Which one of the following statements about the situation in the Ryotwari areas is correct ?

Correct — A, (a) A large amount of land passed into the hands of the money lenders, merchants and rich peasants, who usually utilised the services of the tenants. That sentence is the standard summary of what the ryotwari settlement actually produced, as distinct from what it promised. Under ryotwari, introduced in the Madras Presidency largely through Thomas Munro and in Bombay under Elphinstone and the survey settlements that followed, the government settled the revenue directly with the individual cultivator, the ryot, and recognised him as the proprietor of his holding so long as he paid. There was no zamindar in between, and the reform was presented as making the peasant the owner of the soil. Three features of the system undid that. The demand was pitched very high — about half the net produce, and in the early Madras settlements more — leaving nothing for a bad year. It was fixed in cash and collected rigidly on the due date whatever the harvest, so the cultivator had to sell his crop at whatever price the season offered, and borrow when it was not enough. And the ownership the settlement conferred was transferable and mortgageable, which meant that for the first time the land itself could be pledged and taken. The money lender, who had previously been able to seize only the crop, could now take the field. Over the nineteenth century the holdings accumulated with money lenders, grain merchants and the richer peasants, who did not cultivate them personally but leased them back to the men who had lost them, or worked them through share-croppers and landless labour. The result was landlordism produced from below in areas designed to have none, and a cultivator who had been made an owner on paper and reduced to a tenant in fact. The rural indebtedness behind it is what exploded in the Deccan riots of 1875 in the Poona and Ahmednagar districts, when peasants attacked the money lenders' bonds and account books, and what the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act of 1879 was passed to relieve.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)Landless labourers became the land owners. — The settlement was made with the man already in occupation of the land, so the landless were never its counterparty; they were, if anything, the class it added to. Ryotwari transferred no land to anybody. It recorded an existing cultivator as proprietor, fixed a cash demand on him, and left the consequences to the market — and the market moved the land upwards, towards creditors and rich peasants, not downwards towards labourers. No colonial land revenue system anywhere in India gave land to the landless; that was attempted only after independence, through the abolition of intermediaries, tenancy legislation and ceilings on holdings, and even then unevenly. An option that has a colonial revenue settlement performing land redistribution has mistaken the purpose of the exercise, which was to secure a large and certain revenue.
• (c)It stopped the practice of leasing out land to tenants at high prices. — It encouraged the practice rather than stopping it. Once land was a saleable and mortgageable asset carrying a fixed cash charge, leasing it out became the obvious way for a non-cultivating owner to get a return, and the rents charged in the ryotwari districts were high precisely because competition for land among cultivators who had lost their own was intense. There was also no legal restraint on the rent for most of the period. Because the ryot was the recognised proprietor, whatever he did with his land was treated as his private arrangement, so the tenants under him fell outside the protective tenancy legislation that developed, slowly and imperfectly, in the permanently settled areas. The sub-tenant of a ryotwari holding was in many places the least protected cultivator in British India.
• (d)Landlordism was totally destroyed. — Landlordism was not destroyed in the ryotwari areas; it grew there, in a new form. The option also misstates the purpose of the settlement, which was not to abolish an existing landlord class but to avoid creating one in the territories acquired after the Permanent Settlement of 1793 had shown what a permanent revenue fixed on intermediaries cost the state. Where zamindars existed, ryotwari was simply not applied. What the system did instead was to manufacture a fresh class of non-cultivating proprietors out of the money lenders and rich peasants who acquired the land, so that by the end of the century a large part of the ryotwari districts was cultivated by tenants paying rent, exactly as in the zamindari districts. The word to be suspicious of here is 'totally'. This item's three wrong options are all absolutes — landless labourers 'became' owners, leasing was 'stopped', landlordism was 'totally' destroyed — and the keyed option is the only one that describes a tendency rather than a completed transformation.

The British made three broad kinds of land revenue settlement in India, and the differences between them are differences in who was recognised as the owner and with whom the state dealt. The Permanent Settlement of 1793, Cornwallis's arrangement for Bengal, Bihar and Odisha and later parts of Madras, made the zamindar the proprietor and fixed his revenue in perpetuity; the state's share could never rise, the zamindar's rent from the actual cultivators was not similarly limited, and the sunset law that sold up defaulting estates put much of Bengal's land into the hands of Calcutta purchasers. The ryotwari settlement, developed in Madras and Bombay, dealt directly with the cultivator, made him the proprietor conditionally on payment, and revised the demand periodically, commonly at thirty-year intervals, after survey. The mahalwari settlement, worked out for the North-Western Provinces from 1822 and later applied in the Punjab and parts of central India, took the village or mahal as the unit and settled the revenue with the village body jointly, collected through a headman. All three shared the features that mattered most to the cultivator: a demand far heavier than anything the pre-colonial state had taken in practice, assessed in cash, collected inflexibly, and enforced by sale of the land. The consequences were common to all three as well — indebtedness, the transfer of land to non-cultivating owners, the growth of tenancy and share-cropping, the fragmentation of holdings, and a countryside that produced famine out of commercial agriculture.

Key facts

• Under ryotwari the state settled revenue directly with the individual cultivator, who was recognised as proprietor so long as he paid; there was no intermediary.
• It was introduced chiefly in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, and later extended to Assam, Berar and Coorg.
• Thomas Munro is associated with its introduction in Madras and Mountstuart Elphinstone with the Bombay Deccan.
• The demand was pitched at about half the net produce, was fixed in cash, was collected rigidly regardless of the harvest, and was revised periodically after survey, commonly every thirty years.
• Because the holding was now transferable and mortgageable, default transferred the land itself to creditors.
• Land accumulated with money lenders, merchants and rich peasants, who leased it to tenants or worked it with share-croppers rather than cultivating it themselves.
• The Deccan riots of 1875 in the Poona and Ahmednagar districts were directed against money lenders and their bonds.
• The Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act of 1879 followed those riots and restricted the sale of a peasant's land in execution of a debt decree.

Common traps

• Reading 'no intermediary' as 'no landlord'. Ryotwari removed the zamindar and then grew a landlord class of its own out of creditors.
• Believing the ryot's proprietorship was secure. It was conditional on paying a heavy cash demand on time, and forfeiture followed default.
• Assuming a colonial settlement redistributed land. None did; the movement of land was consistently away from the cultivator.
• Choosing an option containing 'totally', 'stopped' or 'became' without asking whether any land policy of the period completed what it set out to do.
• Mixing up the geography: permanently settled Bengal, Bihar and Odisha; ryotwari Madras and Bombay; mahalwari the Ganga valley, the North-Western Provinces and the Punjab.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Ryotwari settlement in the Madras Presidency is chiefly associated with which one of the following ?

  • (a)Lord Cornwallis
  • (b)Thomas Munro
  • (c)Holt Mackenzie
  • (d)William Bentinck

  Answer(b) Thomas Munro

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act, 1879 was passed in the aftermath of which one of the following ?

  • (a)The Indigo revolt in Bengal
  • (b)The Deccan riots against money lenders
  • (c)The Pabna agrarian disturbances
  • (d)The Moplah rebellion in Malabar

  Answer(b) The Deccan riots against money lenders