Change in Bengal Agrarian Society c. 1760-1850

Change in Bengal Agrarian Society c. 1760-1850 seeks to trace the course of change in the agrarian society of Bengal under the rule of the East India Company with special reference to the impact of the Permanent Settlement introduced in Bengal and Bihar on 1 May 1793 and later in Madras and Varanasi presidencies and most of northern India.

Divided into three parts, Part One is an attempt to describe the nature of land tenures and the different categories of land rights, as they prevailed before the Permanent Settlement. Part Two is an exploration of five localities covering districts from West, North, and former East Bengal and covers a wide spectrum of geographical and social conditions including the lie of the land, the composition of the population, the conditions of land tenure before the Permanent Settlement, the resultant rent-sharing structure, etc. Part Three deals with changes and continuity in the rural order as it emerged in the nineteenth century from the 1790s.

The work is based on wide ranging original source material. Ananda Bhattacharyya's Introduction to this remarkable work places it in context.

Ratnalekha Ray obtained her Ph.D. on Permanent Settlement in Bengal from the Cambridge University, UK. She taught History at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Later she went to the Netherands. She has contributed several articles to prestigious journals and her last article was on Maheshganj Pal Chowdhury, the oldest family of the Pal Chowdhuries of Maheshganj, before her untimely demise in 1985.

Ananda Bhattacharyya is Assistant Director, Directorate of State Archives, Government of West Bengal, Kolkata. He is the author of a large number of books and has also edited and introduced several publications.

This work seeks to trace the course of change in the agrarian society of Bengal under the rule of the East India Company with special reference to the impact of the Permanent Settlement. Part One is an attempt to describe the nature of land tenures and the different categories of land rights, as they prevailed before the Permanent Settlement and as they were affected by the Regulations of 1793. It will emerge that in traditional agrarian society there was an incredible variety of land rights, which differed from district to district, and we shall observe that the attempt to simplify the situation by creating a single category of landlords by the Permanent Settlement only succeeded in creating fresh complications in each locality. On the premise that these local circumstances need to be thoroughly explored before reaching general conclusions, I shall undertake five area 'studies in Part Two of my book. The selected districts, chosen from West, North and East Bengal, will cover a broad spectrum of geographical and social conditions in the Bengali-speaking region of Eastern India. In each area study I shall note the lie of the land and the composition of the population, the local conditions of land tenure before the Permanent Settlement, the distinctive settlement of the district in 1793, the sale of 'estates' after the Permanent Settlement, the resulting rent-sharing structure, and the impact of changes in the upper levels of tribute collection on the land-holding structure in the village and on the position of dominant village groups in the lower rungs of the hierarechy of landlords. Although my period will be roughly 1760-1850, wherever possible I shall look forward in time and relate changes in local land tenure systems to broader social and political movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.