THE RYOT’S BURDEN
Several times in Poona I met a Mr. Junshi (as I will call him),
who lived in one of the beautiful houses the Mahrattas used to
build while their Peshwas still reigned. He was an oldish man, for
an Indian, but thin, bright-eyed and alert, and from his mouth
statistics flowed like water from a fountain statue. One day I called
on him, and was shown into the open courtyard of old marble and teak,
round which the main building rose in three stories; but beyond I
could see another courtyard, more beautiful and cooler still, where
lived his wife, his sons’ wives, his nieces, and other ladies of
the blood, and beyond that again there was a glimpse of leaves and
brilliant flowers.
“We require flowers,” he said, “for the worship of our idols. We
worship our idols here in the house every morning and evening,
hanging garlands round their necks and placing bunches of flowers
before them. You, I believe, worship only once a week.”
I told him I had been brought up on family prayers that never failed
in regularity, even when we were at the seaside, and this pleased him
very much.
“However,” he went on, “I think we have an advantage in acknowledging
so many gods in our pantheon that each of us can choose which
he likes best. For each of our idols is a symbol of some divine
attribute, and helps the worshipper to fix his thoughts upon the
attribute he most desires to worship.”
“But some of us also,” I said, “find it helpful to contemplate images
representing the attributes of motherly love, chastity, compassion,
or courage in the face of evil; and we offer flowers to them.”
This pleased him too, but when we reached his long room upstairs we
turned from idols to the main interest of his life. On bookshelves
round the walls, and heaped upon the floor and tables, were hundreds
of volumes and pamphlets crammed with figures. It seemed as if the
owner had collected every book and essay ever written upon the
economics of India, and year by year had filtered them into his mind.
He had the instinct for averages which I take to be the economist’s
instinct. He thought of women and children in terms of addition; he
saw men as columns walking. He watched the rising and falling curves
of revenue, expenditure, and population as others watch the curves
of beauty. Any line of figures was welcome to his spirit, and though
he had made his living by teaching little Indians to read “Robinson
Crusoe,” his chief study seemed to lie in the scripture called the
“Statistical Abstract relating to British India.” Upon this careful
piece of literature he meditated day and night; or, if his mind
required a change, he relaxed it on theology.
I have called the “Statistical Abstract” literature, and to him it
was so. To him it was as pleasing as a poem to know that under the
heading of “Priests and others engaged in religion,” the number of
“total supported” was 2,728,812, among whom 178,656 females were
classified as “actual workers”; or that the total supported by
“indefinite and disreputable occupations” was 737,033, and in this
class alone the male and female “actual workers” were approximately
equal. He liked to meditate on the daily average of prisoners in the
various provinces, and on the infirmities of population according
to residence and according to age. It was good to know that there
were about 6,000,000 more males than females in the country, but
18,000,000 more widows than widowers, and 391,000 widows under
fifteen. These were the lyrics or realistic ballads of his reading,
but he took higher interest in the figures that move with something
of epic grandeur. To him there was a splendour and æsthetic
satisfaction in knowing that the total of India’s population,
including the Native States, was 294,361,056 in 1901, and that of
this number 207,050,557 were Hindus like himself; while agriculture
supported 191,691,731—close upon two-thirds, or 65·16 per cent., as
he put it—and 15,686,421 (including nearly 1,000,000 females) could
write and read, a total of 1,125,231 being “literate in English.”
But I think, after all, it was the great passage headed “Finance”
that he enjoyed with the most delicate appreciation for style.
Perhaps it depended on his mood whether he more admired the lines
of the “Gross Revenue and Expenditure” or of the “Net Revenue
and Expenditure.” It was sonorous as a hexameter to read aloud
that the total gross revenue in India and England for 1905-6 was
£84,997,685, and the total gross expenditure charged to revenue was
£82,905,831. But the net statements of revenue at £48,539,680, and
expenditure at £46,447,826, were trim as a sonnet. It was a dubious
point, but for details he certainly preferred the gross, thinking
them more realistic, and his favourite passage was that beginning,
“Principal heads of Revenue, Land Revenue, £18,862,169, for 1905-6.”
