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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
It has been customary to view the effects of the British annexation of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces (1801–3) in terms of an abrupt caesura. Upon the whirling anarchy of the North Indian scene there suddenly fell the Pax Britannica. A political revolution was worked almost overnight. The tide of Sikh expansion was checked and turned back, Jat power penned in Bharatpur, Sindhia driven across the Chambal to his matchless rock citadel at Gwalior, and the Oudh nawabi stripped of its Doab, Rohilkhand and eastern districts. The second line of the political elite could not long survive this dismantling of the superior political structure. Although, at first, expediency impelled the use of large-scale intermediaries, the assertiveness of British rule and its hunger for revenue could tolerate no more than could the Mughals the existence of tall poppies along the principal strategic highway of its power between Benares and Delhi; and on their part the number of magnates capable of keeping their footing and making the rapid adjustment from warlordism to estate management were few indeed. Within two decades of 1801 a large proportion of the established magnates had been swept from the scene, and the remainder were finding that the sun of official favour had gone down while it was yet day.
This paper was originally presented at the Director's study group on ‘India: Society in War, 1795–1808’, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 1974.
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19 ‘Report on the Moquddumee Biswahdaree Settlement of Pergunnah Barah, Zillah Allahabad’, by Temple, R., 9 December 1850, Sels. Rec. Govt. N.W.P. Part XXVII (Agra, 1856), art. 15, pp. 400ff.Google Scholar
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33 In the four districts of Benares, Ghazipur, Jaunpur and Ballia, Chhattris owned in 1886 some 41 per cent of the land, their hold varying from a quater in Ghazipur to three-quaters in Ballia; Orders of Government, Resolution, 15 June 1889 p. 8Google Scholar, printed as Appendix to Ghazipur S.R. 1880–85 (Allahabad, 1886), and to the remaining district settlement reports of similar date.Google Scholar
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41 The Dobhi Raghubansis numbered some 14,500 in a district population of 1,203,000, District Gaz. U.P., Vol. XXVIII, Jaunpur (1908), p. 80.Google Scholar The Lakhnesar Sengars were merely 8,538 in a pargana population of 52,733, Ballia S.R. 1882–85 (Allahabad, 1886), p. 71. These were the densely-settled communities; ordinary proprietary bodies were very much smaller.Google Scholar
42 Hasting's remarks are cited in the account of the revenue history of the old Benares province in Jaunpur S.R. 1877–86, p. 161. It is noticeable that Sheolal Dube did succeed not in ousting the old proprietors but in locating inferior cultivators in the turbulent Badlapur taluq of Jaunpur. Cohn in Frykenberg, , Land Control, pp. 110–11.Google Scholar For Wilton, Oldham's demand, see W. Oldham, Tenant Right and Auction Sales in Ghazeepoor and the Province of Benares (Privately printed, Dublin, 1873), p. 9.Google Scholar
43 Ballia S.R., p. 4. How this was carried out where no strong clan system survived is to be seen in the Ballia pargana which was broken up into a number of small taluqs and settlements made with local petty notables.Google Scholar
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52 I have dealt with this point in a paper delivered at the XXIX Congress of Orientalists in Paris, July 1973, entitled ‘Privileged Land Tenure in Village India in the Early Nineteenth Century’Google Scholar, to be published in Frykenberg, R. E. (ed.), Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia (University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar
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