¹ Washbrook, D. A., ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 15, 3 (1981), pp. 649–721.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On landed property see also Pouchepadass, Jacques, ‘Land, Power and Market: The Rise of the Land Market in Gangetic India’, in Peter, Robb (ed.), Rural India. Land, Power and Society under British Rule (London, 1983), pp. 76–105.Google Scholar

² These questions will be treated in a book, now in preparation, on Bihar and the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885. The present paper is closely related also to Robb, Peter, ‘In Search of Dominant Peasants: Notes on the Implementation in Bihar of the Bengal Tenancy Act 1885’, in Dewey, C. J. (ed.), Arrested Development in India (Riverhead and Delhi, forthcoming). Some of the questions are also raised in ‘Land and Society: The British “Transformation” in India’ and ‘State, Peasant and Money-lender in late Nineteenth-century Bihar: Some Colonial Inputs’, in Robb, Rural India, pp. 12–2 and 106–48, and in unpublished papers, ‘Ideas and Agrarian Policy in India: The Great Rent Law Debate and the Bengal Tenancy Act 1885’ and ‘Peasants and Other Concepts: Indian Agrarian History after the New Empiricism’.Google Scholar

³ M[ackenzie], A., ‘Memorandum on the History of the Rent Question in Bengal since the passing of Act X of 1859’, in Report of the Government of Bengal on the Proposed Amendment of the Law of Landlord and Tenant in the Province with the revised Bill and Appendices, vol. I (Calcutta, 1881). The sources for a discussion of the rent law debate are exceptionally voluminous, including many published collections of official papers. In this essay references will be provided only for specific points or quotations.Google Scholar

⁴ See the evidence and report volumes in Report of the Rent Law Commission (Calcutta, 1880).Google Scholar The best-known version of the extreme case is otherwise The Zemindary Settlement of Bengal, 2 vols (Calcutta, 1879), published anonymously by a minor official; I have discussed this in an unpublished paper, ‘Raiyat's Property’, presented to the Heidelberg Anglo-German conference on ‘Arrested Development in India’ in July 1984.Google Scholar

⁵ See Mookerjea, Ashutosh, ‘The Proposed New Rent Law for Bengal and Behar’ (Calcutta, 1880, reprinted from Calcutta Review, 10 1880).Google Scholar

⁶ The MacDonnell Collection in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, gives some impression of the situation among officials; see his letters to his wife, ‘Sunday evening’ and 28 August 1885, Mss. Eng. hist. d. 215; other correspondence, Ibid., d. 235 passim; and Finucane's memorandum on the 1906 Amendment Act, Ibid., c. 368. See also Field, C. D., A Digest of the Law of Landlord and Tenant in the Provinces subject to the Lieutenant- Governor of Bengal (Calcutta, 1879). Other useful sources drawn on for this essay show the practice of the courts on land and tenancy questions:Google ScholarFinucane, M. and Rampini, B. F., The Bengal Tenancy Act being Act VIII of 1885 … (Calcutta, 1886),Google Scholar and Finucane, M. and Ali, Syed Ameer, A Commentary on the Bengal Tenancy Act (Act VIII 1885) second edition edited by J., Byrne (Calcutta, [1911]).Google Scholar

⁷ Government of Bengal to Government of India (Revenue and Agriculture Department), 27 July 1881, in Report of the Government of Bengal. The notion can be traced back to the early nineteenth century, for example, Holt Mackenzie's minute of 1819, repeatedly quoted during the 1870s and 1880s.

⁸ Ibid..

⁹ For a recent statement of this view see Sen, Asok, Chatterjee, Partha and Mukherji, Saugata, Perspectives in Social Sciences 2. Three Studies on the Agrarian Structure in Benga 1850–1947 (Calcutta, 1982).Google Scholar See also Chaudhuri, B. B., ‘The Process of Depeasantisation in Bengal and Bihar 1885–1947’, Indian Historical Review II, I (1975), pp. 105–65.Google Scholar

¹⁰ See above, note 7.

¹¹ The Commissioner (Halliday, F. W.) was reporting views of Collectors after a conference in July 1883. The remarks were later taken up by pro-landlord interests;Google Scholar see Dacosta, J., ‘Remarks and Extracts from Official Reports on the Bengal Tenancy Bill’ (London 1884).Google Scholar See also Reynolds, H. J., ‘Memorandum on the Rent Bill’, 18 05 1881, in Report of the Government of Bengal.Google Scholar

¹² This view was put forward by Phear, J., in the Great Rent Case, Thakurani Dassee v. Bisheshur Mookerjee B.L.R., F.B., 326 (06 1865), and adopted by the Government of Bengal in 1881 (see above, note 7).Google Scholar

¹³ For a discussion of the earlier period, see Chowdhury-Zilly, Aditee Nag, The Vagrant Peasant. Agrarian Distress and Desertion in Bengal 1770 to 1830 (Wiesbaden, 1982).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Patna Resolution for 1878–79, quoted in Mackenzie, ‘Memorandum’.

