HISTORY II NOTES Sahil Bansal

David Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in

Colonial India’
 The author suggests that the legal ideas and the institutions are the best
way of entry into the study of the social history of the era in question.
 What is Law?
 The law may be seen to represent a set of general principles through
which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to
legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find
valuable.
 The nature of the society can be studied by the studying the nature of the
law that governed the society
 The law cannot just be studied in the courtroom
 It is important to take note of the general social context
 Effective property right in india is one of the important aspects that
washbrook is trying to look at
 There are divergent historical views about the changes that the Anglo-
Indian law brought to the role of lad and the rights relating to the land.
 Where one set of historians say that the process of change was very rapid
and radical thereby associating a lot of power with the law they say that
this happened due to the westernisation and capitalism that the solidarity
of the Indian villages was torn apart and a bourgeois culture or dominance
was established over the Indian peasantry.
 The other set of historians emphasise on the continuity of the traditional
and feudal elements in the law and question its effectiveness in the
establishment of the authority
 By looking constantly at the relationship between the law and its historical
milieu, we may be able to understand better not only its effects on society
but also, and more critically, the forces in society which moulded it.
 The permanent settlement of 1793 laid the foundation of the anglo Indian
legal system. Rule of law and the nature of property rights were its major
features
The british governments principles of State-craft:
1. Independent judiciary was set up
2. The britishers wanted to have a good relationship with the landed class
of the area hence they made a law that had incentives for the landed
class in the form of various conventions like validating the sale of
property for value, to allow the party one in the contract to go and take
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up the property of the other party if that other party to the contracts of
debt and services failed to discharge its liabilities. Scheme for Indian
transformation based on principles drawn from the british whig political
and European Physiocratic economic theory.
3. The british under their scheme to transform India wanted to promote
the existence o the private property thereby they wanted to free
individual from dead hand of the state and his property from the
taxation burden so that he can accumulate his own wealth. PRIVATE
INDIVIDUALISM
 to accomplish the aim of private individualism the british decided to cut
the taxes collected by the government right to ownership separated from
the right to collect revenue on the land role of state was limited to the
preservation of the law and order.
 British wanted the permanent settlement to be a free market

 Public Law versus Private Law:

“Whereas the public law had the intention of enlarging and safeguarding the
freedoms of the individual in the market place, and was to be made by statute
and the courts in the light of equity and policy, the personal law was meant to
limit the sphere of ‘free’ activity by prescribing the moral and community
obligations to which the individual was subject, and was to be made by the
‘discovery’ of existing customary and religious norms.”
 The personal law that the british formulated was an extremely orthodox
one it was seen as the barrier in the wa of the developments towards the
future
 It was because the british relied on the pundits for the interpretation of the
hindu law hence it was because of them that the caste system and varna
theory found a place in the law
 The hindu law started expanding to the various parts of the country it even
went to the those parts which had never known about it in the first place
and secondly had always had their own local customs and scriptures to
follow
 Example of the orthodoxy of the law : reversal of the practise of nuclear
family, the position and independence of the women declined.
 Nineteenth century came to be known as the Brahmin century of the
country
 The anglo Indian law was janus faced that is two sided :
“If the public side of the law sought to subordinate the rule of ‘Indian status’
to that of British contract and to free the individual in a world of amoral
market relations, the personal side entrenched ascriptive (caste, religious
and familial) status as the basis of individual right,”

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 The new law derived a lot from the hindu religious principle even the
definition of family was derived from a religious hindu principle.
 A huge amount of rights were propounded in relation to the holding of the
property be it the right of the heir or the right of the head of the family or
about the partition of the joint family etc.
 The free market that british wanted was deeply entangled with the family
as well. As far as the case of movable property was concerned it was
comparatively easier to exchange and transfer compared to the
immovable property like land.
 An example of the regulation that the social did in the sphere of the
property rights is the caste system regulating the right to own property
according to the caste system certain castes were not allowed to own the
property and also they were not allowed to trade. If the british would have
tried to interfere in any of such kind of practises they would have faced
bad consequences.
 Even the tax slabs were decided depending on the cast of the person
 All these social factors posed a hurdle in the carrying out of the market
activities
 The idea of the land being a right was changed to the idea of land being a
trust. This idea that evolved in the permanent settlement came as a shock
to the other communities. The examples of the community trusts that were
build are : ‘Bhaichara’ system in northern India where in the society as a
collective had a say in the rights of the individual to hi s land. In the
southern part of the country a similar example was the ‘Mirasi’ tenure
system.
 The ‘grants’ did not represent the marketable forms of landed property
 The nature of property right was very highly affected by the contradiction
that existed between the highly orthodox and conventional personal law
and highly liberating and modernising public law.
 In the first half of the 19th century the law favoured both the concept of the
private property rights and the community trust
 Division of the property into individual and the ancestral categories
 It was held that if an individual received any substantial help in his
business activities from members of his joint-family, then all his business
profits were joint-family property and fell on the ancestral side of the line.
 The more closely we try to scrutinise the freedom of the anglo Indian la the
more we become aware of its limits
 Bengal lords had an intention of bringing ‘the rule of property’ – promote
economic development – operations of open market
 The above stated aim of the rule of property was not recognised in the
legal systems, rules and institutions of the britishers

