Week 3

This weeks readings involve the increasing interaction of the East India
Company with the subcontinent, in particular how the EIC adopts means
of controlling land and its revenues to establish structures of rule and
power.

The readings touch on the three land revenue systems including PS,
Mahawari and Ryotwari systems. These land revenue systems are backed
by socio-economic schools of thought at the time and exemplify Whig and
utilitarian ideologies as well as the opposing currents of Orientalism at the
time.

Banerjee-Dube describes the process in which the EIC came to a suitable

land revenue system. She starts with detailing British distrust of local
landed gentries or zamindars which led to the increasing militarization of
the Company army. Subsequently, administrative failures such as the
1770 famine led the EIC to realize the impossibility of imposing total
British dominance over Indian land, which led to the establishment of the
Permanent Settlement.

Guha experiments with the ideology behind the Permanent Settlement.

The text argues that PS is part of a broader ideological movement initiated
by the Scottish Enlightenment in particular. He first describes Orientalist
thinkers of the likes of Dow whose erroneous idea was that property was
not a socio-economic or political concept in India prior to European
presence on the continent. Dow advocated for the establishment of PS
with the belief that this would solve the scarcity issue of Bengal which he
believed in a way was due to misallocation by Indian rules/ despots. Both
texts believed that Dows view typical of Orientalist thinking of the time
originated from a lack of understanding of Indian agriculture and socio-
political structures. Compounded with the EICs greed and need to extract
profit at the highest rate possible, this will result in the eventual failure of
PS.

In The English Utilitarians and India, Eric Stokes discusses different models
of land ownership and tax collection (Permanent Settlement by Cornwallis,
ryotwari by Munro in Madras and an intermediate system managed
through taluqdars in northern India) buttressed by emerging theories on
social and economic production at the time. Anglicists buttressing Whig
notions of utilitarianism argued for a greater understanding and census of
land economies and information. Though this championed a newer age of
policy administration based on data and scientific analysis, the sheer
bureaucracy involved in the operation of such a project, as well as British
ignorance of the nature of land, culture and status in the subcontinent
also foreshadowed the failure of the Ryotwari system.