Against this he would set, as a kind of antiphone, the gross
expenditure on army services (excluding Marine and Military Works) of
£19,267,130.[19]
There were two passages also from which he appeared to derive the
kind of savage pleasure most men seek in tragedy or satire. One was
that the gross expenditure on education by the Government of India
amounted to less than £1,700,000 in 1905-6, and he worked out the
State expenditure for education for the current year (1907-8) at
1½_d._ per head in India, as against 5_s._ 4_d._ per head in France.
The other was that the Hindus, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists,
and Animists contributed out of their labour during the year of grace
which we had just survived (1906-7) the sum of £125,906 in order
that the British residents might not be devoid of the consolations
of religion as represented by Bishops and Anglican chaplains, Roman
priests, Presbyterian divines, and cemeteries.
For myself, there was, of course, a certain ironic interest in the
endowment of an Anglo-Indian’s Christianity by the natives around
him, and for the first time I was inclined to favour a system of
payment by results. But, in regard to Finance, all such things are
insignificant in comparison with the one main question of the tax
upon the cultivator.[20]
An immemorial custom in India, consolidated in the Laws of Manu,
gave the ruler a share in all crops—a fraction fluctuating according
to the soil, but not higher than one quarter. Probably this was a
tribute levied upon the village community in return for protection,
or simply as a penalty for conquest. It was paid in kind, so much
grain from so much crop, and as the proportion was always the same on
the same ground, the peasant did not feel the variation in quantity
much. But having inherited the custom, the British rulers found it
more convenient and uniform to collect the tax in cash, and to levy
the rate, not in proportion to each year’s crop, but on a valuation
that remains unaltered for long terms of years—usually thirty years
in Madras and Bombay, but twenty years in other places, for instance
in the Punjab. This process of valuation is called the Settlement,
and Settlement Officers are almost continually engaged in drawing
up a kind of progressive Doomsday Book upon the fields, pastures,
woods, and wells of each village. It is hardly possible to ascertain
the exact proportion of value fixed by the Settlement Officers as
the tax. Throughout India there is a general understanding that
“about one-half of the well-ascertained net assets should be the
Government demand.”[21] This income tax of ten shillings in the pound
is, however, in reality a fairly steady minimum, and the tax often
goes higher, to say nothing of the “cesses” or local taxes nominally
levied for roads and education.
Whether the money is called tax or rent, would not seem at first
sight to make much difference; for it has to be paid and the people
who pay it have no voice in its levy or in its expenditure. If it
is a tax, it is a large income tax on land, fixed for some years
and collected from the smallest landowners as well as the largest.
If it is a rent, the system is partial land-nationalization without
national control and without economic freedom. But as a matter of
practice, the difference in the use of words is vital, and it cannot
be put more plainly than in the Minute written by Lord Salisbury when
he was Secretary of State for India in 1875:—
“If we say that it is rent, the modern Indian statesman will hold
the Government in strictness entitled to all that remains after
wages and profits have been paid, and he will do what he can to
hasten the advent of the day when the State shall no longer be
kept by any weak compromises from the enjoyment of its undoubted
rights. If we persuade him that it is revenue, he will note the
vast disproportion of its incidence compared to that of other
taxes, and his efforts will tend to remedy the inequality, and to
lay upon other classes and interests a more equitable share of the
fiscal burden. I prefer the latter tendency to the former.”[22]
The average Indian official does not agree with Lord Salisbury. He
prefers the rent theory to the tax theory, and when the cultivator
has been allowed his subsistence off the holding, together with what
the official estimates as profit, the rent is taken in the name
of revenue, but under the excuse of rent, and I have often heard
officials urge the theory of land nationalization in their defence.
It is, however, as I said, a nationalization in which the conditions
of political and economic freedom are absent.
