Chapter VII: Old and New Possessions in Madras (1785-1807)

CHAPTER VII

OLD AND NEW POSSESSIONS IN MADRAS (1785-1807)

PITT’S India Bill became law in 1784, as has been stated before. The immediate possessions of the East India Company in the Province of Madras down to that date consisted of a small tract of country round the town of Madras, and the long strip of country along the sea known as the Northern Circars. The first land settlements in Madras were therefore made in these Circars or States.

As early as 1765, when Lord Clive obtained for the Company the Dewani of Bengal, he also obtained from the Great Moghal a grant of four of these Circars, viz. Cicacole, Rajamandri, Ellor, and Kondapily. After a period of native administration, these Circars were placed in 1769 under the charge of Provincial Chiefs and Councils, and the system of administration was similar to that of the Bengal Districts.

In 1775 the Court of Directors directed that a Committee of Circuit should be appointed to inquire into the state of the Northern Circars, in order to ascertain the population, the produce, and the state of manufactures, as well as the gross revenues of the States, and the customary rights of Zemindars and cultivators.¹ The Court also intimated their desire to secure to the Zemindars their annual incomes, and to save the cultivators from undue exactions; and they wished to ascertain if it was possible to introduce into the Circars such regulations as had been established in Bengal. A Committee was accordingly appointed, but was abolished in 1778 by Sir Thomas Rumbold, as has been stated in the last chapter. It was revived in 1783, and continued its inquiries till 1788.

It appeared from the reports submitted by this Committee that lands in the Northern Circars were principally held by Zemindars. The Zemindars in the hill country, descended from the Rajas of the kingdom of Orissa, were virtually independent rulers within their States, and had only paid a fixed tribute to the Mahomedan Government. The Zemindars in the plains were more under the control of the Government, but had been allowed to appropriate to their uses the rents of their estates, so long as they paid a fixed revenue to the Government.

Besides these Zemindari lands, there were certain demesne or household lands of the Government, known as Haveli lands. They were tracts of country adjoining capital towns, and reserved for the supply of the garrisons and civil establishments of the Mahomedan rulers. “Since the establishment of the British Government they [the Haveli lands] may be correctly described as being portions of territory which were not in the hands of the Zemindars, but in those of the Government, and in which it was therefore optional to adopt any system of management for collecting the land revenues from the Ryots that might be preferred.” The system which was actually adopted was not a wise one; the Haveli lands were farmed out to agents or large speculating renters, who were thus furnished with “the most ample means of oppression.“¹

Both in the Zemindari territories and in the Haveli territories there existed from time immemorial the Village Community system, a simple form of self-government which protected the cultivators of every village from the oppression of the Zemindars and the Government. This ancient institution - ancient in the days of Manu-had survived the wreck of dynasties and the downfall of empires, had secured peace and order in villages in times of war, and struck the servants of the East India Company in the eighteenth century as a unique and excellent institution.

“A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some hundreds or thousands of acres of arable and waste land; politically viewed, it resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of officers and servants consists of the following descriptions. The potail, or head inhabitant, who has the general superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants, attends to the police, and performs the duty, already described, of collecting the revenues within his village, a duty which his personal influence and minute acquaintance with the situation and concerns of the people renders him best qualified to discharge; the curnum, who keeps the accounts of cultivation and registers everything concerned with it; the talliar and totie, the duty of the former appearing to consist in a wider and more enlarged sphere of action, in gaining information of crimes and offences, and in escorting and protecting persons travelling from one village to another, the province of the latter appearing to be more immediately confined to the village, consisting, among other duties, in guarding the crops and assisting in measuring them; the boundary-man, who preserves the limits of the village or gives evidence respecting them in case of dispute; the superintendent of tanks and watercourses distributes the water therefrom for the purpose of agriculture; the Bramin, who performs the village worship; the schoolmaster, who is seen teaching the children in the villages to read and write in the sand; the calendar Bramin, or astrologer, who proclaims the lucky or unpropitious periods for sowing and threshing; the smith and carpenter, who manufacture the implements of agriculture and build the dwelling of the Ryot; the potman, or potter; the washerman; the barber; the cowkeeper, who looks after the cattle; the doctor; the dancing-girl, who attends at rejoicings; the musician, and the poet. These officers and servants generally constitute the establishment of a village; but in some parts of the country it is of less extent, some of the duties and functions above described being united in the same person; in others it exceeds the number of individuals which have been described.

