(a) Explain how the Permanent Settlement initiated a rule of property in Bengal and what were its consequences ? (20 marks)
(b) Was the Western education a harbinger of cultural awakening or an instrument of colonial hegemony ? Discuss. (20 marks)
(c

Question

(a) Explain how the Permanent Settlement initiated a rule of property in Bengal and what were its consequences ? (20 marks)
(b) Was the Western education a harbinger of cultural awakening or an instrument of colonial hegemony ? Discuss. (20 marks)
(c) Can you explain how, after acquiring Diwani, the government of the East India Company functioned like 'an Indian ruler' ? (10 marks)

UPSC Answer Check · Accepted Answer

The British rule in Bengal was built on three linked mechanisms: a new property order, an English-language class, and a Company that ruled through Indian forms.

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. The settlement also led to sub-infeudation: zamindars created jotedars and intermediate tenants to secure rent, producing a jotedar-tenant hierarchy.

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, while in regions such as Birbhum, where peasant resistance and weaker landlord control persisted, the settlement’s impact was uneven. Over time, fixed revenue and landlord extraction discouraged investment, contributing to agrarian stagnation.

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. 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.

The Company as an Indian ruler
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. 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 the Company took direct control of civil administration, the paradox deepened: it ruled as an Indian sovereign in form, but as a colonial trading power in substance.

In conclusion, the Permanent Settlement created property-based extraction, Western education produced a culturally awakened yet colonial-dependent class, and the Company’s Indian-style rule masked commercial domination. Together they show that British power in Bengal was not merely military conquest but an integrated system of economic, cultural and administrative control.

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

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