Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T08:09:26.141Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

2 Bayly, C. A., ‘Local control in Indian towns—the case of Allahabad’, Modern Asian Studies, 5:4 (1971), pp. 289–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Frykenberg, R. E., Guntur District (London, 1965),Google Scholar and Rosselli, J., ‘Theory and Practice in North India: The Background of the Land “Settlement” of 1833’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 06 1971, pp. 134–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See Stokes, E.T., ‘Traditional Élites in the Great Rebellion of 1857: Some Aspects of Rural Revolt in the Upper and Central Doab’ in Leach, E.R. and Mukherjee, S.N. (eds), Élites in South Asia (Cambridge, 1970).Google Scholar

5 Metcalf, T. R., ‘Raja to Landlord’, in Frykenberg, R. E. (ed.), Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison, 1969).Google Scholar

6 Reeves, P. D., ‘Landlords and Party Politics’, in Low, D. A. (ed.), Soundings in Modern South Asian History (London, 1968).Google Scholar

7 The North-Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, and the Province of Oudh were combined in 1901 to form the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. In fact, the provinces had been united under a single head, the Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Commissioner, since 1877. In this paper, the whole of the area of the provinces will be referred to as ‘the United Provinces’ (U.P.), whatever the date.

8 For the details of the Oudh Compromise see: Metcalf, T. R., The Aftermath of Revolt (Princeton, 1965), pp. 134–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Report of the United Provinces Zamindari Abolition Committee [Hereafter UPZAR], 2 vols (Allahabad, 1948), Vol. II, table I.Google Scholar

10 Crooke, W. W., The North-Western Provinces of India, their History, Ethnography and Administration (London, 1897), p. 289.Google Scholar

11 UPZAR, II, table II.

12 Quoted in Chew, E. C. T., ‘Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall, a study of the Anglo-Indian Official Mind’. (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1969).Google Scholar

13 SirHewett, J. P.. Minute on the amendment of the Revenue Law, 16 08 1909.Google Scholar Uttar Pradesh State Secretariat Record Room, Lucknow [hereafter UPS], R[evenue Department], file 667 of 1908.

14 Crooke, , op. cit., pp. 285–6.Google Scholar

15 See Gubbins, M. R., The Mutinies in Oudh (London, 1858).Google Scholar

16 Benett, W. C., A Report on the Family History of the Chief Clans of Roy Bareilly (Lucknow, 1870)Google Scholar; idem, Report of the Final Settlement of the Gonda District (Lucknow, 1870).Google Scholar

17 Elliot, C. A., Chronicles of Oonao, a district in Oudh (Allahabad, 1862).Google Scholar

18 Millett, A.F., Report on the Land Revenue Settlement of the Fyzabad District (Allahabad, 1880).Google Scholar

19 The talukdars of Oudh were thus described by, among others, SirButler, Harcourt, see Sen, S.C. (ed.), The Speeches of the Hon. Sir Spencer Harcourt Butler (Allahabad, 1921), p. 99.Google Scholar

20 Manual of Titles, United Provinces (6th ed., Allahabad, 1917), p. 39.Google Scholar

21 Cohn, B. S., ‘Political Systems in 18th-Century India—the Banaras Region’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, LXXXII, pp. 315–17.Google Scholar

22 Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Allahabad, (hereafter UPA), Files of the Board of Revenue (hereafter BR), Rae Bareli, file 18.

23 See, for example, UPA, BR, Bahraich, file 4, pp. 1, 25, 54; UPA, BR, Kheri, file 6, p. 1R.

24 A map of the Awa estate is to be found in the Annual Report of the Court of Wards, N.W.P., for 1875/6 (Allahabad, 1877), between pp. 14 and 15.Google Scholar

25 An excellent example of this is the Kundrajit taluka, see below p. 264.

26 UPA, BR, Bara Banki, file 32, p. 15.

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

33 See, for instance, the Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture and Land Records 1880 [hereafter AR] (Allahabad, 1881), p. 27.Google Scholar

34 NWP & RAO Progs, 09 1888, p. 11.Google Scholar

35 NWP & RAO Progs, 10 1895, p. 28.Google Scholar

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

39 UPA, BR, O[udh] G[eneral Series], file 2235(I), pp. 77–9.Google Scholar

40 UPA, BR, Sultanpur, file 3(II), pp. 47–51.Google Scholar

41 Collector Allahabad to Commissioner Allahabad, Letter 471R of 1872, UPA, BR, Allahabad, file 95.

42 The Awa estate for example; Court of Wards Report, 1879/80, p. 67.Google Scholar

43 See a number of examples quoted in the Bijnor Settlement Report, 1899.

44 UPA, BR, Sultanpur, file 3(II), pp. 47–51.Google Scholar

45 UPA, BR, Gonda, file 310, p. 27.Google Scholar

46 UPA, BR, Sitapur, file 209.Google Scholar

47 UPA, English files of the Commissioner of Varanasi (Benares), [hereafter COV], Basta 28, file 983 of 1869.Google Scholar

48 UPA, BR, Fyzabad, file 442, p. 47.Google Scholar

49 In 1917 for instance, the manager of the Qila Partabgarh estate Babu Ramasmaran Lal, was a retired deputy Collector, Leader, 21 03 1917.Google Scholar

50 Siddiqui, Nurul Hasan, Landlords of Agra and Avadh (Allahabad, (?) 1950), p. 102.Google Scholar

51 Oldham, Wilton, Ghazipur, A Historical and Statistical Memoir, 2 vols (Allahabad, 1870–1876), Vol I, pp. 56–7.Google Scholar

52 UPA, BR, Jaunpur, file 2.Google Scholar

53 UPA, BR, Rae Bareli, file 35, pp. 125–32.Google Scholar

54 UPA, BR, Farrukhabad, file 13(I).Google Scholar

55 Numerous attempts were made from the 1880s to educate the patwaris and compel them to live in or near their circles.

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

57 The lack of staff and the strain which was likely to be put on the existing staff was one of the reasons often advanced for the inability of many estates to organize co-operative banks or systems of rural sanitation.

58 Wiser, W. and Wiser, C., Behind Mud Walls, 1930–60 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969).Google Scholar

59 UP Progs RA, 11 1907, p. 68.Google Scholar

60 The development of tenancy legislation is discussed in detail by Neale, Walter C., Economic Change in Rural India: Land Tenure and Reform in Uttar Pradesh, 1800–1955 (New Haven and London, 1962).Google Scholar

61 Even the village labourers were not without a certain amount of power which could be brought to bear by refusing service. This was, it seems, quite a common event in the western part of the North-Western Provinces and in particular in Meerut. See Annual Report on the Administration of the Land Revenue, U.P., 1919–20 (Allahabad, 1921), pp. 26–7.Google Scholar

62 See Metcalf, ‘Raja to Landlord’ in Frykenberg, Land Control in Indian History.

63 NWP & O Progs RA, 09 1888, pp. 1–18.Google Scholar

64 NWP & O Progs RA, 12 1896, p. 106.Google Scholar

65 Sleeman, W. H., Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, 1849–50, 2 vols (London, 1858), Vol. I, pp. 149–50.Google Scholar

66 See, for instance, Moradabad Settlement Report 1881, p. 21Google Scholar; NWP Progs RA, 06 1874, p. 44.Google Scholar

67 Shaikh Habib-ullah to SirButler, Harcourt, 6 03 1921.Google Scholar Harcourt Butler Papers, India Office Library, Mss. Eur. F. 116–80.