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1 - Northern and Central India

from II - Agrarian Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Eric Stokes
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The upper Gangetic region, which today falls largely within the boundaries of Uttar Pradesh, exercised a palmary influence on the evolution of the Indian landholding system in the colonial period. Here the key-stone of the arch of the British revenue settlements was formed by the ‘village republics’, which became celebrated in the Western world through a memorable descriptive passage of Sir Charles Metcalfe, and which supplied the material from which Marx and Maine constructed their influential theories of the nature and role of the ‘Indian village community’. From the Doab or mesopotamia of the Ganges and Jumna, constituting the heart of the North-Western Provinces, the settlement system which accorded modern proprietary title to holders of jointly-owned or jointly-managed village estates was extended after 1849 as far as the vale of Peshawar when the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab came under British rule. South of the Jumna the village mahalwar system was equally influential in instituting a form of village proprietorship under very different tenurial conditions, firstly in the so-called Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, annexed in 1818, and later from 1862 throughout much of the region brought within the Central Provinces. One of the key questions which the historian has to answer is how far, in the absence of substantive technological change in agriculture, the fiscal and legal apparatus of the settlement system prompted a decisive structural alteration in agrarian society.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1983

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References

Cohn, B.S.Structural Change in Indian Rural Society, 1596–1885’, in Frykenberg, R. (ed.), Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison, Milwaukee and London, 1969).Google Scholar
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Husain, I. Land Revenue Policy in North India (Calcutta and New Delhi, 1967).
Mackenzie, Holt, Memorandum, 1 July 1819, para. 550, Selections from the Revenue Records of the N.W. Provinces 1818–1820 (Calcutta, 1866).
Mathur, J.K. The Pressure of Population: Its effects on rural economy in Gorakhpur District (Dept of Agriculture Bulletin, Allahabad, 1931).
Metcalf, T.R. Land, Landlords and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979).
Misra, B. Overpopulation in Jaunpur (Dept of Agriculture Bulletin, Allahabad, 1932).
Neale, W.C. Economic Change in Rural India: Land Tenure and Reform in Uttar Pradesh, 1800–1955 (New Haven, 1962).
Pandey, G. The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (Delhi, 1978).
Pradhan, M.C. The Political System of the Jats of Northern India (Oxford, 1966).
Roberts, D.T., Reports of the Board of Revenue on the Revenue Administration of the N.W. Provinces 1882–83 (Allahabad, 1884), Divisional Reports.
Siddiqi, A. Agrarian Change in a North Indian State: Uttar Pradesh, 1819–33 (Oxford, 1973).
Siddiqi, M.H. Agrarian Unrest in North India: The United Provinces, 1918–22 (New Delhi, 1978).
Stokes, E. The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959, repr. 1963 and 1969).
Stokes, E. The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1978).
Whitcombe, E. Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, vol. 1 (Berkeley, 1972).

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