Remaking of Agrarian Relations Between the military victories of the East India Company in the 1750s and 1760s and the Permanent Settlement of 1793 lay nearly three decades of experimentation. The decisive change was not that a wholly new agrarian order appeared overnight after Plassey or Buxar. Rather, a commercial corporation acquired political leverage, then fiscal sovereignty, and gradually inserted its own supervisors, councils, collectors, auctions, revenue farmers, courts and accounting practices into an older Mughal–Nawabi system of zamindars, amils, qanungos, patwaris and village producers. Bihar is especially revealing because the transition can be seen through Shitab Rai’s revenue administration, the Patna Revenue Council, early experiments in Tirhut, the Rajmahal–Bhagalpur supervisory system and the uneven fiscal geography of Monghyr. This chapter follows that transition from 1757 to the eve of the Permanent Settlement. It therefore stops short of treating the 1793 settlement itself in detail; that belongs to Chapter 55. 54.1 Company expansion was a sequence, not a single conquest The remaking of agrarian relations began before the Company directly collected land revenue. Plassey in 1757 enlarged Company influence at the Bengal court, but it did not transfer the countryside into a British administrative system. The Battle of Buxar in 1764 was more consequential for Bihar because Company forces defeated a coalition that included Mir Qasim, Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. Even then, military victory had to be converted into fiscal authority, administrative routines and enforceable claims over local intermediaries. The agrarian transition was therefore cumulative: war altered sovereignty; treaties redistributed rights; revenue institutions changed more slowly. 54.2 Buxar made Bihar central to the Company’s territorial state Buxar linked Bihar’s political history directly to the making of Company rule. Mir Qasim had earlier shifted his capital to Monghyr and attempted to strengthen nawabi authority against Company interference. His defeat removed a major regional challenge. The settlement that followed brought the Company into a new relationship with the Mughal emperor and the Bengal nawab. From this point Bihar was not merely a corridor for Company trade or military movement. Its land revenue became part of the fiscal foundation of a territorial regime whose military and commercial ambitions increasingly depended on collections from the countryside. 54.3 The Diwani grant of 1765 changed the legal claim to revenue On 12 August 1765 Shah Alam II granted the Company the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Diwani signified the right and responsibility to administer the revenues. The grant did not instantly create a European bureaucracy in every pargana. It gave the Company a superior fiscal title while much of the existing machinery remained Indian. This distinction matters. A sanad could transfer sovereignty over revenue without replacing the personnel, village records, customary claims and negotiation through which revenue was actually realised. Agrarian change therefore began as an overlay: a new claimant to surplus stood above older layers of administration. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 212 — From military leverage to direct revenue government, 1757–1793 54.4 “Dual government” describes divided responsibility but can conceal continuity The years 1765–1772 are often described as a “Dual Government,” with the Company controlling revenue while the nawab retained the nizamat or civil and criminal administration. The phrase captures an important division of formal responsibility, yet newer scholarship warns against imagining two neatly separate machines. Company authority worked through Mughal–Nawabi offices and Indian fiscal agents, while those agents adjusted to Company supervision. Abdul Majed Khan’s study of Muhammad Reza Khan emphasizes continuity and overlap. For Bihar, the role of Shitab Rai similarly shows that the Company initially depended on established expertise rather than governing the countryside through a fully European hierarchy. 54.5 Shitab Rai embodied continuity in Bihar’s early Company revenue system After the Diwani, Raja Shitab Rai remained a crucial figure in Bihar’s revenue administration under Company supervision. His position illustrates the early logic of indirect control: the Company wanted the fiscal benefits of sovereignty without immediately constructing a costly district bureaucracy. Existing officers knew pargana accounts, landed families, cesses, arrears and local bargaining conventions. Yet this arrangement also created ambiguity about responsibility. Company officials increasingly demanded higher, more regular remittances while local officers remained the visible face of collection. Complaints of corruption or oppression could therefore be directed downward even when the fiscal pressure originated at a higher level. 