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 In the beginning the british were not so serious about their aim of bringing
the property rights under the ambit of statute and the courts:

“Stamp fees to bring a suit were pushed up to prohibitive levels: it cost Rs

1,000 in initial court charges to start an action on property worth only Rs
50,ooo.3+ The courts were denied the necessary machinery to enforce their
own decrees with the result that the great majority of suits for the execution of
decrees already obtained were ‘infructuous’. The Company state paid scant
attention to the quality of the judiciary, which tended to consist of civil
servants largely ignorant of the law but too incompetent to be given other
duties, or passed retirement age and too impecunious to live on their
pensions.”
 The judiciary at this point of time was a big failure it took extremely long
resolve cases ,people were not satisfied with the kind of decisions that
were being given
 High rate of corruption seeped in the system
 J.B. Norton said “South India existed outside the rule of law”, the inference
that can be made from this statement is that the judicial system put up by
the british was not efficient enough cater the needs of the people this is
why the people in south india resorted to out of the court settlements
 The courts defeated the purpose for which they were set up that is to
deliver justice and decide cases what they rather became were the places
for the people to put there cases into where they knew they shall hardly be
heard and hence the accussed used to roam scot free, would that case had
been heard in the panchayat a speedier justice would have been exercised
and the person would have been behind the bars hence people took cases
to the court
 The british accrued the blame of the bad condition of the judiciary to the
innate litigiousness of the Indians and the hiatus between the values of the
Indian litigants and those enshrined in the western legal system
 The public law that was made by the market only looked at the market in
particular but overlooked th eland and hence neglected any chance of
reproduction and modernisation of the agricultural base and kept it in the
same intact way
 The company established its monopolies. These monopolies it received
from the regime that had been in the country before the british came to
India opium was one of the commodities that th ebritish established their
monopoly on
 Early colonial India operated under a‘state mercantilist’ form of economy
in which the institutions of the ‘ancien regime’ were made more efficient,
brutalized and bastardized but, significantly, not dissolved.
 Both the landed property and the commerce remained under the control of
the state.
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 State had monopolies over the more valuable areas of commerce and
through these monopolies it tried to regulate the other spheres.
 Principle profits from-: salt, abkari and drug material
 Until 1830s company also had a control over the textile trade
 The company had a control on the finance and banking as well
 Open market hardly existen t
 Company used both its political and military powers to extract revenues
from the Indian economy
“Political influence and force were used to establish favourable conditions for
the production of various commodities such as indigo, opium, tea, coffee and
sisal.51 Military coercion was applied liberally to support the dominance of
those playing intermediary roles in the revenue system and to help them
collect revenue and maintain the peace. The Company’s claim to have
‘demilitarized’ society was strictly a half-truth.”
 Arms taken away from rest of the society but from itself (british)
 The qualities which they brought to economic relations are well caught in
such documents as the Report of the Madras Torture Committee (1855)
which found physical intimidation and violence to be routine elements in the
revenue system.
 The importance of revenue department was very high because revenue
was central to the whole british raj
 The british decided to bring up the revenue departments in the various
areas of the company that shall be run by the specially trained officers who
hsall be capable enough to extract the revenue and surplus from and
continuing production on the land that shall come under their jurisdiction
although the idea behind establishing these departments was the same
but the nature of these revenue departments varied with the varied regions
 The british instead of abolishing the difference and bringing equality,
rather decided to preserve the differences that existed in the Indian
society and use them to their benefit. They preserved the caste system as
well. The motive of the britishers behind this was that if the difference was
maintained then always someone shall be above the other one and finally
there will be someone at the top of the system and this shall make their job
easier because then they can just go and hold the head of the system to
extract surplus and who in-turn shall do it by holding the person
immediately under him and the chain shall follow right upto the bottom.
 The solidified and brought to prominenece the already existent positions
of the heads like headman, vatandars, zamindars, mirasidars, etc.
 But it was not possible for the british to bring up a head of the system and
then hold him liable for the conduct of the system and to reap benefits out
of it, in certain areas. It is because these certain areas had no system of
differentiation or a person at the top of the system for eg: the bhaichara

