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Landlords and Lords of the Land: estate management and social control in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

P.J. Musgrave
P.J. Musgrave
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

The problem of controlling and taxing the countryside is one which has remained with all governments in Asia, or indeed in the whole developing world, up to 1972. Government has inevitably tended to be essentially urban-based, centred on military power-bases, whether they be ‘Pacified Areas’, towns or mud forts, backed by military power normally concentrated in these centres. Outside the towns, however, lived the great mass of the population, and the great mass of the potentially taxable wealth, and it is upon its ability to control the rural areas that the credibility and survival of any régime must ultimately depend. It is perhaps an indication of our preoccupations with the problems of pacification and control in Asian societies that increasing interest is being shown in the patterns of rural control, in systems of traditional deference, which are usually seen as surviving much longer and much more strongly in the countryside than in the towns, and in problems of income distribution through social structures based on land. In such a situation, then, the role of the ‘estates’—of traditional and institutionalized systems of dependence and of control, of systems which were commonly used and hence studied by governments—is one which demands to be considered.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , May 1972 , pp. 257 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

An earlier draft of this paper was read at a seminar in the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, in November 1971. I should like to thank Professor E. T. Stokes, Christopher Bayly, Francis Robinson and David Washbrook for assistance in the preparation of this article.

1 This term has been recently used by Cohn, Bernard in ‘Society and Social Change under the Raj’, Indo-British Review, Vol. III, No. 3, 01-04 1971, pp. 25–40.Google Scholar

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27 UPA, BR, Fyzabad, file 11(I).

28 UPA, BR, Fyzabad, file 11(I).

29 UPA, BR, Sultanpur, file 204, p. 127A.

30 This was the normal method of partitioning estates and villages

31 This pattern was not limited to the North-West Provinces. Even before 1856, bankers like the famous Chandan Lal were building up scattered estates; while, after 1856, the Kashmiris of Lucknow established themselves as important landholders in Lucknow district.

32 The Kiratpur estate in Bijnor, for instance, was made up of 2 whole villages and 23 shares: NWP & O Progs RA, 03 1897, p. 515.Google Scholar

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36 There seems, it must be emphasized, that there was a major increase in interest in agriculture, and almost a revolution in estate management, in the period after 1915.

37 AR contains many examples of this. In the 1880s an abortive attempt was made to establish a Provincial Agricultural Association, which, though it failed, did produce a number of local societies such as the Porter Agricultural Association of Baraon in Allahabad.

38 UPA, English files of the Commissioner of Meerut [hereafter COM], file I–VII/ 1860.Google Scholar

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56 National Archives of India, New Delhi,Legislative Department,July 1896,Proceedings 170–6B, p. 95.Google Scholar

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