Rigidity and the Affliction of Capitalist Property: Colonial Land Revenue and the Recasting of Nature

Studies in History

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 237-272

  D'souza, Rohan ^a  

^a JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY   (India)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61649094311     PISSN: 02576430     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/025764300402000204     Document Type: Article

References (152)

1. Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, New Delhi, 1982.
2. Utsa Patnaik, ‘The Process of Commercialisation under Colonial Conditions’, in idem, The Long Transition: Essays on Political Economy, New Delhi, 1999, pp. 252–97.
3. Amiya Bagchi, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 83–84.
4. Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria, Berkeley, 1983, pp. xxv–22.
5. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston, 1957, pp. 130–31.
6. See the chapter titled ‘Market and Nature’, in The Great Transformation, 1957 pp. 178–91.
7. K.M. Patra, Orissa under the The East India Company, New Delhi, 1971, p. 1.
8. For an elaboration of the differences in social and political organization between the Garjat and the Mughalbandhi refer to B. Pati, Resisting Domination: Peasants, Tribals and the National Movement in Orissa 1920–50, New Delhi, 1993, pp. 1–59.
9. B.C. Ray, Orissa Under The Marathas (1751–1803), Delhi, 1960, p. 132.
10. A. Stirling, ‘Minute on Tenures in Orissa, 10 October 1821’, in G. Toynbee, A Sketch of the History of Orissa from 1803–1828, Cuttack, 1873, p. ix (Appendix).
11. During the Maratha regime, the title of zamindar was given only to the holders of one or more parganas and to the rajas of killas (forts). In the later sanads, however, the terms zamindar and ta'allqdar were used synonymously. Refer to Patra, Orissa, p. 2.
12. S.L. Maddox, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement of the Province of Orissa (Temporarily Settled Areas), 1890 to 1900, Cuttack, Vols I & II, undated; see Vol. I, p. 159.
13. For an account of the revenue administration during the Mughal period see M.A. Haque, Muslim Administration in Orissa (1568–1751 A.D.), Calcutta, 1980, pp. 226–42.
14. Andrew Stirling, An Account, Geographical, Statistical and Historical of Orissa Proper or Cuttack, place of publication not mentioned, 1822, p. 137.
15. Toynbee, History of Orissa, pp. 28–36.
16. According to Satish Chandra, the weakening of the Mughal imperial authority and the crisis of the jagirdari system in the eighteenth century led to the abandonment of the old Mughal system of checks and balances in which the faujdar held the administrative power and the jagirdar merely collected the revenue. The collapse of this arrangement gave a powerful fillip to a process of ‘re-feudalization’, wherein revenue collection rights, which included administrative powers, were regularly auctioned to revenue contractors. See Satish Chandra, The 18th Century in India: Its Economy and the Role of the Marathas, the Jats, the Sikhs and the Afghans, Calcutta, 1982, p. 22. The revenue collector, on the other hand, had no administrative powers.
17. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, p. 161.
18. L.S.S. O'Malley, District Gazetteer of Puri, Cuttack, 1908, p. 44.
19. W.W. Hunter, ‘Orissa Under Foreign Government, Mughal and Maratha (1568–1803)’, in N.K. Sahu, ed., A History of Orissa, Vol. I, Calcutta, 1956, p. 176.
20. He does not specify, however, the areas or estates from which this amount was drawn, nor does he clarify the exchange rate for the rupee vis-à-vis the kauri, the currency in which the collections were made. W. Ewer, Commissioner, to B. Bayley, acting Chief Secretary to Government, 13 May 1818, Selections from the Correspondence on the Settlement of the Khoordah Estate in the District of Pooree, Vol. I, Calcutta, 1879, p. 20 (Henceforth Ewer's Report).
21. Sushil Chandra De, Guide to Orissa Records, Bhubaneswar, 1961, p. xvi.
22. During the Mughal and Maratha periods the chief currency in Orissa was the kauri or cowry, which was a seashell imported from the Maldives. See B.C. Ray, Foundations of British Orissa, Cuttack, 1960, pp. 187–203.
23. Also see Sushil Chandra De, ‘The Cowry Currency in India’, The Orissa Historical Research Journal, Vol. I, April 1952.
24. For an enumeration of the various types of rupees in use, consult Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, Delhi, 1986 (reprint), pp. 774–76.
25. Also see Shubra Chakrabarti, ‘Intransigent Shroffs and the English East India Company Reforms in Bengal (1757–1800)’, Indian Economic and Social History Review (henceforth IESHR), 34, 1, 1997, pp. 72–78.