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community of the Punjab region. So in these cases the britishers decided to

create the heads of the system to hold them liable for the system’s
functioning
 In some cases, it failed to find significant differentiation within the kin-body
but was obliged to elevate it in its entirety to privilege over outsiders
(bhaiachara, co-sharing mirasi tenure, etc.).
 The figure of the intermediaries or the collaborators became very
prominent as they were the once who linked britishers to the Indian
society. So the britishers too tried to keep them happy.
 It did not, at least willingly or consciously, dismantle the ancien regime’s
revenue system and institutions of economic manage- ment. Indeed, it
worked them more intensively than they had ever been worked before. Its
effective revenue demand was much higher than that of previous regimes
(prior to the 1820s by intent and, thereafter, by ‘accident’)62 and bore
more heavily on the value of land. It reduced several of the investment and
re-distributive functions of the old state system (takkavi, maintenance and
extension of irrigation works, etc.) and increased the use of force to secure
surplus and the continuation of production. Against this background, its
elaboration of a legal system which treated and protected landed property
as if it existed at a remove from the state, as a private subject’s right, was
pure farce (and plainly regarded as such by the mind of local
administration).
 British and the social change:
“The elements of continuity in ‘the first century’ of colonial rule frequently
have been seen to derive either from fears which the British possessed that,
by disturbing the bases of religious and traditional authority, they would
unleash revolt against their rule or from administrative and political
weaknesses which made them dependent on ill-con- trolled collaborators. It
is clear, for example, that colonial rule did disturb the bases of religious and
traditional authority. There was support, overt and covert, for Christian
missionaries;64 relationships between Hindus and Muslims were placed on a
drastically different basis;65 the Brahminization of the Hindu law represented
a real revolution in domestic and social mores, which was pushed through in
the face of considerable opposition.66 Moreover, the struggle on the land
produced many casualties among the ‘traditional’ elites.67 If the Company
could afford to take these risks, which served no coherent purpose of its own,
why should it not have attempted to restructure society along lines in which it
claimed to see positive value? Equally, the weakness evidenced in the
Company’s relationships with its indigenous collaborators can easily be over-
estimated and misunderstood. Occasionally, the state did show an ability to
change the groups from which it drew its intermediaries, and regularly to
change individuals within the groups.68 More significantly, whatever the
limitations on control, these collaborators were producing for the Company
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higher levels of surplus extraction than any previous indigenous state had
enjoyed. What both of these formulations may miss is consideration of the
general forces restricting the freedom of the Company to reconstruct society
and manipulate the various types of collaborator available to it”
 Aspects of the context in which the company had to operate:
1. Military imperative – the raj in order to establish its influence and
owner in the various different parts of the country by the use of
military force and arms and to do that it had to incur huge amount of
expenditure which in turn led to a high amount of tax collection.
2. Problem of organising the production and marketing of the high
value crops from which they earned profits in economic condition of
land plenty and labour scarcity.
 Anglo-Indian law and European Capital:
“The Anglo-Indian law also helped European capital to penetrate the
sphere of Indian finance. Prior to the law’s establishment across India,
European capital had been in a distinctly difficult position outside the
courts of the presidency towns and dependent upon Indian justice for its
security. Now it could relate to indigenous business on more than equal
terms. Not only was there likely to be racial sympathy between the ‘white’
higher judiciary and British mercantile interests, but the personal law of
Europeans gave them distinct advantages over Indian rivals. Whereas their
Hindu debtors stood Liable to the full extent of joint-family assets, they
themselves could be liable for no more than their personal fortunes”
 Practise of law was deeply linked to the political structure
 The law was just focusing on the reformation of the urban commercial
groups according to the ways of the colonial state it left the rural agrarian
base to ebb and flow and there happened no production or reproduction
for the same.
 In effect, the first phase of colonial rule subjected India less to the
rule of property and law than to that of bureaucratic despotism and
state monopoly.
 In the mid decades of the 19th century it was actually that the britishers
started paying heed to the disputes and issues that were related to the
property rights even the judiciary was revamped and made more efficient
to resolve the issues quickly. Formal costs of litigations reduced. Number
of courts increased. Amount of litigation increased.
 The period from the Mutiny to the First World War was the great age of
civil litigation in India and, if ever the rule of law was established, it
was in these years.
 The new changes that came in the context in which the british were to
operate:

