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The Indian Empire and Peasant Production of Opium in the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

J. F. Richards
J. F. Richards
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

IN the post-1857 decades of the nineteenth century, the British rulers of India controlled the vast territory and population of the Indian subcontinent (of the size and cultural diversity of Western Europe) under nearly ideal conditions of peace, stability and order. By this time as well, they could count on the active cooperation and loyalties of both old and new major indigenous elites in urban and rural India. The annual and decennial assessments of the ‘Moral and Material Progress of the Peoples of India’ recited to Parliament the areas in which appreciable progress had been made.On the material side, British policy makers in the latenineteenth century concentrated imperial or state resources in agricultural development. Their simultaneous, often conflicting, goals were soto improve the security and efficiency of food-crop production that they could eliminate or at the very least sharply diminish periodic drought-inspired dearth and famine mortality in the countryside. The other major goal was to develop substantial export crops—wheat, cotton,sugar, indigo, tea, coffee, opium, etc.—as income producers for thepeasant, the landlord and for the regime. To meet both objectives the Government of India directed its major resources into capital investment in public works: immense canal systems designed to improve andextend cultivation; railroads, to draw production from remote areas to the seacoast; breakwaters, warehousing, docks, navigational aids at the great port terminii to increase the speed and security and reduce the costof sea-borne exports. These public enterprises meshed with intricate structures of agency houses, export brokers, and commission agents,both British and Indian, who jointly penetrated to the most distant centers of cash crop production.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , February 1981 , pp. 59 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 For the most direct exchanges o this issue see Morris, M. D., ‘Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History,’ Journal of Economic Hisoty, XXIII (1963),Google Scholar and reprinted with three critical rejoinders in The Indian Economic and Social History Review of March, 1968.

2 See Benoy, Chowdhury in his Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal (Calcutta, 1964)Google Scholar and a 1970 two-part article by Bhushan, Chaudhuri Binay, ‘Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal,’ Indian Economic and Social History Review, VII (1970), pp. 26–60, 211–51.Google Scholar

3 For the introduction of opium into India and Persia by Arab traders see George, Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, 6 vols (London and Calcutta, 1892), VI, 24.Google Scholar

4 The Dutch initiative in Bengal is discussed in Om, Prakash, Silver for Cloth: The Dutch East India Company in Bengal 1630–1720 (forthcoming).Google Scholar

5Ibid.

6 This description of the pre-British system in Bihar comes from a 1773 memoir written for Johnathan Duncan, the British administrator of Benares by Ram Chand Pandit, one of the first opium contractors for the Bengal government. See the long extracts quoted in Watt, , Economic Products of India, VI, Pt I, 37–8.Google Scholar A man at Patna in the late seventeenth century was probably the man-i Shahjahani at 73.76 lb. avoirdupois.Google ScholarCf.Irfan, Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (Aligarh, 1963), p. 372.Google Scholar

7 From Ram Chand's memorandum, Watt, , Economic Products of India, VI, Pt I, 39.Google Scholar

8Ibid.

9Ibid., p. 40.

10Rajeshwari, Prasad, Some Aspects of British Revenue Policy in India, 1773–1833 (New Delhi, 1970), pp. 148–50.Google Scholar

11Ibid.

12Michael, Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 108–9.Google Scholar

13Chowdhury, Commercial Agriculture in Bengal, p. 9.Google Scholar

14Cf.Greenberg, , British Trade and the Opening of China, pp. 131–2.Google Scholar

15Tan, Chung, ‘The British–China–India Trade Triangle, 1771–1840’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review (1974), p. 417.Google Scholar

16 Five yearly average computed from Turner, F. S., British Opium Policy (London, 1876), Appendix V, p. 305.Google ScholarTurner obtained his data from the Calcutta Financial and Revenue Accounts of 1875.Google Scholar

17Chaloner, W. H., ‘Currency Problems of the British Empire’, in Barrie, M. Ratcliffe, Great Britain and Her World 1750–1914, Essays in honour of W. O. Henderson (Totowa, N.J., 1975).Google Scholar

