India under Ripon: A Private Diary

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

In every village which I visited of the British Deccan I heard complaints of poverty resembling most closely those to which I was accustomed in Syria and Egypt—complaints of over-taxation of the country, of increase and inequalities of assessment, of the tyranny of local overseers (not necessarily Englishmen) charged with levying the rates, complaints of the forest laws, of the decrease of the stock of working cattle, of their deterioration through the price of salt, of universal debt to the usurers. The only complaints conspicuous from their absence were those relating to insecurity of life and to conscription, the two great evils of Western Asia. And I will say at once before I go further that immunity on these heads goes far in my opinion towards counterbalancing the miseries which our rule would otherwise seem to have aggravated in the condition of the Indian ryot.

The special evils which we have imposed upon him are, however, only too apparent. In former days, though his land assessment or rent was very likely as high as now, it was mitigated for him by custom and by certain privileges which our system of administration has deprived him of. In bad seasons when his crop was poor he enjoyed remissions which are very seldom granted now. The lord of the land to whom he paid his rent lived within reach of him, and in days of distress might be cajoled into pity or possibly frightened into moderation. But the landlord now is a formless thing—the Government—which no tears can reach, no menace turn away. It is represented only by a succession of changing agents, strangers to the country, ignorant of the people and their wants, and whose names the ryots rarely learn to know. This is a constant complaint in their mouths, and the condition of British India under the modern system is a striking instance of the evils of absentee ownership. For the last hundred years it has been the constant aim of the Madras Government to destroy all ownership in land but its own, and it has so far succeeded that it stands now alone throughout the greater portion of the Presidency face to face with the peasantry. If these were happy the result might be good. But in their actual circumstances of chronic starvation it seems to me a very dangerous one.

With regard to the actual amount of the assessment, I made what inquiries I was able, endeavouring, so far as possible, to ascertain what proportion it bore to the gross value of the crop, and, although I state it with all due diffidence, I think I am not wrong in putting it at 35 to 40 per cent. for the Deccan district. It may well be considerably more, but I think it can hardly be less. In any case, I feel quite certain that Dr. Hunter’s figures in his book (which, be it remembered, is the accepted handbook about India) are enormously wrong, where, quoting the Famine Commission, he states that “the land tax throughout British India is from 3 per cent. to 7 per cent. on the gross out-turn.” Seven per cent. would of course be a very light rent in any country, but 40 per cent. would be inordinately high, and I am quite sure that impartial inquiry would prove that, in the Deccan at least, my own figures are far more nearly correct. In Bengal, I know there are lands assessed as low as 1 per cent.; but Bengal is a prosperous country, nearly the only one in British India, and is precisely the exception which best proves the general rule by exemplifying the causes of agricultural poverty.

It is, however, not merely the amount of the assessment which weighs upon these Deccan ryots, nor merely the inelasticity of its collection. If the natives themselves are to be believed, there are other causes of poverty directly due to the British connection which have had a far more disastrous effect upon the prosperity of the country than any taxation has produced. The reason, these say, why the ryot of the present day is poorer than his predecessor of fifty years ago is this. Under the ancient system of native rule, and during the early days of the Company, the agricultural population was not wholly dependent on agriculture. It had certain home industries which employed its leisure during those seasons of the year when labour in the fields was useless. There was the carrying trade which could be engaged in with the bullocks used at other times for ploughing. There was peddling of ghee and other home-made wares; and above all there was the weaving industry, which employed the women, and the men too during their idle time, and helped them to pay their rent. But modern improvements and modern legislation have altered all this. The railroads have very much destroyed the carrying trade; native industries have been supplanted by foreign ones, and the introduction of machinery and of foreign cottons has broken up every hand-loom in the country. The ryot, therefore, is reduced to the simple labour of his fields, and this does not suffice him any longer to live and to pay his assessment—therefore he starves. This account of the matter has been very ably set before the English public by Sir William Wedderburn, and I do not propose to argue it out here. But I can testify that it is the account also given by the natives themselves, and that I have no doubt that it is strictly true.

The official account is different. According to apologists of the Strachey school, over-population caused by the security of our rule is the sufficient reason of all distress, and it is possible that this may be correct of Bengal and other districts enjoying more prosperous conditions than those of which I am now speaking. But as applied to the Deccan it is manifestly untrue. For nothing like the whole area of cultivable land is taken up, and the population is scanty rather than excessive. The causes of distress and famine must be looked for rather in the growing impoverishment of the existing population, than in its numerical excess—in its enforced idleness during part of the year, and in the disappearance of the whole class of large proprietors who in former times used to lay up stores of grain to keep their peasantry alive in the droughts. It is my opinion, in common with that of the most intelligent native economists, that a permanent settlement of the revenue, such as there is in Bengal, would do more by the creation of a wealthy class of landowners in the Deccan, towards mitigating the periodical famines there, than any other form of legislation could, or the covering of the country with a whole network of railroads.