“Under this simple form of municipal government the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of villages have been but seldom altered, and though the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated, by war, famine, and disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families have continued for ages. The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and divisions of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged; the Potail is still the head inhabitant, and still acts as the petty judge and magistrate and collector or renter of the village.” ¹

The above extract is of the utmost importance, as it gives us an insight into the constitution of self-governing Indian villages, not in the mystic days of ancient Hindu rule, but in the eighteenth century; not described in old Sanscrit works like Manu, but depicted by the servants of the East India Company in official documents from actual observation and inquiry. It shows us at a glance how the great agricultural population of India tilled their lands and manufactured their commodities in their own self-contained little republics through thousands of years, while dynasty succeeded dynasty and empires rose and fell. Happy it were if the British administrators of India had preserved and fostered and reformed these ancient institutions, and thus continued to rule the people through their organised assemblies. Two causes, however, operated from the commencement of the British rule to weaken the old village communities. An extreme anxiety to enhance the land revenue to its very utmost limits induced the administrators to make direct arrangements with every individual cultivator.¹ An equally unreasonable anxiety to centralise all judicial and executive powers in their own hands led the modern rulers to virtually set aside those village functionaries who had so long exercised these powers within the limits of their own villages. Deprived of their functions, the village communities rapidly fell into decay, and the Indian administration of the present day, better organised in many respects than the administration of the past, suffers from this disadvantage, that it is more autocratic, and rests in a far less degree on the co-operation of the people themselves.

But we must return to our narrative of the administration of Zemindari lands in the Northern Circars. These lands were annually settled with Zemindars until 1778, when Sir Thomas Rumbold made a five years’ settlement, as has been stated in the last chapter. The oppressive practice of annual settlements was resumed in 1783 and continued till 1786, when a three years’ settlement was concluded on an increased revenue demand by the Board of Revenue. In 1789 a settlement for three, and eventually for five, years was concluded and the Zemindars were assessed at two-thirds of their gross collections. The new Circar or State of Guntoor, which had come into the Company’s possession in 1788, was settled in the same way.

Lord Hobart, who was appointed Governor of Madras in 1794, effected a great reform in abolishing the Company’s Chiefs and Councils, and in appointing Collectors in all districts for the administration of the land revenue under the control of the Board of Revenue. The settlement of Zemindari lands continued to be made on the same principles as before. Lord Clive, son of the victor of Plassey, succeeded Lord Hobart, and it was during Lord Clive’s administration that a Permanent Settlement of the land revenues, such as had been made in Bengal in 1793, was extended generally into the Northern Circars between 1802 and 1805. The general standard by which the revenue demand was regulated appears to have been two-thirds of the gross collections from the cultivators.¹

The Haveli lands of the Northern Circars have a somewhat different history. Collectors were first appointed in 1787, and they adopted two different methods for collecting the revenue in Haveli lands. In some places they collected it directly from the cultivators in kind, *i.e. * taking a share of the produce as the Government revenue; and in other places they farmed out the lands for stipulated sums. The general arrangement, however, was that the Collector made settlements with the head inhabitants of villages, and they made a separate arrangement with each individual cultivator.² When the Company’s Chiefs and Councils were abolished in 1794, the Collectors became alone responsible for these settlements, subject to the control of the Board of Revenue; and when the Zemindari lands were permanently settled between 1812 and 1804, the Haveli lands were parcelled out into mootas or blocks of a convenient size, yielding generally from 1000 to 5000 Star Pagodas as the annual revenue, and were sold by public auction as permanent Zemindaris. 1 The Jaigir lands round the town of Madras were also settled permanently at the same time.

Such is the history of land administration from 1765 to 1805 in the oldest portions of the Company’s territory in Madras, embracing the Northern Circars and the tract of land round the city of Madras. But in the meantime, other tracts of country had come into the Company’s possession, and it is necessary now to refer to these new acquisitions.

