fancy it to have been universally before the Mahommedan conquest. The Mussulmans brought with them the avarice of conquerors, and a stringent system of revenue collection. Under the Mogul empire, as organized by Akbar the Great, the share of the state was fixed at one-third of the gross produce of the soil; and a regular army of tax-collectors was permitted to intervene between the cultivator and the supreme government. The entire vocabulary of the present land system is borrowed from the Mogul administration. The zamindar himself is a creation of the Mahommedans, unknown to the early Hindu system. He was originally a mere tax-collector, or farmer of the land revenue, who agreed to furnish a lump sum from the tract of country assigned to him. If the Hindu village system may be praised for its justice, the Mogul farming system had at least the merit of efficiency. Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb extracted a larger land revenue than the British do. When the government was first undertaken by the East India Company, no attempt was made to understand the social system upon which the land revenue was based. The zamindar was conspicuous and useful; the village community and the cultivating ryot did not force themselves into notice. The zamindar seemed a solvent person, capable of keeping a contract; and his official position as tax-collector was confused with the proprietary rights of an English landlord. The superior stability of the village system was overlooked, and in the old provinces of Bengal and Madras the village organization has gradually been suffered to fall into decay. The consistent aim of the British authorities has been to establish private property in the soil, so far as is consistent with the punctual payment of the revenue. The annual government demand, like the succession duty in England, is universally the first liability on the land; when that is satisfied, the registered landholder has powers of sale or mortgage scarcely more restricted than those of a tenant in fee-simple. At the same time the possible hardships, as regards the cultivator, of this absolute right of property vested in the owner have been anticipated by the recognition of occupancy rights or fixity of tenure, under certain conditions. Legal rights are everywhere taking the place of unwritten customs. Land, which was before merely a source of livelihood to the cultivator and of revenue to the state, has now become the subject of commercial speculation. The fixing of the revenue demand has conferred upon the owner a credit which he never before possessed, by allowing him a certain share of the unearned increment. This credit he may use improvidently, but none the less has the land system of India been raised from a lower to a higher stage of civilization.
The means by which the land revenue is assessed is known as settlement, and the assessor is styled a settlement officer. In Bengal the assessment has been accomplished once and for all, but throughout the greater part of the rest of India the process is continually going on. The details vary in the different provinces; but, broadly speaking, a settlement may be described as the ascertainment of the agricultural capacity of the land. Prior to the settlement is the work of survey, which first determines the area of every village and frequently of every field also. Then comes the settlement officer, whose duty it is to estimate the character of the soil, the kind of crop, the opportunities for irrigation, the means of communication and their probable development in the future, and all other circumstances which tend to affect the value of the produce. With these facts before him, he proceeds to assess the government demand upon the land according to certain general principles, which may vary in the several provinces. The final result is a settlement report, which records, as in a Domesday Book, the entire mass of agricultural statistics concerning the district.
Lower Bengal and a few adjoining districts of the United Provinces and of Madras have a permanent settlement, i.e. the land revenue has been fixed in perpetuity. When the Company obtained the diwání or financial administration of Bengal in 1765, the theory of a settlement, as described above, was unknown. The existing Mahommedan system was adopted in its entirety. Engagements, sometimes yearly, sometimes for a term of years, were entered into with the zamindars to pay a lump sum for the area over which they exercised control. If the offer of the zamindar was not deemed satisfactory, another contractor was substituted in his place. But no steps were taken, and perhaps no steps were possible, to ascertain in detail the amount which the country could afford to pay. For more than twenty years these temporary engagements continued, and received the sanction of Warren Hastings, the first titular governor-general of India. Hastings’ great rival, Francis, was among those who urged the superior advantages of a permanent assessment. At last, in 1789, a more accurate investigation into the agricultural resources of Bengal was commenced, and the settlement based upon this investigation was declared perpetual by Lord Cornwallis in 1793. The zamindars of that time were raised to the status of landlords, with rights of transfer and inheritance, subject always to the payment in perpetuity of a rent-charge. In default of due payment, their lands were liable to be sold to the highest bidder. The aggregate assessment was fixed at sikká Rs.26,800,989, equivalent to Co.’s Rs.28,587,722, or say 2¾ millions sterling. While the claim of Government against the zamindars was thus fixed for ever, it was intended that the rights of the zamindars over their own tenants should be equally restricted. But no detailed record of tenant-right was inserted in the settlement papers, and, as a matter of fact, the cultivators lost rather than gained in security of tenure. The same English prejudice which made a landlord of the zamindar could recognize nothing but a tenant-at-will in the ryot. By two stringent regulations of 1799 and 1812 the tenant was practically put at the mercy of a rack-renting landlord. If he failed to pay his rent, however excessive, his property was rendered liable to distraint and his person to imprisonment. At the same time the operation of the revenue sale law had introduced a new race of zamindars, who were bound to their tenants by no traditions of hereditary sympathy, but whose sole object was to make a profit out of their newly purchased property. The rack-rented peasantry found no protection in the law courts until 1859, when an act was passed which restricted the landlord’s powers of enhancement in certain specified cases. Later the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, since amended by an act of 1898, created various classes of privileged tenants, including one class known as “settled ryots,” in which the qualifying condition is holding land, not necessarily the same land, for twelve years continuously in one village. Outside the privileged classes of tenants the act gives valuable protection to tenants-at-will. The progress in the acquisition of occupancy rights by tenants may be judged from the fact that, whereas in 1877 it was stated of the Champaran district that the cultivator had hardly acquired any permanent interest in the soil, the settlement officer in 1900 reported that 87% of the occupied area was in the possession of tenants with occupancy rights or holding at fixed rates. It is believed that the ryots will eventually be able to secure, and to hold against all comers, the strong legal position which the Bengal Tenancy Act has given them.
The permanent settlement was confined to the three provinces of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, according to their boundaries at that time. Orissa proper, which was conquered from the Mahrattas in 1803, is subject to a temporary settlement, which expired in 1897 and a re-settlement was made in 1900. The enhancement in the revenue amounted to 52% of the previous demand; but in estates in which the increase was specially large it was decided to introduce the new rates gradually.
The prevailing system throughout the Madras presidency is the ryotwari, which takes the cultivator or peasant proprietor as its rent-paying unit, somewhat as the Bengal system takes the zamindar. This system cannot be called The Ryotwari system. indigenous to the country, any more than the zamindari of Bengal. If any system deserves that name, it is that of village assessment, which still lingers in the memories of the people in the south. When the British declared themselves heir to the nawab of the Carnatic at the opening of the 19th century, they had no adequate experience of revenue management. The authorities in England favoured the zamindari system already at work in Bengal, which appeared at least calculated to secure punctual payment. The Madras Government was accordingly instructed to enter into permanent engagements with zamindars, and, where no zamindars could be
