Book Review: Documents on Economic History of British Rule in India,1858–1947: Part I: Eastern India in the Late Nineteenth Century,1860s–1870s;Part II: Eastern India in the Late Nineteenth Century,1880s–1890s

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The reviewer addresses two questions. How could research students best use the large number of documents included in the volume? What could be the possible themes for which the documents could be used?

Users of the volume should keep in mind that, except for a few, the documents alone would only partially serve their purpose. They would be most useful as guide to access more detailed reports on which they are based, such as those from the district officials, including Collectors, Divisional Commissioners and the Board of Revenue. ‘Reports on the Administration of Bengal’ of the years 1860–61 to 1900–01 (Part I, Document 1-Document (henceforth D) 15 and Part II, D 1-D 10) and the ‘Reports on the Survey and Settlement’ in different districts (Part II, D 14–D 24) are all based on the reports sent from the ‘lower level’ bureaucrats to the Lt. Governor in Council. ‘Annual Reports’ on the administration of Bengal may be used first. They provide an idea of the major events of particular years. Research students then need to go to the major ‘Proceedings’ kept in the archives, such as those of the Revenue Department and the Board of Revenue. Here again, the Board of Revenue Proceedings are more useful than the Revenue Department Proceedings. The latter often left out important reports sent by the Board of Revenue.

There are a few notable exceptions: (a) ‘Famine Reports’ (Part I, D 16–D 17); (b) Reports on the ‘Conditions of the Lower Classes of Population in Bengal’ (Part II, D 12); and (c) Selected Reports from Divisional Commissioners (Part I, D 34–D 36). These are all reports from the District Collectors and Divisional Commissioners.

The documents, all official representations, were liable to be biased, and scholars using them need to check their trustworthiness. Some biases are conscious distortions. Some others have much to do with the official mindset. Scholars having access to the elaborate reports on which the documents are based could see them for what they are.

The questions covered in the document are wide-ranging. Users of the volume would make their own choice. The present reviewer’s choice relates mainly to trends in the agrarian history of eastern India (Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Assam) in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Here are some of the themes for reconstruction of the region’s agrarian history.

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We elaborate just a few of these themes. The documents, though scattered, help us understand the broad changes in the economy of the four provinces, and make a comparative study of the major trends in them.

What happened in the second half of the nineteenth century is not intelligible without an understanding of what had happened in the first century of British rule. A notable feature of the agriculture in the Bengal Presidency in the first century was a big contrast between Assam and Orissa, on the one hand, and Bengal and Bihar, on the other. The worst form of agricultural decline occurred in Assam. The decline, much less marked, occurred in Orissa too. The peasant economy of Bengal initially suffered a big setback as a result of the famine of 1769–70, but gradually recovered. Cultivation steadily increased in the Bihar districts too, except in Purnea, infamous for its unhealthy climate, primarily because of labour shortage caused by excessive mortality from recurring ‘fevers’.

The agricultural decline in Assam in the later decades of Ahom rule (1760s–1826) continued and indeed deepened during early colonial rule. The decline in colonial times had, however, different roots. Except for the population decline, they had much to do with aspects of the reorganisation of the political system and land revenue administration by the state. The reorganisations ¹ had a radical form and involved a structural change: complete overthrow of the old Ahom polity and rejection of the old mode of surplus extraction of the state from the peasant village. All this was reflected in the long agricultural depression in the province. The declining trend continued in Assam in the second half of the century. Labour shortage remained a perennial constraint on the growth of cultivation. The decade 1891–1901 was one of the worst in the demographic history of Assam. ² Things steadily improved since then. The decisive reason was the arrival of skilled Muslim peasants from the eastern Bengal districts. The immigration, confined till 1911 to lower Assam, spilled over later to other parts of the Brahmaputra Valley.

In Orissa, the process of consolidation of the colonial polity, which had a big role in the agricultural decline, had different forms. The crucial one was the imposition of a large increase in the revenue demand. The reorganisation of the monetary system, which it necessitated, and the silver scarcity due to other reasons, caused widespread peasant distress. ³ The biggest setback for Orissa’s agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century was the devastating famine of 1866.

The story of how it originated and how, in different ways, it nearly undermined the organisation of agriculture, and other modes of living, and thus led to large-scale mortality and unprecedented rural distress can be told largely on the basis of the Document 16 of Part I of the volume.

Drought, perhaps the worst in recent history, that caused an enormous loss of crop had much to do with the beginning of the crisis. Its magnitude was not due to the drought alone. The rural economy had already grown frail. The famine following the huge loss of crop only exposed the frailty, and severely aggravated it.