Lord Cornwallis’s war with Tipu Sultan, concluded by the Peace of Seringapatam in 1792, brought in the districts of Salem and Krishnagiri, comprising the Baramahal. Lord Wellesley’s final war with Tipu Sultan in 1799 brought in Canara, Coimbatore, Balaghat, and some other places. Tanjore was annexed by Lord Wellesley in 1799, and the whole of the country between the Krishna and the Tumbbadra was taken over from the Nizam of the Deccan in 1800. Lord Wellesley made the Nawab of Arcot retire on pension, and the whole of the Karnatic was added to the Company’s dominions. Thus within ten years, between 1792 and 1802, the East India Company acquired the richest and fairest portions of that great territory which now forms the Province of Madras, and a new system of land settlements grew up with the acquisition of this new territory.

When the Baramahal districts were acquired by the East India Company in 1792, Lord Cornwallis entrusted their administration to Captain Read and three other military officers, who were better acquainted with the languages and the habits of the people than the civilians of those times. The principle on which Captain Read formed settlements with individual cultivators was the principle which was subsequently developed and introduced into other parts of the province by his assistant, Thomas Munro, afterwards Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of the province. His name is as intimately connected with the Ryotwari settlement of Madras as the name of Lord Cornwallis is connected with the Zemindari settlement of Bengal.

Thomas Munro had arrived as a young man of nineteen at Madras in 1780, and had taken his share in the wars against Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan. Later in life he won his laurels in the wars with the Mahrattas, and received encomiums from the British Parliament for his courage, ability, and success. But it is not as a successful soldier that Munro is remembered in India. He was one of the few of the Company’s servants who devoted his life to promote the welfare of the people, and his name, therefore, is gratefully remembered by the people of Madras to this day, as the name of Cornwallis is in Bengal, and the name of Elphinstone in Bombay.

Employed under Captain Read on settlement work in the Barmahal districts, his keen eye detected the defects of the Company’s system of administration, and his sympathetic judgment suggested the true remedies.

About the Karnatic he wrote: “A great part of the Nawab’s revenues are remitted through agents in Madras at 3 per cent and 4 per cent per month. The rents in some parts of the Karnatic are regulated by the grain sown, every kind paying a different rate, and in others they are levied in kind, and in all the leases are annual. When the rents are fixed according to the grain, the lands are measured every year. The surveyors in making their reports are guided by the bribes they receive, and a thousand frauds are practised both on the farmers and the Government; and where they are collected in kind, the produce of the land is either thrown upon the cultivator, at a price much above its value, or else a standard is fixed for the market below which no person can sell until the whole of the public grain has been disposed of. Such wretched management, one would think, must soon ruin the country.”

Similarly of the British territory he wrote: “The Revenue Board made some time ago an application for an increase of salary to the Collectors, which Government rejected with great marks of displeasure; but in doing this, they showed little knowledge either of true policy or human nature, for when men are placed in situations where they can never become independent by their avowed emoluments, but where they may also, by robbing the public without any danger of discovery, become so on a sudden, the number of those who would balance which side to take is so small that it ought not to be brought into account. We see every day Collectors who have lived above their salary amassing great fortunes in a very few years. The operation by which this is accomplished is very simple. When rents are paid in money, by giving Government a rent roll below the real one; and when in kind, by diminishing the produce of the land or of the sales. It is vain to say that Collectors, being men of education and character, will not descend to such practices; the fact is against this conclusion.“¹

By 1798 the Ryotwari settlement of the newly acquired Baramahal districts was completed.

“The Baramahal has now been completely surveyed and the rents of it fixed. . . . The great number of farmers in the Baramahal necessarily occasions much detail in the management of the revenue; but there is no difficulty in it — nothing is required but constant attention, and where this is given, it is both better for the country and easier for the Collector to receive the rents directly from 60,000 farmers than by the medium of ten or twelve Zemindars or great landholders. The rent of the division of the country under my charge last year was 165,000 Pagodas, which was collected within the year without a single Rupee outstanding, and without any trouble, from about 20,000 farmers.” ¹

In this letter we see the growing partiality of Thomas Munro for the Ryotwari system in tracts of country where there were no hereditary Zemindars. In places like Bengal and the Northern Circars, where the prevailing system was the possession of lands by great landlords, the Government had continued that system and made settlements with Zemindars. In other places, where the prevailing system was the payment of the revenues by the Ryots or cultivators direct to the State, Munro continued that system and made settlements direct with the Ryots. It was necessary and essential to give some permanency to the Government demand, in both cases, for the improvement of agriculture and the prosperity of the people. This was done by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal; and this was desired and recommended by Thomas Munro for Madras, but has never been done. Herein lies the fatal defect in the land settlements of Southern India.

