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From Little King to Landlord: Property, Law, and the Gift under the Madras Permanent Settlement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Nicholas B. Dirks
Nicholas B. Dirks
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology
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Extract

In the last few years, modern historians of India have pushed the historical frontier of their field backwards in time. Colonialism is no longer considered the great watershed it once was thought to be. Historians who concern themselves with economic processes such as protoindustrialization tend in particular to minimize the impact of the consolidation of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Changes viewed as significant by these historians usually begin with the introduction of capitalism and the early encroachment of a world system, both of which predate the full political realization of colonialism. Historians who concern themselves with political changes tend in the other direction, although increasingly they have proposed major continuities between the ancien régime and the early colonial state. Historians concerned with social change view colonialism as significant but invoke various new forms of dualism to account for the limited effects of colonialism on local social forms. Whatever their differences, all of these historians agree that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial for viewing later changes in economy, polity, and society, and, from their varying theoretical and ideological perspectives, delight in excoriating traditional views of India as static and “traditional” before the arrival of the British.

Type
The Ties that Bind
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , April 1986 , pp. 307 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

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References

1 For example, see Perlin, Frank,“Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia,” Past and Present, no. 98 02 1983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Perhaps the earliest and most strongly stated version of this approach can be found in the work of Frykenberg, Robert E.. See his“Company Circari in the Carnatic, c. 1799–1859: The Inner Logic of Political Systems in India,” in Realm and Region in Traditional India, Fox, Richard G., ed., Duke University, Monograph and Occasional Papers Series (Durham, 1977).Google Scholar See also the recent paper by Washbrook, David, “Law, State, and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies, 15:3 (1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Stokes, Eric, “The First Century of British Colonial Rule: Social Revolution or Social Stagnation,” in idem, The Peasant and the Raj Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 In a recent series of articles, Frank Perlin has eloquently stated, though from a particular perspective, the epistemological assumptions of and problems with these “traditional” views. See Perlin, , “Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Deccan. Extended Class Relations, Rights, and the Problem of Rural Autonomy under the Old Regime,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 5:2 (1978);CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem,“The Precolonial indian State in History and Epistemology. A Reconstruction of Societal Formation in the Western Deccan from the Fifteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century,” in The Study of the State, Claussen, Henri and Skalnik, Peter, eds. (The Hague: Mouton, 1981). See also my“Political Authority and Structural Change in Early South Indian History,” in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13:2 (April-June 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See my “The Structure and Meaning of Political Relations in a South Indian Little Kingdom,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 13:2 (1979);Google Scholaridem.“The Pasts of a Pdlaiyakarar: The Ethnohistory of a South Indian Little King,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 26:4 (1982).Google Scholar It should be noted here that C. A. Gayly has been one of the historians most concerned to maintain a careful balance between the dynamics of the old regime and the changes brought about by British colonialism; he has provided historians with an exemplary treatment of the eighteenth century, if only for northern India, in his recent book, Rulers, , Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.Google Scholar

6 As Marx aptly wrote. “In Bengal [the British] created a caricature of large-scale English landed estates; in south-eastern India a caricature of small parcelled property; in the northwest they did all they could to transform the Indian economic community with common ownership of land into a caricature of itself.” Capital Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974 III, 334n.Google Scholar For more recent views, see Neale, Walter C., “Land Is to Rule,” in Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, Frykenberg, R. E., ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969;Google ScholarKessinger, Tom G., Vilvatpur 1848–1968: Social and Economic Change in a North Indian Village Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974;Google ScholarObeyesekere, Gananath, Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A Sociological and Historical Study Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967;Google ScholarStein, Burton, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980.Google Scholar

7 See the discussion of these two terms in Ludden, David, “Agrarian Organization in Tinnevelly District: 800 to 1900 A.D.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennslyvania, 1978, 171–74).Google Scholar

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9 Lingat, Robert, The Classical Law of India Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, 212. My stress on the term ksatra derives from conversations with Burton Stein. My particular sense of the way in which the king's mastery or lordship of land was constituted in medieval India is also heavily dependent on the recent work of Ronald inden, e.g., his “Lordship and Caste in Hindu Discourse,” mimeograph, 1980.Google Scholar

10 See Kessinger, , Vilvaipur; Washbrook, “Law, State, and Agrarian Society.”Google Scholar

11 See my argument in The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of a Little Kingdom in South India Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

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13 Tinnevellv Collectorate Records, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras.