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1. Rise in population – reversing the land and person ratio – much

more utilisation of the land – increasing competition – no
requirement of artificial political instruments set up by the
government to ensure the full utilisation of the land – also due to rise
in population and the scarcity of land the people were being pushed
into the state of subordination
2. the rural economy came out of its Long depression and passed into a
period of growth which lasted, broken only by the occasional and
regional famine, until the [920s. Grain prices rose steadily,
3. the state’s role of dominating and managing the economic activity
came to an end – the monopolies of the state collapsed – the
commerce sections that fell outside the control of the state
prospered well and hence the position of the state declined.
 The transfer of governing authority from the Company to the Crown in
1858 symbolized the final part of the transition from mercantilist
monopoly to free market competitive economy.
 As the time passed and the market was no more a mercantile one whereas
it rather became a free competitive market it was important to take note of
the contradiction between the public and the private law, because now the
conventional and orthodox nature of the british law shall not work in
benefit of its public counterpart which was now promoting a free
competitive market economy.
 Indian property relations would have to undergo very much the same
kinds of change as British property relations during the transition to
advanced market capitalism: concepts of community trust and moral
obligation would have to weaken in favour of the freedom of the individual
 To some degree, the law shouldered the enormous burden thrown upon it.
It moved in various ways to beat back the frontier of the personal law and
to disentangle private property rights from the institutions of the Hindu
family and from the functions of ascriptive status and political office.
 Dismantling the traditional:
“Rights of veto on private land alienations became increasingly difficult to
enforce at law; while even some intra-familial constraints, such as the
theoretical check on fathers of sons, fell into desuetude.84 In the market, a
variety of measures made land more easily transferable. ‘Traditional’ usury
laws were weakened; where still uncertain, the right to acquire ancestral land
to meet the un repaid debts of individual joint-family members was
strengthened;85 the growth of registration departments and documented
property title improved land’s legal security and freed it for exchange from
prescriptive social encumbrance.86 Much land locked up in status- and role-
specific inam tenure became converted into freehold private property which
could be used and alienated freely.87 The revenue system progressively

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dropped caste differential rates of assessment, which had created artificial

land values which were difficult to realize through sale. Finally, various
property-holding public trusts, such as temples which had been directly
supervised by the state, were turned into semi-private corporations
responsible only to the courts.”
 Moral and social constraints were reduced by the law
 the outcome of basing the Anglo Indian law on and rigidifying the
Hindu law:
“Progress in dismantling the Hindu law was greatly hindered by the
‘assumption’ of the law which took place in the 1860s88 and by the
determination with which the Government of India maintained the ban on
religious and social interference. The first measure restricted what little
flexibility the judiciary may have possessed to manoeuvre between different
scriptural authorities and pandits’ interpretations to innovate. The
‘assumption’ now fixed the norms and relations of Hindu ethics and left
society to try and accommodate itself to the pressures of the epoch with
mores frozen in the Vedic age (or what nineteenth-century jurists thought was
the Vedic age). The ban on religious and social legislation prevented reform
even when the need was obvious and the support strong. The rigidity of the
law and the state’s determination to preserve its version of ‘tradition’ are well
seen in the ‘Gains of Learning’ agitation in South India. In spite of strong
pressure from the educated elite to redraw the line between ‘individual’ and
‘ancestral’ property in order to allow at least professional earnings to be
regarded as individual property, the law was unmoved until the 1930s. More
than twenty legislative Bills were sent from Madras to Calcutta and New Delhi
but they all came back. Litigation to enforce rights to property in the inflated
Hindu family seems to have become increasingly common; while the courts
also made their presence felt by preserving the conventions of caste and
religious deference against growing attempts to change them from below”
 the british began bringing a divide in the Indian society between the
landed classes and the non landed ones by preserving the interests of the
landed class. Also certain restrictions were placed on the other
communities who were landless from entering into the field of possession
of the land rights. So these classes which did not have any land went to the
urban centres and began the productions units.
 Most provinces developed Encumbered Estates and Court of Wards
Acts which functioned as ‘shields’ to safeguard the properties of certain
‘ancient and prestigious’ families from loss for debt or other market
irresponsibilities.
 The Anglo Indian law never aimed at giving an individual more amount of
power over hsi property rather what it did was that it protectioned certain
ancient and prestigious families’ property from being partitioned.

