(a) Explain how the Permanent Settlement initiated a rule of property in Bengal and what were its consequences ? (20 marks) (b)…

(a) The Permanent Settlement and a rule of property in Bengal

Before 1793, Mughal and early Company revenue administration treated zamindars as holders of hereditary rights or local proprietary claims, not as mere tax collectors; their status varied by region. Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement of 1793 converted the revenue assignment into a hereditary proprietary right. The zamindar became a landlord with a fixed, perpetual revenue obligation to the Company, while the right to collect rent from cultivators became his private property. This created a rule of property because the state no longer managed land through fluctuating assignments; it recognised a class of proprietors whose title rested on a fixed demand. Ranajit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) traces the idea to Philip Francis and physiocratic thought, which expected secure private property to produce an improving landlord class on the English model. The settlement also led to sub-infeudation: zamindars created patnidars and other intermediate tenure-holders to secure rent, producing a long chain of intermediaries.

The consequences were structural. Agriculture became more commercial as landlords sought cash rents and market crops. Absentee landlordism grew, especially in districts such as Burdwan, where zamindars lived away from estates and relied on agents. Peasants suffered from high rents, insecurity, and immiseration, especially after Regulation VII of 1799 let zamindars distrain tenants’ property, and their occupancy rights were recognised only with the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885. The sunset law, under which estates were auctioned if revenue was not paid by the deadline, caused a large share of the old estates to change hands in the first two decades, transferring land to Calcutta merchants and officials. Historians such as Rajat Ray and Sugata Bose also show that rich peasant jotedars, rather than zamindars, often controlled the village economy, so the settlement’s impact was uneven. Over time, fixed revenue and landlord extraction discouraged investment, contributing to agrarian stagnation.

(b) Western education: awakening or hegemony

Western education had a dual character. Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, emerging from the Anglicist-Orientalist debate, promoted English as the medium of instruction to create a class “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” This was colonial hegemony: English education functioned as an ideological apparatus, as Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest argues, producing clerks, lawyers and interpreters who legitimised British rule and connected the colony to metropolitan culture.

Yet the same education also became a harbinger of cultural awakening. It created a Bengali middle class, a vernacular press, associations, and reform movements, which spread further after Wood’s Despatch (1854) and the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras (1857). Raja Rammohan Roy used English and legal knowledge to campaign against Sati, while Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar led the campaign for widow remarriage, later reflected in the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856. The press and associations gave this class a public space to critique social customs and colonial policy. However, the awakening remained limited because English education was expensive, urban, and disconnected from the masses, and the class it produced often served colonial administrative interests.

(c) The Company as an Indian ruler after the Diwani

After acquiring Diwani in 1765, the East India Company began to function like an Indian ruler. Clive’s arrangement produced a dual government, 1765-1772, in which the Company collected revenue while the nawab retained nominal authority, and the Company paid the Mughal emperor an annual tribute of 26 lakh rupees as his diwan. The Company assumed nawabi functions: it maintained an army, conducted diplomatic correspondence, and exercised judicial administration, often through existing Mughal forms. It adopted Persian as a court language, used local titles, and maintained revenue-farming continuity by relying on zamindars, jotedars and amils, while qanungos remained hereditary record-keepers of revenue and land records. This mimicry gave the Company legitimacy and administrative efficiency, but its real purpose was subordination to British commercial interests. After 1772, when Warren Hastings announced that the Company would 'stand forth as diwan' and his judicial plan applied Hindu and Muslim law through pandits and maulvis, the paradox deepened: it ruled as an Indian sovereign in form, but as a colonial trading power in substance.