26. C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870, Delhi, 1992 (Indian edn), p. 77.
27. Ewer's Report, p. 21.
28. Major Fletcher, an army officer from Madras, was deputed to Khurda to draw up an assessment for the estate for a period of two years (1803–05). P.K. Pattnaik, A Forgotten Chapter of Orissa History: With Special Reference to the Rajas of Khurda and Puri (1568–1828), Calcutta, 1979, pp. 143–45.
29. E. Watson, 4th Judge, Calcutta Court of Circuit, to W.B. Bayley, Secretary to Government in the Judicial Department, 3 May 1817, in De, Guide to Orissa Records, p. 7. The owner of the Mahanadi ferry was granted a jagir of 240 beeghas of land and the grant for the Kathjuri ferry was 200 beeghas.
30. J. Beames, ‘The History of Orissa under the Mohammedan, Maratha, and English Rule’, 1875, in Sahu, ed., A History of Orissa, Vol. II, p. 310.
31. Manmath Pandey, ‘Maratha Rule’, in J.K. Samal, ed., Comprehensive History and Culture of Orissa (1568 A.D.–1994 A.D.), Vol. II, Part I, New Delhi, 1992, p. 28, 27.
32. Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth Century Maratha Svarajya, Cambridge, 1986;
33. Stewart Gordon, Marathas, Marauders and State Formation in Eighteenth Century India, New Delhi, 1994;
34. Frank Perlin, ‘State Formation Reconsidered’, Modern Asian Studies (henceforth MAS), 19, 3, 1985, pp. 415–80.
35. For a view challenging the predatory thesis in Orissa, see R.D. Banerji, History of Orissa, Calcutta, 1931, pp. 90–115.
36. John Beames, ‘Notes on Akbar's Subahs with reference to the Ain-i-Akbari’, in B.P. Ambashthya, ed., Beames' Contributions to the Political Geography of the Subahs of Awadh, Bihar, Bengal and Orissa in the Age of Akbar, Patna, 1976, p. 95.
37. For a detailed account of the Mughal-Maratha conflict in the Orissa delta see Banerji, History of Orissa, pp. 90–115.
38. A peshkashi zamindari was not subject to a detailed assessment of land actually under cultivation while a mal-wajib zamindar was expected to pay revenue on the basis of actual measurement of land under cultivation. See N.A. Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration Under the Mughals, New Delhi (reprint), 1989, pp. 22–24.
39. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, pp. 159–60.
40. According to Beames the word killah though referring to a fort was in actual fact a much ‘humbler affair’. It was for the most part merely the house of a zamindar surrounded by an earthen rampart or breastwork and occasionally a rude moat. These skeletal defences were then ‘girdled by a thick belt of bamboo and rattan jungle’, which was intended to prevent incursions from the Mughal cavalry. See John Beames, ‘Notes on Akbar's Subahs’, p. 96.
41. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire, The New Cambridge History of India, Cambridge, 1993, p. 284.
42. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, pp. 159–60.
43. According to the Ain-i-Akbari, Orissa in its greatest dimensions when attached to the subah of Bengal in 1592, included five sarkars. The sarkars of Kalinga and Rajamundry were later amalgamated with the subah of Hyderabad. The Marathas, in fact, were only in control of the remaining three sarkars, i.e., Jellasore, Bhadrak and Cuttack. See John Beames, ‘Notes on Akbar's Subahs’, pp. 94–106.
44. The qanungo essentially maintained records relating to the interests in the land. The chaudhuri attested revenue papers and was also associated with the tasks of collecting the revenue. In Bengal the title ta'allqdar generally referred to a small zamindar or holder of a zamindari which was recently purchased and was not of long standing. See Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration, pp. 25–28, 87–91.
45. In the eighteenth century the appellation ta'allqdar could refer to either a revenue-farmer or a small zamindar. On the whole, a ta'allqdar was smaller than the zamindar and referred to a person who had contracted to pay revenue not only of his own zamindari but for the zamindaris of other persons as well. In effect, the ta'allqdar contracted for only a part of the revenue while the zamindar was responsible for his entire holding. See Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707), Aligarh, 1963, pp. 172–73.
46. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. II, p. 456.
47. D.H. Kingsford, ‘Report on the Settlement Operations in the District of Balasore’, in Maddox, Final Report, Vol. II, p. 456.