The new assessment, which in Bombay lasts for thirty years, depends
almost entirely on the discretion of the Settlement Officer. His
decision is supervised by higher authorities, but it usually stands,
and the only fixed rule for his guidance is that he may not increase
the revenue of a Taluka (group of villages) by more than 33 per
cent., nor that of a single village by more than 66 per cent., nor
that of a single holding by more than 100 per cent. This leaves
him plenty of margin, and in fifteen large districts of the Bombay
Presidency we find that the average increase was 30·4 per cent. at
the last assessment (1899).[23] This increase is assessed, not on
the yield of the ground, but on the “capabilities” of the ground,
and “capabilities” are calculated upon the quality of the soil,
the average rainfall, the market, the railway, and other elements
of “unearned increment.” Mr. Vaughan Nash’s account of the matter
expresses what happens:—
“The officer appointed to value the land and fix the assessment
has made his shot—I use the expression advisedly—at the average
crop, and has determined the demand which is to hold for the next
twenty or thirty years; and in theory it is understood that the
cultivator is to enjoy not less than half the profits of his farm,
beside the privilege of subsisting on its produce.... At the end
of the assessment period the authorities make another shot; and
now mark what happens. They find that since their last valuation
prices have advanced, new railways have been made, cultivation has
been intensified—or might be intensified, under a little pressure;
and, after the due application of tests of all kinds, geological,
botanical, hydrographical, meteorological, arboricultural, etc., it
is discovered that land and farmer can bear an extra 30 per cent.
or so on the old assessment.”[24]
We may assume the Settlement Officer to be a scrupulously honest
and painstaking public servant. Let us assume that his knowledge of
agriculture and local conditions is equal to his devotion. Still his
responsibility is almost too great for the wisest and most zealous
official. It is his official duty to raise as much as he decently can
for the Government, whether he calls the sum tax or rent or share
of profits. Against his decision there can be no resistance and no
practicable appeal. The cultivator is not in reality a free agent in
the new bargain, and if he protests that the payment is beyond his
income, he is informed that, being incapable of cultivating his own
land to the highest advantage, he must learn better or go.
Usually he does neither. In most cases he has no opportunity for
learning better, and he cannot, or does not, go. He borrows. An
anonymous writer once attacked me with scorn for saying that a large
proportion of cultivators in Bombay were receiving no net income, no
profits for themselves at all; they were simply existing on their
land, and for their few clothes, medicines, and family festivals they
were trying to get outside work, selling their family bangles, or
appealing to the money-lender on the off-chance that a “bumper crop”
might enable them to pay something some day.
“According to Mr. Nevinson,” cried this anonymous writer, “the
ryots in the Presidency are such simpletons as to go on cultivating
land, their income from such cultivation being always equalled
by their cultivation expenses. Why, then, do they cultivate at
all, when obviously by abandoning the land and its profitless
cultivation they could at once better their position by devoting to
other work the time and labour they now expend on cultivation.”[25]
The question is worthy of the old professorial economists, who never
went beyond books for knowledge, and settled the affairs of human
nature in their studies by their own conceptions of reason. They
used to tell us that, when one trade failed, the labour devoted to
it became absorbed in other occupations. I have often wondered, if
their trade of theorizing failed, in what other occupation their
labour would become absorbed. A large number of our Indian officials
spend nearly the whole of their time dealing with abstractions and
cases on paper, their feet under their writing-tables. The increasing
pressure of the daily routine drives them further and further from
reality, and one might suppose that this anonymous writer had never
been face to face with a peasant in his home, or known anything of
the peasant’s clinging to the land, or ever been thrown out of work
and compelled to face starvation for a single day himself.
What I said was perfectly accurate. The Indian cultivator will cling
to his land even when he makes no profit beyond his subsistence wage.
I believe the same to be true of peasant proprietors or small holders
in nearly every country; certainly it is true in France, Russia,
and Ireland, for I have known cases in all three countries. So the
Indian cultivator, when he makes no profit and is called upon for
increased assessment or his daughter’s marriage, does not at once
set off to Bombay and become a watchmaker or a docker, as economists
think he ought. As I said, he borrows. Usually he goes to the village
money-lender (banya or sowkar), and receives advances at 12 to 30
per cent. per annum, according to his character in the village. In
reality, I think, the money-lender speculates on the chance of a
“bumper crop” every few years, but in the last resort he may sell up
the cultivator through the civil courts in Bombay, or convert him
into his own labourer to work the land for him on a subsistence wage.