18Sources: Calculated from tables in Watt, Economic Products of India, p. 56; Turner, British Opium Policy, p. 307, and House of Commons,Google ScholarSessional Papers, 1894, vol. LXI,Google ScholarRoyal Commission on Opium, Report, Appendix V, Rivett-Carnac, J. H., ‘Note On the Supply of Opium’, p. 319.Google Scholar

19For the reserve policy, see Rivett-Carnac, ‘Note on the Supply of Opium’, p. 327. Rivett-Cognac was Opium Agent at Benares for a number of years. See also, Watt, Economic Products of India, p. 93.Google Scholar

20Ibid., p. 325, calculated from output figures supplied in his report.

21 See Owen, David E., British Opium Policy in China and India (New Haven, 1934), pp. 311–54 for a full discussion of this process.Google Scholar

22Cf.John, Strachey, India, Its Administration and Progress, 4th rev. edn (London, 1911), p. 150.Google ScholarStrachey provides an abridged version of an 1892 article by G. H. M. Batten of the Indian Civil Service. Batten's figure for annual average acreage in the qinquennium ending 1900–01 is 586,400 acres with 1,477,000 opium cultivators holding licenses in 1900–01.Google Scholar

23 These were not Indian Civil Service officers, but members of the subordinate British services. Pay scales ranged from Rs 900 per month at the highest grade for Sub-Deputy Agents, to as low as 200 per month for the fourth grade of Assistants. Ibid., p. 319.

24For Patna these were1) Tirhut, 2) Hajipur, 3) Chopra, 4) Aliganj, 5) Motinari, 6) Bettiah, 7) Shahabad, 8) Gaya, 9) Tehta, 10) Patna, 11) Monghyr. For Benares:1) Ghazipur,2) Mirzapur,3) Azamgarh, 4) Gorakhpur, 5) Basti, 6) Allahabad, 7) Etawah, 8) Fategarh, 9) Mainpuri, 10) Bareilly, 11) Sitapur, 12) Lucknow, 13) Fyzabad, 14) Gonda, 15) Partabgarh, 16) Rae Bareli. List given in Rivett-Carnac, ‘Note on the Supply of Opium’, p. 319.Google Scholar

25Ibid., p. 325. At the same time, the average annual pay of 16 British Sub-Deputy Agents and 34 Assistants totalled just over Rs 250,000. This of course, is the usual Colonial disparity.

26Ibid.

27 E.g., if the number of peasants receiving licenses in 1892–92 for Patna agency, 637,865 is divided by the number of agents (41) the ratio is 1:15,500. For Benares in the same year the ratio was somewhat less at 1:10,700. Ibid., pp. 323, 325.

28 See Baden-Powell, B. H., The Land Systems of British India, 3 vols (London, 1892), I, 153Google Scholar and 23n. The term meant originally simply a peasant proprietor who ‘held a number’ in the Revenue Collector's book, but in the nineteenth century came to be applied to the headman responsible for the village's revenue.

29Rivett-Carnac, ‘Note on the Supply of Opium’, p. 320.Google Scholar

30Ibid.

31Chowdhury, , Commercial Agriculture in Bengal, pp. 48–9,Google Scholar quotes from the Government of India Opium Commission of 1883, ‘Poppy is a crop, which, to be successful, requires fine cultivation. It is a gardener's crop grown on what in upper Hindustan is called Koerar or Kachhiana land. Other castes may cultivate it, but its cultivators proper are the koeri and the kacchi’.

32Risley, H. H., The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, 4 vols (Calcutta, 1889), III, 408–9.Google Scholar Risley also supplies district population figures for each caste from the Censuses of 1872 and 1881. For the eight districts of Bihar, included in the Patna Agency territory he records a total population of 1,08 1,515 Koiris in 1881. The remaining 35 districts of Bengal recorded only 113,011 Koiris (p. 409). The caste was clearly a Bihar caste living where its unique cultivation could best succeed with poppy, tobacco or vegetables.