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 The law was conventional – it was needed to shore up ‘antique’ social

institutions and rights
 Certainly, there were forces of resistance to change in rural society and,
until perhaps the turn of the twentieth century, it was unclear how seriously
Indian agriculture required structural innovations to make it market-worthy
 In the 1890s the agriculture began to decline and the famines began to
happen this very clearly showed that there was a shortage of investment in
the agrarian sector.
 The raj was also responsible for opening up the agrarian interior to deeper
market penetration by building the railways and port facilities and
sustaining the currency and credit systems of the colonial primary product
exporting economy.
 The state did not take adequate steps to make social developments in the
market sector. The courts although indicated a change was required to
generate the freedom that the market was in need of to actually develop
properly. For an individual to disentangle his rights from the community he
was in need of the state apparatus in the form of police that shall work in
the favour of the state interests and hence shall lead to the promotion of
Individualism, but what Indeed the police did was exactly opposite of what
it was expected to do because the police was chosen from the society itself
by the state so they were more loyal to the community than to the values of
the state

 The legal and political environment which the raj was creating for the
operation of market forces and the penetration of capital remained
contradictory.
 The clearest sign of the problem was the difficulty which large
accumulations of capital, whether made during the mercantilist era in
revenue and monopoly speculation or imported from outside, encountered
in gaining direct access to, and control over, agricultural production.
 The british made such a system that there was no incentive left, neither for
the agriculturists bor for the mercantile class to proper or work on their
respective professions to generate profits out of it:
“If landlords could not charge competition rents, what forces drove peasants
to increase production? If they could not re-possess their tenants’ lands, why
should they invest in improving them?103 If urban and mercantile capitalists
did not possess the ultimate sanction of being able to seize their defaulting
debtors’ lands, how could they impose the rhythms of the market on
production? Indeed, without this sanction, what kind of security was offered
them to invest at all?”

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 A large gap was opened up and perpetuated between existing large

accumulations of capital and the productive base.
 The implications that the above stated gap had were:
1. Capital got limited to the relationship of the rentier-tenant,
commodity speculation and short-term industry, since the entry of
the capital in the agrarian sector was not allowed
2. Due to the gap the money that was generated in the capitalist market
got deflected from the investment in the agrarian sector and rather
got diverted towards the other spending like the spending by the
capitalist or the mercantile class on their luxurious lifestyle or in the
chains of money lending transactions or they were also pushed
abroad before the growth of industrialisation
3. The gap because it prevented the movement of the investment fro
the capitalist sector tot the agriculture sector hence it left the
agrarian sector vulnerable to the vagaries of the nature. now
because the agriculture sector became vulnerable whch was
responsible for the supply of raw materials to the industrial sectors
even the industrial sector became vulnerable and hence the
producers were not willing to invest large sums or to consolidate
and concentrate. Due to lack of the consolidation and concentration
the businesses did not grow big
4. This left the large measure of control over the production with the
small- holing farmers and petty village landowners who laboured, or
directed labour, on the land.
 Owing to the gap and the decline of the investment the agriculture began
to decline.
 The agriculture was declining due to the lack of investment but the british
saw this economic problem through the lens of politics and hence failed to
acknowledge its real sense.
 Landlords were failing to keep their rents in line with inflation and, in
several provinces, were finding that the combination of occupancy tenure
rights and complicated legal rituals was making it difficult for them to
collect rents at all. In Bengal, the levels of effective rent collection appear
to have collapsed; while in West U.P., many petty zamindars were under
the severest of pressures.120 The signs of stress in the mercantile
communities were unmistakable. The protections afforded to the agrarian
community drove many professional bania groups out of agricultural
finance and turned their roles over to wealthier members of the community
itself. A flood of mercantile capital made for better opportunities overseas,
in East and South Africa and South East Asia
 Yet, so far from responding to these imperatives by pursuing policies of
structural change, the raj was inclined to do exactly the opposite. Every

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crisis was met by efforts further to defend the agrarian community and to
shore up its antique mode of production.
 Reason why raj was following the protectionist policies towards the
agriculture:
“Its policies of social conservation and peasant protection flowed from the
fear that if competitive capitalist relations were allowed freedom to take over
the countryside, the resulting conflict would destroy the raj’s own institutions
of government and political security.”
 The price of this strategy, which meant that the value of the inheritance
would be dwindling, was lower than that of encouraging the capitalist
process and risking the loss of everything. But there are two curiosities or
paradoxes about this otherwise readily comprehensible position.
1. The first is the extent to which British fears always ran far ahead of
Indian realities. The raj was already paranoid about the
consequences of the imminent capitalist transformation before any
signs that it might be taking place appeared.
2. Second, this strategy of protection represented a very strange way
for any capitalist state, or at least state attached to capitalist
metropolitan base, to behave. Leaving aside the ideologically-
biased models of modernization theory, with their supposition of a
smooth and ‘osmotic’ transition, all capitalist processes of
development have involved (and continue to involve as part of their
nature) political struggle, resistance and repression. The ‘problem’
faced by the raj was not unique to it but one of universal historical
experience. However, it has been by no means universal for the
political instruments of capitalist states to be used not to crush
resistance but to protect and preserve the social bases from which it
is arising.
 The raj found itself in a situation in which it would have liked to stop history
somewhere around 1880.
 The reasons why the raj was in its best time in 1880s were:
1. Possessed a neart perfect equilibrium between the development of
the forces of production necessary to its economic needs and the
solidity of the social and political structures necessary to its security.
2. There appeared to be room for accommodation between
metropolitan (and indigenous rentier and mercantile) capital and
the existing agrarian structure in the buoyancy of the economy. All
could live together, in some kind of harmony, without contending for
the bases of one another’s social existence.
3. The complex and long-winded procedures of the law, and the
dependence of its executive machinery on local power structures,
promoted out of court compromises and settlements.

