HISTORIA CLÍNICA ELECTRÓNICA

Territorial rule by a trading company, and the introduction of British law and of a modern bureaucracy, could have ushered in a rapid commercialisation, a development of India’s home market and general economic growth. The rise of Indian merchants in the eighteenth century, when Mughal power was declining, could have added to this type of development. There was a ‘commercialisation of power’ in the eighteenth century, when traders often emerged as important creditors and bidders for the right to collect taxes in many small Indian states. The East India Company was also involved in this game in a big way. But in spite of all this ‘commercialisation of power’, traders and rulers remained tied to the sluggish rhythm of the economy of agrarian states subjected to the vagaries of the monsoon and the slow seasonal circulation of the currency. The East India Company did not try to introduce any major changes in the Indian economy. For a long time it even retained the duties on internal trade and the taxes on artisans, etc., which impeded the production and circulation of commodities. The company also copied the land revenue system of its respective predecessors and, in spite of all kinds of obiter dicta in the files of British administrators, they did exactly what these predecessors used to do, only they were more exacting in collecting whatever was assessed. The province of Orissa may serve as an example to illustrate this point. It yielded 400,000 rupees of land revenue per annum after having been conquered by the Marathas, who were known for their eagerness to extract as much revenue as possible; after the company took over this province (1804–15), however, it managed to collect 750,000 rupees annually.

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The famous Permanent Settlement of Bengal, which was fixed once and for all in 1793, was not at all generous by the standards of the time. It was based on the rule that the zamindar, who used to be only a tax collector and who now became a landlord in the British sense of the term, would keep only 10 per cent of what he collected from the peasants, who were now called tenants and who paid rent rather than revenue to the landlord. Much has been written about the philosophy behind the Permanent Settlement, but little attention has been paid to the actual conditions prevailing at the time it was introduced. The population of Bengal had been decimated by the severe famine of 1770. There was a scarcity of tillers of the soil and the zamindars complained about ‘absconding peasants’ whenever they had to meet the British revenue demand. Warfare in Southern India had to be financed by the company and therefore it was in dire need of a predictable revenue income. The Permanent Settlement was the best solution of the immediate problem. The zamindar now had the exclusive responsibility for meeting the revenue demand and his estate would be auctioned if he did not pay up in time.

Complaints about ‘absconding peasants’ became irrelevant, as the authorities were no longer concerned with the contractual relations between ‘landlord’ and ‘tenant’; the landlord could turn to the civil courts for that. But they did treat the revenue demand that the landlord had to meet as a contractual obligation and subjected him to the fuller rigour of British law, which protects the creditor and sees to it that contracts are strictly observed. The revenue settlement, however, was not subject to the scrutiny of civil courts and the zamindar could not hope to delay a forced sale by appealing to a court. He had to accept the terms of the contract imposed upon him or quit.

By injecting the dynamics of British contractual law into the Indian land revenue system, the new rulers toned up that system in a big way. This also applied to the regions of India to which the Permanent Settlement was not extended and where the peasants were assessed directly. These revenue-paying peasants were defined as government tenants whose land was also subject to forced sale when they did not meet their contractual obligation of paying the revenue punctually. In keeping with the philosophy of the freedom of contract, the peasant was free to relinquish the land, if he felt that the revenue demand was too high, but as he had nowhere else to go this option was not open to him. If he did forfeit his land, he usually stayed on to till it for somebody else.

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21 Earlier regimes had always regarded land revenue as a tax that varied in accordance with good or bad harvests. By turning this tax into a contractual rent to be paid to the government regardless of such vagaries and enforcing this demand with the rigour of British law, the company had created the necessary conditions for its symbiosis with the agrarian state. Much of the silver pumped into India earlier was now extracted again and transferred abroad. This caused a severe deflation in India, where money was now scarce and prices remained depressed throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. This also set a limit to the upward revision of the revenue demand in the provinces to which the Permanent Settlement had not been extended. Wherever the revenue assessment was enhanced, this meant a further reduction in the buying power of the peasantry. This in turn limited the demand for imported goods, and British industry therefore found less of a market in India than it might have hoped for. Indigenous weavers, who could produce cheap textiles because their food and the raw material they required was cheap in this period of depressed prices, could withstand British competition.

Only Bengal, where most weavers had produced for the export market, was severely affected and the bones of Bengali weavers did indeed bleach in the plains of India, as Lord Bentinck remarked.

Nevertheless, those weavers who survived in other provinces did so only under miserable conditions. It has sometimes been stated that imported British industrial yarn enabled the Indian weavers to stay in business quite comfortably. This imported yarn was only of marginal significance, however; in most parts of the interior of India indigenous yard was still predominant. Moreover, textiles made of Indian yarn were more durable when subjected to the drastic treatment meted out to all textiles by India’s vigorous washermen.

Under such conditions of exploitation, deflation, depressed prices and reduced buying power, the parasitical company could live on its paralysed host for some time, but there were no prospects of economic growth. There was a considerable time-lag in the regional penetration of India, but by 1840 most provinces had been subjected to British rule and the revenue administration had covered every nook and corner of the vast land. The fact that the British moved in as heirs to regimes that had put up a fierce and costly resistance to them meant that they also inherited a revenue demand that was pitched very high. Tipu Sultan in Southern India, the Marathas on the Deccan and the Sikhs in the Punjab had all geared up their revenue machinery in order to find the means for fighting the British. Although their resistance proved to be futile in the end, they

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did pave the way for the exploitation of the respective regions by the company.