Company rule, Permanent Settlement, and Darbhanga Raj

Detailed chapter description

Settlement, and Darbhanga Raj Revenue before representation The East India Company acquired fiscal authority in Bihar before it created representative institutions or a modern public administration. That sequence matters. From the grant of the dīwānī in 1765 onward, the Company's first durable claim on villages, markets and landed houses was a claim to revenue. Courts, policing, survey, registration and bureaucratic classification expanded around that fiscal core. For Tirhut and the eastern districts, colonial rule therefore first appeared less as a sudden replacement of every local institution than as a new sovereign claimant attempting to make inherited rights calculable, enforceable and remittable (British Library, Mss Eur B373; Marshall 1987; Travers 2007). 1765: the dīwānī and a new revenue sovereign The Mughal emperor Shah Alam II's grant of the dīwānī of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the Company in 1765 supplied a legal-political basis for Company revenue collection. British Library records include Robert Clive's September 1765 correspondence explicitly concerning that grant. The change was fundamental, but it did not create a blank institutional field. Company servants still depended on zamindars, chaudharīs, qānūngōs, bankers, village accountants, revenue farmers and local knowledge. The new regime inherited a vocabulary and personnel that had developed under Mughal and post-Mughal government even as it gradually altered their legal position. 325 The limits of the 'dual government' shorthand The years after 1765 are often summarized as a period of 'dual government', with revenue power and nominal executive responsibility separated. The phrase is useful only if it does not conceal uneven practice. Revenue collection, policing, adjudication and local coercion were already entangled. What changed over the following decade was not simply the abolition of a tidy dual system, but the Company's progressive decision to supervise and standardize functions that it had initially tried to exercise through inherited structures. In north Bihar the pace of this change varied by locality and by the reliability of intermediaries. The famine of 1770 and the fiscal state The great famine of 1770 exposed the vulnerability of a revenue regime whose information, transport and relief capacities were limited. Scholarship on Bengal as a whole places the disaster within a conj