However, while the Delhi model certainly influenced the revenue systems that emerged in the Extra-Regulation Order, Cohn’s caution against generalizing on the impact of the British on the spaces they conquered must be taken to an extreme in Kumaon. At least on the Gangetic plain, all the spaces the Company had conquered or incorporated shared an experience with and the normative influence of late-Mughal legal,
19 Ibid., p. 71.
20 Ibid., p. 31; Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, pp. 18, 144.
21 Kaye, Selections from the Papers of Lord Metcalfe, p. 49; Michael Mann, ‘A permanent settlement for the Ceded and
Conquered provinces: Revenue administration in North India, 1801-1833,’ The Indian Economic & Social History Review
32, no. 2 (1995): pp. 447-248; Panigrahi, Charles Metcalfe in India: Ideas & administration, 1806-1835, p. 28.
22 East India Company, Papers regarding the administration of the Marquis of Hastings in India: Papers respecting the Nepaul War, p. xi, 569; Pemble, Britain's Gurkha War: The invasion of Nepal, 1814–16, pp. 96-97.
119 revenue and administrative practices and associated machinery of Government. As such, on the plains, the Company’s Regulation Order was always a palimpsest written on underlying structures of late-Mughal systems. Kumaon, however, had never been conquered by the Mughals, and all other incursions by empires of the plains had been fleeting and transitory. Consequently, plains revenue models, Mughal or otherwise, had had little or no substantive impact on Kumaon’s pre-colonial revenue system.
Unconstrained by the standard palimpsest then, the formal revenue and property practices that emerged in Kumaon under the Extra-Regulation Order are better
understood as an independent creative adaptation to meet the needs of the Company in the political, economic and cultural conditions of Kumaon.
The pre-colonial revenue models of Kumaon
The Company saw revenue collection as a basic expression of its rights as a sovereign, and Gardner began to implement a collection system to achieve this within a week of occupation.23 This first tranche of revenue collection bore little resemblance to the settlements of the plains. In the absence of any detailed knowledge of the resources of the region, and entirely as a stop-gap measure, the first year of revenue collection was based on the revenue collection system the Gurkhas had used.24 However, while the Company recycled the Gurkha model, it departed from that model in two significant ways. The Company made a significantly lower level of demand than the Gurkhas had, and the revenue flow became centred on the Company’s treasuries.
The Gurkhas’ overall revenue demand had been set impossibly high.25 This had led to much of the land tax being realized not by direct payments, but by selling up defaulting landholders’ estates. In cases where this yielded a deficiency on the debt, the landholder and his family were sold into slavery down on the plains.26 Combined with people fleeing the region to escape the Gurkhas’ excessive tax demands, the sale of many Pahari into slavery had led to the depopulation of the region and, consequently, a
23 Adam, J. - Adjutant General and Secretary to Government to Gardner, E., 18/5/1815, KDMLR, vol: 3. 24 Adam, J. - Adjutant General and Secretary to Government to Gardner, E., 27/5/1815, KDMLR, vol: 4. 25 Traill himself thought the actual land revenue set by the Gurkhas was reasonable. However, suppliments to the
demand in the form of unauthourized taxes, court fines, taxes on doms and taxes on looms had raised the demand
to unreasonable levels. See Traill, ‘Statistical Sketch of the Kumaon,’ p. 190 and 'Statement B', p. 229.
120 significant reduction in the level of cultivation. A reduced level of cultivation had, in turn, led to an ever-shrinking revenue base.27 The Government in Kathmandu had attempted to take steps to correct the dysfunctional long-term effects of this level and style of extraction.28 However, the Gurkhas’ military frontier had expanded so quickly and so far from Kathmandu that the Gurkha government was unable to develop and deploy effective bureaucratic systems to ameliorate the problems.29
The Company hoped that through ‘improvement’ that Kumaon would eventually become a financially valuable, revenue-positive acquisition.30 Continuing to sell off the population for a short-term gain would have been counterproductive to this ambition. Moreover, selling revenue defaulters into slavery was not an option for the Company. In response to the Gurkhas’ practices, the Company had earlier prohibited the sale of slaves beyond their native country right across the Company’s territories (see chapter 7).31 Given this prohibition, and with an eye to gaining the acquiescence of the region’s
population in their occupation, the Company set the demand at the rate the Gurkhas had been able to collect as standard tax receipts rather than their impossibly high ambit claim. In addition, the Company granted considerable remissions on land-taxes due in pargana that had been damaged, disturbed or depopulated by the war, particularly districts close to the strategically important eastern front such as Kali Kumaon.32
Given these policies, the first year's land-tax demand by the Company was only a paltry Rs.1,23,350, with some of this realized in trade goods at rates regarded as artificially high.33 However, the receipt of even this paltry amount into the Company’s treasury marked a major change in the structure of Kumaon’s revenue system.