In hopes of saving the ryot from this extortion, the Government has
devised agricultural banks and other schemes for advancing loans at
the reasonable interest of 5 per cent., and in course of time this
benefit will probably increase. But at present the economists, as
usual, have made the mistake of omitting the uncertain element in
man, and he yet continues to prefer his familiar old money-lender
to the most advantageous Government loan. In some districts I have
heard there is a national feeling about it, but I suppose the chief
reason really is that the Government claims its interest down on the
nail for a fixed day, whereas the village money-lender can often be
cajoled, bribed, frightened, or persuaded, like a reasonable tailor,
to put off the dreaded moment of demand.
The actual cash amount of the assessment is not such an important
question to the cultivator as its proportion to his income. The
figures given for Deccan villages by Mr. Vaughan Nash in his “Family
Budgets,” show an assessment of about two shillings an acre.[26]
Many of the villages I visited were probably poorer, being in the
mountains, but the average assessment tax in them appeared to be
only a little over one shilling an acre, and sometimes as low as
fivepence, on an average holding of twenty acres. The assessment, as
I said, has now to be paid in cash on a certain day, often while the
crop is still growing. If payment is not made, everything the peasant
possesses can be seized and sold by the Revenue authorities—house
and land, plough and oxen, bedding and cooking pot. That is the
money-lender’s opportunity, and in practice it is usually the
money-lender who hands over the cash. If he refuses a further
advance, the Government is compelled either to cancel the debt (which
is now often done in famine seasons), or to suspend the debt till
next harvest (which is frequently done, but only puts off the evil
day), or to sell the peasant up, which usually yields a very small
price, and sometimes produces serious disturbances, as in the Deccan
riots of 1875, when the money-lenders were burnt out and driven from
the village.[27]
As is well known, nearly all the land in the Bombay Presidency, and
far the greater part of Madras, is held on this “ryotwari” system,
or peasant tenantry to the State, there being no intermediary at law
between the Government and the cultivator, though the money-lender
often acts as such. In many other provinces the land is owned
by landlords, or “zemindars,” much as in our own country, and
the revenue is taken from them, though it is ultimately paid by
the cultivator. In Bengal the zemindars were granted a Permanent
Settlement in 1793, which fixed the demands of the State so that
no further assessment has been instituted, and revenue stands at
an almost constant figure. The Rent Acts of 1859 and 1885 aimed at
protecting the cultivators from the usual abuses and extortions of
the landlord system, but whether the Permanent Settlement, which, of
course, involves a great loss of revenue to Government, is justified
or not by its results—whether the greater prosperity and intelligence
of Bengal arise from the moderation and fixity of the assessment, or
are due to climate, race, and enterprise, is one of those questions
that are argued between officials and educated Indians with a kind of
perpetual motion. A similar Permanent Settlement for the whole of
India was proposed by Lord Canning just before his death in 1862, but
finally abandoned twenty years later, after laborious discussion.[28]
[Illustration: THE RYOT’S HOME.]
[Illustration: CARRYING LEAVES FOR FUEL.
[_Face p. 92._
]
On leaving even small and beautiful cities like Poona you pass
through a zone where the inhabitants enjoy the health and suffer
from the scrappiness of suburbs. Here they live partly by gardening,
partly by burning lime or working in the town, and their houses
have a touch of urban refinement. The ceilings and the tops of the
walls, for instance, are hung with those garish pictures of religious
subjects—the adventures of Krishna, and other scenes—which would
provide so suitable a market for German art. But the suburbs are
short, within a few miles you enter the heart of the country, and in
his primeval village are brought face to face with the ryot—the
cultivator of the soil, the basis of the Indian Empire, the one man
for whom, or at least by means of whom, all the rest of the intricate
machinery exists, from the splendours of Simla down to the office of
the “Remembrancer of Legal Affairs,” and the “Finger-print Bureau,”
in Poona’s residential quarter, or to Lord Kitchener’s reviews in the
Poona cantonment.
In my various journeys within a circle of twenty miles round the
city, I found the ryot much what I had expected—gentle-mannered,
patient, hardy, and incredibly thin, living with his family in a
clean but dusty hut, furnished with little beyond a few brass pots
and dishes. All day he was working in his field, and he gathered for
converse at evening—“cow-dust time,” as they call it—on the steps of
the village temple, in which a vague red image represents the idea of
helpful strength—something like Hercules or the Archangel Michael;
for it is the same Maruta who helped Rama on his wandering search for
the beloved Sita.