Other modern grievances of the peasant are, first, the new Forest Laws. These were introduced some years ago in consequence of the growing famines which, it was argued, were caused by the irregularity of the monsoon rains, which in their turn were caused by the denudation of the forests. Admitting as true all that can be said of the necessity of strong measures to prevent destruction in these, and to increase the area of vegetation, the modus operandi seems to have been needlessly violent, and most injurious to the people. One would have supposed that so wide an object as the regulation of the rainfall would have been provided for out of Imperial funds. But this was only done in part. The bulk of the loss fell on individual peasants. Wherever I went in the Madras and Bombay presidencies I heard of common lands enclosed and rights of pasture withdrawn, and this without any compensation at all being given to the possessors. The plea seems to have been that, in the days of the Mohammedan Empire, the Mogul was lord of all uncultivated lands, and that therefore, although time and custom had intervened for generations, the land might be resumed. The effect in any case has been disastrous. The leaves of trees are largely used in India for manure, and the supply is now cut off. The pasture has been reduced and cattle are dying of hunger. Where wood had been free from time immemorial, so much a load now has to be paid. In the Ghauts of Bombay matters seem to have gone farther still, and after the great famine of 1877-78 Sir Richard Temple had whole districts enclosed, evicting the ryots and destroying their villages. The ryots in turn set fire to the forests, and but for his timely resignation of office it is said the whole country would have been morally and physically in a blaze. I know that the ill-feeling caused by his high-handed action—which reminds one of that attributed to William Rufus when he enclosed the New Forest—has left behind it memories bitter as those in Ireland to this day. Bad or good, necessary or unnecessary, the Forest Act has much to answer for in the present state of discontent among the peasantry.

Allied to this, and even more general in its pressure on the poor, stands, secondly, the Salt tax. Its oppressive character has been much disputed; but in the Madras Deccan and the poorer districts of Bombay there should be no doubt whatever upon the matter. It is the one great theme of complaint, the one that touches the people most nearly and is most injurious in proportion to the poverty of the sufferer by it. The comparatively well-to-do ryot of Bengal and North-Western India does not feel it and does not complain of it. But wherever there is real pinching in the necessities of life, there the salt monopoly raises a clamorous cry. It is only the very poor who are obliged to stint themselves in salt; but the very poor are, unfortunately, the rule in Southern India. In the Deccan, moreover, its pressure is more galling, because natural salt lies on the ground, and the people are therefore starved of it as it were in sight of plenty. In several villages which I passed the ryots told me that they had been reduced to driving their cattle by night to the places where salt is found, that they may lick it by stealth; but the guards impound them if thus caught infringing the law; and latterly orders have been given that the police should collect in heaps and destroy all salt whatever found in its natural state above ground. In other parts I heard of a kind of leprosy attacking persons deprived of this necessary article of diet; and especially on the sea-coast south of Bombay the disease was spoken of as prevalent. The fact of there being no complaint with regard to the salt tax at Calcutta or in Northern India, has caused the Indian Government to be callous in this matter, and I fear the fact that it brings six millions sterling to the revenue is an additional reason why it is likely still to be overlooked. But it is one that is nevertheless very urgent in the poorer districts, where it is causing real and increasing suffering, and where it is regarded with well-founded anger. The price of salt sold to the people by the Government is reckoned at from 1200 to 2000 per cent. on its cost value.

Lastly, and this is the case all over British India, the peasantry is deeply, hopelessly in debt. It is curious to find this prime cause of the Egyptian Revolution faithfully reproduced in India under our own paternal and enlightened rule, and through the same causes. Agricultural debt came into being in either case with European methods of finance; and, although the subject has been thoroughly threshed out by previous writers, I shall perhaps be pardoned if I once more briefly explain the process. In old times, as I understand the case, in Oriental lands money was practically unknown to the peasantry. Their dealings were in kind, and especially the land tax paid to the Government was paid not in coin but in corn. The whole of the peasants’ security, therefore, if they wanted to borrow, was their crop—and, if at sowing-time they needed seed, it was recoverable only at the harvest; at which time also the Government took its share—a tenth according to strict Mohammedan law, or it might be a fifth, or in times of grievous tyranny the half. Nothing more, however, than the crop of the year was forthcoming. No lender, therefore, would advance the impecunious cultivator more than his seed corn or the loan of a yoke of oxen, and there was no possibility on the Government’s part of anticipating the taxes. The economic law of ancient Asia was to do things parsimoniously, to spend according to the means in hand, and at most to store up wealth for rainy, or rather rainless, days.

But with European administration came other doctrines. Wealth, our economists affirmed, must not be idle; production must be increased; resources must be developed; capital must be thrown into the land. The revenue, above all things, must be made regular and secure. In order to effect this, payment in money was substituted for payment in kind, a regular tax for an irregular portion of the crop;—and, while the rate was nominally lowered, no loss from accidental circumstances was to be allowed to fall upon the Government. So much coin must be forthcoming every year as the tax on so many acres. In countries like England where the system is understood, where markets are at hand, and money plentiful, this is undoubtedly the best and most convenient form of levying the revenue. But in the East its introduction has always produced disorder. In the country districts of India, as in Egypt, corn could not be sold in the public market at its full market price, and, when the day came for payment of the Government dues, the peasant had the choice either of selling at a grievous loss or of borrowing the money. He generally borrowed. I believe it may be stated absolutely that the whole of peasant indebtedness in either country originally came from the necessity thus imposed of finding coin to pay the land tax.

The change, however, put immediate wealth into the hands of Government, by lessening the cost of collecting the revenue, and so was approved as a beneficial one; and by an inevitable process of financial reasoning borrowing was encouraged. It was argued that capital, if thrown into the land, would increase the wealth of the agriculturist along with the wealth of the revenue. But how induce the investment of that capital except by increasing its security? In order to enable the agriculturist to borrow, he must be able to give his debtor something of more value than the crop in his field. Then why not the field itself? The laws of mortgage and recovery of debt by safe and easy process were consequently introduced, and courts appointed for the protection of creditors. This completed the peasant’s ruin. Finding money suddenly at his disposal, he borrowed without scruple, not only to pay taxes and to improve his land, but also for his amusements. Whether I am right or wrong in the details of this history, it is an indisputable fact that at the present moment there is hardly a village in British India which is not deeply, hopelessly in debt. In the course of my inquiries I do not remember to have met with a single instance of a village clear of debt even in Bengal.