Book I, Chapter 5: Land Settlements in Madras

CHAPTER V

LAND SETTLEMENTS IN MADRAS

A Ryotwari Settlement, i.e., a Settlement of the land revenue with the cultivators of the soil, was made by Captain Read and Thomas Munro in the districts of Baramahal, when the East India Company first acquired those districts in 1792, and was gradually extended to other parts of the province of Madras. The first assessments were severe and oppressive. The State demanded about one-half the estimated produce of the fields, a demand which was more than the whole economic rental of the country. Thomas Munro perceived this, and in 1807 proposed to reduce the assessment to a third of the produce. The Government of Madras admitted the justice of the proposal, but could not give effect to it, for the Directors of the Company pressed for money. Orders were received from England for an additional annual remittance of a million sterling, accompanied by a threat that the Directors would take the question of reducing the establishments in their own hands in case of disobedience. The Madras peasantry, therefore, obtained no relief.

Between 1808 and 1818 the Madras Board of Revenue urged the wise plan of recognising the Village Communities of the Province. They suggested that Land Revenue Settlements should be concluded with these bodies according to the ancient custom of India. And they proved from experience that Village Settlement had succeeded wherever it was tried, and that Settlement with individual tenants had failed. But representative Village Communities had no place in the scheme of the Company’s absolute government; the Directors decided to deal with the cultivators individually, without any intermediate bodies. The ancient Village Communities of Madras declined from that date.

Sir Thomas Munro was Governor of Madras from 1820 to 1827, and within this period the Ryotwari Settlement was introduced into all parts of the Province where a Permanent Settlement of the land revenue had not already been effected with Zemindars. Munro succeeded in reducing the Government assessment to the extent he had recommended before; and his considerate measures and his untiring supervision remedied many evils.

But even the reduced demand of Sir Thomas Munro was found to be oppressive. One-third of the produce of the field represented the entire economic rent in many villages and fields. It was demanded in a fixed sum in money, irrespective of the annual yield or the prevailing prices. And it was realised, not through village elders and village corporations, but through the low-paid agents of the State, who added to the miseries of the cultivators by their cruelty and their corruption. And when Sir Thomas Munro, who had organised everything and supervised everything, was removed from the scene by the hand of death, the difficulties of the system were felt more severely than ever. For thirty years the Province of Madras became a scene of oppression and agricultural distress unparalleled even in India in that age.

The Revenue Collectors themselves witnessed the universal misery by which they were surrounded, and some extracts from their Reports¹ will illustrate the condition of the people.

Cuddapa District.—The Collector wrote to the Board of Revenue in 1828: “The Ryots are more in the hands of the merchants than perhaps you are prepared to hear. . . . The peasantry are too poor to more than keep up their cultivation with Takavi [Government advances], when they have met with no extraordinary losses. When they have met with such losses from the death of cattle or other cause, it is impossible to repair them without assistance from Takavi.”

Bellary District.—The Collector reported in 1845: “The universal complaint and request of the Ryots is to be allowed to reduce their farms, a convincing proof that cultivation is not profitable. Ryots, formerly substantial, and capable of laying out their capital on the lands, and liquidating their Sircar [State] demand, reserving their produce until they could get a favourable price, are now sunk in debt bearing heavy interest, entirely subject to their creditors; and were it not for the aid of the Collector through his revenue subordinates, one-half, or at least one-third, of the highly assessed lands would ere this have been thrown up. Husbandry is not carried on efficiently, and consequently the land seldom returns what it ought and is capable of. The number of Patta [lease] holders has increased, but they are a poor class who seek a maintenance only in husbandry with less spirit, and by no means to be compared with the substantial farmers who have fallen into difficulties and disappeared from the rent-roll of the district. With regard to food and raiment, the majority of them are poorly clad and ill-fed, and it is impossible to arrive at any other conclusion than that poverty is the cause.”

Rajamundry, afterwards called Godavari District, appeared, from the report of Sir Henry Montgomery in 1844, to have been on the verge of ruin. There were famines in 1830 and 1831; the seasons were unfavourable in 1835, 1836, and 1837, and calamitous in 1838, 1839, and 1840. The population, which was 695,016 in 1830, had decreased to 533,836 in 1840.