I have never heard even the most frigid official speak evil of the
ryot. As the best patronizers in the world, we find in the ryot a
most suitable object for our characteristic capacity. Hard-working,
sober, and reverential beyond the dreams of country parsons, he is
exactly the sort of being to whom we enjoy extending the kindly and
protective sympathy due from a squire to his villagers. Just as in
Natal or Nigeria every one is ready to commend the untutored savage
and pat his curly head provided he remains savage, so in India even
the Anglo-Indian will admit a distant affection for the poor dear
ryot, and regrets the good old times when hardly an Indian of them
all made pretence to further education or equality. But education and
equality are the two things that undermine our accustomed pedestal,
and the thought of a time when we might no longer be required to
exercise our national function of patronage fills us with dismay.
The crop and the assessment are the two kindred and vital points
in the ryot’s earthly life, as distinguished from the life of his
spirit. In the Deccan, as in all parts of India, the crop is simply
a matter of opportune rainfall, and when I was in Poona there had
been no good crop for fifteen years. That autumn the prospect was a
little worse than ordinarily poor, though the main famine district of
the year was in the United Provinces, far away north. Preparations
for a serious famine had to be made already, for, as Sir William
Hunter estimated, one-fifth of India’s population—say sixty million
souls—are perpetually living on insufficient food, apart from
famines; and, partly owing to the export-trade, the villagers no
longer store grain to meet an evil day, nor do they possess cash to
purchase grain from other parts of the country. So when the pinch
of scarcity comes, the land-owning or land-taxing Government alone
stands between them and starvation; and, indeed, the Government
prides itself at all times upon its service as protector of the
poor, especially against other landlords and money-lenders. There is
always a good deal of justice in the claim, even when the Government,
having first tempered the wind, proceeds to shear the lamb. But
famine is the special opportunity for Government beneficence. All
officials then vie with each other in the thankless labour of holding
the bodies and souls of thousands together, and within a month of
his landing as Governor of Bombay, Sir George Clarke had all his
preparations ready for relief works, terracing of hills, sinking of
wells, and remission (not merely suspension) of the year’s assessment
money.
Of the assessment and of famine I had heard and read a great deal
before, but one set of grievances, closely connected with both,
was new to me. It arose from the Forest Laws—a subject we hardly
consider in England unless we are thinking of William Rufus or the
game-preserves of kilted City Fathers in the Highlands. The present
strict system of forest preservation was, I believe, instituted
after the terrible famine of 1877-78, with the admirable intention
of restoring the rainfall. In old times the village communities
maintained a tract of communal forest for grazing and fuel near
each village, just as they did formerly in England, and still do
in Russia. An ancient Indian custom set aside an acre of grazing
for every acre of cultivated land. But under our rule the influence
of village communities was to a great extent destroyed, because we
remembered nothing like it in England, and the plough was suffered to
encroach upon the forest till there was a real danger that no forest
would be left and the rains would cease. Nothing could be better
than the intention of the Forest Department in checking the process
called “denudation,” but instead of restoring the control of forests
to the villagers themselves under definite rules of maintenance,
they centralized the managements as bureaucrats will, declared
uncultivated land to be Government forest, prohibited wood-gathering
or cattle-grazing without payment, let out the grass and timber by
auction to contractors, and entered the proceeds to the advantage
of the Department. There is no denying the benefits to Government
and the contractors. The destruction of forest is checked, hay and
fuel are supplied to the cavalry cantonments and cities, and the
Department (including Burma) contributes a net sum of about £800,000
a year to the Indian exchequer.[29] Could anything be more desirable?
[Illustration: ON THE CAUSEWAY.]
[Illustration: A VILLAGE HEADMAN.]
“But how about my buffalo?” cries the thin ryot of the valley. As
Mr. Vaughan Nash said in his book on the Famine, the buffalo is
quite as necessary to the Indian peasant as a boat to a fisherman.
Buffaloes are necessary for work on the fields, manure for the soil,
and milk for the family, to say nothing of fuel and flooring. No one
who, like myself, has lived much in Kaffir huts with cow-dung floors,
or has cooked on the veldt for weeks together with cow-dung as fuel,
will make light of such uses. But still, when wood is to be had, only
a fool uses cow-dung for cooking or even for flooring. In the Indian
forests, wood is to be had, but the Forest Laws forbid the people to
use it, and they are driven to floor and cook with the cow-dung that
ought rightly to go as manure for the fields.
