. 1800 crores. The peak of profits for the landlords was reached in 1929—30 when, with and increase of 58% in rents but a rise of 19% in revenue, the landlords profits rose by 96%.

The declining cottage industries compelled the teeming unemployed to seek subsistence in the only available but crowded occupation, namely, agriculture to which they now flocked by outbidding others at the time of fresh lease.

Rents, therefore, were sharply raised. To these high rents “must be added the iniquitous practice of extorting Abwabs or presents upon every occasion every feast, festival or visit received by the Zamindar was made the pretext for robbery”.

The landlord was not the only one to exploit the tenants; every one of his sub­ordinates from the Naik or accountant who helped to falsify the books, down to the collecting peons exacted their own share of abwab. Thus “the beggarly race of peasants who, though nominally free-born British subjects, were more degraded and less cared for than the slaves of Cuba or the serfs of Russia.”

The system failed to define and protect the rights and privileges of the tenants. The tenant was left to the tender mercies of a heartless landlord who, ignoring the customary rights, evicted him at the slightest provocation or temptation. And yet no steps to protect him were taken till 1859.

Even then, the poverty of the people, their passive character, and the extreme difficulty of proving, by legal evidence before a distant court, what was customary, rendered this protection illusory in practice.

Thus, the rights of the ryot passed away-sub-silentio and his condition became so helpless that, worn out by years of toil and oppression, he often flew from the scene of his misery and if he had not the heart enough to become a dacoit, in all probability died of starvation in the jungle.

The Zamindari System had another noteworthy effect in the subdivision of rights in land. The Zamindars leased out their interests and the middlemen leased out in turn, thus creating a long chain of intermediates—the Talukdar, the Patindar, the Parpatindar between the State and the actual tiller of the soil.

The Simon Commission found as many as 50 intermediaries between the State and the actual cultivator, each one a mere parasite who fattened himself on the product of the cultivator.

While the ryot lost his security of tenure and other customary rights and privileges, its other effect was to deprive the govt. of its due share in the ever expanding income of the Zamindar. The share of the govt. remained fixed at the 1793 level whereas the income of the Zamindar, by way of higher rents, multiplied several times.

According to S.M. Hussain, a member of the Floud Commission, the net income of the Zamindars increased from Rs. 20 lakhs in 1793 to 832 lakhs in 1940. During the same period, the income of the govt. remained fixed at £3,000,000. This naturally made the income of certain provincial govts. inelastic and rendered it difficult for them to meet the increasing demands for expenditure.

The system involved the govt. in loss of revenue in another way also. At the time of permanent settlement, natural resources like minerals and fisheries found in a given land were not taken into account. Consequently, they were exploited by the Zamindar for personal and private gain, the state getting no share in it.

The system, unjust and oppressive as it was, deprived the govt. of intimate knowledge of rural conditions—the plight of the cultivator or the state of agricul­ture.

It lost direct contact with the ryot, and in the absence of village maps and land records, administration had to be carried on without any wide knowledge of local conditions and customs. Placed in such a position, the govt. found no urge to undertake any measure for the improvement of agriculture or the agricul­turist.

Cornwallis’s hope that the new landlord ‘would be known as the benevolent landlord of a covenanted tenantry’ was belied. He instead became an absentee- landlord who never lived in his village nor took any interest in the welfare of the ryot or the improvement of his land. He neither supplied capital not controlled farming operations and preferred to become a mere rent receiver rather than a wealth producer.

In fact, the Zamindari System was inherently incapable of producing food and raw materials for a developing economy. It kept the ryots at or below the subsistence level which not only restricted the internal market, but also dried the very fountain which could have been a source of producing economic surplus for investment and development.

Whatever economic surplus agriculture yielded was eaten up and appropriated by the unproductive classes. This could have only led to an ‘arrested and thwarted’ economy of India.

Prof-Bhatia rightly holds the system responsible for the series of famines that occurred after its introduction. In the sphere of production, the system led to the separation of agricultural capital from labour engaged in the cultivation of land. The actual tiller lacked the resources to invest while the Zamindars, who had the resources, were just not interested in the improvement of land.

In the sphere of distribution, the high rates charged by the moneylenders and high rents collected by the Zamindars diverted a major portion of agricultural income from the cultivator to the landlord and the money-lender.