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4. The capitalists were able to extract some amount of benefit from the
agrarian sector without actually socially penetrating inside it.
 The peaceful and the golden era of the british rule from 1880s did not last
long.
 The population began to increase and this increase in the population led to
slot of pressure on the market . this also led to a rise in the competition in
the market this rise in the competition in the market led to the capitalists
putting much more pressure on the market. This led to the disruption of the
balance.
 The legal institutions that the raj made to foster peace and propriety and to
maintain the stability were fast collapsing. They were no more able enough
tot maintain the equilibrium in the society. The pointers that showed the
collapsing state of the raj were the increase in the litigation and the high
number of legislations that were being enacted before the First World
War.
 The courts were failing to perform their duties that raj was trying to build
up the required social conditions by legislations
 Capital and the agrarian community were in direct confrontation. By
holding them together, without allowing either adequately to subordinate
the other, the raj was sitting still while their antagonism intensified and
perpetuated a framework which prevented its resolution. In the wake of
the First World War it was to face the costs of its policies in the explosion of
agrarian agitation, which attended the non-cooperation movement.
 In the period between the world wars there came a lot of changes like:
1. Firstly, The formal judicial structure was changing in its social
character. Indianisation of the judiciary happened. The authority of
the formal courts was devolved to the local dispute resolution
bodies. The village notables and the local village officials were
given the judicial powers to sit as judges in these courts. As we have
seen, throughout the colonial era, unofficial and informal
arbitrational procedures had always existed in rural society,
supplementing and often being more effective than the jurisdictions
of the British courts. What was happening now was that these
procedures were being drawn up into the structure of the state and
given a full legitimation.
2. Secondly, Growing state regulation of the usage of property and the
market. The revenue law was an important instrument in the hands
of the raj not just to regulate the relationship between the landlord
and the tenant but also to regulate the collection of revenue and how
much revenue to be collected
3. The domain of revenue law had shown a strong tendency to expand,
especially towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the early

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twentieth century.145 By the interwar period, it was dominant over

litigation in the zamindari regions and effectively being used by the
state to convert rental relations into a department of government
administration.
4. The overseas labour market regulation was tightened. This process
had begun in North India in the 1890s and was extended
southwards, to the large migrant labour flows to Ceylon and Burma,
in the wake of the First World War.
5. The state began stepping in the market comparatively more to
regulate the conditions in the country. especially at the end of the
first world war there was a food shortage in the various parts of the
country the state time and again not just went to tackle the economic
conditions but also tacked the political dangers that were expected
6. Thirdly, the increase in the profits of the landed elite dependent
directly on the functions that the state played. There were steps
taken in this regard:
i. First, the political benefits accrued not merely to those who
held specific tax- shielded state offices but in general to the
increasingly small proportion of agrarian society who held
significant amounts of land at all.
ii. The raj shifted the burden of taxation from the heads of the
landowners and now it rather drew its income from the
customs and excise duties and taxes on non-agricultural
incomes.
iii. Land ownership came to include the privileged tax status
iv. More than this, the raj also was redirecting income and capital
towards landholders.
v. As state proscriptions on the activities of ‘professional’
moneylenders and commodity dealers hardened, protected
opportunities for landowners to increase their role in agrarian
commerce also appeared.
vi. Larger amount of resources were being pumped into
agricultural developments.
vii. Second, the devolution of the administration continued much
beyond the judiciary and opened up a political process which
gave certain members of the agrarian community ‘legitimate1
control over many of the ancillaries of agriculture.
viii. The state was no longer simply manipulating the terms
of the civil law to provide some general shields from the
potentially disruptive effects of mercantile and rentier
capitalism. Much more, it was isolating the wealthier
members of the landholding community and trying to
establish positive relations with them, which could act as