But the grazing is the chief difficulty, now that the old communal
lands are being swallowed up by the Forest Department. The villagers
may earn a few pence by cutting grass for the contractor who carts
it away to the city, but the hungry buffaloes look up and are not
fed. Even where a grazing allotment is made, it is too small, and I
was in a village fifteen miles from Poona where the twelve families
could afford to keep only one buffalo between them, and they had to
pay rent to the Forest Department for the right of grazing that one
buffalo and a few goats upon little patches of the vast hillsides,
all of which they regarded as the common lands of the village for
centuries past. The rent, no doubt, was very small, probably only
a few shillings a year for the buffalo and goats, but the village
income was very small too.
From the bureaucracy’s well-intentioned schemes, other peculiar
results arise which perhaps did not occur to those who framed
the laws. One case, for instance, was mentioned to me by several
villagers as a kind of typical or proverbial absurdity. A waggon
broke its wheel and the owner began to mend it. The village police,
hearing the hammer, arrested him under Section E, paragraph 109 (or
some such clause) of the Forest Laws, upon the charge of practising
carpentry within a mile of the forest limit. In his innocence, he
asked what he ought to have done to get his waggon home over the
few hundred yards to his door. He was informed that he ought to
have walked into Poona, twenty or thirty miles away, discovered the
office of the Forest Department, waited till the proper official,
who would very likely be in the country, returned to town, stated
his case, and asked for a legal certificate authorizing him to cut
timber for the repairs of his wheel on the spot. Then, with good
luck, within a week or ten days from the accident, he might have
found himself in a position to drive his waggon home in accordance
with bureaucratic regulations. I believe, however, that this rule has
now been modified, and that the man would only have to hunt a forest
ranger for permission. But take another grievance, which recalls
childhood’s memories of the Norman Conquest. The ryot’s little
wealth of crop and stock is continually exposed to wild beasts—deer,
wolves, panthers, and boars—just as our farmers’ crops are exposed to
hares and rabbits. But under the Arms Act, the ryot has little chance
of killing them himself. His duty is to walk into the nearest town
and report the presence of a wild beast to the police. The police
look round for an Englishman who wants something to kill. Frequently
they advertise for one in the local papers, and usually they have not
to wait very long. Off goes the Englishman—rifle, tiffin-basket, boy,
bedding, and all. But in the meantime it is not improbable that the
wild beast has walked away, or founded a whole new family even worse
than himself. At the best, it is just possible that the Englishman
may miss him.
While I was in India a movement was started for the protection of the
helpless ryot from deer. In many parts of the country, especially in
Rajputana and the Central Provinces, you may frequently see herds
of deer and antelopes browsing upon the standing crops, to the
great loss of the cultivator. It was alleged that the increase of
deer was due to the gradual reduction of tigers (which are nature’s
own corrective), and the proposal was to discourage the slaughter
of tigers by withdrawing the Government reward of £3 6_s._ 8_d._ a
head, or even to forbid the sport of shooting tigers unless they
were proved by experience to be man-eaters. Personally, I think
the latter regulation would be good, for the deer would be reduced,
the crops protected, and the tigers increased. But I am not sure
how far a ryot, in the interests of agriculture, would approve of a
regulation that allowed one tiger one man.
The main grievances of the ryot against the Forest Department may be
seen briefly stated in a memorial presented to the Governor of Madras
by the cultivators of eight villages in the Salem district, April,
1908. The Forest Department proposed to reserve the Anurath Hills
in the neighbourhood of the villages, and the memorial protested
that already there was not much waste land for grazing, and hardly
enough land even for cultivation. To reserve the hills would also
deprive the villagers of wood and fuel, and inflict a kind of double
assessment:—
“You settle our lands,” said the memorial, “every thirty years
and raise the assessment. To pay this assessment we ought to
cultivate our land with the aid of good manure. To have manure we
must maintain sufficient stock of cattle. When we enter the forest
to procure fodder, you demand permit fees; thus you demand double
payment (one in the shape of land assessment and the other in the
shape of forest fees) for the lands we cultivate.”
