Ancient Rights and Future Comfort

Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, and British Rule in India

Peter Robb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138963504
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136799327
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the character of British rule in nineteenth-century India, by focusing on the underlying ideas and the practical repercussions of agrarian policy. It argues that the great rent law debate and the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 helped constitute a revolution in the effective aims of government and in the colonial ability to interfere in India, but that they did so alongside a continuing weakness of understanding and in effective local control. In particular, the book considers the importance of notions of historical rights and economic progress to the false categorisations made of agrarian structure. It shows that the Tenancy Act helped to widen social disparities in rural Bihar, and to create political interests on the land.

Chapter One
Property, classes and the state

He [Sir Ashley Eden, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal] would like to see the Bengal ryots, as a class, secured in the enjoyment of those rights which the ancient land law and custom of the country intended them to have, protected against arbitrary eviction, 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.¹

These 'ancient rights' and this 'future comfort' were like talismans of one aspect of British thinking about agrarian policy in India during the nineteenth century. They were the professed goals and the guiding principles not only for the Bengal tenancy law to which Eden was referring, but also across a wide range of other initiatives. They should not be taken at face value, but do suggest clusters of issues or routes of inquiry by means of which it is possible to assess the ideas and impact of the British and to approach the realities of conditions in the Indian countryside. On such a basis (and though much has had to be left out),² this study seeks ultimately to relate agrarian structure to a critique of colonialism, and indirectly of theories of modernisation and development. It has two main characters: rural Bihar as seen in agrarian structure and the relations of production, and the British as revealed in their intellectual assumptions and policies towards India. Change in Bihar is explained by means of an analysis of British perceptions. The intention is not to give a comprehensive account of agrarian conditions. Rather the attempt is to uncover the object through the categories and ideas imposed upon it, the veil both of the past and of the present.

It is also argued that perceptions themselves produced intended and unintended effects. Through the enormous elaboration of Indian law, an apparent effort to close all eventualities and to fix all interpretations, the executive power of British rule was striving (in part) to legitimise and facilitate interventions by the officers of the state, to a degree beyond what was thought possible or desirable in a society such as Britain, with its organised and recognised private interests. Indian resistance to the state existed alongside opportunistic co-operation or expectations of state intervention, and Indian protest was sometimes admitted and even feared—indeed British policies helped define a range of political interests—but Indian opinion was not allowed the same voice as supposedly legitimate interests within Britain. The ideas of officials were thus peculiarly important in the colonial setting.

In this volume, the centrepiece is the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 and its attempt to 'reinstate' the original privileges of agricultural producers in the form of occupancy tenants. The ideas which it embodied, about societies and India in particular, and about the proper goal of British rule, were of wider significance than would be supposed from a consideration of tenancy alone. The Act was particularly important for Bihar, then administratively part of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, because the tenancy reform owed much to certain officials with Bihari experience, and because aspects of the legislation were conceived with particular reference to the needs of Bihar. It will be shown, however, that it fitted them peculiarly badly. In due course, a second volume will consider the promise of British reformers to improve the physical and economic conditions of the people of Bihar, through state action and the virtues of trade; that study will be centred on the production of commercial and other crops but, again, will be informed by an assessment of policies and the ideas which lay behind them. Thus, if the first theme is a specific one about rural Bihar, a second major thread of the discussion traces the nature and development of British rule in India. The period chosen, though not appropriate in all respects, is convenient for one important variable, the state's land policy. The starting-point is the permanent settlement of Bengal land revenues in 1793, and the effective cut-off the provincial economic, banking and agricultural inquiries of the 1920s.

It is hoped that the findings of this study may range wider than the place and period to which they are applied. However, it should be emphasised that the detailed examples are mainly confined to Bihar's old Patna Division of Champaran, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Saran, Shahabad, Patna and Gaya, and to the last few decades before 1900. The concentration upon Bihar needs no excuse, given that Patna Division was more populous than the Bombay presidency, but Bihar also provides valuable illustrations both as the extreme case it was claimed to be at the time, and because it was nonetheless extremely various. The concentration on the latter part of the nineteenth century follows from the attention paid to the debates and implementation of the Tenancy Act of 1885, and is partly justified too by an argument (to be developed below) that the passage of the Act advanced and epitomised aspects of the making of the nation state in India. It marked an important step in a general expansion of state responsibilities. This of course was a long-term process, deriving (as Foucault and others have observed) from political and scientific developments that permitted or required the state to optimise and transform rather than to control and exploit the society which it governed: a continuity in such aims and in the terms of understanding will be stressed in this book.³ Nonetheless, in these matters, as contemporaries recognised, the 1880s in particular were years of radical reform and ambition, despite the many instances of continuity or temporising. Focused under Ripon, as far as government was concerned, and also exemplified by the Famine Commission and the Local Self-Government Act, this period was analogous to other significant forward-looking decades such as the 1790s and 1830s.⁴ Not just landlords' self-interest, officials' ambition and lawyers' arrogance, but a larger struggle about the purpose and role of the state, explain the length and vehemence of the debate over Bengal tenancy.