This left no chance for the agricultural labourer to enjoy the fruits of his own efforts, destroying all incentive to agricultural improvement. Agriculture naturally declined causing a series of famines in the country. Equally important was the social change brought by the system. Ever-mounting debts and frequent evictions could not have established harmonies relations in the village community.

The system led to the emergence of the all powerful landlord at one end and a mass of poor, dispossessed peasantry at the other end of the rural society, destroying, in the process, the traditional good relations in the village community.

The ryot could have nothing but a feeling of hatred and revenge against the one who had dispossessed him of his land while the landlord was always fearful of those whose property had been bestowed upon him, both living a life of mutual distrust and tension. Such a set-up could have hardly promoted peace and stability in the country but always carried the potentialities of violence, individual or collective.

S. Gopal observes, “By vesting the Zamindars with all residuary rights of property, the govt. exalted their status and ensured a continuous improvement in their position. On the other hand, the rights of the ryots were exposed to damage. The practical security given by custom was shattered. In its place, were substituted the shadowy protection of the courts and vague promise of succour in the future. By thus undermining the protection of the ryots and giving a new bias to the interests of the Zamindars, the permanent settlement altered the balance of rural society in Bengal.”

We may conclude with Ram Gopal that the Zamindari System was “one of the great wrongs—one of the most enormous blunders—by which 20 million small holders were dispossessed of their rights and handed over, bound hand and foot, to the tender mercies of a set of execting rack-renters”.

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2. Essay on the Ryotwari System:

After the completion of the permanent settlement in Eastern India, the East India Company was in favour of extending it to Madras. However, attention was soon focused on the effects of the permanent settlement, particularly in respect of State’s share of land revenue and, in consequence, official opinion began to favour the Ryotwari System.

Under this system, the ryot was directly under the state. Land revenue was assessed on each separate holding held by the ryot who was recognised as proprietor, i.e. he could sublet, mortgage or transfer by gift or sale. He could not be ejected so long as he paid the assessment. Ryotwari settlement was a temporary one, the period of assessment varying between 20—40 years.

The ryotwari settlement was first made by Captain Read and Thomas Munro in the districts of Bara Mahal in 1792. Gradually, it was extended to other parts of the province where a permanent settlement of the land revenue had not been made or where the permanently settled estates were sold up for inability to pay the fixed revenue. In course of time, it spread to Bombay, Assam and Berar also.

Baden Powell has contended that the ryotwari village was the original type in India and that individual property was the rule in early land settlements. He further asserts that the early settlers in India had no idea of a common tribal ownership of property, including land.

He is, however, contradicted by Elphinstone who mentioned in 1819, the existence of village communities in Bombay which “contained in miniature all the materials of a state within themselves, and were almost sufficient to protect their members if all other govts. were withdrawn.”

Likewise, the Madras Board of Revenue recommended between 1808 and 1818 ‘the wise plan of recognising the village communities’. Mukerjee further asserts that these ancient Indian communities held all property in common. Therefore, the claim of the authorities that, in recognising the ryotwari system, they only gave legal recognition to what was already in vogue, cannot be sustained.

The author of the system claimed many merits for it. It was claimed, firstly, that the system put the cultivator in direct touch with the state. Secondly, the ryot, being a virtual proprietor on a simple and perfect title, had all the incentive to make the investment in land and improve it.

Thirdly, it was thought the system would establish a self confident, self-reliant peasantry and thereby help in the creation of peace and stability in the country. Fourthly, it was claimed that the system would enable the govt. to help and aid the ryot in difficult seasons by lowering its land revenue demand.

In practice, these hopes were not realised. With this system, the British tax collectors were able to constantly enlarge the assessment, draining the very life blood out of the peasants. Bhowani Sen aptly observes that “Rent-grabbing by the state was by no means different from the Zamindari extortion”.

In fact, the credit of an officer depended upon the amount of revenue he was able to collect. No wonder that every assessment led to upward revision of revenue.

What is more, the system left too much in the hands of the revenue officers whose estimates were often based on mere guess work. Individual cultivators were never allowed a chance of proving what total produce they obtained, what their expenses of cultivation were and what net income remained to them. They had even no right of appeal and had either to pay the assessed revenue or quit their ancestral fields.

