Chapter XXI: Wingate and the Ryotwari Settlement in Bombay (1827-1835)

CHAPTER XXI

WINGATE AND THE RYOTWARI SETTLEMENT IN BOMBAY (1827-1835)

We have brought our narration to the year of the departure of Mountstuart Elphinstone from India. The land assessment in every Province of India was felt at that time to be excessive, not only by the people, but also by the Company’s servants and revenue officers. In Madras, the revenue officers had told Dr. Francis Buchanan, as we have seen in Chapter XII, that the heavy Land-Tax impeded agriculture and the prosperity of the people, and Sir Thomas Munro gradually reduced the rate from one-half to one-third the gross produce, which last was still an excessive tax. In Northern India, Sir Edward Colebrooke and successive Governors-General had implored the Court of Directors, in vain, to redeem the pledge given by the British Government, and to permanently settle the Land-Tax, so as to make it possible for the people to accumulate wealth and improve their own condition. And in Bombay, Elphinstone had viewed with concern the rapid growth of revenue in several Districts, and Chaplin’s decision to fix it at one-third the gross produce was calculated to give little relief. Throughout the continent of India, except where the Land-Tax had been permanently fixed, the people groaned under the assessments of the new rulers of the country. The Directors were deaf to representations, and the servants of the Company, who felt the injustice done to the people, expressed their opinions with bated breath, and were powerless to afford relief.

One of the most distinguished Englishmen then in India was Bishop Heber. He made a tour through India in 1824, 1825, and 1826, and during this extensive tour he inquired with great care into the condition of the people in the different provinces through which he travelled. What created the saddest impression on him was the poverty of the people, and the heavy Land Tax which was levied by the East India Company in their dominions. He did not mention this explicitly in his Journal, which was recorded with an eye to publication, but in his private letters he opened his mind and stated his opinions more freely. His letter to the Right Honourable Charles Williams Wynn, dated Karnatic, March 1826, will serve as an example.

“Neither Native nor European agriculturist, I think can thrive at the present rate of taxation. Half the gross produce of the soil is demanded by Government, and this, which is nearly the average rate wherever there is not a Permanent Settlement, is sadly too much to leave an adequate provision for the present, even with the usual frugal habits of the Indians, and the very inartificial and cheap manner in which they cultivate the land. Still more is it an effective bar to anything like improvement; it keeps the people, even in favourable years, in a state of abject penury; and when the crop fails in even a slight degree, it involves a necessity on the part of the Government of enormous outlays in the way of remission and distribution, which, after all, do not prevent men, women, and children dying in the streets in droves, and the roads being strewed with carcasses. In Bengal, where, independent of its exuberant fertility, there is a Permanent Assessment, famine is unknown. In Hindustan [Northern India] on the other hand, I found a general feeling among the King’s officers, and I myself was led from some circumstances to agree with them, that the peasantry in the Company’s Provinces are, on the whole, worse off, poorer, and more dispirited, than the subjects of the Native Princes; and here in Madras, where the soil is, generally speaking, poor, the difference is said to be still more marked. The fact is, no Native Prince demands the rent which we do, and making every allowance for the superior regularity of our system, &c., I met with very few men who will not, in confidence, own their belief that the people are overtaxed, and that the country is in a gradual state of impoverishment. The Collectors do not like to make this avowal officially. Indeed, now and then, a very able Collector succeeds in lowering the rate to the people, while by diligence he increases it to the State. But, in general, all gloomy pictures are avoided by them as reflecting on themselves, and drawing on them censure from the Secretaries at Madras or Calcutta, while these, in their turn, plead the earnestness with which the Directors at home press for more money.

“I am convinced that it is only necessary to draw less money from the peasants, and to spend more of what is drawn within the country, to open some door to Indian industry in Europe, and to admit the natives to some greater share in the magistracy of their own people, to make the Empire as durable as it would be happy.” ¹

It will appear from the above account, that while there were few officials in India who did not know the people to be overtaxed, they were unwilling to make the avowal openly. It is, however, to the honour of the Service that, when questioned on the subject openly in England, some of them stated their opinions in the most emphatic manner. Robert Richards was one of them; and some of his replies given to the Committee of the House of Commons deserve to be quoted.