The memorial went on to say that, owing to the rigour of forest
administration, the villagers, to protect themselves, had to bribe
the subordinate officials of the Forest Department, and it concluded
with the words:—
“We lead a peaceful life. It is the policy of the Government to
keep every ryot in a contented and happy state. But in order
to secure additional forest revenue, if you permit the Forest
officials to enclose an additional reserve against our wishes,
you will create much heart-burning and discontent against the
Government.”
But let us put things at their best. Let us suppose there is neither
drought, nor famine, nor plague. Let us assume that the assessment
has been paid without borrowing, and the Forest Laws observed or
evaded, that wild beasts have been killed, and yet the deer have not
damaged the crops. Let us suppose that the ryot’s income reaches
the highest possible average, which Lord Curzon calculated at £2 a
year per head of the population, including all the rich merchants,
bankers, and landowners. It is next to impossible that the average
income in any village could be as much as that, but let us assume it
is. Still it remains at only half what is spent per head in England
every year on drink alone. It represents a standard of poverty which
we can hardly conceive—a level where every fraction of a farthing
counts. And yet I found within twenty miles of Poona a group of
villages where the ryots clubbed together of their own accord to hire
a schoolmaster at a salary of eight shillings a month. In face of
a sacrifice so astonishing it appeared to me that all the outcries
about the dangers of education in India that were then filling
the speeches of our statesmen and the columns of the _Times_ and
Anglo-Indian papers, might with good hope be accounted vain.
[Illustration: A TEMPLE TANK, MADRAS.
[_Face p. 102._
]
FOOTNOTES:
[19] The total military expenditure for India, including Marine,
Military Works, etc., was £21,586,086 for 1906-7, but this was
reduced in the following year to £20,520,500. See “Government of
India, Financial Statement, 1908-9,” p. 16.
[20] Of the many books on the Indian Land Revenue, one may consult
Mr. Romesh Dutt’s “India in the Victorian Age,” “Famines and Land
Assessment,” and “The Economic History of British India”; “Land
Revenue Policy,” an official reply to Mr. Dutt’s criticisms, issued
by Lord Curzon in 1902; some chapters in Sir Henry Cotton’s “New
India”; some pamphlets by Sir William Wedderburn, “The Indian Ryot,”
“The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” etc.; “Indian Problems,” by
Mr. S. M. Mitra (strongly on the official side); and Mr. Sidney
Low’s “Vision of India,” containing in chapter xxiii. an interesting
account of the Settlement Officer’s work in camp. Mr. Theodore
Morison’s “Industrial Organization of an Indian Province” (1906), is
also mainly occupied with the land question in the United Provinces
of Agra and Oude.
[21] “Land Revenue Policy” (1902), p. 13.
[22] Quoted by Mr. Vaughan Nash in his chapter on the Land Revenue
System: “The Great Famine and its Causes” (1900).
[23] “India in the Victorian Age,” by R. C. Dutt, p. 491 (2nd
edition).
[24] “The Great Famine,” pp. 240-2.
[25] Letter from “A Poona Resident” to the _Glasgow Herald_, December
14, 1907.
[26] “The Great Famine,” p. 62 ff.
[27] See “The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” by Sir William
Wedderburn (1897), p. 9.
[28] The whole question of land-ownership and the Settlement is very
lucidly discussed in Mr. Theodore Morison’s “Industrial Organization
of an Indian Province,” chapter ii. His general conclusion is that
the Indian system of land-tenure is something intermediate between
complete nationalization and absolute private property. “To the
extent of one-half the State is able to appropriate that unearned
increment in rental incomes which is due to the development of the
country. But, except for this contribution to the public exchequer,
the economic position of the landlord is not affected by the land
revenue laws. He receives rent for the use of the national and
indestructible properties of the soil, and he raises that rent when
the growth of population and the development of the country makes it
profitable to bring poorer lands under cultivation.” In saying this,
Mr. Morison is, however, obviously thinking only of a zemindar or
landlord district, such as the United Province, with which his book
chiefly deals.
[29] The net profit on Forest Revenue for 1905-6 was £824,748. In the
four previous years it had risen by nearly £100,000 a year, but in
1907-8 it dropped to £756,100, chiefly owing to a fall of price in
Burma.