Under the Gurkhas, the settlement had not been based on an agreement between landholders and a central civil authority, and little or no cash flowed to the state centre. Rather the jumma of the country (amount of tax on land demanded by the state) had been
27Traill, ‘Statistical Sketch of the Kumaon,’ p. 190.
28Items ‘46 and 47’ in Papers regarding the administration of the Marquis of Hastings in India: Papers respecting the Nepaul War,
233-34.
29 Stiller, The Rise of the House of Gorkha: A study in the unification of Nepal, 1768-1816, pp. 265-69.
30 Adam, J. - Adjutant General and Secretary to Government to Gardner, E., 2/6/1815, KDMLR, vol: 4.
31Bengal Presidency, ‘Regulation X of 1811 ‘ (1811), Section II. Dewar, A hand-book to the English pre-mutiny records in the government record rooms of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, p. 150.
32 Gardner, E. to Adam, J. - Secretary to Government in the Political Department, 21/3/1816, KDRLI, vol: 2. 33 Ibid.
121 parcelled out to troop commanders in jaedad (in this context, an assignment of the
revenues of a tract of land for the maintenance of troops).34 Garhwal, for example, had been divided into 84 pargana under three Gurkha officers.35 With these officers largely engaged at places of military action further to the west, direct administration of revenue had been devolved to deputies called bechari who were free to set the revenue demand as they saw fit.36 More often than not though, the bechari then farmed the revenue demand to local principal landholders and clan leaders known as kamin in Kumaon and siana in Garhwal. These, in turn, imposed the demand on village headmen, pudhan.37 Each of these intermediaries between the military and cultivator was able to extract fees, a percentage and a range of traditional offerings.38 The Gurkha government in Kathmandu saw none of the revenue.
However, the Gurkha revenue system, although of a particular form and highly extractive, should not be seen as a distinct break with the longer-term customary
practices of the region in pre-colonial times. Traill himself had no direct experience with the earlier system under the Chand Rajas. Nevertheless, through interrogation of local informants with a living memory of the Chand system and patient assembly of the scattered documentation he could find, Traill was eventually able to construct a broad understanding of the revenue and property system under the Chand Rajas. While this understanding was plainly constructed from a pro-British perspective, it is widely accepted as the best available.39 Importantly, and given the absence of alternative sources, Traill’s understanding of customary property rights during the early occupation of Kumaon took on an almost unchallengeable status in all later legal texts.40
Fortunately, we do not have to take Traill’s pronouncements entirely on faith. His ‘Statistical Sketch’, ‘Statistical Report’ and his widely reproduced ‘Settlement Report’ of January 1829, which collectively contain the essence of his understanding of Chand-era revenue systems and property rights, show a remarkable concordance with the principals
34‘Traill, G. W. to Gardner, E. 1 March 1816’ in Whalley, British Kumaon: The Law of the Extra-Regulation Tracts Subordinate to the Government, N.W.P., pp.26-26.
35 Unfortunately, the number of pargana and officers in Kumaon is not available from the archive. 36Raper, ‘The Sources of the Ganges,’ p. 499.
37Traill ‘Statistical Sketch of Kumaon,’ pp. 173-74. 38 Ibid. p. 174.
39 Tolia, Founders of Modern Administration in Uttarakhand, 1815-1884, p. 11. 40 Ibid.
122 if not all the details of reports available from the mosaic of Hill States to Kumaon’s west. This variation in detail does not invalidate Traill’s report. As discussed earlier in chapter 2, each Pahari community, while similar, was particular and unique and details varied not just between Hill States but within those Hill States.
