Settling Permanently, A quick look into one of the most esoteric terms
“In the year 1793, Lord Cornwallis introduced the system of Permanent Settlement in Bengal.” These lines, or some variation thereof, were printed in my history textbook of 6th standard. The page had a small, grainy, black and white photo of an English man sitting upon a horse, printed upon cheap paper. The twelve year old kid, yours truly, was really confused. What was settled? Why was it settled? Settled between whom? Furthermore, the addition of the word permanent before settlement made it seem more ominous. It suggested something unchanging, immutable.
None of the answers to these questions were ever had by me at that tender age. To ask my teachers about these seemed pointless, me knowing very well that they had more important work to do. Also that they were not that interested in answering questions of a kid which was pretty unimportant seeing that you just had to remember a date and a name to get 1 marks, which could be easily enough done without regard to what in the earth actually was Permanent Settlement. I also had a thread of another thought running through my mind, that the teachers were not capable enough of answering this question, and that asking the same to them nonetheless will accomplish nothing other than invoking their ire, or worse, summary dismissal.
Fast forward a decade and a half, I took up a job as a revenue official, and while going through the various land laws, again came upon the word “Settlement”. This time around the word made sense, given my professional situation, and somewhat intuitively I had an epiphany. The words from my Class VI history book came back to me, dragged into forethought from the deep recesses of my memory from where it had lain sequestered for a long time.
To give you a brief, in land revenue related matters, settlement is the process by which land revenue is assessed and fixed, and the land revenue payable by all the land owners is determined. You can say that the exact amount of land revenue is settled as a contract between the government, which claims title and interest over all the land, and the land owners who are then bound by law to pay the revenue due on their account of use of such land.
Prior to the industrial age, land was one of the major sources of revenue to any government, and very high importance was paid to the collection of the land revenue due to the government. Land revenue officials were frequently and in most areas the only permanent representative of the government. As the duties of the government increased over time and due to administrative exigencies, these revenue officials were vested with the additional responsibilities of discharging these additional duties along with their original duty of collecting land revenue. Such was the case in India too, where the Commissioners and Collectors, whose posts had been created with a view to streamline revenue collection, were vested with so much other executive, quasi-judicial and judicial powers, that they still continue to this day discharging all these duties under these monikers, wielding vast powers, even though the amount of land revenue pales in comparison to other revenue sources the government has after industries and production have become much more profitable than agriculture owing to advancement of technology.
To come back to my original point after that lengthy digression (pardon me please, had to get that out of my system), Permanent Settlement was a system of land revenue assessment and collection introduced under the aegis of the East India Company administration led by Charles Cornwallis. Land revenue assessment was revised from earlier rates, and made permanent, that is that the land owner had to pay only a fixed amount as land revenue, irrespective of his income from the use of such land. A class of land revenue collection agents were created, called the Zamindars, who had to pay the fixed amount of land revenue in perpetuity. The directors of the Company thought that this would make it easier to predict revenue inflow and thus budget expenses and receipts, and also incentivise land owners to undertake measures to improve their land, once they were assured that any increased income from such improvement would not be taxed away by the government. This system created a multitude of problems, most of which are best left for another day.
As you may very well have guessed, the system was far from permanent. Settlements have for long been periodically revised and updated, to match the current economic conditions. Long before and most importantly after Indian independence, the land revenue system underwent major reforms and many such irregularities and unreasonable demands, and arbitrary behaviour on the part of the land revenue officials of the government were checked. Nowadays, in most areas the land revenue payable to the government each year is so low that a land owner is not even bothered about it, and vice versa the government pays almost no importance to the collection of this land revenue from each and every landholder.
Now, the only time a person has to deal with these archaic and esoteric laws is when he desires to buy a piece of land, and all these cumbersome and perplexingly worded laws hit him like a speeding locomotive with their attendant bureaucratic red tape, and frequently he is left feeling helpless and at the mercy of the Babus behind their high sounding designations.
Nonetheless, these evolution of the land laws and revenue systems are themselves interesting, telling us a lot about the priority and the outlook of both the rulers and the ruled, and sometimes, piecing all these together to understand why we are where we are and can make us understand how seemingly ancient systems and customs undergo changes and become new ones while still retaining their old flavour.
Just sometimes, they also can answer a long unanswered question by a curious kid, that what exactly was settled, and why.
