Permanent Settlement

The 'Permanent Settlement' - also known as the 'Permanent Settlement of Bengal' (Bangla: ?????????? ?????????, Chirosthayi Bandobasto) - was an agreement between the East India Company and Bengali landlords with far-reaching consequences for both agricultural methods and productivity in the Empire and the political realities of the Indian and Pakistani countryside. It was concluded in 1793, by the Company administration headed by Lord Cornwallis.

Influence of the Permanent Settlement

The Company hoped that the zamindar class would not only be a revenue-generating instrument but serve as intermediaries for the more political aspects of their rule, preserving local custom and protecting rural life from the possibly rapacious influences of its own representatives. However, this worked both ways; zamindars became a naturally conservative interest group and once British policy changed to one of reform and intervention in custom in the mid-nineteenth, they were vocal in their opposition.

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While the worst of the tax-farming excesses were countered by the introduction of the Settlement, the use of land was not part of the subject of the agreement; hence the tendency of Company officials and Indian landlords to force their tenants into plantation-style farming of cash crops like indigo and cotton rather than rice and wheat. This was a cause of many of the worst famines of the nineteenth century.

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In addition, zamindars eventually became absentee landlords, with all that that implies for neglect of investment on the land.

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Once the salient features of the Settlement were reproduced all over India - and indeed elsewhere in the Empire, including Kenya - the political structure was altered forever, with the landlord class holding much greater power than they had under the Mughals, where they were subject to oversight by a trained bureaucracy with the power to attenuate their tenure. In India, not until the first efforts towards land reform in the 1950s - still incomplete everywhere except, ironically, West Bengal - was the power of the landlord caste/class over smallholders diluted. In Pakistan, where land reform was never carried out, elections in rural areas still suffer from a tendency towards oligarchy reflecting the concentration of influence in the hands of zamindar families.

Related Topics:
Mughal - West Bengal - Zamindar

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