One of the most useful and lively of these alternative accounts of Pahari revenue systems again comes to us from G. C. Barnes, this time from the Hill State of Bashahr to Kumaon’s west that sat athwart the Sutlej valley with its trade route into Tibet.
The revenue of Bussahir is realised by eighteen different imposts or
‘Kurrads.’ The State has a distinct share in every department of industry, and is not above receiving its income in a little ghee, oil, corn, honey, wine (made from the juice of grapes), ingots of iron - where iron abounds, wool, as also contributions from the flocks and herds of the people.
…[additionally] the cost of such [royal] festivals as the Ram-Nowmee, the Dussarah, and the Holee, is provided for, each by its separate money tax. The Raja’s elephant has a cess specially imposed for its maintenance to which every peasant contributes at the rate of three annas a house. A similar impost exists for furnishing the Raja’s magazine.41
Barnes’ account of the Bashahr revenue system outlines that revenue in Bashahr was collected from a wide range of sources closely matched to the particular products of each locality. Moreover, given the unmonetized nature of the economy, revenue was largely collected in kind rather than easily transported and stored cash. Indeed, Barnes would go on to relate that in Bushahr cash money was only really found close to the main Indo-Tibetan trade route that ran along the valley floor. This meant that, by and large, the imposts mentioned above such as ‘three annas’ do not generally relate to actual cash imposts. Rather, they generally relate to imposts in kind referenced on traditional rates of exchange.42
What is not apparent from Barnes account of tiny Bashahr, and a point Traill takes particular care to emphasize in his ‘Statistical Sketch’, ‘Statistical Report’ and ‘Settlement Report’ was that Pahari revenue flows and political systems were not centred on the sovereign, but were dispersed amongst the region’s clan leaders, aristocracy and
41G.C. Barnes, ‘Memorandum on the District of Bussahir,’ in Selections from the public correspondence of the Punjab Government ed. Henry Gregory (Lahore: Hope Press, 1859), pp. 108–110.
123 theocracy.43 In Kumaon, the aristocracy consisted of the principal civil and military office holders and a few of the larger landholders. Rather than being remunerated by the sovereign, the aristocracy independently collected rent from land grants and 32 forms of traditional offerings in which the sovereign took little or no share.44 Financially
independent of the sovereign, the aristocracy’s influence was ‘boundless in their several departments.’ 45 Combined with the substantial alienation of land revenue through grants to Brahmins and religious intuitions by the sovereign, this absence of revenue flow to the centre meant that ‘ the actual amount of rents which reached the [sovereign’s] treasury was extremely small.’46 Rather than rents, the primary income for the sovereign was in the form of a series of 36 traditional offerings such as ‘Ch,Hatees, Rukum and Buttees Kulam’ proffered at various festivals and on occasions such as royal weddings.47
Unfortunately for the sovereign, however, the expenses he incurred in conducting these events were so high that there was little profit and ‘the sovereign was ever poor, and
during some of the latest reigns was frequently reduced to absolute indigence and want.’48 The impecunious state of earlier Kumaoni sovereigns was not an acceptable
outcome for the Company and the revenue model that emerged under Traill’s direction was focused on delivering land-tax revenue to the Company’s treasuries.
The Gardner–Traill settlement of 1815–16, based as it was on the Gurkha system, was intended entirely as stop-gap measure until a ‘complete investigation shall have put Government in possession of an accurate knowledge of the resources of the province of Kumaon, and of the several local considerations which must necessarily bear on the question.’49 Nevertheless, the question of what form the settlement would eventually take was not entirely open-ended. Right from the start, Gardner advocated a settlement loosely based on Metcalfe’s village model, which Government advised was the likely form
43Traill, ‘Statistical Sketch of the Kumaon,’ pp. 168-70.
44 Ibid., p. 169; Traill, G. W. to Home, D. - Acting Secretary to the Board of Revenue indecipherable, 2/1/1829,
KDRLI, vol: 10.
45 Traill, ‘Statistical Sketch of the Kumaon,’ p. 169. 46 Ibid.
47 Traill, G. W. to Home, D. - Acting Secretary to the Board of Revenue indecipherable, 2/1/1829, KDRLI, vol: 10. 48 Traill, ‘Statistical Sketch of the Kumaon,’ p. 169.
124 the settlement would take, but that ‘the Governor-General reserves the subject for future and deliberate consideration.’50