Gantur and Masalipatam.—The famine of 1833, known as the Gantur famine, was the severest on record in these parts. Captain Walter Campbell, who was an eye-witness, stated: “The description in The Siege of Corinth of dogs gnawing human skulls is mild as compared with the scene of horror we are daily forced to witness in our morning and evening rides. . . . It is dreadful to see what revolting food human beings may be driven to partake of. Dead dogs and horses are greedily devoured by these starving wretches; and the other day, an unfortunate donkey having strayed from the fort, they fell upon him like a pack of wolves, tore him limb from limb, and devoured him on the spot.” In the Gantur portion of the Krishna district from one-third to half of the whole population perished. An epidemic broke out in the following year, and “a man in perfect health was hardly to be seen anywhere.”

Nellore District.—The Ryots had become impoverished by the low prices of grain which ruled. The total cultivated area had risen from 244,319 acres in 1801 to 389,802 acres in 1850. But garden lands had ceased to be cultivated through the pressure of the assessment, owing to a fall in the prices.

North Arcot.—The Collector reported: “The Ryots are in worse condition than they were at the beginning of the century. However this may be, their present condition is indubitably bad, and must be improved. The great body of them are certainly poor; their food is deficient in quantity as well as coarse; and their clothing is scanty and poor; and their dwellings extremely mean; all this combined with gross ignorance.”

South Arcot.—The Collector reported an increase in the population and in the wages of labour, and found some indications of improvement in carriages, cloths, and houses. But agriculture was in a backward condition owing to heavy and unequal assessment, and two-thirds of the cultivable lands were waste.

Tanjore District did not suffer to the same extent as other districts from agricultural depression owing to improvements in irrigation works and in communications.

Coimbatur District.—The Collector wrote in 1840, that of the ten preceding seasons nine had been bad ones, and the land revenue had fallen in consequence. The trade in coarse piece-goods exported to Bombay had improved, but trade in fine goods had been annihilated by English manufacturers. Prices of grains had increased owing to a succession of bad seasons.

Salem, Madura and Tinnevelly Districts.—The exports of cotton goods manufactured in Coimbatur, Salem, Madura, and Tinnevelly had considerably increased. The price of labour had not risen with the increase of cultivation. The Collector remarked that cheap prices had increased the consumption of luxuries.

General Condition of the Madras Ryot.—From these accounts of the condition of the different districts we turn to a description of the Madras cultivators generally, given by one of the best-known Madras officials of his day.² Bourdillon had served as Collector in North Arcot and elsewhere; had acquired a thorough and intimate knowledge of the people among whom he had lived; and had been chosen with Sir Arthur Cotton and other distinguished men to form the Public Works Commission which submitted their valuable report in 1852. His account of the Madras Ryot recorded in 1853 is sober and thoughtful; it exaggerated nothing; but it indicated with painful details the chronic poverty of the cultivators.

A very small proportion of the cultivators who were favourably assessed or held revenue-free lands, or possessed other exceptional advantages, were well to do, and, with an income of 30 to 40 shillings a month, were accounted to be very well off. An income of £3 to £5 a month was very rare even among these classes.

The large majority of the cultivators, however, were always in poverty and generally in debt. “A Ryot of this class of course lives from hand to mouth; he rarely sees money except that obtained from the Chetty [money-lender] to pay his kist [instalment of Government revenue]; the exchanges in the out villages are very few, and they are usually conducted by barter. His ploughing cattle are wretched animals not worth more than 3½ to 6 rupees each [7 to 12 shillings], and those perhaps not his own, because not paid for. His rude and feeble plough costs, when new, no more than 2 or 3 shillings; and all the rest of his few agricultural implements are equally primitive and inefficient. His dwelling is a hut of mud walls and thatched roofs, far ruder, smaller, and more dilapidated than those of the better classes of Ryots above spoken of; and still more destitute, if possible, of anything that can be called furniture. His food and that of his family is partly their porridge made of the meal of grain boiled in water, and partly boiled rice with a little condiment; and generally the only vessels for cooking and eating from are of the coarsest earthenware, much inferior in grain to a good tile or brick in England, and unglazed. Brass vessels, though not wholly unknown among this class, are rare.