In order to make prompt realisation of revenue, all manner of torture such as ‘keeping a man in the sun, preventing his going to meals or other calls of nature, confinement, quartering a peon on him, putting a low caste man on his back, blows with fist or whip’ was frequently used.

This, no doubt, increased the income of the govt.— in the province of Madras alone, the income from land revenue increased from £32.90 lakhs, in 1861 to £41.80 lakhs in 1874 —but—epidemics, malnutrition, and starvation causing death of scores of thousands became common in areas where the system prevailed. The Madras famine of 1877 fatally proved how little was the security and staying power of the cultivators.

An impossibly high revenue demand which the ryots found themselves unable to pay, inevitably led them into the clutches of the money-lender. That land revenue was a major cause of indebtedness is confirmed by the evidence of Vaughan Nash who found that “the authorities regarded the moneylender as their mainstay for the payment of revenue.”

It was this indebtedness and not the establishment of peace and security and rise in the market value of land, as Dr. Verma Anstey wants us to believe, which lead to large scale transfer of land from the agriculturist to the non-agricul­turists.

Peasants were reduced to the status of labourers or share croppers com­pletely working for the moneylender, paying over to him, as rent and interest combined, the greater part of what they produced.

Thus the system which aimed at creating self-reliant peasant proprietors, was reduced, in practice, to the Zamin­dari System. The same elements, who had become Zamindars in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa i.e. the Urban rich, dispossessed the actual tillers but chained them to the land as serfs. The seriousness of the problem can be imagined from the fact that in 1947—48, 60% of the cultivators in Gujarat were tenants.

The system was expected to provide incentive to the ryot to make investment on his land. The high revenue demand, however, left very little to the producer to carry out the necessary improvements. This deprived the ryot of the confidence and zeal which private ownership of land was supposed to confer on him.

This system, under which revenue was revised every now and then, bred corruption and encouraged immorality. The Tehsildars, who went about to make inquiries and fix revenues, had almost entirely under their control the amount of assessment which was raised for the govt.

In all ryotwary districts. Consequently whenever they went to a village, the first thing the ryots of a village did was ‘to endeavour to buy them over to get a low assessment’.

The Ryotwari system, although it was advocated as a closer approach to Indian institution, in point of fact, broke right across these institutions by making the settlement with individual cultivators. The individual being assessed directly, the village Community lost its economic function and the collective basis of its life was destroyed. R.C. Dutt points out that “ancient village communities of Madras declined from that date.”

By and large,“the system did not, in general, increase production or prosperity of the people.” Top heavy assessments rendered the lands of little value and people with capital were shy of investing in agriculture for want of adequate returns. This can be seen from the fact that in Coimbatore, where assessment was moderate, agriculture flourished.

Objectively, by introducing this system, the colonialists helped a section of the small feudals, who had risen from the upper strata of the village community to strengthen their hold on land seized from the community. Thus, the Ryotwari system, far from destroying the foundations of feudal landholding, merely con­solidated it.

However, the Ryotwari system was different from the Zamindari system in two respects. The occupancy ryot under Zamindari tenure was the victim of illegal exactions. His right of sale and transfer was restricted and in many cases even denied. Fraudulent accounting deprived him, not infrequently, of his possession.

Under the ryotwari tenure, the bigger peasant proprietor was in many cases free from these handicaps. This gave him the strength to struggle against rackrenting and market domination, with slightly greater advantages than the occupancy ryots under the Zamindari Tenure.

Another difference between the two system lies in the fact of uneven develop­ment of irrigation facilities. There were better irrigation facilities in the ryotwari areas than in the Zamindari areas. The result was that a section of the ryotwari peasants was able to retain some surplus and to develop cultivation with wage labour to a relatively greater extent than the occupancy ryot in the Zamindari areas.

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3. Essay on the Mahalwari System:

Warren Hastings and Marquis of Wellesley rapidly extended the British rule, taking Benares and some adjoining areas in 1775, Allahabad and its adjoining districts in 1801, and Delhi and Agra in 1803.

A pledge of permanent settlement was given to the landholders of these districts but this could not be honoured because the company, after a long debate, finally decided against a permanent settlement in these areas. As a result of a conference held at Allahabad in 1833, Lord William Bentinck passed the Regulation IX of 1833 which laid the basis of the Mahalwari System.