14 Collector's Report Regarding the Tinnevelly Poligars and Sequestered Pollams, 1799–1801, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras.Google Scholar

15 In Mudaliyar, P. K. Gnanasundara, Note on the Permanent Settlement Madras: Government Press, 1940.Google Scholar

16 Ibid. par. 369.

17 Tipu Sultan had commenced a systematic attempt to remove the local pālaiyakārars and replace them with revenue officials called amildārs. Often, rather than risking local revolt by directly attacking the pālaiyakārars, he would invite them to Srīrarikapaṭṭinam. his capital, give them honorary posts in the army, settle their families there as well, and protect them with armed guards, which made them in essence captives. Tipu even resumed many of the local inams in the Baramahal and had brahmadēyam lands assessed in 1784. See Firminger, Walter Kelly, ed.. The Fifth Report on East India Company Affairs—1812 (Calcutta: R. Cambray and Company, 1918), III, 350–82;Google Scholar and The Baramahal Records; or. The Ancient Records of Salem District, Madras (Madras: Government Press, 1907), Sec. V.Google Scholar

18 Stein, Burton, “Munro Sahib and Elements of the Political Structure of Early Nineteenth-Century South India,” manuscript, 28–37.Google Scholar

19 Letter from Board of Revenue to Collector Lushington, 4 September 1799, in Correspondence between Mr. Lushington, S. R., Collector ofRamnad and Poligar Peshcush and the Board of Revenue and the Special Commission on the Permanent Settlement of the Southern Pollams and of Ramnad and Shevagungah Zemindaries in the District of Madura (Madura: Collectorate Press, n.d.), ASO (D)3O4, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras. The only major difficulties that the Board of Revenue saw when enunciating this policy in 1799 involved determining the proper amount of peshkash and ascertaining the “rights of the Talookdars, or under Tenantry throughout the different districts, that in confirming the proprietary rights of the Zemindars we may not violate the ascertained right of other individuals.”Google Scholar

20 Deed of Permanent Settlement, art. 9 (reprinted in ibid.. 68).

21 Ibid., art. 7.

22 Ibid., art. 10.

23 Alienation is a British usage which means the transfer of property, titles, goods, etcetera, from one person to another, by gift or sale, or even deceit. I use this term here because it was the term most generally used in British records for all the transfers involved in inām gifts or in gifts where some dimunition of the tax burden was entailed.

24 Eric Stokes, Peasant and Raj, 60.Google Scholar

25 In the end, the usual principle followed by Lushington, as for example in Ramnad, was to take two thirds of the average collections of the six previous years. Proceedings of the Board of Revenue, Madras, no. 2234, 25 March 1850, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras (hereafter cited P.B.R.). In zamindaries where actual rebellions took place, such as Civakāṅkai, the determination of peshkash proved more difficult because previous collections had been “irregular.” In Civakāṅkai Lushington simply “Proposed for its Peishcush, and Government acceded to this proposal, two-thirds of the Ramnad zemindary peishcush on the grounds that originally the Zemindaries of Ramnad and Shivagungah formed one state, the revenues of which had been divided by the then Raja in the proportion of Ramnad three-fifths and Shivagungah two-fifths.” Letter from Collector Lushington to the Board of Revenue, 30 September 1802, in Correspondence.

26 Guha, Ranajit, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of the Permanent Settlement Mouton: Paris, 1963.Google Scholar

27 Minutes of 31 December 1824, in Mudaliyar, , Note on Permanent Settlement, 82.Google Scholar

28 See Price, Pamela, “Rāja-dharma in Ramnad, Land Litigation, and Largess,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 13:2 (07–12 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also, for the most thorough and insightful treatment of north Indian landlords, see Metcalf, Thomas, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.Google Scholar For an analysis which shares the kind of expection that accompanies the Permanent Settlement—that the opportunity of security should be greeted by local investment and the subsequent generation of a group of landed capitalists—see Baker, Christopher, “Tamilnad Estates in the Twentieth Century,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 13:1 (1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Price, “Rāja-dharma in Ramnad,” 208. Nonetheless, Price seems to assume that the only reason these nonmaterial strategic concerns continued to have such salience was that Ramvad was so poor and dry p. 237. In so arguing, she fails to persuade us of the continuing integrity of precolonial political forms and the role of British colonial intervention in making the continuance of the old regime all the more probable.Google Scholar

30 Letter from R. Eden to Board of Revenue, 14 October 1836, in Selections from Old Records: Papers Relating to Zamindaries, Mittahs, etc., Tinnevelly District, Board Sent Madras: Government Press, 1934, 8.Google Scholar

31 Letter from E. P. Thompson to Board of Revenue, 30 May 1839, in Selections from Old Records, 38.Google Scholar

32 Extract from a letter from the Court of Directors, 9 May 1838, no. 5, in Selections from Old Records: Papers Relating to Zamindaries, Mittahs, etc., Tinnevelly District, Board Received Madras: Government Press, 1934, 17.Google Scholar