From Baramahal, Munro was transferred to Canara, where he completed the settlement work with his usual ability and success within one year, and the settlement here was made with landlords.

“I came here,” he wrote in 1800, “because, after having been named as a person qualified to ascertain the actual revenue of the country, I could not decline the task without seeming to desert my duty ; but now that this is done, and that the collections, except where interrupted by invasion, are as regular as in the Baramahal, or even more so, I think my work is performed.“¹

“All my settlements were made with the landlords, or, in cases where there was no landlord, with the immediate occupant…. The produce was perfectly ascertained, because the accounts of it were brought forward by both parties. There was no instance in which the Sirkar’s share [the Government’s share] was more than one-third. In many it was not one-fifth or one-sixth, and in some not one-tenth of the gross produce.“²

When the country between the Krishna and the Tumbhadra was ceded by the Nizam of the Deccan to the East India Company in 1800, Thomas Munro, who had settled Baramahal and Canara, was chosen to settle that country. The Ceded Districts were therefore the third field of Munro’s civil administration. That Munro performed his work in the new field with his usual ability and knowledge of details is beyond question; that the pressing demands of the revenue authorities prevented him from showing that consideration for the people which his own judgment suggested is admitted by him with a candour which almost disarms criticism.

“Were I sure that every succeeding Board of Revenue and Government would support the slow and gradual increase of assessment which has already been recommended, I would undoubtedly adhere to it ; but it is not likely that I shall be permitted. The desire that men at the head of affairs usually have of seeing the country, or at least the public income, flourishing under their auspices, will most probably compel me to proceed too rapidly…. I may get nervous as I grow older, and become afraid of censure. If I leave room for my successor to raise the revenue, it would be said that I allowed the inhabitants to defraud Government. . . . I have no thoughts at present of precipitating matters, though I shall, for the sake of assisting the public want of money, press the ryots more than I ought to do.“¹

When Munro wrote this, he had in his mind the case of his friend G——, who was about to be removed from the service because he had made assessments in the Karnatic which the Board of Revenue had considered too low. It was by such undue pressure on its revenue officers that the Company’s government raised the land revenues of their newly acquired territories to a point which was harsh and oppressive to the cultivators of the soil.

“The report is that the Board thinks that he was precipitate in his settlement of the Karnatic, that it was much too low, and that he trusted too much to his old friend, Lachman Row. G—— says, that he made it low on purpose, with the view of being better able to raise it hereafter. I shall be extremely concerned if he is removed, not only for my regard for him as an old friend, but because I am afraid that his marriage, after his long revenue life, has left him but little before the world. I think it hard, too, that a man should be removed merely for an error of judgment; censure would, I think, have been sufficient. You will observe, too, that his error is on the right side.“²

After an administration of the Ceded Districts for seven years, Thomas Munro at last left India in 1807 for a well-earned rest. The authorities were highly pleased with the gradual increase of revenue which he showed, from £402,637 to £606,909, or an increase of 50 per cent. within seven years!³ It was by such results that the Company judged the work of its officers.

Other districts were in the meantime settled by other officers. Malabar came into the possession of the Company in 1792, and was for a time included in the Bombay Presidency. The Bombay Government made two annual settlements with the Rajas and Nair chiefs of Malabar, followed by a five-years’ settlement. On the failure of the Rajas and the Nair chiefs to make punctual payments, their lands were taken from them, and they rose in rebellion. The Bombay Government having thus failed in their administration, Malabar was transferred to the Madras Presidency in 1800. Lord Clive, then Governor of Madras, appointed a Principal Collector and Subordinate Collectors for the administration of the country. Settlements were made partly with landlords and partly with the tenants themselves, but the system of revenue management generally adopted was the Ryotwari system, which was now finding favour with the authorities. And thus the hereditary Rajas and Nair chiefs who had owned lands in Malabar before the time of the British rule were gradually got rid of, and finally disappeared from the scene. True statesmanship would have continued the old order of things, and reduced the Rajas and Nair chiefs into loyal subjects of the British Government and leaders of the people. But the desire to make settlements immediately with the cultivators, in order to get as much revenue as the land could yield, steadily influenced the policy of the Company’s government more and more as years passed by.