“Where the revenue is collected, as it is in India, on the principle of the Government being entitled to one half of the gross produce of the soil, and vast numbers of officers, whose acts it is impossible to control, are also employed in the realisation of this revenue, it is a moral impossibility for any people whatever to live or prosper so as to admit of a very extensive commercial intercourse being carried on with them. . . .

“It may be done [i.e. manufacture of articles for foreign exportation] in lands not subject to the aforementioned exorbitant tax. It may also be the case in Bengal, where the Permanent Settlement has been enforced for many years, and where its original ruinous pressure is no longer so severely felt; but it would be quite impossible in lands, for example, subject to the Ryotwari Tax, or from lands where from 45 per cent. to 50 per cent. of the gross produce is actually levied as revenue. . . .

“I am personally acquainted with instances where the revenue assessed upon certain lands has actually exceeded the gross produce. I have also known other lands in India where a revenue has been assessed as being specifically derivable from rice lands, plantations of fruit trees, pepper, vines, and other articles, and each portion particularly described; but on comparing the assessment with the lands in question, those very lands have been found to have been nothing but jungle within the memory of man.“¹

The general feeling of the officers engaged in land assessments in India at last found expression in a great and memorable work. To Lieutenant-Colonel Briggs belongs the credit of expounding for the first time the true nature of the Land-Tax in India, after an exhaustive inquiry into the laws and usages of ancient and modern times. The East India Company had so far regarded India as their estate, and had sought to derive from it the utmost possible land revenue, in disregard of ancient rights and customs. Against this practice John Briggs took his stand. In his great and epoch-making work on the subject¹, he explained to Englishmen of his time, and of all succeeding time, that land in India had never been the property of the State; that the soil was private property in India, as among all other civilised nations; and that the State was only entitled to impose a tax on this form of private property, as on other private properties.

It is not possible, within our limits, to give an analysis of this great work of nearly five hundred pages; but it is necessary to place before the reader a few of the conclusions arrived at, which have their value at the present time as they had seventy years ago. John Briggs pointed out that among ancient nations—the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, and the Chinese—the right of the State consisted in levying a tax of one-tenth of the produce. Among the ancient Hindus the right of the King or the State was to levy of grain one-eighth part, a sixth, or a twelfth, according to the difference of the soil and the labour necessary to cultivate it"². And Briggs showed, after an exhaustive inquiry into the practice of succeeding ages—

“That the occupant of the land alone was its sole proprietor; that the demand on him for contributing to the support of the State was a sort of income-tax, viz., a limited portion of the produce of his estate; and that this portion was fixed in time of peace, but liable to increase in time of war; and that, under all circumstances, it left a certain surplus profit to the owner, equivalent to a rent. Moreover, I hope I have established that the Sovereign never claimed to be the proprietor of the soil, but of the Land-Tax.”

The disregard of this cardinal principle by the East India Company, and their endeavours to sweep away the entire profits from the land, leaving to cultivators barely enough to support their lives, were regarded by John Briggs as the main causes of the poverty of India under British rule.

“The flourishing condition of the country under the Moghal Emperors is recorded by all European travellers who have visited the East within the last three centuries; and the wealth, the population, and the national prosperity of India, far surpassing what they had seen in Europe, filled them with astonishment. That the condition of the people and the country under our Government presents no such spectacle, is every day proclaimed by ourselves, and we may therefore assume it to be true. . .

“If I have proved that we have departed from the practice of our predecessors, that we have established a system far exceeding theirs in rigour, even in the worst of their regular governments, then indeed there is some reason to call for a reform, and to hope at least for investigation. . .

“I conscientiously believe that under no Government whatever, Hindu or Mahomedan, professing to be actuated by law, was any system so subversive of the prosperity of the people at large as that which has marked our administration. . .

