Company rule, Permanent Settlement, and Darbhanga Raj

Research record

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

Section index

1. Revenue before representation
2. 1765: the dīwānī and a new revenue sovereign
3. The limits of the 'dual government' shorthand
4. The famine of 1770 and the fiscal state
5. 1772 and the drive toward direct supervision
6. Revenue experiments before permanence
7. The Bihar decennial settlement, 1789
8. 22 March 1793: what Regulation I actually declared
9. What the Permanent Settlement fixed - and what it did not
10. Actual proprietors, zamindars, talukdars and chaudharīs
11. Revenue sale and the chronology of the 'sunset law'
12. Property became more alienable, but not socially simple
13. Darbhanga before 1793: a fiscal house, not a princely state
14. Madhav Singh, c.1775-1807: a reign of transition
15. The Permanent Settlement dispute and the reduction of political status
16. Why '1,500 villages' must be cited as a claim
17. 1800: a surviving Darbhanga settlement horizon
18. Parganas, jagirs and revenue-free land after 1793
19. The archive as a field of property
20. Panji history must be separated from Permanent Settlement mythology
21. The word śrotriya and the later Śrotriya sub-caste are not the same thing
22. The c.1800 Śrotriya reconstruction adopted in this volume
23. Why 1600 Śaka / 1678 cannot be accepted automatically
24. Why a '1760 order of Madhav Singh' is chronologically impossible as stated
25. Genealogical upgradation and the politics of rank
26. Permanent Settlement and the social uses of genealogy
27. A comparative caution: Nepal is not a control group without evidence
28. Diagrammatic source control: two transformations, not one timeless order
29. Courts, procedure and the conversion of memory into evidence
30. Babuana, maintenance estates and divided rights
31. The Permanent Settlement did not end state intervention
32. Raiyats below the settlement
33. Rent, abwabs and the struggle over legal dues
34. The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885
35. Cadastral survey and the manufacture of a record-of-rights
36. Measurement, literacy and unequal evidentiary power
37. Darbhanga Raj under the Court of Wards, 1860-1879
38. The Court of Wards as an 'institutional shelter'
39. Managerial reform and the problem of whose efficiency
40. Lakshmishwar Singh and the post-1879 landed public sphere
41. From household retainers to estate bureaucracy
42. The estate's dispersed geography
43. Roads, irrigation, schools and hospitals as estate power
44. Markets, fisheries, ferries and non-crop income
45. Commercial crops and the limits of estate statistics
46. 1912: Bihar and Orissa as a new province
47. Peasant protest against Darbhanga Raj, 1919-20
48. Estate records and the problem of surveillance
49. Caste, language and the search for a region
50. Darbhanga titles, royal style and the absence of princely-state sovereignty
51. Colonial knowledge and the Buchanan-Hamilton surveys
52. Gazetteers: indispensable late compilations, not eyewitnesses to 1793
53. Reading Darbhanga Raj records against the grain
54. From political authority to cultural authority
55. The c.1800 turning point in the Parallel History
56. What continuity means after 1793
57. Conclusion: property, genealogy and the colonial reconstitution of power
58. Chapter-specific bibliography

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Company rule, Permanent Settlement, and Darbhanga Raj.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/political-17/