33 Minutes of 31 December 1824, in Mudaliyar, , Note on Permanent Settlement, 82.Google Scholar

34 Reprinted in Ibid., 78.

35 See Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India London: Oxford University Press, 1959.Google Scholar

36 Mill, J., The History of British India, London: J. Madden, 1820 V, 513.Google Scholar

37 Derrett, J. Duncan M., “J. H. Nelson: A Forgotten Administrator-Historian of India,” in Essays in Classical and Modern Hindu Law, 3 vols., Derren, J. D. M., ed. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977, II, 354–73.Google Scholar

38 Lingat, , Classical Law of India, 257–58.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., 259.

40 Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books 1983), 196.Google Scholar

41 Stokes. English Utilitarians, 235.Google Scholar

42 Washbrook, , “Law, State, and Agrarian Society,” 657–58. 665.Google Scholar

43 The most important and insightful recent study of the cultural impact of colonial law is by Appadurai, Arjun, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Appadurai argues that the British were profoundly ambivalent about questions of change and preservation, wishing to regularize their administration of India while altering as little of “Indian tradition” (as they defined it) as possible (pp. 166–67). Appadurai demonstrates that in spite of this ambivalence the British brought about profound changes, involving the shift of law from a royal and administrative context to a colonial and bureaucratic one. and often entailing major changes in the legal basis and social constitutions of religious communities.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 P.B.R., no. 1863, 17 September 1873.

45 Ibid., no. 2104, 22 May 1871.

46 As stipulated under Act XIV of 18.59, Section 1, Clause 14, Madras Regulations.

47 P.B.R., no. 747. 8 May 1873.

48 Ibid., no. 1863. 17 September 1873.

49 District Court of Madura, original suit no. 21 of 1873. I am grateful to Pamela Price for making the transcript of this case available to me.

50 P.B.R.. no. 389. 21 February 1874.

51 Ibid., no 1116. 12 May 1874.

52 Ibid., no. 3490, 2 December 1874.

53 See Price, “Rāia-dharma in Ramnad.”

54 Proceedings of the Court of Wards, Madras, no. 874. 24 July 1886.

55 Ibid., no. 1684. 4 November 1887.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., no. 874, 24 July 1886.

58 Ibid. no. 2060. 3 August 1874.

59 Ventures of this kind occurred only at the upper level of society. Even today, many disputes continue to be solved within the framework of traditional local procedures for dispute arbitration. In areas of Tamil Nadu where I worked, local assemblies called kuiṭṭams continue to play an important role in certain areas. In fact, it is often considered to be a sign of the demise of these institutions, and of local society in general, when the law courts are frequented. The characterization of Indians as unusually litigious is based on the extraordinarily rapid penetration of legal institutions into certain areas of Indian society. This effect was due to the transfer of all cases concerning landholding to the legal domain and to the uncertain classificatory command the newly created legal codes had over foreign systems of landholding. But most other areas of civil law continued to be dealt with effectively in local assemblies, where the purpose of arbitration was not to punish offenders but rather to re-establish communal harmony—and hierarchy. Landholding had been summarily removed from its previous contextualization within the same communal institutions.

60 This is the clear implication of Washbrook's paper. Once Washbrook judges the law to be a mere accomplice of the economic interests of the colonial state, he lets the law drop from his analysis. Because he sees the old regime state in India as little different, if less powerful and therefore less brutal, from the colonial state, he does not identify the cultural, social, and political factors that made the transition to colonialism so disruptive. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that Washbrook does not consider seriously the nature and significance of the introduction of the colonial law beyond its demonstrable economic effects, or lack of them. However, in a more recent paper Washbrook has shifted his approach and is now centrally concerned with the mechanisms through which the law eroded the corporate institutions of the old regime in South India even while it seemed to invoke these institutions. Washbrook cites as an example the fact that laws demanding written consensus on each property transaction within a village actually worked to reduce significantly the openness and dynamism of village society. Washbrook, David, “Colonialism, Underdevelopment, and the Making of a Backward Economy: The Case of South India. 1770–1870” (Paper presented to Humanities Seminar,California Institute of Technology,30 April 1984).Google Scholar

61 For a detailed examination of the role of the law in the history of zamindaries in southern India, see Price, Pamela G., “Resources and Rule in Zamindari South India, 1802–1903: Sivagangai and Ramnad as Kingdoms under the Raj” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1979). Of particular interest is her discussion of succession disputes (ch. 5, pp. 132–75).Google Scholar