¹⁵ MacDonnell's views arose out his work in famine relief, as a district officer in Bihar, and in preparing his Report on the Foodgrains Supply (Calcutta 1876). This particular remark was quoted by SirTemple, R. in 1874–1875 and again in Mackenzie, ‘Memorandum’.Google Scholar

¹⁶ In the following paragraphs the information is not intended to be new or contentious, though an attempt is made at re-interpretation. Illustrations of readily available data may be found in the appropriate district gazetteers and settlement reports for Champaran, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Saran, Shahabad, Patna and Gaya, in the volumes covering the same areas in Hunter, W. W., A Statistical Account of Bengal (Calcutta, 1876 etc.), and in the report and evidence volumes of the Bihar and Orissa Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee (Patna, 1930). Statistics may also be found in Bengal Land Revenue Administration Reports from 1847.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Information on this is summarized in Sengupta, Nirmal, ‘The Indigenous Irrigation Organization in South Bihar’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, 2 (1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ This suggestion was encouraged by a paper on Mauss's The Gift given by Professor Trautman, T. at the School of Oriental and African Studies on 8 November 1985.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See Government of India Revenue and Agriculture Department Proceedings B 52–3, June 1895. The tendency was for land rights to be regarded as surety for indefinite credit. This encouraged rather than prevented any tendency for land transfer. Land acquisition might in turn commend itself to richer cultivators, even on apparently uneconomic terms, as a convenient and safe outlet for money.

²⁰ The land records issue was extensively discussed by MacDonnell (see above, note 6). On coal mines, see Rothermund, D. and Wadha, D. C., Zamindars, Mines and Peasants (New Delhi, 1978), for example p. 8.Google Scholar

²¹ Thus far the controversy (currently associated mainly with Bagchi, A. K.) stretches from Thorner, Daniel, ‘De-industrialization in India, 1881–1931’ in Daniel and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (Bombay, 1962) toGoogle ScholarKrishnamurty, J., ‘Deindustrialisation in Gangetic Bihar during the Nineteenth Century: Another Look at the Evidence’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 22, 4 (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² The producers' options could increase, by this argument, but not in proportion to improvements in communications and marketing. Hence specializations could become exaggerated for areas and people, just as records and communications have been said to make social and religious behaviour more, rather than less, ‘orthodox’. On the other hand, the importance of particular resources or advantages could wax or wane over time—as discussed in Robb, Peter, ‘Hieararchy and Resources: Peasant Stratification in late Nineteenth Century Bihar’, Modern Asian Studies 13, 1 (1979)—so that of course any dominant interest could lose out as circumstances changed; a possible decline in the rent-receiving and revenue-collecting roles is discussed below.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ See Robb, ‘Dominant Peasants’. For an example of continuing zamindari control, through intermediaries, of a local market and industries, see also Robb, Peter, ‘Town and Country: Economic Linkages and Political Mobilization in Bihar…’, in John, L. Hill (ed.), Debate on the Congress (forthcoming).Google Scholar

²⁴ Bayly, C. A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars. North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983) andGoogle ScholarLudden, David, Peasant History in South India (Princeton, 1985).Google Scholar

²⁵ The concluding pages of this essay are, once again, intended to do no more than suggest an interpretation of well-known materials, including those on rent questions from the earliest times gathered during the great rent law debate. Most of the information may be found in Dharma, Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1983). Some of this section draws out similarities in particular between Eric Stokes's contribution on Northern India (see Ibid., especially pp. 64–5 and 83–6) and my independent conclusions about Bihar. For other regions of India see also pp. 199–206 and 236–41. Further reference may be made to books listed on pp. 1035–1039 or inGoogle ScholarCharlesworth, Neil, British Rule and the Indian Economy 1800–1914 (London, 1982). Among more recent studies (not already cited above) see in particularCrossRefGoogle ScholarBaker, Christopher John, An Indian Rural Economy 1880–1955. The Tamilnad Countryside (Oxford, 1984);Google ScholarCharlesworth, Neil, Peasants and Imperial Rule. Agriculture and Agrarian Society in the Bombay Presideny, 1880–1935 (Cambridge, 1985);Google ScholarIslam, Sirajul, Bengal Land Tenure. The Origin and Growth of Intermediate Interests in the 19th Century (Rotterdam, 1985);Google Scholar and Raj, K. N., Neeladri, Bhattacharya, Sumit, Guha and Sakhi, Padhi (eds), Essays on the Commercialization of Indian Agriculture (Delhi, 1985) (especially the essays on the Punjab by Neeladri Bhattacharya and Mridula Mukherjee, pp. 51–162).Google Scholar

²⁶ Baker, An Indian Rural Economy, pp. 461–3.

²⁷ Further work has appeared since this essay was written. On trading intermediaries see Datta, Rajat, ‘Merchants and Peasants: A Study of the Structure of Local Trade in Late Eighteenth-century Bengal’, andGoogle ScholarKum, Banerjee Kum, ‘Grain Traders and the East India Company: Patna and its Hinterland in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review 23, 4 (1986).Google Scholar For similar arguments (contrary to Washbrook) on the differential impact of law and market forces, see Bhattacharya, Neeladri, ‘Colonial State and Agrarian Society’ in Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi and Thapar, Romila, Situating Indian History (Delhi, 1986).Google Scholar On Bengal land questions—defining social typologies on the management of production rather than of rent, a shift regarded in this essay as a change over time—see Bose, Sugata, Agrarian Bengal. Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge, 1986).Google Scholar