British agrarian policy in Eastern India

The present book is an adaptation from my thesis origi nally submitted for the Ph.D. degree of Bihar University. Since the thesis was written, two good books, Chittabrata Palit's Tensions in Bengal Rural Society, (Cal. 1975), and K.K. Sengupta's Patna Disturbances and the Politics of Rent, (Delhi, 1973), have been published, which lucidly and authori tatively analyse the agrarian problems of Bengal in the 19th century. Hence, to avoid repetition, I have drastically reduced, and sometimes even deleted, from my book the portions dealing with the agrarian problems of Bengal and Bihar. Thus, the book in the present form is mainly a study of the evolution of the British agrarian policy in Bengal proper and Bihar in the two decades following the Revolt of 1857.

At the earliest stage, the main concern of the Company's Government was to obtain the "surplus revenue". The agra rian policy was geared to the necessity of obtaining stable and "surplus" income from land; and this policy was framed against the backdrop of the Physiocratic and the Whig theo ries. With the progress of the Industrial Revolution, the emphasis on surplus revenue gave way to a more comprehen sive objective of increasing the productive capacity of land and diversifying the income from land to larger sections of the rural society so that India could play the dual role of a supp lier of raw materials to the British industries and a purchaser of their finished products. The Utilitarian philosophy with its anti-feudal stance supplied the necessary theoretical tools. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution made rapid strides in England. There was a further spurt in the demand for raw materials and for an expanded market for finished products. The pressure for modifying the land policy in the light of new economic rationale provided by the mid-Victorian liberalism increased. The mid-Victorian liberals were convinced that agricultural progress required an enter prising landlord class investing large capital in land. Modern concepts of private property, capital investment in agriculture, free competition, market rent etc., came to play increasingly dominant role in the formulation of agrarian policy.