In early colonial Bengal, pervasive disputes between urban creditors and tax-paying landlords (zamindars) shaped the East India Company's emergent system of civil justice. Mediating conflicts between creditors and landed debtors was already an important aspect of rulership under the nawabs of Bengal. The Company’s efforts at fiscal centralization, raising tax demands on landholders, and auctioning off ‘revenue farms’ – rights to collect local revenues in return for payments agreed in advance – to wealthy merchants (banians), further intensified conflicts in the countryside. By exploring the controversial efforts of banians to accumulate land rights, and by tracing the Company's hesitant efforts to adjudicate disputes over land and credit, this chapter further reveals how the Company's strategies of legal and fiscal centralization depended on the adaptation and reworking late Mughal, Persianate practices of claimsmaking and dispute resolution. It shows how the Company's efforts to consolidate zamindari rights as a saleable, mortgageable form of taxable private property were being worked out as much in judicial inquiries and decrees as in central legislation.

This chapter explores how inheritance disputes involving landholders (zamindars) in early colonial Bengal became a site for the production of a Persianate form of Hindu law. By tracing in detail the process of judicial investigation in two complex cases of of zamindari inheritance involving elite Hindu zamindars, the chapter shows how British officials drew on the expert knowledge of khalsa revenue officials (especially qanungos) and of brahman pandits (experts on dharmashastra), and how the Company government tried to justify its judicial decrees on the basis of a reconstituted form of Mughal law. The records of judicial inquiries into zamindari tenures reveal the Persianate context for the Company’s early administration of Hindu law, as nawabi practices for hearing and deciding disputes among tax-paying zamindars were reformulated under the Company state.

European rule brought the people of Bengal economic upheaval, a social shake-up and a cultural kick in the teeth. The British were unlike the Mughals – they wanted more than just to extract Bengal’s riches. It was their ambition to transform Bengal’s economy to make it yield them much more income. To this end they subjected the population of Bengal to an endless series of social, administrative and economic experiments. Among these were ‘permanent settlement’, a system of land rights and taxation that enabled the British to distance their administration from the vagaries of nature, climate and social upheaval in the Bengal delta. They had a rural gentry collect the colonial taxes on their behalf. Other institutions of rule and commodity production for far-flung markets further shaped local society. An important legacy was the transformation of religious identities – notably Hindu and Muslim – into political ones, creating the ‘communal’ politics that are still prominent in Bangladesh.