Tanjore was annexed by Lord Wellesley in 1799. The cultivators in this State used to pay their rents to their Raja through head-ryots, called Pattakdars. A Pattakdar’s circle included from one to 128 villages; and many of the Pattakdars were virtually Zemindars. The British Government made a clean sweep of these Pattakdars, introduced the Ryotwari system in 1804, and fixed the revenue with reference to the produce of an average number of years, not on a survey valuation of the lands¹.

The administration of the Karnatic was transferred to the East India Company, firstly by the treaty concluded by Lord Cornwallis with the Nawab in 1792, and finally by the annexation of the Karnatic made by Lord Wellesley in 1801. A great portion of this territory had been for many generations, often for centuries, under the rule of the local military chiefs, known as the Polygars.

The Polygars were “head-men of villages, or public servants of other descriptions, whose actual condition had become changed to that of military rulers during the revolutions of power in the Deccan, which had everywhere contributed to the usurpation of authority, and in no part more than in the southern division of the Peninsula. Though their Sunnuds, where Sunnuds could be produced, did not particularly describe the terms on which they held their Pollums [estates], they all bore internal evidence of their dependence on the Emperor, and of their subjection to the Subadars of the Karnatic, to whom they yielded tribute, and whose camp they were bound to attend, whenever summoned, with a military force proportioned to the extent of their local jurisdictions².”

The condition of the Polygars had formed the subject of much correspondence from the time of Warren Hastings. The Nawab of the Karnatic had frequently sought the help of his British allies to extirpate these local chiefs, in order to extend his own power over the people, but the Court of Directors had marked with concern the employment of British troops in the disagreeable service of helping the Nawab against the Polygars. They had given precise orders that “the native princes, called Polygars, should not be extirpated.” They had considered it “repugnant to humanity to force them [the Polygars] to such dreadful extremities.” They had feared that the Nawab’s government was “none of the mildest,” and that there was “great oppression in collecting his revenues.” And while they were aware that the people of the Karnatic had suffered from many distresses, they had held that the oppression of the Nawab of the Karnatic was “greater than all.”

After the conclusion of Cornwallis’s treaty of 1792 with the Nawab of the Karnatic, the Directors entered into a full discussion of the principles of that treaty in their despatch of the 10th June 1795. This was followed by discussions in India, and in 1797 Lord Hobart, Governor of Madras, recorded a minute suggesting the means of rendering the Polygars useful subjects and obedient tributaries of the British Government. The Directors replied in their despatch of the 5th June 1799, in which they insisted on the absolute suppression of the military power of the Polygars, and on the institution of a pecuniary tribute higher than the Polygars had paid before.

Armed with this despatch, the Madras authorities went beyond all just and reasonable limits. They concluded a settlement in 1799–1800, by which they retained all lands held by the Polygars outside their own villages, and demanded a revenue which exceeded the previous demand by no less than 117 per cent. The Southern Polygars rose in insurrection. The rising was soon put down, and the insurgents were deprived of their estates, and in some cases capitally punished. The revenue was declared to be progressive for several years, and afterwards to remain unalterable to an amount calculated to be equal to two-thirds of the gross collections. Finally, a Permanent Settlement was made in 1803 for the fourteen estates which still remained in the hands of the Southern Polygars, and the revenues fixed were more moderate than the exorbitant demands of 1799–1800, varying from 41 per cent. to 51 per cent. of the gross rental. These estates were principally situated in the Tinivelly district, and similar settlements were made with the Polygars in Sivaganga and Ramnad.¹

Permanent Settlements were also made with the Western Polygars in 1802; but for the Polygars of Chitoor, who came under British rule with the annexation of the Karnatic, a worse fate was reserved. They resisted the British claims and were mostly driven from their fastnesses, and took refuge in the jungles. With a few exceptions, all the estates of the Chitoor Polygars were resumed, and settlements were made with the tenants direct.