48. The early Hindu rulers grouped the revenue villages into khands or bisis which were then apparently transformed into the Mughal pargana. The divisional accountants—khandpatis or bhoimuls—became the chaudhuris and qanungos, while the village pradhan was retitled the muqaddam. See Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, pp. 158–59.
49. John F. Richards, Mughal Administration in Golconda, Oxford, 1975, pp. 135–73.
50. I. Habib, ‘Agrarian Relations and Land Revenue’, in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, Delhi, 1982, p. 239.
51. See also Haque, Muslim Administration, pp. 230–39.
52. M.A. Haque, ‘Muslim Rule in Orissa’, in M.N. Das, ed., Sidelights of History and Culture of Orissa, Cuttack, 1972, p. 141.
53. Habib, Agrarian System, p. 249.
54. Also see Asiya Siddiqi, Agrarian Change in a Northern Indian State: Uttar Pradesh 1819–1833, Oxford, 1973, pp. 54–65. Siddiqi confirms Habib's observation that the volume of produce rents was automatically lower in bad seasons.
55. N.A. Siddiqi has argued that for crop-sharing, one-half was a maximum demand, rarely implemented, while most rates were pitched at one-ninth, one-fourth and one-third. This pattern of crop-sharing made a wide accommodation for variations in soil types, nature of crops grown, amount of labour and capital involved, etc. In effect, local contexts and circumstances went into the determination of the share. See Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration, pp. 47–48.
56. Ratnalekha Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society 1760–1860, Delhi, 1979;
57. Rajat Ray and Ratna Ray, ‘Zamindars and Jotedars: A Study of Rural Politics in Bengal’, MAS, Vol. 9, 2, 1975.
58. B.B. Chaudhuri has underlined the importance of these zamindars in the agrarian economy of Bengal by identifying a number of their vital functions such as the maintenance of embankments, irrigation works and even the distribution of water. See B.B. Chaudhuri, ‘Power Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Eastern India, 1757–1947’, in Meghnad Desai, Susanne Hoeber et al., eds, Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity in Asia, New Delhi, 1984, p. 107.
59. Rajat Datta, similarly, has noted some of these indispensable links in rural Bengal, wherein zamindars were the sources for agricultural credit and flood works (pulbandi). See Rajat Datta, ‘Agricultural Production, Social Participation and Domination in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal: Towards an Alternative Explanation’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 17, 1 October 1989, p. 87.
60. Ranajit Sen, Economics of Revenue Maximisation in Bengal 1757–1793, Calcutta, 1988, p. 25.
61. Satish Chandra, ‘Some Institutional Factors in Providing Capital Inputs and Expansion of Cultivation in Medieval India’, Indian Historical Review, 3, 1 July 1976, pp. 89–92.
62. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, pp. 74–109, 86.
63. Stirling, An Account, pp. 74–75.
64. Saiyid Nurul Hasan, Thoughts on Agrarian Relations in Mughal India, New Delhi, 1973, pp. 29–32. Hasan listed the following intermediaries: muqaddam, chaudhuri, ta'allqdar and qanungo. All of these officials were present in the Orissa Mughalbandi.
65. Stirling, An Account, pp. 74–75.
66. B.C. Ray, Orissa Under the Mughals, Calcutta, 1981, pp. 117–20.
67. Ray, Orissa Under the Marathas, p. 132.
68. Toynbee, History of Orissa, p. 25.
69. W.H. Moreland has argued that revenue farming during the Mughal period was concentrated on the financial rather than the ameliorative side of administration. Consequently, revenue farming was a purely extractive arrangement independent of any reciprocal obligations for ensuring conditions of productivity through investments etc. See W.H. Moreland, The Agrarian System of Moslem India, Delhi, 1994 (second reprint), pp. 10–11;
70. and W.H. Moreland, From Akbar to Aurangzeb: A study in Indian Economic History, Delhi, 1990 (reprint), pp. 236–45.
71. Stewart Gordon, ‘The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire 1720–60’, in idem, Marathas, pp. 38–45.
72. Wink, Land and Sovereignty, p. 362.
73. Also see Wink, ‘Maratha Revenue Farming’, MAS, 17, 4, 1983, pp. 591–612.
74. Some historians of Mughal India, however, view the practice of ijara or revenue farming as having been detrimental to agrarian production. N.A. Siddiqi argues that the rise of the ijaradars in the eighteenth century adversely affected both agriculture and the land revenue administration of the Mughals. See Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration, pp. 97–99.
