Permanent Settlement and Landed Society

Detailed chapter description

The Permanent Settlement of 1793 converted the experimental decennial settlement of Bengal and Bihar into a perpetual state demand upon designated zamindars, independent talukdars and other proprietors. Its importance lay not simply in fixing revenue, but in reworking the legal language of landed authority. A hereditary revenue-collecting right was increasingly treated as proprietary property, while punctual payment to the colonial state became the condition of security. Yet the settlement did not define every right below the zamindar. Raiyats, under-tenure holders, village officials, service tenures, rent-free grants and customary users continued to inhabit a layered agrarian field that subsequent regulations, courts and tenancy statutes tried to order. In Mithila, Vajji and Anga the effects were regionally uneven: Tirhut entered a large permanent settlement in 1793, Bhagalpur was only partially settled at that date, and Monghyr contained a mixture of estate forms and difficult fiscal geographies. This chapter therefore studies the Permanent Settlement as the beginning of a new landed society, not as a one-day replacement of all older agrarian relations. The decennial settlement of 1790–91 was initially framed as a ten-year arrangement. Cornwallis and his colleagues then chose to make the assessed demand perpetual in 1793. The change mattered because future agricultural expansion and rental growth would accrue chiefly below the state’s fixed demand. In return, the Company expected secure landed property and predictable revenue to encourage improvement. The settlement therefore joined fiscal calculation to a political theory of property. It was less an isolated regulation than the culmination of the experiments traced in Chapter 54. Regulation I of 1793 declared the public assessment on settled estates fixed in perpetuity. It did not freeze the actual produce of the land, the number of cultivators, the rent collected from each raiyat, or the internal structure of every estate. The distinction between public jama and estate income is fundamental. A permanently fixed state demand could coexist with changing cultivation, prices, rents and subordinate tenures. Much later agrarian conflict arose precisely within that widening space between fixed public revenue and variable private rental income.