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pillars of a new political system. Its strategy had several

important consequences. It became more possible for the
larger landowners to emancipate themselves from some of
the constraints of community and custom.
ix. The state now very clearly brought out the difference
between the people who possessed land and those who were
landless and were more dependent on the labouring work for
their subsistence
x. This labouring class that developed it was suddenly
weakened to state of abject poverty. Hence this class of
people they started posing a revolt against the state but the
state quashed it easily with the use of the police it had
xi. The devolution of the law and of agrarian administration was
an aspect of the general devolution of political authority from
the colonial bureaucracy to domestic politicians, from Briton
to Indian, as the raj moved steadily, if for a long time
unwittingly, to its demise.
 The raj also in the twentieth century brought certain social changes in the
Indian society:
“The ban on religious and social legislation, for example, went by the
wayside when ‘representatives’ of Indian society expressed a contempt for
Anglo- Indian ‘tradition’. In the 1930s, the Madras intelligentsia at last won
its Gains of Learning Act and several of the caste impediments to social and
economic activities were removed”
 The british raj was losing its control overt the Indian state because as it is
visible from the nature of the ability of the police and the legislature to
penetrate more into the villages of the Indian society. The dominant local
groups began to had their influence over these political institutions and
were no more feared of them
 Principal beneficiary of state subvention, protection and intervention was a
sector of ‘advanced’ industry painfully beginning to arise within the Indian
economy itself. Through tariffs, state contracts, infra-structural services,
interventions in both the commodity and labour markets and the political
repression of labour, the raj expressed a commitment to industrial
development.
 The author after he talked of the benefits that the raj devolved on the
classes in the society he also looks at who were the one at loss at the time
of Raj:
1. First, the consumer, who had to meet the bills from higher taxes and
pay higher prices for protected production.
2. Second, commerce, especially at the local level, which was being
taken over by state agencies and squeezed by state regulation of the
market.
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3. And third, labour which was subjected to increasing repression in

both agriculture and industry. State support for the rights of
landowners against labour was matched by reciprocal support for
the rights of industrial capitalists. Wage bills were cheapened by
state-sponsored ‘rationalization’ programmes and policies to limit
and moderate trades unionism.
 The causes which led to the growth of the Indian Industrialisation:
1. Doubtless, the growing political pressures of the nationalist
movement played their part, making it more difficult for the British
to maintain the political structure and ‘open door’ trade policy which
had favoured the limited interests of the metropolis
2. The rates of return in the country became attractive owing to the
decrease in the commodity rates and commerce.
3. The rise of Japan threatened Britain’s ability to use the Indian open
door and helped to bring tariff protection to underpin the
profitability of industrial manufacture.172 In these conditions, the
colonial state could not ignore the needs of Indian industry and
began to develop policies more favourable to it.
4. The one remaining reservation was that industry’s expansion ought
to be directed away from a challenge to rival British manufacture
wherever possible. The squeeze on labour costs in part stemmed
from an attempt to improve Indian industry’s profits without
increasing its needs to compete more strongly for residual British
markets
 The british did not pay much heed to the production of the primary product
while they were too busy with the war and industry. They faced a
consequence of this mistake when after a point of time the country suffered
food shortages and they had to import food. Also the raw materials that
were required for the industries had to be imported whereas if the british
would have in first place taken care of the primary production this would
not have happened
 The state’s attempts to raise agricultural productivity through new in-puts
and technological help were proving too little and too late to make much of
an impact
 The economic corollary of the state’s agrarian policy was stagnation and
the growth of industry was not part of any far-reaching process of
economic transformation.177 This situation hardly suited metropolitan
interests. With the decline of the colonial trades, India’s future value to
Britain lay in the ability of the growth sectors in her economy to link up
with new elements in the metropolis. The provision of finance capital and
capital goods to Indian industrialization offered the promise of continuing
profit from the empire. The restraints imposed by the protection of
agriculture obstructed the realization of this promise. Indeed, the
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economics of empire in India became increasingly questionable. New

