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Between qanungos and clerks: the cultural and service worlds of Hindustan's pensmen, c. 1750–18501

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2014

HAYDEN BELLENOIT
HAYDEN BELLENOIT*
Affiliation:
Department of History, US Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland 21402, USA Email: bellenoi@usna.edu
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Abstract

This paper argues that our understanding of the transition to colonialism in South Asia can be enriched by examining the formation of revenue collection systems in north India between 1750 and 1850. It examines agrarian revenue systems not through the prism of legalism or landholding patterns, but by looking at the paper and record-based mechanisms by which wealth was actually extracted from India's hinterlands. It also examines the Kayastha pensmen who became an exponentially significant component of an Indo-Muslim revenue administration. They assisted the extension of Mughal revenue collection capabilities as qanungos (registrars) and patwaris (accountants). The intensity of revenue assessment, extraction and collection had increased by the mid 1700s, through the extension of cultivation and assessment by regional Indian kingdoms. The East India Company, in its agrarian revenue settlements in north India, utilized this extant revenue culture to push through savage revenue demands. These Kayastha pensmen thus furnished the ‘young’ Company with the crucial skills, physical records, and legitimacy to garner the agrarian wealth which would fund Britain's Indian empire. These more regular patterns of paper-oriented administration engendered a process of ‘bureaucratization’ and the emergence of the modern colonial state.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , July 2014 , pp. 872 - 910
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

1

The author is grateful to Richard Abels, Ram Advani, Ian Barrow, Chris Bayly, Thomas Brennan, Nandini Chatterjee, Faisal Devji, Michael Dodson, Sanchari Duttta, Nancy Ellenberger, Justin Jones, Shruti Kapila, Karen Leonard, Dilip Menon, Richard Ruth, Lee Pennington, Ernest Tucker, Aparna Vaidik and David Washbrook, all of whom provided gentle guidance and constructive feedback. Raj and Naheed Verma generously opened their home to my curiosity, whilst Vibhuti Rai and his father, Sri Sampal Rai taught me more about Kayasthas than I could imagine and provided a very valuable family history. Ram Advani in Lucknow has been a true and gracious gentleman in linking me up with the city's Kayasthas and in Lucknow's environs. My wife, Sara, corrected my fumbling Persian (mis)translations and long put up with my ‘Kayastha rambles’. To her this research is dedicated.

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139 Ibid; E. Cuthbert, Allahabad, 29 October 1806, CCPRP, P/91/20, IOL for the cases of Munu Lal, who as qanungo of Cuttah earned an astonishing annual Rs. 4,800.

140 J. Routledge, Bareli, 30 December 1806, CCPRP, P/90/55, IOL.

141 M. Bane, Tirhut, 18 February 1820, BRP, P/112/46, IOL.

142 Shakespear, Selections, pp. 236–237. It is difficult to ascertain whether Duncan made Akbar's policy in the 1580s a precedent which established 2-salaried qanungos per pargana. See Habib, Agrarian System, pp. 331–335.

143 Shakespear, Selections, pp. 236–237.

144 C. Dumbleton, Kanpur, 10 July 1807, CCPRP, P/91/20, IOL.

145 C. Dumbleton, Kanpur, 10 July 1807, CCPRP, P/91/20, IOL.

146 Ibid.

147 H. Elliot, Memoirs, pp. 36–103.

148 Mss. of Sri Sampal Rai, ‘Sri Ganeshya Nam’, 1915, p. 5, in author's possession.

149 Ibid., p. 6.

150 Ibid., p. 8.

151 Sri Sampal Rai, Lucknow, 2006.

152 ‘Sri Ganeshya Nam’, p. 8.

153 The author is grateful to Mr Alok Sinha, IAS, Lucknow, who brought this to my attention.

154 ‘Sri Ganeshya Nam’, pp. 5–8.

155 ‘Kayastha World’, in Kayastha Samachar (Allahabad: Kayastha Pathshala, 1901), p. 63.

156 Ibid. It was only in the late nineteenth century that ‘Kayastha’ became a caste category, as seen in the work of Kali Prasad's Kayastha Samachar and Krishna Sahay's Kayastha ethnography. See Kayastha Samchar, which started in 1873 as an Urdu publication and converted to English in 1899. Prasad, The Kayastha Ethnology for the beginnings of the usage of Kayastha as a ‘caste’ category.

157 Ulrike Stark has cast doubt on whether Kishore was a Kayastha, but ‘Kayastha’ may be understood better as a category of functionality before the 1880s. See Stark, U., Empire of Books (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), pp. 140–145Google Scholar.

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