Why a piece of legislation was passed is a question admitting of many different answers. Many statutes in colonial India, and not least the 1885 Act, were derived from a peculiarly wide range of traditions and pressures, internal and external—because of colonialism and its idea of India as tabula rasa in legal terms, and in contrast with laws evolved largely within 'national' jurisdictions. Policy was affected by political considerations, in both India and Britain, and by legal and other precedents internationally and over time. However in this study the aim is quite restricted: it is not so much to elucidate the politics and policy-decisions as to set out the main ideas popularised by the tenancy debate, and to assess their impact. Those questions are quite complex enough. Surrounding the 1885 Act was rhetoric—properly so called because of the arguments' particular stylised forms—which encapsulated changes occurring over a long period, in the understandings of property, economy and the tasks of government. The legislation matters partly because colonial India was so bound by rules, and increasingly focused on the state. (Again, this was a by-product of colonialism and its experiments in building institutions so as to retain and extend executive authority.) The debate helped create a picture of rural society that continues to have influence. Explaining the intellectual frame of the Tenancy Act provides a way to investigate its consequences.⁵

Intellectually what is possible and what desired for governments are constituted through perceptions, ideologies and moral imperatives. In operation as in the records, colonial policy was affected by priorities as they were then thought to be (not what we may now think they were). Decisions were taken within limits or along lines determined by a series of different but overlapping agenda. These were ideational (in the Platonic sense) as well as pragmatic, existing independently as ideal constructs, though they also shaped perceptions, categorisation, and reality itself. The absolute principles included notions of duty and arguments about 'individuality', 'progress' and 'equity'. (We might compare the case for action against slavery or sati.) Specific concepts related to the laissez-faire state, and to theories of property, rent and exchange. Overarching ideas included rationalist or Benthamite views of law and government, classical economic doctrines, and a historicism which was ultimately Augustinian in its view of the origin of human institutions.

Among the practical calculations were included career development for officials, and the enthusiasms which arose from their expertise or experience. Individual careers were influenced by fashion, as for example among Indian civil servants, when (at a time of worries about famine and social change and property rights) Antony MacDonnell made his mark through his Bihar food supply report or his minute on Bengal tenancy, or Denzil Ibbetson sealed his career by masterly exegesis of revenue, social forms and land transfer.⁶ Obviously important were political goals—the need to protect, accommodate and co-opt Indian institutions, the safeguarding of governments and budgets, and the partisanship of colonial economic and strategic policy. For much of this book, the state is imagined to operate within a web of such goals and strategies, in combinations which changed from person to person, issue to issue, and time to time. The suggestion is (as said) that by studying the main features of British policy, in these terms, and in parallel with an understanding of Bihar conditions, it will be possible to define the nature of colonial errors and impact.

II

The 1885 Act's categorisations and prescriptions represented those of a 'modern' state—definite categories with rights located within them, as species of property; categories and rights defined by function, and justified by use. The state intervened to regulate and encourage these rights, and thus reflected changing ideas about government. Coming together were strands of Western theory and of Indian conditions and statecraft. The British exported many of their attitudes and systems, and incorporated much into standard forms in the empire as they had within Britain. Their views and debates about India undoubtedly often reflected agenda for Britain. In addition suitable priorities for India also influenced institutions and the expectations of the state—arguably in both countries, just as imperial experience helped define British identities and concerns. Some practices of expanding government—bureaucracy, rules, departments, inquiries, precedent, records—were developed in tandem at home and abroad, with mutual influences.⁷ Eric Stokes's pioneering work alerted us to these possibilities.⁸ The crosscurrents were assisted by the fact that, more than the French, the British tempered their universalism, at least after the loss of the American colonies and the acquisition of an 'alien' India, with a partial sense of exclusivity (keeping Britishness and British institutions to themselves) and a corresponding image of India (for example) as needing the invention of special measures, especially in governance. Such inventions and distinctions were never wholly achieved, yet they were required by Indian as well as imperial expectations, priorities and conditions. The two strands of policy-making were internal reasons and imported doctrines. They came together in India to produce a growing acceptance of the duties of government and a consensus on the likely course of social development. Thus conservative debates about historical legitimacy and India's special needs were accompanied by a radical willingness to act, in order to 'put things right'.