A major source of it was insecurity of water supply, a prime need for agriculture. Artificial irrigation was negligible and agriculture left wholly at nature’s mercy. Where embankments were neglected, as indeed they often were, floods destroyed the crops. Agriculture also remained vulnerable because of its mono-crop nature. Stability of the rural economy, where means of livelihood other than agriculture were extremely limited, wholly depended on the safety of the most important crop, the winter rice (Sarad) grown in as much as 78.4 per cent of the total cropped area. Other crops were insignificant as sources of food. Villages lost their major source of food supply when the Sarad crop failed, mostly due to failure of rain or its mal-distribution. On the one hand, agricultural organisation had an unstable social base. The number of settled resident peasants (thani ryots), with secure titles to land, had sharply declined in the recent years. The long agricultural depression, especially in the 1840s, and other causes had greatly weakened them. ⁴ On the other hand, the deeply entrenched rural credit system tended to reduce the rice stock in peasant villages even in normal years, because the rice traders, who invariably were also the leading rural creditors, dominated the rice market. The surplus of a normal Sarad harvest was largely drained out of the village as a result of their trading and credit activities. They could corner much of the available rice. Purchases from the open market operation normally formed only a small part of the supply. They could secure whatever quantity they wanted through an elaborate credit system. Advances in cash or kind were made to cultivators before the beginning of the agricultural season, on condition that they would hand over to traders a certain quantity of their harvest. A major source of their control over cultivators was the closed nature of the credit system, meaning that a particular community of traders, Kumtees controlling the export market and Dandeedars the internal market, dominated the rice market. ⁵ This reduced rice availability in the local market, because the merchant creditors having prior commitments to supply rice in other markets away from Orissa could not back out of the commitments, except in exceptional circumstances. This was the reason why the traders could not afford to heed the appeals of the famine-stricken peasants to stop rice exports. Continuing exports pushed up the prices of rice. The result was much the same where the traders arranged for rice procurement through local zamindars and moneylenders. Government inactivity worsened the price situation. Convinced that a considerable quantity of rice was still available in the market, it did not take any initiative to induce traders to import rice. In principle, it abstained from meddling in the market fearing that it would further derange the market system. The widespread sense of panic over the possibility that the acute shortage of rice in the market would not soon end led to suspension of all sales in the market. Speculation of traders led to further depletion of rice supply in the market. The inevitable happened. Prices abruptly shot up. ⁶ The price in the later part of October 1865 was two to three times above normal. With the food stock running out, cultivators deserted their villages. The desperation was not of much use, because scarcity of food was as chronic everywhere. The result was starvation deaths. Most mortality occurred amongst the people belonging to the ‘lowest strata’ of society, including day labourers, who had no income whatsoever because the severe drought had sharply reduced all agricultural work. Salt workers suffered as much with the government recently stopping its salt manufactures altogether. ⁷ For starving villagers the only means left of getting any food at all was grain robbery, wherever the grain could be found. It was not a sporadic, but an organised activity on a large scale, too large to be prevented through police measures. ⁸ Statistics of mortality were hard to collect under the circumstance even where the police cared to collect them, because a large number of deaths in remote villages could not be recorded. Even the modest estimate of the morality was about 25 to 30 per cent of the population. Labour shortage, also due to peasant desertion, was indeed the biggest constraint on the resumption of cultivation in the next season. Another measure of the acute peasant distress was the sharp fall in the number of thani ryots; the probable reason being the loss of their petty holdings either to opulent peasants or to rural creditors. ⁹ This meant that they had lost their status as occupancy peasants, a status protected by the law. The government eventually realised the magnitude of the crisis and postponed the revision of the revenue settlement, due in 1867, until the end of the century.

The documents show that despite some serious setbacks the Bengal economy did much better than Bihar’s. Government had no doubt whatsoever about the continuing negative trends in Bihar’s economy.

Apart from the famine of 1865–66 adversely affecting particularly the western districts of Bengal (Part I, D 16) and the more devastating famine of 1896–97 which affected nearly the whole of the Bengal Presidency (Part II, D 13) three major developments depressed the economy of some parts of Bengal. Two were of ecological origins: the dying river system of Bengal and malaria epidemics, also called ‘fever’ when it was generally endemic, breaking out from time to time. The third development was ‘cattle murrain’.

