Abstract
Annual inundations leading either to the alluviation of new land or the diluviation of existing land was a chief characteristic of the mid-Gangetic plains. This “unepisodic” nature of fluvial ecology, unlike more violent and disruptive ones such as floods, raised several issues related to the adjustment and measurement of land, settlement, revenue, property, and not least, farming. These flexible and movable agrarian lands, locally called diaras or churs, presented the colonial state with a grave problem, as revenue and agrarian policies were based on “permanence”. This chapter takes up the themes of law and measurement to show how the colonial state came to deal with this peculiar ecological situation. In so doing, the chapter argues that the colonial approach was far from homogenous. The ideological thinking among the revenue bureaucracy remained vertically divided, while the legal interventions, which professed to follow local customs, provided the context for further complications and litigations.
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Notes
- 1.
Richard Clarke, ed., The Regulations of the Government of Fort William in Bengal, in Force at the End of 1853, 3 vols. (London , 1854), 2: 748.
- 2.
Ibid., 2: 749.
- 3.
H. G. Hamilton to xxx, 20 April 1835, Monghyr Collector Khas Mehal Correspondence [hereafter MCKMC], 1835, Bihar State Archives, Patna .
- 4.
A full length treatment of this can be found in Nitin Sinha, “Fluvial Landscape and the State: Property and the Gangetic Diaras in Colonial India, 1790s–1890s”, Environment and History, 20 (2014): 209–237.
- 5.
Extract of a Letter from the Officiating Deputy Secretary to the Government, Territorial Department, 2 November 1830, in Circular Orders of the Sudder Board of Revenue at the Presidency of Fort William, ed. William Peters (Calcutta : Baptist Mission Press, 1838) 164, [Hereafter CO].
- 6.
Peters, CO, no. CLXXVII, 286–87.
- 7.
Ibid. p. 287.
- 8.
Christopher V. Hill, “Water and Power: Riparian Legislation and Agrarian Control in Colonial Bengal,” Environmental History Review 14, no. 4 (1990): 18.
- 9.
Ibid., 10–14.
- 10.
This theme has been dealt with in some length in Nitin Sinha, “Law, Agro-Ecology and Colonialism in mod-Gangetic India, 1770s–1910s”, in Gunnel Cederlof and Sanjukta Das Gupta, Subjects, Citizens and Law. Colonial and Postcolonial India (Routledge, 2016).
- 11.
March was already late for this work, as Hamilton mentions in his letter dated 2 March 1835. H. G. Hamilton to xxx, 2 March 1835, MCKMC, 1835.
- 12.
During the settlement of Bhownundpore, the deputy collector did not test the measurements carried out by ameens (native revenue officials involved in measuring the land and proposing an assessment) because the hot season had already begun. This happened because ameens were not appointed before mid-January, a matter on which the commissioner expressed regret. Commissioner’s Order, 16 July 1869, Monghyr ’s Collector Settlement Letter Received, 1867–71, Bihar State Archives, Patna [hereafter, MCSLR].
- 13.
This observation, made by Hamilton, must be viewed with caution. In certain areas of Monghyr, where he travelled in 1835, rabi (winter) crops were important. The quality of soil found in diaras also yielded inferior rabi crops. Lewis Sydney Steward O’Malley, Bihar and Orissa District Gazetteers: Monghyr , rev. ed. (New Delhi : Logos Press, 2007), 99. O’Malley also mentioned that, as the most fertile lands, diaras produced “fine bhadoi crops before the river rises and good rabi crops in the cold weather.” Ibid., 89–90.
- 14.
H. G. Hamilton to xxx, 14 April 1835, MCKMC, 1835.
- 15.
Writing in the late nineteenth century, Baden-Powell, one of the leading British officials to have studied and produced monographs on the revenue history of India, summed up the role of measurement in the most explicit way. According to him, the settlement must start with “a complete survey of the land, involving a preliminary demarcation of the necessary boundary lines; because without that, neither can there be an exact account of the culturable land, and the extent of each kind of soil which requires a different rate of assessment; nor can there be any correct record of the rights of all parties, landlord, co-sharer, sub-proprietor, occupancy-tenant, or whatever they are, in case the system requires a record of rights.” The other two reasons why surveys were essential were, first, to have a correct list of revenue payers and their holdings, and second, to ascertain the valuation of land and revenue rates. Baden Henry Baden-Powell, Administration of Land Revenue and Tenure in British India, 2nd ed. (Delhi: Ess Ess Publications, 1978), 147–8 (emphasis original).
- 16.
First name Nisbet to xxx, 17 February 1836, MCSLR, 1834–36.
- 17.
H. G. Hamilton to xxx, 22 February 1836, MCSLR, 1834–36.
- 18.
First name Wells to xxx, 12 May 1834, MCSLR, 1834–36.
- 19.
First name Nisbet to xxx, 17 February 1836, MCSLR, 1834–36.
- 20.
He had measured the talooqa Nundlalpore in pargana Pharkiya in Monghyr in 1825. According to O’Malley, the first “professional survey” was carried out in this pargana by Lieutenant Egerton between 1835–38. It is interesting to note that O’Malley did not even mention Tanner’s survey, which was probably not “scientific” enough. O’Malley, Monghyr, 163.
- 21.
First name Wells to xxx, 12 May 1834, MCSLR.
- 22.
Extract from the Address of the Sudder Board to the Government, 29 March 1836, in Peters, CO, 533–35.
- 23.
Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State, and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chapter “Living with Hazard: Disaster Subcultures, Disaster Cultures, and Risk-Mitigating Strategies”.
- 24.
Ibid., 37.
- 25.
Hill, “Water and Power,” 11.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
“Settlement of Diara Lands in North Bihar ,” files nos. 24-S/6 (1896) and 24-S/4 (1897), Revenue Department (Land), Government of Bengal, BSA.
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Sinha, N. (2017). Measuring “Disaster”: The “Everydayness” of Fluvial Landscapes and the Colonial State in Gangetic Diaras, 1790s–1880s. In: Schenk, G. (eds) Historical Disaster Experiences. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49163-9_18
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