33 Cf. the comments of Nevill, H. R., in the Gazetteer of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Fatehpur, vol XX (Allahabad, 1906), 86–7.Google Scholar

34William, Crooke, The North-Western Provinces of India (London, 1897), pp. 50–1.Google Scholar

35Ibid., p. 53. Crooke, in these classifications, is actually reflecting the operating principle for determining the relative incidence of the land revenue on village lands developed in the rate assessment (Settlement) operations of the period 1858 to 1878 in this region.See Baden, Powell, Land Systems of British India, II, 56–58.Google Scholar

36 Crooke gives a figure from near Aligarh of rents at Rs 12 per acre (7.5 per bigha) for lands in the first category, Rs 8–12 annas in the second and Rs 4–12 annas in the last, per acre (p. 53). A private witness before the Opium Commission of 1895, concerned to show the plight of the opium cultivators, stated that rents in Patna at that time did not exceed Rs 10 per bigha. Royal Commission on Opium, Report, LXI, 697.

37 Cf.Rivett-Carnac, ‘Note on the Supply of Opium’, p. 320 for a statement of the policy, but no figures on such advances are supplied. For a discussion of wells in their location, capacity and usage, see Elizabeth, Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India (Berkeley, and Los Angeles, 1972), pp. 29–31. Rather than canals, ‘Kachhis, the skilled garden-cultivators, and even the officers of the Government Opium Department were reported to have a marked preference for wells’, p. 80.Google Scholar

38Watt, , Economic Products of India, VI, Pt I, 61–3.Google Scholar

39Ibid.

40 Various detailed accounts of the procedures for cultivation are available. I have used the accounts in ibid., pp. 60ff and in the report of Rivett-Carnac, cited above.

41Based on outturn averages supplied by Rivett-Carnac, , tables, p. 325.Google Scholar Over a twenty year period, the lowest average figure for Patna Agency per acre was 4 seer 3 chittack in 1882–1883 and the highest 9 seer 8 chittack in 1873–1874. For lands in the Benares Agency, generally of higher yields, similar figures are 6 seer1891–1891 and 10 seer 9 chittack in 1884–1885. Thus, the production averages for 1892–93, the last year recorded by Rivett-Carnac are neither exceptionally high nor exceptionally low.

42 See Royal Commission on Opium, Report, LXI, 697. Sen also pointed out that F. N. Wright, the Settlement Officer at Kanpur, had made a similar calcuation for one bigha in Kanpur district and had arrived at a figure of Rs 37 rupees 8 Annas.Google Scholar

43Cf.Rivett-Carnac, , ‘Note on the Supply of Opium’, p. 320.Google Scholar

44These and the following calculations are made from the data supplied in the tables appended to his report by Rivett-Carnac, , p. 325.Google Scholar

45cf.Chowdhury, Commercial Agriculture in Bengal, pp. 36–40.Google Scholar

46 For the government preference for investment in large-scale ‘public works’ rather than direct loans, see Whitcombe, , Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, pp. 110–18. And also Figure 6.Google Scholar

47Ibid.

48Rivett-Carnac, ‘Note on the Supply of Opium’, p. 325.Google Scholar

49Nevill, H. R., District Gazetteers of United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Basti, XXXII (Allahabad, 1907), p. 44Google Scholar. The village of Hairaya is located at 26′ 47‖ N and 82′ 28‖ E between the district towns of Gorakhpur and Fyzabad.

Ibid., p. viii. Cf., Nevill comments that of the rabi crops ‘the most important is poppy, which is extensively grown in the Khaga tahsil and also in Fatahpur, though in a less degree, while in the other parts of the district the area is insignificant. In 1904 there were nearly 8,600 acres devoted to poppy,’ In Khaga of the spring-summer planting of 101,550 acres, 4,495 were under poppy license (p.v).