The documents do not say much about how the ‘moribund’ river system reduced the fertility of land. ¹⁰ Government was more worried over the more spectacular phenomenon—the huge demographic reverses caused by malaria and the fever in other forms (Part II, D 12, p. 315). The census data revealed the magnitude of the reverses. They ‘show a diminution since 1872 of 6 per cent of the population of Burdwan… It is believed that even greater desolation was caused by the fatal Burdwan fever during the previous decade’. The 1881 census estimated the ‘total mortality from this cause’ at ‘no less than 7000000’. The ‘fatal disease’ continued to be active in the years from 1881 to 1884. Burdwan and Hugli lost about 12.5 per cent of their population. The census data of the period 1872–91 show that in the severely affected districts like Burdwan, Hugli, Nadia and Jessore, ‘the descending spiral was not reversed in course of two decades 1872–91’. ¹¹ The particular origins of malaria and the circumstances aggravating it account for some of its significant characteristics. It was not a temporary phenomenon, like the plague in Bihar (1898) or the influenza throughout the greater part of India (1918–19), disappearing for ever after a brief spell of terrible ravage. ‘Its potency as a killer derived from its recurrence’. The documents nearly ignore how malaria and other forms of fever severely affected the productivity of the surviving population, debilitating them and leaving them listless, incapable of the hard labour that cultivation demanded. They, however, generally agree that ‘the class visited most severely by the fever was the lowest class—that of the day labourers, which also is notoriously the poorest, the worst fed, clothed and housed’. Shortage of labour and its low productivity hit agriculture most because it was to this deprived community that most agricultural labourers belonged.

The third development which reinforced the declining trend in agriculture was the ‘cattle murrain’, which villagers called gootee (‘cattle pox’, a kind of small pox). ¹² Document 34, Part I relating to the murrain in the Chittagong Division suggests that the area ravaged by it was fairly large. ‘It seems to be generally flying about the district and to be confined to no particular time or locality.’ The loss from the murrain was extremely heavy throughout the 1860s and the early part of the 1870s. The normal death rate seldom exceeded 4 to 6 per cent. The rate in the murrain-affected areas was rarely below 15 per cent and as high as 35 per cent in some places. Contemporaries explained the big increase as due to improved communications and the diminishing pasture. The first made possible movement of large herds of cattle from place to place and helped the spread of the epidemic. The second deprived cattle of adequate food and reduced their powers of resistance when the epidemic struck. Cattle poisoning was also cited as a cause of the widespread cattle death. The Cattle Plague Commission (1871), which investigated the crime, related it to the expanding hide trade, the value of which increased nearly ten times between 1835–36 and 1874–75. The extensive cattle mortality directly affected agriculture, because cattle prices tended to rise as a result of all these. Replacement of the lost cattle was a severe drain on peasant resources. Cultivation suffered as a result. ¹³

As regards the trend in the Bihar economy towards decadence and stagnation, which government affirmed several times, the documents do not provide any hard statistical data. The official judgement was wholly impressionistic. Its basis was local officials’ description of ‘conditions of lower classes of the population in Bengal’ (Part II, D 12). The local reports formed part of an enquiry instituted in 1887, ‘to ascertain whether there is any foundation for the assertion frequently repeated that the greater part of the population of India suffers from a daily insufficiency of food’. The samples were limited. ‘An attempt has been made to ascertain actual facts in limited areas, chosen as typical of the districts in which they are situated… the enquiries made have often been of a searching character.’

The reports relate to seven adjoining districts: Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga, Saran, Bhagalpur and Munger. The conclusion drawn is suggestive: ‘There is no doubt that in this part of Bihar, while the upper and middle classes are prosperous, the ordinary labourers, and the smaller cultivators, amounting, according to the Commissioner of Patna, to some 40 per cent of the population [of over fifteen millions], are much worse off than the corresponding classes in Bengal.’ The explanation is suggestive too. The dire poverty is rooted in the organisation of the rural economy itself. The causes were not incidental or ephemeral.

Some reports are illustrative of the conclusion. A Settlement Officer in Bhagalpur found that ‘the lower classes, which including the weaving class, amounted to 25 per cent of the population, have little chance of improving their position, and they have no resources to fall back upon in time of scarcity’. The Patna Collector writes of ryots holding less than four local bighas, or two and a half acres. ‘Their fare is of the very coarsest; consisting to a great extent of khesari dal [a kind of an inferior pulse], and the quantity is insufficient during a considerable part of the year. They can only make one full meal instead of two.’

The explanation of the pitifully scanty wages of labour reveals, however, the mindset of a colonial government (Part II, pp. 319–324, 332). Government was not at all to be blamed for this. It was all due to the so-called overpopulation in the province, with its social institutions compounding the evil.

What then could be the solution? ‘Emigration can afford a sufficient and lasting remedy only if it be conducted on a large scale and continuously.’

About the pitiable existence of a section of the rural poor—the large community of agricultural labourers—local officials rarely disagreed. Developments like famines just worsened them. The reports on the Bihar famine of 1866–67 (Part I, D 17) brought to light a revealing feature of the rural economy of Darbhanga.