“The scale of the Ryots descends to those who possess a small patch of land, cultivated sometimes by the aid of borrowed cattle, but whose chief subsistence is derived from cooly-labour, either cutting firewood and carrying it for sale to a neighbouring town, or in field labour.

“The purely labouring classes are below these again, worse off, indeed, but with no very broad distinction in condition. The earnings of a man employed in agricultural labour cannot be quoted at more than 20 rupees [40 shillings] a year, including everything; and this is not paid in money but in commodities. . . .

“Taking his earnings at the highest rate, viz., 20 rupees a year, this would be equivalent in real value, using the same standard of comparison as above, to 10 pounds a year in England.³

“The English field labourer earns on an average not less than £28 a year, including his extra gains in harvest time; and thus it appears that the real wages of a field labourer in regular employ, his command of the necessaries and conveniences of life, are in this country little more than a third of what they are in England.”

We will cite the testimony of one more distinguished officer on the actual working of the Ryotwari System, under which each District Collector was entrusted with the task of realising an impossible land revenue from a hundred thousand tenants in his district! George Campbell, afterwards Sir George Campbell, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and then Member of Parliament, wrote in 1852 the following account of the Madras System:—

“Only imagine one Collector dealing with 150,000 tenants, not one of whom has a lease; but each pays according as he cultivates and gets a crop, and with reference to the number of his cattle, sheep, and children; and each of whom gets a reduction if he can make out a sufficiently good case. What a cry of agricultural distress and large families there would be in England or any other country under such a system! Would any farmer ever admit that his farm had yielded anything, that his cattle had produced, or that his wife had not produced? If the Collector were one of the prophets and remained in the district to the age of Methuselah, he would not be fit for the duty; and as he is but an ordinary man and a foreigner and continually changed, it would be strange if the native subordinates could not do as they liked, and, having the power, did not abuse it. Accordingly, it is generally agreed that the abuses of the whole system, and specially that of remissions, is something frightful; chicanery and intrigue of all kinds are unbounded; while the reliance of the Madras Collector on informers by no means mends the matter.”⁴

These were the early results of a policy which had ignored Village Communities, and had prescribed the collection of an impossible land revenue directly from each petty tenant. It is painful to add that the use of torture was almost universal in the Province for the prompt realisation of the assessed revenue from the miserable cultivators. Rumours of this baneful practice were heard in England; and in 1854, Mr. Blackett, M.P. for the town of Newcastle, brought on a debate upon a Motion for a Commission to inquire into the land system of Madras. He described the system as the vilest that could be devised, and asserted that the exorbitant revenue demand could only be realised by torture. The fearless John Bright took a part in the debate, and his eloquent description of the condition of the Madras cultivator, and of the treatment he received, roused indignation in the country.

The Indian Government, slow to move in the path of reform, was forced to take some action after this debate. A Commission was appointed to take evidence; and an Act was passed to enable the Commission to proceed with their task. Elliot, a judge of the Madras Small Cause Court, Norton, a Madras barrister, and Stokes, a pronounced supporter of the Ryotwari System, were appointed Commissioners. A Commission, so constituted, submitted a guarded report. They found, that the practice of torture for the realisation of the Government revenue existed in the Province; and they also found that injured parties could not obtain any redress. But they were careful not to cast any imputation on the European Officers of the Government, and they saw nothing to impress them with the belief “that the people at large entertained the idea that their maltreatment is countenanced or tolerated by the European officers of Government.”⁵

The kinds of torture which were most common were: keeping a man in the sun; preventing his going to meals or other calls of nature; confinement; preventing his cattle from going to pasture; quartering a peon on him; the use of Kittee Anundal, i.e., tying a man down in a bent position; squeezing the crossed fingers; pinches, slaps, blows with fist or whip, running up and down; twisting the ears, making a man sit with brickbats behind his knees; putting a low caste man on his back; striking two defaulters’ heads, or tying them by the back hair; placing in the stocks; tying by the hair to a donkey’s or a buffalo’s tail; placing a necklace of bones or other degrading or disgusting materials round the necks; and occasionally, though rarely, more severe discipline.”⁶