markets failed to develop; the acute crisis in primary commodity
production caused by the depression saw the metropolis having to bail out
the cotton market and cover the Stirling debt; and the ‘modernization’ of
the Indian army was having to be paid for, in part, by the British tax-payer.
 Holding the landed property in those days was considered as privilege in
itself this privilege was although already enjoyed by the landed elite
before the british legitimised and recognised it. After the legalisation of
the privileges of the landed elite they had a control in the political sphere
as well. This created a divide between the people who had access to the
national political system and those who did not have it.
 British developed a kind of political structure which had in built tendency
of being immobile:
“After industry had taken over the manufacturing quota of the old metropolis,
in what directions could it expand without putting pressure on its agrarian
ally? Without some fundamental change in the nature of agricultural
technology capable of being used within its social constraints, how could
agrarian society significantly increase its output? The political structure
seemed to contain in-built principles of immobility”.
 Three phases of colonial rule come up in this piece by washbrook:
 The first phase of ‘the mercantilist state’:
1. Effective rights to land emerged, as under the ancien regime, at the
point of conjuncture between the extractive institutions of
government and the corporate organizations of agrarian society and
reflected the status of the struggle between the two for control over
surplus.
2. Here the Anglo-Indian law strongly favoured neo-traditional types of
property relationship and concepts of community trust.
3. These presented an illusion of continuity which served the
Company’s political security. But they also facilitated the extractive
operations of the state and European mercantile capitalists by
extending liabilities and holding together property trusts to service
debts.
4. State showed no real interest in making market competition, under
the rule of law, the dynamic behind agrarian society, regulating its
production and reproduction.
 The second phase of the ‘High Colonial State’:
1. Conditions of market competition now touched the agrarian base
and the taw was assuming definitions of property right more suitable
to a ‘free’ capitalist context. Yet it clearly did not go so far as to
establish a basis of equal and individualistic competition. The state
was maintaining and manufacturing social prescriptions which

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limited the consequences of competition and was trying to keep

control over the land in the hands of existing agrarian corporations.(
preservation of the antique social value)
2. The raj had to maintain a delicate balance in this phase
 The third phase of ‘the incipient nation state’:
1. The definition and regulation of property right passed back directly
to the state and the political systems and became increasingly
subject to the operations of the criminal, rather than civil, law.
2. They tried building a strong position for the landowning elites in the
countryside. The principal purpose of this position was to provide
political stability over a countryside whose growing relative
impoverishment was starting to threaten the possibilities of
continuing capitalist business activity at all.
 Through each of these phases, we have used the law as a focus on the
complex social and political forces at work in colonial India, on the
problems posed by these (and by the international context) to the
governing metropolis and on the consequences of the law’s various
resolutions for the continuing development of agrarian society.
 What does this view of India’s colonial history through the law have to tell
us about the problems of historical and sociological conceptualization
which dominate debates about the recent past?
1. First, it may help to periodize the history of the raj rather more
clearly.
There has been a tendency to treat ‘British’ rule as all of one piece,
from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and to pay insufficient
attention to the very significant reorientations in the relationship
between state and society which took place over those two hundred
years.
On the other, there has been a tendency to suppose a single break,
from the time of the Mutiny, between an active and innovatory
‘early’ period and a conservative later phase.
It is very difficult to see how the development of Indian society is to
be comprehended without reference to the precise economic and
political pressures to which it was subject and which composed its
immediate historical context.
2. Second, our perspective may help to dispel the images of British
rule as monolithic and omnicompetent, Again, by considering the
pressures upon it, we can see the particular points of weakness and
the deepening contradictions in the structure of the raj.
3. The 'dynamic immobility’ of the Indian economy reflected, and was
constrained by, a 'dynamic immobility’ in the social and political
principles of later British rule.

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4. And third, our view from the law also may raise questions about how
the law itself should be conceptualized. Clearly, we have not treated
the Anglo-Indian law as an autonomous field of sociological inquiry,
whose norms and institutions can be separated from the wider
context of society and analysed meaningfully in their own terms.
5. There are two contextual justifications for this approach. First, the
notional independence of the judiciary from the executive,
proclaimed in the Permanent Settlement, was never realized.
Colonial India had no independent legislature or written constitution
to act as a check on the executive, which actually appointed
thejudiciary as part of the civil service and changed the law as it
pleased. The supposed autonomy of the judiciary was an illusion,
perpetuated by colonial legitimating ideology, and the law was a
department of the executive. Second, undoubtedly the most
important changes of the period were those emanating from the
socio-economic context and progressively altering the nature of the
value in landed property. It is very hard to see how rules for the
protection of property may be understood apart from the conditions
creating ‘social’ value in that property in the first place.

G. Arunima, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women:

Families and Legal Change in Nineteenth-century
Malabar’
With the text, we will see that how evolution of legal scholarship altered power
relations in society. A patriarchal & patrilineal society was formed. Many
societies where women were at good position they were left as worse.

Early Intervention – 1792 in west, women rights book written (liberal), 1792 EIC
encroached Malabar (authoritarian) and this reading is how nayar women in
Malabar were left with few rights and a matrilineal society was turned patrilineal.
(Colonial Double Standards)

 This paper deals with the changes in the matrilineal community among the
nayar s of Malabar in the 19th century and the limits placed on women’s
legal rights in this period.

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