Famines inevitably worsened their material conditions, especially where wages were paid in kind. During times of poor harvest, rich farmers, their employers, reduced employing labour. Where they were paid in food grains,

the mere labourer, dependent on the cultivator, was deprived of his customary means of support. Similarly, the petty artisans and day labourers, the dosads, mosaheers, domes, koormes [all landless labourers, having the lowest caste ranking in the Hind society] and others, who in a village community ordinarily receive a day’s food, supplemented by small cash payment, for a day’s work, could not longer obtain his employment when the day’s food has assumed a value hitherto unknown, and every householder’s store of grain was so reduced that the household with difficulty supported his own family. (p. 285)

A local official thus wrote of ‘conditions’ of agricultural labourers in Darbhanga about two decades later (1888) (Part II, p. 366). In general half of the ‘whole number of agricultural labourers’ did not possess any land.

‘Conditions’ of landless agricultural labourers, such as ‘Kurmis, Dosads, Chamars and Jolahas and some Bania’ in a south Bihar district, Sahabad, were nearly identical.

On the assumption that employments outside agriculture would long remain negligible, government correctly identified the implications of a fast-growing population for the rural economy where land had become a scarce asset. One implication of the ‘abundance of cheap’ labour was the ‘readiness of ryots, holding at rates much below those which may be obtained by competition, to under-let at a rack-rent, leaving the actual cultivation to a class of paupers; the disposition to sub-divide where the younger members of the family cannot obtain a decent subsistence by labour; and the tendency of landowners to enhance rents held, without direct and efficient legal sanction, at privileged rates’. The agrarian legislation, such as the Rent Act of 1859 and the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, would hardly improve matters.

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We have just cited an official explanation partly relating the destitution of Bihar peasantry to rack-renting and insecurity of their ‘title’ to land. Government believed suitable agrarian legislation would go a long way towards coping with the evils. Some of the documents (Part II, D 11 and Part I, D 15) show how government intended to go about it.

Contrary to an impression, government scarcely regarded agrarian legislation as a piece of ‘social engineering’, in the sense of an independent initiative of its own towards creating a ‘harmonious’ rural order free from recurring conflicts between the two classes, zamindars and peasants (ryots). Government intervened, because it could not help doing it, in the context of rural tension and class conflicts, which created at times a ‘law and order’ problem, especially in the adivasi world.

The legislation for adivasi villages (The Chotanagpur Tenures Act, 1878, for instance) noticeably differed from that for ‘peasant villages’ (The Bengal Tenancy Act, 1885). In the latter case it was basically a compromise. While keen on ‘protection’ of peasants government was reluctant to go beyond a limit. It sought to prevent, as far as possible, exercise of arbitrary powers of zamindars in enhancing rent through ‘illegal’ and extra-legal means. It did not, however, ever feel that rent rates would be frozen for ever. Government would go only as far as to ensure that the ryots would be ‘left in the enjoyment of a reasonable proportion of the profits of cultivation, and, in short, placed in a position of substantial comfort, calculated to resist successfully the occasional pressure of bad times’ (Part II, p. 296). It did not decide that the ryot (‘occupancy tenant’) was ‘entitled to sit at any special privileged rate of rent’. On the other hand, ‘the zamindars will be admitted to share in the growing prosperity of the country upon fair terms’. It presumed, despite occasional setbacks, the country’s agriculture would prosper, and preventing zamindars, through artificial means, from having a share in the prosperity would kill their incentive for investment in agriculture. The legislation, again, did not ‘protect’ the whole of the cultivating community. Only an arbitrarily chosen group called ‘occupancy ryot’, defined as a ryot continuously holding land in the village for twelve years, qualified for the protection. The numerous communities left outside the pale of the law included cultivators, who in different ways rented land from the ‘occupancy ryots’, various types of agricultural labourers and the large community of migrant cultivators providing the labour force for new cultivation. Quite a few of them formed the distinctive rural stratum of share-croppers.

The legislation for adivasi villages substantially differed. Adivasi wanted the government to restore the lands they had lost to assorted groups of aliens (dikus, sadans). The legislation actually formalised the loss, and thus helped the aliens consolidate their control over adivasi villages. Government candidly admitted that the loss had been too pervasive for legislation to undo it. The Chotanagpur Tenures Act of 1878 (Part I, D 15), passed after much fanfare, finally sealed the fate of Bhuinhars, the families of original village founders. They had long been losing their lands over the years, and no part of it could be retrieved. They now believed nothing short of a combined resistance could do it. This was the background to the rise of radical movements in the entire adivasi world.

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Scholars working on eastern India’s economic history in the second half of the nineteenth century would surely find this two-part volume of documents an immensely useful collection of original source materials. The reviewer has some suggestions on how best the documents could be used for reconstruction of the agrarian history of the region. Scholars must be having their own choices. We warmly congratulate again the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, for sponsoring this huge enterprise. The two editors have done a splendid job.