According to John Stuart Mill, under the Mahalwari System:

“The peasant proprietors compound with the State for a fixed period. The proprietors do not engage individually with the govt. but by villages. The village, through its headman, undertakes to pay so much for so many years, themselves assigning to each man his quota. Primarily each man cultivates and pays for himself but ultimately, he is responsible for his co-villagers and they for him; they are ultimately bound together by a joint responsibility. If one of them is compelled to sell his rights to meet demands upon him, others have the right for preemption.”

Briefly, in a Mahalwari village, a body of co-sharers jointly claimed ownership of the entire village area. It was recognised that the villages concerned were units by themselves and the ownership of property was joint or communal.

Baden-Powell gives three principles according to which land in a joint village was shared by the Co-sharing families. The first was the family-share system according to which each of the co-sharing families got a fraction of the whole, determined by its place in the geneological table.

The second system was adopted in the non-ancestral villages where land was shared either according to the number of ploughs owned or with reference to shares in wells or just in equal lots made-up artificially of various strips of land.

Thirdly, there was the principle of defacto holding when there was no sharing. Hence in these joint villages, land revenue was assessed on the whole village called the Mahal; the co-sharers usually forming ‘one large cousinhood’ were severally and jointly responsible for its payment. Generally, however, a co-sharer of standing was selected to undertake the primary responsibility of paying the revenue.

Whether these co-sharers themselves cultivated the land or they had below them a class of tenants, depended upon the way in which the joint village originated. Generally, the joint villages of the U.P. were proprietary bodies descended from ruling chiefs, grantees, revenue farmers who had grown up over an already existing body of cultivators who worked as tenants.

In the central Punjab, where enterprising colonizing groups founded such villages, cultivation was mostly done by the co- sharers themselves and the number of tenants was inconsiderable. However, certain parts of U.P., and the frontier districts of Punjab had co-sharers belonging to a superior or military caste which considered it derogatory to work on the fields and therefore, cultivation came into the hands of tenants.

However, as the Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee noted, the details regarding procedure, period of settlement and assessment of land revenue vary from place to place. In Agra, Settlements were made collectively with village bodies but in Oudh, it was generally made with individual Talqudars.

In the Punjab, revenue was collected from joint-holders of village estates, the share of revenue from each was distributed and could be recovered separately. In Madhya Pradesh, Malguzars were recognised as proprietary landlords of villages which were es­sentially ryotwari in character.

In fixing land revenue with individual Malguzars, the settlement officers had to fix not only the revenue demand to be collected from Malguzars but also to determine the rent payable by all classes of tenants of Malguzars.

The state demand varied from 40—70% of the rental and the set­tlement was made for 30 years. However, subsequently, under the Punjab Land Revenue Act, 1929, the states’ share was fixed at 1/4 of the net assets and the period of settlement was extended to 40 years.

Thus the Mahalwari system in the area of Oudh and C.P., was, in practice, the Zamindari system with a temporary settlement while in certain areas of the Punjab, it amounted to the ryotwari system. In either case, the system was full of defects.

The cultivators were in the same position as the peasant proprietors under the ryotwari system or tenants under the Zamindari system. The measures adopted by the Govt. failed to benefit the ryot on account of his ignorance, poverty and the passivity.

A fundamental fact about these land tenure systems is that none of them arose spontaneously out of the historical development of Indian society; Rather, they were economic experiments introduced by the British rulers, experiments which while introducing certain foreign systems into Indian soil, swept away clean all the remnants of the old village communities.

As Marx puts it, “In Bengal, they created a caricature of English landed property on a large scale, in South Eastern India, a caricature of small allotment property, in the North west, they transformed the Indian communes, with common ownership of the soil into a caricature of itself.”

These unsuccessful and absurd experiments were, from the very inception, harbingers of an agrarian crisis. They brought in chaos and disorder in land relations, helped to boost up the declining feudal system, turned landlords into estate owners but peasants into paupers, created social tensions in countryside, ruined Indian agriculture and ushered in a whole era of devastating famines.

According to Thorner, these “land systems served as a build-in-depressor on account of which Indian agriculture continued to be characterised by low capital intensity and antiquated methods.”

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