54.6 Revenue became inseparable from the Company’s fiscal-military needs The Company was simultaneously merchant, army employer and territorial revenue claimant. Land revenue could finance troops, administration and the purchase of export goods. This altered the political economy of collection. Under an Indian court, revenue also sustained armies and elites, but the Company’s corporate accounts linked territorial surplus to commercial remittance and shareholder expectations in a distinctive way. Contemporary debates repeatedly returned to the expected “surplus” of Bengal and Bihar. 561561 GAJENDRA THAKUR The pressure to know, assess and regularise the countryside was therefore not merely an administrative preference; it was tied to the financial architecture of Company expansion. 54.7 Commercial privilege and fiscal sovereignty reinforced each other The Company had entered eastern India as a trading corporation. Once it obtained Diwani authority, its commercial and territorial roles became intertwined. Control of customs disputes, saltpetre and opium procurement, advances to producers and the financing of Company investments interacted with land- revenue flows. The precise impact varied by commodity and district, but the structural point is clear: the same institution that claimed public revenue also possessed powerful private and corporate commercial interests. This dual position affected bargaining with merchants, zamindars and officials and helped transform the balance of power within regional markets. 54.8 The 1769 supervisors marked a first attempt to see inside the districts By 1769 the Company had become dissatisfied with indirect fiscal management and appointed European “Supervisors.” Their mandate was broader than simply checking cash receipts. They were to investigate the history and productive capacity of districts, existing demands on cultivators, collection practices, commerce and justice. In practice they remained dependent on interpreters, Indian clerks and local revenue knowledge. Yet the office signalled a new administrative ambition: to turn the countryside into an object of systematic information. Surveying revenue relations became a technique of rule even before the Company possessed the staff to control them directly. Figure 213 — Agrarian mediation before and during the Company transition 54.9 The Patna Revenue Council brought Bihar under a new supervisory centre In 1770 a Revenue Council was established at Patna for Bihar. This was a significant institutional step because it created a provincial node through which Company servants could supervise the older revenue machinery. The council did not eliminate dependence on Indian agents, but it concentrated correspondence and review. Patna’s older role as administrative and commercial centre now acquired a specifically colonial fiscal function. The shift also helps explain why later district histories of Tirhut, Saran and other parts of north Bihar repeatedly refer to orders and supervision emanating from Patna during the transitional years. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II 54.10 Tirhut reveals how experimental the early district system was The administrative history preserved for Tirhut is unusually revealing. European supervision appeared after 1769; in 1771 a European Collector was appointed in Tirhut, but the experiment did not last. In 1772 control shifted again under the Provincial Council at Patna and the new five-year revenue settlement. Later annual settlements also proved unstable, and direct European collectorship was restored in 1782. Such reversals show that the Company did not arrive with a finished district system. It tested competing arrangements because it did not yet know how to convert nominal assessments into reliable revenue without destroying the local structures on which collection depended. 54.11 Bhagalpur shows both information failure and fiscal leakage The Bhagalpur–Rajmahal corridor followed a different sequence. An English Supervisor based at Rajmahal was appointed at the end of 1769. Later district records state that when the Company assumed direct revenue management in 1772, substantial sums from Bhagalpur, Colgong and Chhai were found to have been unaccounted for over preceding years. Whatever the exact mechanisms, the episode demonstrates why Company officials increasingly equated better knowledge with higher revenue security. It also shows the weakness of treating the 1765 Diwani as equivalent to effective local control: legal entitlement and actual remittance could be far apart. 54.12 Monghyr and Anga exposed the limits of paper sovereignty The Mughal sarkar of Monghyr covered a large and uneven territory, including areas where Company control was weak and some zamindars remained difficult to subordinate. Later revenue analysis described portions as refractory or imperfectly explored. This should not be read as evidence of an empty administrative space; rather, it indicates that claims made in imperial revenue lists exceeded the practical reach of successive states. Company expansion in the Anga zone therefore required negotiation, coercion and new information. A uniform fiscal policy encountered riverine lowlands, forest-edge tracts, zamindari strongholds and shifting jurisdictional boundaries. 