One thing which came out very clearly during this inquiry was that where the land was severely assessed, the cases of torture were frequent. “In Canara and Malabar,” the Commission wrote, “we learn that the Land Tax is generally light, that the people are flourishing, the assessment easily and even cheerfully paid, the struggle more often being who shall be allowed than who shall be made to pay the Government dues. Land has acquired a saleable value, and allotments of waste are eagerly contended for. Who can be surprised then at hearing one and all the European dwellers in those favoured spots declare that there torture for revenue purposes is comparatively unknown?”⁷

And Bourdillon, the Collector of North Arcot, recorded his opinion that torture for the purposes of revenue “might have ceased entirely by this time, but for the exorbitant demand on the land, and some particular incidents of the revenue system in these Provinces. With a moderate assessment, land would have become a valuable property; and a man would not only have taken care not to incur the loss of it, but in case of adversity would have in itself the means of satisfying the Government demands upon it. Further, had the assessment been moderate, that circumstance alone would have powerfully tended to raise the character of the people; for when men begin to possess property, they also acquire self-respect and the knowledge how to make themselves respected, and will no longer submit to personal indignities.”⁸

All the evils of the Ryotwari System, attended with over-assessment of the soil, as it prevailed in Madras, were known to the Indian Government. And protests were made against a system which compared so unfavourably with the system of Northern India. As stated in the last chapter, the Sadar Board of Revenue addressed a strong letter to the Governor-General of India,⁹ in which they condemned the Madras System. They pointed out the fraud and oppression practised by every low-paid officer of the State, and deprecated the harassing and inquisitorial searches made into the means of every cultivator. The system, they said, was found in connection with the lowest state of pauperism and dependence. “Every man must be degraded in his own opinion and relegated to a state of perpetual pupilage. The honest manly bearing of one accustomed to rely on his own exertions, can never be his—he can never show forth the erect and dignified independence of a man indifferent to the favour or frown of his superior.” But neither the censure of the Sadar Board, nor the melancholy reports continually received from District Collectors, induced the Madras Government to reform its wretched land administration. It is remarkable that while sweeping reforms were effected in other Provinces by men like Bird and Wingate, no large acts of reform, no great remedial measures, no statesmanlike policy to improve the condition of the people, emanated from the authorities of Madras. Madras has often been called the Benighted Province of India, and never was this opprobrious term more richly deserved than during the first half of the nineteenth century. The light that slowly dawned elsewhere in India failed to penetrate the thick gloom which hung over the Coromandel Coast; and in the vast array of official documents which have been handed down to us from those times, we seek in vain for any great ideas of reform, any sweeping measures of improvement, in Madras.

Madras officials still adhered to their system, and, indeed, extended it from time to time, as permanently settled estates were sold up for inability to pay the revenue. The eagerness with which this policy was pursued in the middle of the nineteenth century has been described by an official of the time. “Meet a Ryotwari Collector in his own house, at his hospitable board, he will admit that the sale of a great Zemindari which he had just achieved was brought about by dexterous management; that the owner had been purposely permitted to get into the meshes of the Collector’s net beyond his power of extrication; that the sale could easily have been obviated, nay, perhaps was uncalled for.” And instances are cited by the same writer which are painful to read in these days.¹⁰

Thomas Munro, the real author of the Ryotwari System, never anticipated the methods which came into operation under that system. He had said before the House of Commons in 1813: “The principle of the Ryotwari System is to fix an assessment upon the whole land of the country; the assessment is permanent; every Ryot who is also a cultivating proprietor of the land which he holds is permitted to hold that land at a fixed assessment as long as he pleases; he holds it for ever without any additional assessment.”

But the assessment was fixed too high; and the consequence was that the State-demand had to be lowered, raised, and lowered again, according to the variation of the seasons, and the condition of the people. The history of the Province during thirty years was thus a history of varying assessments—new Hukm-namas, or orders being continuously issued, altering the assessments. Famine or distress led to a reduction; the first signs of prosperity caused a rise! Modern history scarcely furnishes a parallel to such an arrangement, under which a large, industrious, and civilised population were rendered incapable of improving their condition or acquiring agricultural wealth, by a system of assessments which was kept up to the highest paying capacity of the country from year to year.