75. See also Habib, Agrarian System, pp. 234–36. Habib, however, notes that despite the ‘official disapproval’ of ijara, individual villages that had fallen into ruin were sometimes farmed with the express condition that the revenue farmer would restore them to prosperity.
76. Andre Wink has argued that the Mughal and Maratha form of sovereignty relied on a ‘balancing system of continually shifting alliances and rivalries’. See Wink, Land and Sovereignty, p. 34.
77. For an insight into the tensions between the intermediary zamindar and the primary zamindar, and their shifting loyalties between the Mughals and Marathas, see Muzaffar Alam, ‘The Zamindars and Mughal Power in the Deccan 1685–1712’, IESHR, 11, 1, 1974, pp. 74–91.
78. H. Ricketts, Collector of Balasore, to G. Stockwell, Commissioner of Revenue, Cuttack, 20 October 1831, in Toynbee, History of Orissa, Appendix, p. li.
79. Pandey, Maratha Rule, p. 21.
80. D.H. Kingsford wrongly gives 1773 as the year for the changes introduced by Raja Ram Pandit. See Kingsford, ‘District of Balasore’, p. 429.
81. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, p. 161.
82. Toynbee, History of Orissa, p. 25.
83. Ricketts to Stockwell, 20 October 1831, Appendix, p. xlvii.
84. Ray, Foundations, p. 44.
85. Beames, ‘The History of Orissa’, p. 317, 91.
86. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. II, p. 591.
87. Ewer's Report, p. 21.
88. Legibility is described by James Scott as aspects of statecraft directed at rendering societies accessible and malleable to state functions such as taxation, conscription and the prevention of rebellion. See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, 1998, pp. 1–47.
89. Pandey, Maratha Rule, p. 25.
90. Usha Ray, ‘Maratha Revenue Administration in Orissa’, in Bengal Past and Present, Vol. lxxlv, 138–39, 1955, p. 63.
91. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, pp. 162–64.
92. H. McPherson, ‘Report on Settlement Operations in the District of Puri’, in Maddox, Final Report, Vol. II, pp. 591–92.
93. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, p. 163.
94. ‘… change from social relationships based on “interests” to those based on exclusive claims of ownership has been one of the greatest consequences of the period of British rule.’ Ainslie T. Embree, Imagining India: Essays on Indian History, New Delhi, 1987, p. 7.
95. Irfan Habib, ‘Studying a Colonial Economy without Perceiving Colonialism’, Modern Asian Studies, 19, 3, 1985, p. 309.
96. Patra, Orissa, p. 7.
97. Kingsford, ‘District of Balasore’, p. 430.
98. For a discussion on the kist timing and the collection schedules, refer to Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, pp. 240–42.
99. Sakti Padhi, ‘Land Relations and Agrarian Development: A Comparative Historical Study of Two Districts in Orissa’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, 1986, p. 73.
100. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, p. 164.
101. W. Trower, Collector, to A. Stirling, Secretary to the Commissioner, Cuttack, CDR, Revenue, Vol. 16, December 1817 to 30 September 1818, pp. 2–6. Several cases are listed in this volume with detailed description of sales.
102. Toynbee, History of Orissa, pp. 26–27.
103. Stirling, ‘Minute’, Appendix, p. vii.
104. While Abul Fazl viewed taqqavi as loans for extending cultivation, Todar Mal argued that it was to be given to cultivators only during ‘distressed circumstances’. The taqqavi loans were interest-free and usually made available through the chaudhuris and muqaddams. See Habib, Agrarian System, pp. 253–55.
105. Ain-i-Akbari, Col. H.S. Jarrett, trans., Vol. LI, pp. 43–44
106. quoted in Surendranath Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, Calcutta, 1925, p. 595.
107. In a farman to Rasikdas, the Mughal officials were impressed upon to strive for ‘progressively populating the desolate villages’, to get the cultivable land cultivated and even repair old wells and dig new ones. See Shireen Moosvi, ‘Aurangzeb's Farman to Rasikdas: On Problems of Revenue Administration, 1665’, in Irfan Habib, ed., Medieval India: Researches in the History of India 1200–1750, Delhi, 1992, pp. 197–206.
108. Habib, Agrarian System, pp. 136–89
109. and ‘The Social Distribution of Landed Property in Pre-British India: A Historical Survey’, in Irfan Habib, ed., Essays in Indian History, New Delhi, 1995.
110. For an approximation on the zamindar's share of the surplus see Shireen Moosvi, ‘The Zamindar's Share in the Peasant Surplus in the Mughal Empire—Evidence of the Ain-i-Akbari Statistics’, IESHR, 15, 3, 1978.
