Dadabhai Naoroji in his letter of 4 January 1881 to the under-secretary of state for India protested that the “actual heaviness of the weight of revenue on India is quite two-and-a-half times as much as that on England”. Out of the 65 million sterling taken as revenue from British India’s revenue of around 300 million sterling, Naoroji estimated that 30-40 million “are never returned to the people, but are eaten up in the country, and taken away out of the country”. This, he pointed out, was in contrast to the 83 million sterling (revenue in England on a much larger income base of nearly a billion sterling) of which “every farthing returns, in some shape or other, to the people themselves”.
Naoroji’s concerns had been preceded in 1818 by the Board of Revenue in Madras presidency (the East India Company period) which described the “numerous abuses of every description” for the “purposes of realising the collections from the lands”. That the Board’s apprehensions were brushed aside became known, years later, thanks to a UK House of Commons debate in 1854 that mentioned widespread use of torture in the realisation of land revenue in Madras presidency.
But the Board of Revenue’s written statement of concern gave us a very valuable clue indeed about the nature of the change that the British occupation had administratively wrought, for it added that in pursuit of a system of land rent for the purpose of ‘improving’ the lot of the people, “we find them dissolving the ancient ties, the ancient usages which united the republic of each Hindu village, and by a kind of agrarian law, newly assessing and parcelling out the lands which from time immemorial had belonged to the Village Community collectively.”
It is this—over 130 years after Naoroji laid waste to the British propaganda of ruling India fairly and equitably—which is at the heart of the agrarian distress that in 2018 and 2019 lent fuel to a socio-political opposition front, and which is ignorant about the history of distress.
The connection is not intuitive to make, due in no small part to the slant of historiography which surrounded the subject during the British era (famines and plantations) and then during the transfer of power years and independent India (poverty and food shortages). Yet the evidence has been there, because what has to be looked for is not the cultivator and his practices, but the social and cultural basis in which the cultivator applied his knowledge.
This change accompanied the change in what K M Munshi called the ‘Aryavarta-consciousness’ of India, threatened by the Hunas in the sixth century, and the Arab invasion of Sindh in the eighth century. In the 10th century, Mahmud of Ghazni brought here the total war of the central Asian regions. But more was to follow— Muhammad of Ghor, the Delhi Sultanate and the successor states in Gujarat, Khandesh, Malwa, Jaunpur, Bengal and Sindh.
They brought, with them and in their wake, a continuous stream of foreign mercenaries and freebooters from what we today know as nearer and farther central and western Asia. P M Joshi, the erstwhile Director of Archives in Bombay, had explained that the Bahmani kings made it a policy to employ pardesi (foreign) adventurers freely in their army. A number of these foreigners came for trade and found it to their advantage to take part in politics. So it was during the two centuries of Bahmani rule, as it was in the 300 hundred years after Ghazni, and as it was during the two centuries of Mughal rule. The mercenaries, who often rode in with companies of fighters, were not paid out of the treasury but given the means to support themselves comfortably, even lavishly.
What were these means? They are known to us through the titles of jagirdars, taluqdars, inamdars and watandars—the assigning of the wealth and labour of land tracts as the income of one of these freebooters, his family, cronies and hangers-on. Their creation reached a peak during the rule of Akbar, whose administration made several thousand such awards.
This was a savage overturning of the very consciousness with which our society had considered its dependence on land, indeed on nature’s gifts, and which had been practiced undisturbed until the last days of imperial Kannauj. Cultivators were never, as the British system which gleefully inherited that of the Mughals insisted, individuals whose land working must be assessed, each separately. In pre-Islamic India, ownership of land, and claim to the wealth derived from cultivation of it, was a collective responsibility and not an individual right. This system still endures, in the form of the gaunkari of the Konkan, as but one example.
Forms of ownership were as varied as there were different kinds and categories of geographic sub-units, each adept at one or another crop variety. Recognising both the diversity of tenancy, of rights to cultivation and of land ownership between gramas, and the fundamental collective swarajya which underlay the village socio-economic organisation, the Hindu empires, following the codes given in our Dharmashastras, assessed the out-turn of a village as a unit.
It was greed, the wrecking of the ancient agrarian law, which left the desolate penury of the village in Mughal India to be described in the accounts of Francois Bernier and Afanasy Nikitin. The fundamental unity of India, as described in his book of the same name by Radhakumud Mookerji, lay as much in the knowledge of its far-flung sacred geography, as of its institutions—social and religious. Foremost amongst these was the very humblest, the grama and its people, neglect of which brought down all invaders.