“Although we have everywhere confessed that the heavy pressure of taxation was the most cruel injury they sustained, we have in no instance alleviated that pressure. So far from it, we have applied a false measure for fixing the impost, that of money instead of produce; we have pretended to abolish minor taxes on other classes, but have laid the amount on the landholder; and by minute scrutiny into every individual’s concerns, have, under the plea of justice to ourselves, in many instances deprived the cultivators of the means they enjoyed of paying the heavy taxes from which they sought relief under us, till by rigid exactions we have increased our own revenue and reduced the people to the condition of mere labourers. This is the professed maxim of our rule, the certain and inevitable result of taking the whole surplus profit of land. . . .

“Having assumed that the Government is the sole landlord, it [the present Government] considers the land to be the most profitable source of all revenue; it employs a host of public servants to superintend the cultivator; and it professes to take all the profit. A Land-Tax like that which now exists in India, professing to absorb the whole of the landlord’s rent, was never known under any Government in Europe or Asia.“¹

A great and thoughtful work like this would have created a revolution in any other country in the world. In India it did not produce the slightest change in the procedure of the Bombay revenue officials. The Survey Settlements, recommended by Elphinstone, had already been commenced by Pringle of the Bombay Civil Service in 1824-28; and the Settlements were conducted on untrue and exaggerated estimates of the produce of the soil, and therefore led to disastrous results.

“His [Pringle’s] assessment was based on a measurement of fields, and an estimate of the yield of various soils, as well as of the cost of cultivation; the principle adopted being to fix the Government demand at 55 per cent. of the net produce. . . . The preliminary work of measurement was grossly faulty, and the estimates of produce which formed such an important element in the determination of the assessment, and which had been prepared in the most elaborate manner, were so erroneous as to be worse than useless. But meanwhile the Settlement had been introduced, and with the result of aggravating the evils it had been designed to remove. From the outset it was found impossible to collect anything approaching to the full revenue. In some districts not one half could be realised. Things now went rapidly from bad to worse. Every year brought its addition to the accumulated arrears of revenue, and the necessity for remission or modification of rates. . . . Every effort, lawful and unlawful, was made to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who were subjected to torture, in some instances, cruel and revolting beyond all description, if they would not or could not yield what was demanded. Numbers abandoned their homes, and fled into the neighbouring Native States. Large tracts of land were thrown out of cultivation, and in some Districts no more than a third of the cultivable area remained in occupation.” 1

The system was eventually abandoned. A re- survey was commenced in 1835 by Goldsmid of the Bombay Civil Service and Lieutenant Wingate, afterwards Sir George Wingate.

" Abandoning all attempts to arrive at a theoretical ideal of assessment by endeavouring to discover the yield of soils and assigning a certain proportion of them as the Government demand, the Survey officers adopted the simple expedient of ascertaining the average character and depth of soil in each field, and classing it accordingly; no more than nine gradations of valuation being employed for the purpose. In fixing the rates of assessment they were guided by purely practical considerations as to the capability of the land and the general circumstances of the District."[1]

In spite of the official approval of this latter system, the reader will perceive that the new method was wrong in principle. The principle of fixing the assessment on the basis of the average produce of the fields was the ancient and correct principle; though Pringle failed because he worked it badly. The new method of fixing the assessment by “ascertaining the average character and depth of soil” was absurd on the face of it; though Wingate succeeded because he worked it with that moderation and leniency which was a part of his nature. A geological examination of the soil is not a safe basis for an estimate of its produce; and the continuous increase in the land revenue in later settlements, made on this unreliable basis, has led to impoverishment and widespread distress in the Province.

The Survey, which commenced in 1835, is the commencement of the present land revenue system of Bombay; and the first Regular Settlement in that Province was commenced in the following year, on the eve of the accession of Queen Victoria. It is necessary to examine this Settlement somewhat minutely, because it is virtually the system which is followed in Bombay down to the present time.

The Settlement operations were carried on for many years, and were gradually extended to the whole of the Province. As experience widened, it was thought necessary to gather up the results and to formulate rules for future guidance. This was done in 1847 by what is known as the ## JOINT REPORT, signed by H. E. Goldsmid, Captain Wingate, and Captain Davidson.[2]

The principles of the Settlement, as explained in the Joint Report, were, Firstly, that it was based on the assessment of each field separately, and not of holdings or villages collectively; Secondly, that it granted long leases for thirty years instead of the short leases which had preceded; and Thirdly, that it abandoned the basis of produce estimates, and substituted the estimated value of lands as the basis of assessment. A few extracts from the Joint Report will make this clear.