54.13 The famine of 1770 was a severe test of the transitional regime The famine of 1770 belongs to the fuller history of scarcity in Chapter 58, but it cannot be omitted from the remaking of agrarian relations. Contemporary and later district records from Bihar describe crop failure, distress, ruined zamindars and impoverished raiyats. The crisis exposed the dangers of rigid revenue expectations when agricultural output collapsed. It also sharpened debates over responsibility: who should remit, reduce or enforce collections, and who possessed reliable information about local conditions? The famine did not by itself create later revenue policy, but it revealed the human and fiscal costs of governing through imperfect knowledge and competing authorities. 54.14 In 1772 the Company decided to “stand forth as Diwan” Orders from the Court of Directors instructed the Bengal government to take the entire care and management of revenue into Company hands. Warren Hastings implemented the change in 1772. The revenue headquarters were shifted toward Calcutta, supervisors were redesignated as Collectors, and a Committee of Circuit travelled through districts to make settlements. This was a major constitutional and administrative step. The Company ceased pretending that Indian deputies alone were responsible for fiscal outcomes and made its own servants visibly accountable for revenue management, even though those servants still depended heavily on Indian record-keepers and intermediaries. 563563 GAJENDRA THAKUR 54.15 The Committee of Circuit turned assessment into a travelling inquiry The Committee of Circuit was designed to inspect districts and settle their revenues on the spot. Its work combined inquiry, negotiation and fiscal ambition. Officials sought to discover the “real” resources of estates and parganas, but the information available to them came through interested parties: zamindars, amils, bankers, farmers, clerks and cultivators. The result was not a neutral measurement of agricultural capacity. It was a contest over knowledge. Every estimate of assets and cultivation could affect who obtained a farm, what assessment was imposed and which claims were recognised. 54.16 The quinquennial settlement changed the incentives of collection The five-year settlement of 1772–1777 frequently awarded revenue farms to the highest bidders. In theory competition would reveal the true fiscal capacity of an estate and secure a predictable payment to government. In practice speculative bids could exceed what cultivation and rents could sustain. Some old zamindars retained their areas by bidding; others were displaced by revenue farmers or agents backed by commercial capital. When a farmer’s contractual obligation was fixed at an unrealistic level, the incentive was to extract quickly from subordinate landholders and raiyats or to default and abandon the farm. 54.17 Zamindars were neither simply abolished nor already modern landlords The transitional decades are easily distorted by later legal categories. Zamindars before 1793 possessed important hereditary, fiscal and political claims, but the Company had not yet defined them as the kind of proprietary landlords created by the Permanent Settlement. Under the 1772 experiment, some were bypassed in favour of revenue farmers; others acted as farmers themselves; dispossessed zamindars could receive allowances. Their position was therefore unstable. The crucial question was not whether they were “owners” in a modern sense, but what bundle of collection rights, local authority and hereditary claims the state would recognise. 54.18 Raiyats faced changing collectors more quickly than changing cultivation For cultivators, the most immediate changes were often not new crops or technologies but new layers of demand and uncertainty. A raiyat might encounter the same village headmen and patwari while the person entitled to collect above them changed from a zamindar to a revenue farmer or khas manager. Short leases encouraged some intermediaries to prioritise immediate extraction over long-term cultivation. At the same time, cultivators were not passive. They could conceal assets, move, negotiate, resist illegal cesses, appeal to officials or exploit rivalry among collectors. Agrarian relations remained a field of bargaining, though the Company increasingly sought to discipline that bargaining through written engagements. 