111. Eric Stokes, ‘Agrarian Society and the Pax Britannica in Northern India in the Early Nineteenth Century’, MAS, 9, 4, 1975, p. 508.
112. Benedicte Hjejle, ‘Indian Reality and British Conceptions: The Agrarian Scene in South Vizagapatnam in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in Peter Robb, ed., Meanings of Agriculture, New Delhi, 1996, p.159, 161, 132–33.
113. C.M. Agrawal, Natural Calamities and the Great Mughals, New Delhi, 1987.
114. See also Habib, Agrarian System, pp. 249–56: ‘… under all methods of revenue assessment [of the Mughal administration] there was some provision for relief in the case of bad harvests’.
115. For the Marathas, see Stewart Gordon, ‘Recovery from Adversity in Eighteenth Century India: Re-thinking “village”, “peasants” and Politics in Pre-Modern Kingdoms’ in idem, Marathas, p. 102.
116. In the district of Nanchilnadu (Tamil Nadu), the remission given by local lords, apart from enabling the peasantry to overcome bad harvests, was also directed at reproducing the political power structure of ‘personal dominance and deference’ between tenants and landlords. See M.S.S. Pandian, The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: Nanchilnadu, 1880–1939, New Delhi, 1990, pp. 64–68.
117. See the description of the Mughal provincial administration in Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration.
118. For the Marathas see Sen, Administrative System.
119. Sakti Padhi describes the village headman as a ‘Janus-like entity’ who was simultaneously the representative of the state and the embodiment of the collective interests of the village. See Sen, ‘Property in Land, Land Market and Tenancy Relations in the Colonial Period: A Review of Theoretical Categories and Study of a Zamindari District’, in K.N. Raj, Sumit Guha and Sakti Padhi, eds, Essays on the Commercialisation of Agriculture, Delhi, 1985, pp. 10–11.
120. Letter of the Collector of Cuttack to the Board of Revenue on 17 November 1808, Acc. No. 10, Revenue Records. Quoted in K.C. Jena, Socio-Economic Condition of Orissa, Delhi, 1978, p. 12.
121. By 1837, these middle tenure holders or sub-proprietary tenure holders were collecting barely one-fourth of the annual revenue in the erstwhile Mughalbandi. See Pradipto Chaudhuri, ‘Peasants and British Rule in Orissa’, Social Scientist, 19, 8–9 Aug–Sep 1991, p. 30.
122. Stirling, ‘Minute’, Appendix, p. xlv.
123. Sumit Guha's study of the Deccan is illuminating in this regard. He notes that the colonial regime by turning land into a ‘divisible saleable and qualitatively differentiated factor of production’, effectively ended up separating land from office and property from privilege. Consequently, instead of strengthening the previous elites with new privileges, the colonial regime ‘penetrated and disjointed’ a variety of local institutions, wherein, the ‘patil's office ceased to be that of a village manager and became merely the lowest rung of the administrative ladder and hereditary officials ceased to be magnates and gradually were reduced to landlords only.’ Sumit Guha, ‘Society and Economy in the Deccan, 1818–1850’, in Burton Stein, ed., The Making of Agrarian Policy in India, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 187–214.
124. David Ludden noted that, whereas the pre-British zamindars had been founts of patronage and authority for the provision of public goods, the new landlords instituted by the decree of 1793 became the ‘focal point for the local accumulation of capital in cash and kind’. David Ludden, ‘Productive power in Agriculture: A Survey of Work on the Local History of British India’, in Desai, et al., eds, Agrarian Power, pp. 64–65.
125. Thomas Metcalf's essay on the Oudh ta'allqdar concludes similarly that the ta'allqdar, following British rule, was transformed from being a ruler of men (a petty raja) to a landlord, and was hence bound to those beneath him only by ‘ties of rent and revenue.’ Such a ta'allqdar consequently found it expedient to seek tangible gains by increasing cash rentals and exploiting his powers as landlord. Thomas R. Metcalf, ‘From Raja to Landlord: the Oudh Ta'allqdar 1850–1870’, in Robert Frykenberg, ed., Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, New Delhi, 1979, p. 137.
126. In Bengal, Amit Bhaduri has argued, the introduction of the zamindari system initiated, among many other changes, the commercialization of sub-tenurial rights. This led to a proliferation of intermediaries below the zamindar and choked off investment in land, there being no viable mechanism for sharing the costs and benefits between the zamindar and his innumerable tenants. Amit Bhaduri, ‘The Evolution of Land Relations in Eastern India Under British Rule’, IESHR, 12, 1, 1976, p. 48.