“The cultivator’s title to the occupation of the fields is indestructible while he continues to discharge the assessment laid upon them, though his engagement for each be annually renewed; and by placing the assessment upon each field, instead of on his whole holding, he is enabled, when circumstances make the course desirable, to relinquish any of the former or take up others which may be unoccupied, so as to accommodate the extent of his liabilities to his means to meet them. The fixed field assessment for the term of thirty years, introduced by our surveys, thus secures to the cultivator the full advantages of a thirty years’ lease without burdening him with any condition beyond that of discharging the assessment for the single year to which his engagement extends.”

“We have retained the practice of referring every variety of soil to one of nine classes which experience has proved to afford a sufficiently minute classification for all practical purposes. But in preference to trusting entirely to the judgment of the Classer for determining to what class any particular soil should be referred, we have formed a set of rules for the purpose of determining the soils which should fall into any class. The fertility of a soil in this country, or at least in all parts of it to which our operations have yet extended, being chiefly dependent on its power of imbibing and retaining moisture, and as this quality is mainly affected by depth, we have chosen the latter peculiarity as the principal regulating influence in the formation of our estimates.”

" If all soils of the same depth were of uniform fertility the depth alone would suffice to determine their class, but this is not the case… We deem it sufficient for the purpose of valuation to range them [the soils of different degrees of fertility] under three orders, which again are distributed among the nine classes of our scale on a consideration of their depth, as will be readily understood from the following table:

Table

" The first column of this table contains the nine classes of our scale; the second, the relative values of these, estimating the highest at sixteen annas or one rupee, which is the mode of valuation most familiar to natives.”

“Detailed figured statements should be furnished exhibiting the source and amount of every item of revenue hitherto derived from land of every description.”

“The information thus collected and exhibited with that obtained by local inquiries into the past history of the District will generally enable us to trace the causes which have affected its past condition; and a knowledge of these, aided by a comparison of the capabilities of the District with those of others in its neighbourhood, will lead to a satisfactory conclusion regarding the assessment to be imposed.”

“But instead of a particular sum at which a District should be assessed, it amounts to the same thing, and is more convenient to determine the rates to be imposed on the several descriptions of soil and culture contained within its limits, so as to produce the amount in question. And to do this it is only requisite to fix the maximum rates for the different descriptions of cultivation, when of course all the inferior rates will be at once deducible from the relative values of our classification scales.”¹

The above extracts give us the substance of the famous Joint Report, the basis of the Bombay Land Revenue system. It recognised the transferable and heritable right of the cultivator to his field, but it finally swept away the equally ancient right to a fixed Land-Tax which the Mirasi cultivator had enjoyed under the Mahratta rule. It made an elaborate scale for the distribution of the District revenue demand among a million of fields contained in the District, but it prescribed no limit to that demand. It substituted for the equitable basis of the field produce an impracticable geological basis for the purposes of assessment. And it let loose swarms of Classers, on a pay of ten or twelve shillings a month, to determine the depth and nature of the soil in each field in order to fix its relative value! The total District demand was to be distributed among the fields according to their relative values thus determined, but the District demand itself was to be vaguely determined from “the past history of the District” and the past condition of the people. Thus on the one point on which the people looked up to the Government for some assurance after thirty years of British rule in the Province, they received none; the East India Company and their servants would prescribe no limits to their own demand; they retained the power to shape the demand, to vary it, to increase it, at each recurring settlement, according to the condition of the people. No system could be devised by human ingenuity better calculated to keep an agricultural nation permanently poor and resourceless than the system which left to the revenue officials the absolute and unrestricted power to increase the revenue demand at each recurring settlement. The cultivator had no voice in the settlement of the Land-Tax; he was not consulted in fixing that tax; he was called upon, after the demand was settled, to pay it or to quit his ancestral land and starve.