54.19 Indian fiscal expertise remained indispensable The language of “direct” Company management can mislead if it suggests that European Collectors themselves knew every field, rent roll and customary due. Qanungos preserved fiscal precedents and local records; patwaris maintained village accounts; amils and diwans understood collection routines; bankers advanced funds and transmitted remittances. European officials depended on these actors to translate both language and institutions. The transition therefore produced hybrid administration. Colonial power lay increasingly in appointment, review, coercion and audit, while much everyday knowledge continued to be generated by Indian personnel. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II 54.20 Arrears linked fiscal pressure to credit and coercion Revenue was due on a schedule even when harvests, prices and local collection were uncertain. This made arrears a central problem. Zamindars and farmers borrowed to meet instalments; bankers and moneyed intermediaries became important in the fiscal chain; failure could lead to removal, confinement, khas management or reassignment. At lower levels, attempts to recover arrears could be passed onto raiyats through enhanced rents and cesses. The Company thus transformed agrarian relations partly by making punctual remittance to a distant treasury a dominant test of administrative success. 54.21 The failure of the five-year experiment led to shorter settlements The quinquennial settlement produced defaults, complaints and administrative criticism. When it expired, the Company moved toward annual or short-term settlements, sometimes with zamindars and sometimes with farmers. Tirhut’s later administrative history records annual settlements from the late 1770s into the 1780s. Shorter terms reduced the government’s exposure to a bad long contract but created another problem: uncertainty for those managing estates. The search for reliable revenue thus oscillated between flexibility and stability, with no consensus yet on the correct duration or on the proper person with whom government should settle. 54.22 Tirhut’s restored collectorship in 1782 shows continuing uncertainty The restoration of a European Collector in Tirhut in 1782, with François Grand among the early office- holders, demonstrates that the Company was still redesigning its administrative map well after the 1772 reforms. The Collector had to determine assessments, enforce payments and work through local intermediaries across a large and ecologically varied region. Difficulties of realisation remained significant. The episode matters because later colonial districts can look retrospectively inevitable; in the 1780s they were experimental institutions whose authority, staffing and territorial reach were still being negotiated. Figure 214 — Regional administrative transition in Tirhut, Bhagalpur–Rajmahal and Monghyr 54.23 Bhagalpur’s collectorate linked fiscal administration to frontier governance Bhagalpur’s early Company administration developed at the meeting point of Ganga commerce, settled agrarian zones and hill-frontier politics. A separate collectorate emerged during the late 1770s, with Augustus 565565 GAJENDRA THAKUR Cleveland becoming a prominent Collector from 1779. His later reputation is associated especially with relations with hill communities, but for agrarian history the important point is institutional: revenue, policing, frontier negotiation and district knowledge were becoming concentrated in the Collector’s office. The colonial district was not merely a tax jurisdiction; it was becoming an integrated territorial apparatus. 54.24 Revenue experiments altered local political competition Auctions and short settlements created openings for men with cash, credit and official connections to compete with hereditary landed families. Some bidders were substantial merchants or banians; others were agents acting behind nominal farmers. Old zamindars in turn used kinship, armed followings, petitions and local influence to defend their positions. Company revenue policy therefore redistributed opportunities within rural elites even before 1793. The result was not simply the rise of one new class, but intensified competition among hereditary landholders, revenue entrepreneurs, bankers, officials and village-level controllers. 54.25 Revenue administration and justice became increasingly entangled The Company’s fiscal authority generated disputes over possession, rent, arrears, cesses and succession. During the transitional period the boundary between revenue and judicial business was unstable. Supervisors and Collectors handled complaints while provincial councils and newly reorganised courts altered channels of appeal. This mattered socially because the forum in which a dispute was heard could shape whose records and testimony were decisive. The Company’s attempt to separate and regularise judicial functions was therefore also part of agrarian transformation: land relations became progressively more textual, litigable and reviewable by colonial institutions. 