At this time, the role of history, which had been a prominent device for legitimating policy since East India Company days, was given an added importance. Obviously, too, the state evolved along the same trajectory as a particular view of history.⁹ There was a general intellectual tendency related to the development of theoretical and organised (as opposed to practical or mimetic) knowledge. This was not a wholly sceptical system: it debated with but also depended upon authorities, of Christian revelation, ancient knowledge, Indian precedents. Indeed, ideas of essential categories and rational causation inevitably privileged supposedly original forms—that is, the past. But other developments compounded this effect, not least the increased salience of texts as a result of modern languages and printing. A text standardised, fixed and recorded; by lasting and duplicating, it was predictive of the future, the very role which theory attributed to the past, through essentialism. Accordingly, in matters of land and tenancy, we find an increased emphasis on the written record and the distinct type, and a priority given to 'original' rights.

More pragmatically, too, though within the same ideas of causation, history mattered more and more because policy was being developed in response to supposed failures and inadequacies, including errors of previous administration. By the later nineteenth century it was thought that losses and disruption (literally breaches of category, and a lack of historical progression) were resulting from what had been assumed to be progress, whether of trade or law. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, this did not subsume everything in a single, Eurocentric line of evolution. Doctrines of specificity (as in race theory) had undermined the earlier search for universal principles, a search which had included Indian examples.¹⁰ As a result whatever was proposed had to be 'appropriate', producing fierce debate about India's past and India's supposedly inherent qualities, as clinching arguments.

At the same time there was a scarcely-concealed eagerness to reforge India, allegedly in the interests of its future. In the late nineteenth century there was a severe crisis of confidence, certainly, but it was unlike those which preceded it (from fear, weakness and ignorance) or those which were to follow (from disillusion and cynicism). In the sphere of agrarian policy, the spirit was still that of James Mill who believed in the socio-economic benefits attainable through law and administration. Among its prophets were Richard Jones and John Stuart Mill, revisionists and critics who nonetheless accepted that remedies could be found through further interventions. To a greater degree than in the past, all sides of the argument—autocrats as well as liberals—endorsed rationality and knowledge, and expressed confidence in improvement. In short, the colonial government of the 1870s and 1880s, in these respects at least, seemed the very model of a modern administration—that is, of the kind of state that has had its heyday between that era and the 1970s. At the end of that period, in the face of international corporatism and environmental threats, and with the collapse of centralised states which had taken bureaucratic command to an extreme, a new transition began, born of doubts about science, reason, meaning, and about state probity, intervention and competence; formerly, it was just those elements which had been held dear, and in which confidence had been reinforced, after a struggle, through the advocacy of the 1885 Tenancy Act.

More specifically the Act was framed by common features of classical political economy. These were first the central role attributed to individualistic property and capital as engines of economic progress, and second the insistence upon social classifications as the means of deciding by whom such capital might best be deployed. If there was to be development, in the form of increased productivity in agriculture, then (it was agreed) within society there had to be concentrations of property, and its gainful employment. This implied social differentiation as well as, or prior to, efficient divisions of labour. In regard to tenancy, the dominant ideas explained how possession or ownership should be attributed to rural classes. Official analyses were based on macrostructures and generalisations, produced from ideology and experience. Differences of opinion arose largely over the class which might best manage the accumulation, which class would best promote social order and the productive use of capital. In India at least it was also apparent that the state would have to intervene in order to help produce whatever conditions were thought to be conducive to progress.

The preferred means of regeneration fluctuated between its being socially-led, for example by landlords or proprietary peasan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Sources and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Property, classes and the state
• 2 Official will and administrative capacity
• 3 A necessary reform
• 4 The great rent law debate
• 5 Custom and the law
• 6 The magic of property
• 7 The politics of land
• 8 Keeping the record
• 9 Colonial rule and agrarian structure
• 10 Rents and rights
• 11 Peasants, property and nation
• Index