That we are not exaggerating the evils of the new system will appear from the testimony of those who took a part in the making of the Settlement. The Company’s charter came up for renewal in 1853, and, as usual, there was a Parliamentary inquiry into all branches of the Company’s Indian administration before the charter was renewed. Select Committees of the Houses of Lords and Commons recorded evidence in 1852 and framed their Reports. They recorded further evidence in 1853, and the Lords submitted three Reports and the Commons six. From this voluminous mass of evidence we will select that of a young officer, Goldfinch, who had himself done Settlement work in Bombay, and described it on the 20th June 1853.

“ 6714. After the survey was finished, when you found a field, say No. 11, of five Bighas [about two acres] of land, in the possession of some particular person, did the Collector assess the revenue upon it arbitrarily, or did he ask the occupant or proprietor whether he was willing to pay the amount?

“ The assessment was fixed by the Superintendent of Survey, without any reference to the cultivator; and when those new rates were introduced, the holder of each field was summoned to the Collector and informed of the rate at which his land would be assessed in future; and if he chose to retain it on those terms, he did ; if he did not choose, he threw it up.”

“ 6720. Does the assessment bear the same proportion to the nett produce of all the villages in that District, or does it vary?

“ I cannot answer that question; I can only give a guess as to what proportion the assessment bears to the nett produce of the land.”

“ 6722. Is there one officer superintending the survey for the whole District?

“ Yes.

“ 6723. Therefore the principle of assessment is uniform throughout the Presidency?

“ Certainly.

“ 6724. What service does the Superintendent of Survey belong to?

“ He belongs to the Engineers — Captain Wingate.”¹

To Goldfinch it appeared that to fix the Land-Tax “ without any reference to the cultivator,” and then to ask him to accept the assessment or to throw up his land, was a fair and equitable procedure. It did not strike him that the land belonged to the cultivator, and had been held by his ancestors at a fixed Land-Tax; and that the option of throwing up the land meant a confiscation of his hereditary property. A fuller account of the results of this settlement will be given in another work, — India in the Victorian Age.

It is fair to Captain Wingate to state that he worked this bad system with moderation and leniency. And it is fair to the East India Company to state that they saw the iniquity of the system, and endeavoured to prescribe some general limits to the assessment. Three years after the renewal of the charter they recorded their famous Despatch of the 17th December 1856, in which they laid down that the “right of the Government is not a rent which consists of all the surplus produce after paying the cost of cultivation and the profits of agricultural stocks, but a land revenue only.” And after the abolition of the East India Company, Sir Charles Wood (afterwards Lord Halifax), then Secretary of State for India, recorded in his equally famous Despatch of 1864 that he desired only to take a share, and only a half share of the rent as Land-Tax.

But these were pious wishes which could not be carried into effect when, under the Bombay system, the produce of the field and its economic rent were never ascertained, and the Land-Tax in each District was fixed by an examination into what the people had paid in the past, and what they could pay in the future. Under such a system, where the cultivators were not consulted, and could appeal to no Land Courts, the revenue demand was increased at each recurring Settlement, and the peasantry remained resourceless and poor.

Lord Canning, who was Viceroy of India from 1858 to 1862, proposed to permanently settle the land revenue of Bombay as of other Provinces of India; but the proposal was rejected by the India Office in London in 1883. The Marquis of Ripon, who was Viceroy of India from 1880 to 1884, proposed that the increase of land revenue should be limited to the reasonable ground of an increase in prices; but that proposal too was rejected by the India Office in 1885.

All equitable and intelligible limits to the Land Tax, proposed from time to time, have thus been ignored or rejected; and the present system is as well calculated to keep the Bombay cultivator permanently resourceless as any system that the wit of man could devise. The cultivator has accordingly sunk more and more under the thraldom of the moneylender; and the nineteenth century closed in Bombay with the worst and most widespread famine that has ever afflicted India.

Footnotes

¹ The Present Land-Tax in India, by John Briggs, London, 1830.

² Quoted from Manu’s Institutes, in p. 31 of Briggs’ work.

¹ The Present Land Tax in India, by John Briggs, pp. 393, 410, 414, 416.

1 Bombay Administration Report of 1872-73, p. 41.

¹ Fourth Report from the Commons’ Select Committee, 1853, p. 141.