54.26 The production of records was itself a form of agrarian intervention The new regime demanded histories of districts, lists of estates, accounts of produce, customary cesses, rent rolls, boundaries and arrears. These records were not merely descriptive. Once entered into a Collector’s register or settlement paper, a claim could acquire new administrative weight. Conversely, rights that were customary but poorly documented could become vulnerable. The Company’s growing archive therefore helped transform fluid relationships into categories legible to government. Later colonial surveys would intensify this process, but its roots are visible in the supervisory and settlement experiments of the 1760s– 1780s. 54.27 Territorial revenue financed an expanding colonial political economy Land revenue did not remain inside the district from which it was collected. It entered a wider Company system that supported civil establishments, armies, debt service and commercial investments. This changed the scale at which agrarian surplus was mobilised. Bihar’s cultivators and landed intermediaries were connected through the treasury to military campaigns and export procurement far beyond Bihar. The relationship between village production and imperial finance thus became more direct, even though the actual path of money still passed through many intermediaries and often depended on merchant credit. 54.28 By the 1780s the problem was no longer whether to rule, but how The experiments since 1765 convinced Company officials that they could not simply collect revenue through inherited arrangements without defining their own administrative principles. Yet they disagreed sharply about the solution. Should revenue be farmed competitively? Should hereditary zamindars be HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II preferred? How should productive capacity be estimated? What term would encourage improvement without sacrificing state income? Debates involving officials such as Philip Francis, John Shore and later Cornwallis turned local difficulties into theories of property and political economy. The countryside of Bengal and Bihar became the testing ground for a colonial doctrine of agrarian governance. 54.29 The decennial settlement was an endpoint of experimentation, not yet the Permanent Settlement By the late 1780s Company policy moved toward longer settlements and greater reliance on zamindars. The Decennial Settlement beginning in 1789 represented an attempt to stabilise assessments and landed authority after two decades of short-term changes. It became the immediate institutional bridge to the Permanent Settlement of 1793. Yet the two should not be collapsed. At the moment of decennial settlement the permanence of the arrangement was still a policy question. Chapter 55 therefore begins where this chapter ends: with the conversion of a decade-long settlement into a perpetual one and the new legal architecture of landed property. Figure 215 — Evidence firewall for the Company transition 54.30 Conclusion: Company rule remade agrarian relations through institutions before it fixed property law Between 1757 and 1793 the East India Company transformed from a privileged merchant into the principal territorial revenue authority of Bengal and Bihar. In Mithila, Vajji and Anga this transition appeared through Patna’s revenue councils, Tirhut’s shifting collectorates, Rajmahal–Bhagalpur supervision, the uneven fiscal geography of Monghyr, revenue farms, annual settlements, expanding archives and new channels of appeal. Much older personnel and practice survived, but they operated under changing incentives and a new sovereign claimant. The Permanent Settlement did not create colonial agrarian relations from nothing; it attempted to freeze and legalise a field already profoundly reorganised by three decades of fiscal experiment. Table 54.1 — Administrative phases in the remaking of agrarian relations, 1757–1793 Phase Administrative arrangement Agrarian significance 567567 GAJENDRA THAKUR Phase Administrative arrangement Agrarian significance 1757–1765 Company political and military leverage older revenue institutions continue; without general Diwani Company influence expands before direct fiscal sovereignty 1765–1769 Diwani with revenue collection largely new sovereign claimant overlays through Indian officers existing zamindars, amils, qanungos and village records 1769–1772 European Supervisors; Patna Revenue systematic information gathering Council; early district experiments and closer Company oversight enter the countryside 1772–1777 Company “stands forth as Diwan”; competitive farms and written Committee of Circuit; quinquennial engagements destabilise some revenue farming hereditary intermediaries and intensify short-term extraction incentives 1777–1789 annual / short settlements; changing continued experimentation with councils and collectors zamindars, farmers, khas management and district offices 1789–1793 Decennial Settlement and debate over attempt to stabilise landed authority permanence and assessment; immediate bridge to Chapter 55’s Permanent Settlement