127. Maddox, Final Report, Vol. II, p. 596. See especially clause 5 and 6.
128. L.N. Raut, Socio-Economic Life in Medieval Orissa (1568–1751), Cuttack, 1988, p. 120.
129. Ewer's Report, p. 33, 28–29.
130. Report of the Committee on the Effects of the Inundation in Orissa in 1866, Part I, September 1871, Public Works Department Records, National Archives of India, No. 60–66, p. 15.
131. See Clause 12, in Maddox, Final Report, Vol. I, p. 163.
132. For a survey of the ‘Indo-Islamic’ intelligence and surveillance systems operative in pre-colonial India, see C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 10–55. In the Rajput courts in the eighteenth century, according to Bayly, revenue farmers established their own information networks and particular rapport with village accountants and revenue overseers in order to ensure the success of their collection strategies. These magnates, in turn inevitably sought to choke information flows to the rulers about the actual revenue potential in the region. See especially, p. 31.
133. Usha Ray, ‘Maratha Revenue Administration’, p. 62.
134. Sen, Administrative System, p. 80.
135. Sen, Economics, p. 9.
136. W.W. Hunter, Orissa or the Vicissitudes of an Indian Province Under Native and British Rule, Vol. II, London, 1872, p. 181. In the next twenty-two years (1830–52), a total of £91,889 was remitted, while the figure for the next fifteen years (1852–67) was £397,088. Hunter calculated the average annual sum remitted for 1852–67 at roughly £26,472 per annum, which, by his estimate, approximated nearly 16 per cent of the total annual land tax of that period.
137. Henry Ricketts, Report on the Districts of Midnapore (including Hijelee) and Cuttack, Calcutta, 1858, p. 68.
138. Arthur Cotton, Report on the Mahanuddy River, Calcutta, 1858, p. 8. Cotton based this observation on his study of the early papers of the Company's administration in the Orissa delta.
139. Trower to Stirling, 26 November 1818, Bengal Revenue Consultations, 13 May 1819, quoted in B.C. Ray, Foundations of British Orissa, Cuttack, 1960, p. 168. Amli was the local era of Orissa, it began from the twelfth day of the second half of the lunar month of Bhadra, between 27 August and 26 September of the English year. The British authorities calculated the era from the middle of September. Amli era 1211, for example, was equivalent to the English year September 1803 to September 1804.
140. The East India Company went through a financial crisis in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The fourth Mysore war (1789–99), the second Maratha war (1803–5) and the task of administering the new territorial acquisitions in the Carnatic, Awadh and the Central Provinces, severely strained the Company's internal organization and finances. This period, therefore, witnessed an attempt by the EIC to ‘extract the maximum of India's resources with the minimum effort …’. See Michael Mann, ‘A Permanent Settlement for the Ceded and Conquered Provinces: Revenue Administration in North India, 1801–1833’, IESHR, 32, 2, 1995, pp. 250–67, 6, 6–7, 12.
141. Ewer's Report, p. 31.
142. Gordon, ‘Recovery from Adversity’, pp. 102–3.
143. Gordon, ‘The Slow Conquest’, pp. 46–47.
144. The British principle of ‘non-interference’ or rather, lack of administrative penetration in the early period of their rule in the Doab districts of north India had a debilitating effect on rural credit and on implementing a remission policy. While taqqavi loans were increasingly siphoned off as ‘emoluments’ by the lower levels of the ‘native officials’, remissions could not be effectively directed at providing genuine relief. See Sanjay Sharma, ‘Famine State and Society in North India, c. 1800–1840’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1996, pp. 144–50.
145. See Rohan D'Souza, ‘The Deltaic Rivers of the Bengal Presidency: The Political Economy of Flood Control in Colonial Orissa’, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1998, pp. 1–24.
146. See James M. Coleman, Deltas: Processes of Deposition and Models for Exploration, Boston, 1982.
147. Also see Robert Kay, ed., Deltas of the World, New York, 1993
148. and Michael N. Oti and George Postman, eds, Geology of Deltas, Rotterdam, 1995.
149. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, London (reprint), 1990, p. 931.
150. I have here not dealt with the specific aspect of the manner in which capitalist rents reinforce the monetary valuation of nature. See Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective, New York, 1999, pp. 90–98.
151. Also see Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, London, 1991, pp. 751–950
152. and David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Chicago, 1982, pp. 330–72.