Looking back to these transactions after the lapse of a century, one cannot but regret the harsh policy which led to the virtual extirpation of the Polygars in the Karnatic. The Directors of the East India Company were right in depriving them of all military power, for under the modern system of administration that power must necessarily belong to the State alone. But it was not a just or wise policy to deprive them of their estates outside their own villages, to demand from them a sudden and exorbitant increase in revenue, or to punish their insurrection by virtually stamping them out. They had preserved some sort of peace and order in their estates during the harassing and troublesome wars of Southern India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they had protected weavers and manufactures and shielded the cultivators when there was hardly any other constituted authority in the land; they had excavated great canals and reservoirs for irrigation all over Southern India; and they had given shelter to the British themselves when Madras was taken by the French in the early Karnatic wars. If the Polygars were guilty of turbulence and oppression, they shared their faults with almost all chiefs and nobles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Asia and in Europe, and a wise statesmanship would have attempted to reduce them to order instead of trying to “root out the Polygars.” It is not a wise policy for any Government to change the old institutions of a land; it is not a humane policy for an alien Government to suppress a class, and to confiscate its proprietary rights, in order to add to its income by direct settlements with the tillers of the soil.

The policy of Lord Wellesley’s Government in Madras appears in strong and unfavourable contrast with the policy of Lord Cornwallis in Bengal. Lord Cornwallis found the Bengal peasantry living under hereditary Zemindars, and strengthened and perpetuated the Zemindari institution. Lord Wellesley’s government found a large part of the Karnatic under the power of the Polygars, and virtually rooted them out in order to bring the people under its direct control. Lord Cornwallis respected an ancient institution, and has thus preserved in Bengal a large, prosperous, and contented middle class. Lord Wellesley’s policy denuded Madras of a similar class, and the loss has not been repaired after a century of British rule. Madras has no strong, influential, prosperous middle class, forming a natural link between the cultivators and an alien Government.

The policy of Lord Wellesley’s Government in Madras bore a resemblance rather to the policy of the French Revolution, which a few years before had confiscated the rights of the territorial aristocracy of France. Yet what the barons lost in France was a gain to the French nation; what the Polygars lost in Madras was a gain to an alien trading company. The rents which the Polygars had obtained from the people under their jurisdictions had been spent among the people, had flowed back to them through various channels, and had fructified their trades, manufactures, and industries. The land revenues which the Company obtained — after the Polygars had been virtually extirpated—were, after defraying the cost of administration, withdrawn from the country as the profits of foreign traders. “It cannot be concealed or denied,” said one of the ablest of the Directors of the Company, “that the object of this [Ryotwari] system is to obtain for Government the utmost that the land will yield in the shape of rent.” 1

We have in the foregoing pages given a brief but connected account of the land settlement in Madras down to 1807. We have reviewed the revenue arrangements in the Northern Circars, ending in the Permanent Settlement of 1802-1805. We have referred to the settlements of Thomas Munro in Baramahal, Canara, and the Ceded Districts. We have described the operations undertaken in Malabar and in Tanjore; and we have also described the transactions in the Karnatic, ending in Permanent Settlements with some of the remaining Polygars, while the greater portion of the province was settled with the cultivators direct.

The results of all these settlements can be best shown in the form of the appended list:¹

Permanently Settled

Not Permanently Settled.

It will appear from what has been stated before that, as the system of settlements with Zemindars, Polygars, and other headmen began to be looked upon with disfavour in Madras, direct settlements with Ryots or cultivators began to find favour. The story of the final acceptance of this Ryotwari system for the Province will be narrated in the two succeeding chapters.

Footnotes

¹ Second Report of the Committee of Secrecy, 1782, Appendix v.

¹ Fifth Report, 1812, p. 114.

² Ibid., pp. 93 and 98.

1 Fifth Report, 1812, p. 113.

¹ Letter dated 31st January 1795.

¹ Letter dated 13th July 1800.

² Letter dated 7th October 1800.

¹ Letter dated 5th September 1802.

² Letter dated 28th September 1802.

³ Fifth Report, 1812, p. 124.

1 Henry St. John Tucker, Memorials of Indian Government. London, 1853, p. 113.