The evils of the system were fully exposed during the Parliamentary inquiries of 1852 and 1853, preceding a fresh renewal of the East India Company’s charter. Madras officials were examined in course of those inquiries, and they spoke in no uncertain voice.

Malcolm Lewen, who had served twenty-five years in India as Collector, Judge, and Member of Council, stated before the Select Committee of the House of Commons: “I think that the system of revenue has a great connection with the morality of the country; I think there are systems of revenue in Madras now which tend very greatly to sap the morality of the country as well as to impoverish it.” “The Tahsildars,” he added, “who go about to make inquiries, have almost entirely under their control the amount of assessment which is raised for the Government in all Ryotwari Districts. The consequence is that whenever those people go to a village, the first thing the Ryots of a village do is to endeavour to buy them over to get a low assessment.”¹¹

James William B. Dykes, who had been employed in revenue work in the district of Salem, stated before the House of Commons that throughout that Province the evils of the Ryotwari System were (1) irregularity in assessments which were increased if the cultivators improved their lands; (2) uncertainty of tenure, and (3) the obscurity of the revenue rules which were never made known to the ignorant cultivators.¹²

The Administration of Madras was then forced to adopt a large remedial measure in 1855, similar to that which had been adopted in Northern India in 1833, and in Bombay in 1835. An extensive Survey and Settlement were determined upon; and in their well-known order of 1855, the Madras Government anticipated the happiest results from this Settlement.

“An accurate survey and careful settlement of the land revenue will remove the evils. Each man’s payment will be certain; as a general rule there will be no remissions to be intrigued for or purchased; and thus the scope for cringing and bribery on the one part, and of corruption on the other, will be very greatly diminished; and there is no doubt that, under such a system, a larger revenue may be obtained than at present, with less inconvenience to the people. Not only will the greater proportion of the payments now made to the Government Officers be saved to the Ryot, but by an equal distribution of taxation, those who now pay exorbitantly will be relieved from such extra exertion, and the burden will be laid on those who now, unfairly, evade it. Nor is this all; it is morally certain that, with a moderate and fixed assessment the occupation of land will rapidly increase. At present, cultivation is undoubtedly repressed by the heavy burdens on the land direct and indirect; but when these are lightened, not only will the properly agricultural classes extend their holdings, but numbers of the trading classes will apply their acquisitions to agriculture.

“Further, it is certain that the high assessments and the absence of accurate accounts give occasion to very extensive fraud and the concealment of cultivation. Occasionally instances of this are brought to light on a large scale, so as to prove its existence, and it is well known to all revenue officers that it exists largely, but is concealed through the purchased connivance of the subordinate officials. With reduced assessments, there would be less of this fraudulent evasion, because there would be less inducement to pay for such connivance; and with an accurate survey and clear and simple accounts such fraud would become difficult and dangerous.

“There seems no reason for doubt that, with a vast extent of unoccupied land, with a peaceful and industrious population, scantily fed and scantily employed to the extent of being led to cross the sea in search of employment, though peculiarly averse to leaving home, with roads and other means of communication being every year improved and extended; under all these circumstances it seems clear that such a reduction of assessment as would make agriculture profitable would be speedily followed by a vast extension of cultivation. To these expectations are to be added the more partial causes which will make it practicable to enforce the fair claims of the revenue on extensive tracts now evading them; and lastly it must be noticed that the measures proposed must of necessity occupy a very considerable length of time. It can hardly be expected that the survey and settlement of this extensive Presidency can be accomplished in less than 15 or 20 years, and thus only one-fifteenth or one-twentieth of the revenue will have to be dealt with in each year, and there will be full time for the restorative agencies called into existence by the new measures to come into operation. On the whole, considering the present depressed condition of the Presidency, it seems fair to anticipate with confidence, that the result of these measures, instead of a falling off, will be an accession to the revenue, while as respects the payers and the public the good will be enormous; the revenue will be derived from resources double or treble those upon which it is levied now, and will be paid with corresponding ease and absence of privation.”¹³

We have made this long extract, because this document opens a new chapter in the history of Madras land administrations. The results of the Survey and Settlement, recommended in 1855, will be narrated in a subsequent chapter.

Footnotes