The duties of the collector were fivefold. He was collector of government revenue; registrar of landed property in his district; revenue judge between landlord and tenant; ministerial officer of courts of justice; and treasurer and accountant of the district. None but a man of varied and extensive attainments, united to zeal and industry, could adequately fulfil so many duties; many of the great names in the recent years of Indian history are those of men who laid the foundations for their greatness as collectors. The districts over which the collectors presided varied greatly in size and wealth; but in all cases they comprised several thousand villages each, and yielded revenue varying from one to two hundred thousand pounds per annum—for the whole of which the collector was responsible. In the whole of India, the collectorates were somewhat under a hundred and seventy in number, for the most part identical with districts, but in a few cases comprising whole provinces newly annexed; and these collectorates yielded, in 1856, revenue to the amount of about thirty millions sterling.
The collector-magistrate had generally two assistants, like himself ‘covenanted’ servants of the Company. Besides these there were ‘uncovenanted’ servants, European and native, sufficient in number for the duties to be rendered. The district was marked out into sub-districts containing from one to two hundred villages each. The collector resided at the head-station of the district, with a staff of clerks, writers, and record-keepers. Each sub-district was under the revenue management of a responsible native officer, who had subordinates under him to keep his accounts and conduct the details of his office. Carrying down the classification still more minutely, every village in every sub-district had its headman and its native accountant, who were in intimate correspondence concerning the revenue of the village.
The chief official of the district, as collector of government revenue, obtained this revenue mainly from three sources—land-tax, spirit and drug duty, and stamps. The second and third items were so small in amount, that many well-wishers of the Company urged the abandonment of those imposts; and at anyrate only a small share of the collector’s attention was devoted to them. The land-tax was the great source of revenue; and until the government of India undergoes an entire revolution both in spirit and in practice, such must continue to be the case. So decided was the importance of this tax compared with all others, that of the thirty millions sterling raised in 1856, no less than seventeen millions resulted from land-tax. The land-tax formed the great fund out of which the vast expenses for the executive government, military and civil, were mainly paid. Hence the importance of the revenue-collector and his land-tax duties. The assessment of the land, for the realisation of the tax, differed in different presidencies, according to the relations existing between the state, the landowners, the farmers, and the labourers. In Bengal the revenue was collected in gross from great and powerful zemindars, the state having little or nothing to do with the actual cultivators. In Madras no zemindars or great men were recognised; the state drew the tax from the ryots or cultivators, each on his own bit of land. In Bombay the Madras system existed in a modified form. In Oude nothing could be done till the annexation in 1856, when the peculiar thalookdaree system[[156]] laid a foundation for many troubles in the following year. In the Northwest Provinces the assessment depended on the peculiar village tenures, which had existed from time immemorial, and according to which the ownership of the soil could not be interfered with by the state so long as the village paid the revenue. Great as may have been, and great as were, the differences between the Hindoo, Mohammedan, and English governments, this village system maintained its ground century after century. The tenure of land in these provinces, recognised by the Company as among those institutions which they wished to respect, were mainly three in number:
Zemindaree—denoting those estates where the property was held collectively without any territorial division, whether the owners were one, few, or many.
Puttidaree—those estates where the property was partially or entirely divided, and held separately by the coparceners.
Bhyacharuh—estates held by coparcenary communities, where actual possession had overborne law; it was a kind of Puttidaree founded on actuality rather than right.
Whichever of these systems prevailed, the Company respected it in assessing the land-tax; and thus each piece of land was represented in the tax-books by the name of a particular tax-payer or community of tax-payers. The actual assessment, the percentage on produce, depended on circumstances specially ascertained in each district; but the two guiding principles laid down by the Company, when they established a revenue-system for the Northwest Provinces were—that the rate should be light enough to leave a wide margin of profit to the cultivators; and that it should be fixed without alteration for a considerable period of years. The collector, knowing how much was assessed upon every village or every piece of land, was armed with powers sufficient to enforce payment. Whether the assessment was ‘light’ or not, was a standing controversy between those who respectively supported the zemindaree, the ryotwaree, and the village systems. The Company’s advocates generally urged that, though the ratio of tax to produce seemed heavy, any comparison with English land-tax would be fallacious; seeing that the villagers and cultivators in India were not called upon to pay, in addition to land-tax, any such imposts as excise, tithes, church-rates, county-rates, poor-rates, or income-tax. The excellences and defects of the system, however, are not discussed here; we simply describe the system itself.
The collector, having a definite amount to receive, from a definite number of villages, represented by a definite number of persons, could neither increase nor lessen, anticipate nor postpone, the tax, without special reasons. If a district suffered from drought, the government often deferred or wholly remitted the tax; but this only under well-defined circumstances. The collector’s register recorded all changes in ownership or occupancy by death or private transfer; and as he knew each year who ought to pay, he was intrusted with certain powers to enforce payment by imprisonment, distraint of personal property, annulment of lease, sequestration of profits, transfer of defaulting share to a solvent shareholder of the same community, farming of the estate to a stranger, or sale by public auction.
In most districts, until the time of the Revolt, the collection of revenue was an easy task, occupying only a portion of the collector’s thoughts in May and June, November and December. ‘So complete the machinery,’ said a writer in the Calcutta Review, ‘so prosperous the provinces, so well adjusted the assessment, that the golden shower fell uninterruptedly; and the collector, who had without an effort of his own transmitted a royal ransom half-yearly to the public treasury, was scarcely aware of the financial feat which he and his subordinates had performed.’ But when a drought, an inundation, or any great calamity interfered with the growth or harvesting of the crop, the collector’s duties were most trying and laborious; seeing that he had to listen to petitions for relief or delay from hundreds or thousands of villages in his district.
His ordinary duties as a collector of revenue occupied only a small portion of his time and thoughts. As registrar of landed property, he kept maps and registers of land, drawn out with a degree of minuteness scarcely paralleled in any other country in the world; and these maps and registers were renewed or corrected annually, to shew the size, position, ownership, and crop of every cultivated field in the whole district. As revenue judge between landlord and tenant, he was often called upon to assist the responsible landowner to collect his rent from the cultivators, or to assist the cultivator in resisting oppression by the landlord; it was a duty requiring a knowledge both of law and of revenue matters. As a ministerial officer of the courts of justice, he had to put in force, somewhat in the manner of a sheriff, all decisions of the judge relating to land, transfers of property, or arrears of land-tax; and his local knowledge often enabled him to assist the judge in arriving at an equitable decision. As treasurer and accountant, he took care of the bags of silver coin in which the land-tax and the other taxes were chiefly paid, tested and weighed the coin before making up his accounts, paid monthly stipends to some of the military and civil officers of the district, kept a minute debtor and creditor account, and transmitted his accounts and his surplus silver to Calcutta. In addition to all these duties, the collector, considered as the European who possessed most knowledge on various subjects in his district, performed miscellaneous duties scarcely susceptible of enumeration. ‘Everything that is to be done by the executive, must be done by him, in one of his capacities; and we find him, within his jurisdiction, publican [tax-gatherer], auctioneer, sheriff, road-maker, timber-dealer, enlisting sergeant, sutler, slayer of wild beasts, wool-seller, cattle-breeder, postmaster, vaccinator, discounter of bills, and registrar-general—in which last capacity he has also to tie the marriage-knot for those who object to the Thirty-nine Articles. Latterly, he has been made schoolmaster of his district also. Every new measure of government places an extra straw on the collector’s back. Whatever happens to be the prevailing hobby, the collector suffers. One day specimens are called for, for the Exhibitions of London or Paris; the next day, the cry is for iron and timber for the railway, or poles for the telegraph.’