Permanent Settlement - Influence

Influence

The Company hoped that the zamindar class would not only be a revenue-generating instrument but serve as intermediaries for the more political aspects of their rule, preserving local custom and protecting rural life from the possibly rapacious influences of its own representatives. However, this worked both ways; zamindars became a naturally conservative interest group. Once British policy in the mid-nineteenth century changed to one of reform and intervention in custom, the zamindars were vocal in their opposition. The Permanent Settlement had the features that state demand was fixed at 89% of the rent and 11% was to be retained by the Zamindars. The state demand could not be increased but payment should be made on the due date, before sunset and so it is also known as the 'Sunset Law'. Failure to pay led to the sale of land to the highest bidder.

While the worst of the tax-farming excesses were countered by the introduction of the Settlement, the use of land was not part of the agreement. There was a tendency of Company officials and Indian landlords to force their tenants into plantation-style farming of cash crops like indigo and cotton rather than rice and wheat. This was a cause of many of the worst famines of the nineteenth century. In addition, zamindars eventually became absentee landlords, with all that that implies for neglect of investment on the land.

Once the salient features of the Settlement were reproduced all over India – and indeed elsewhere in the Empire, including Kenya – the political structure was altered forever. The landlord class held much greater power than they had under the Mughals, where they were subject to oversight by a trained bureaucracy with the power to attenuate their tenure. The power of the landlord caste/class over smallholders was not diluted in India until the first efforts towards land reform in the 1950s, still incomplete everywhere except West Bengal. In Pakistan, where land reform was never carried out, elections in rural areas still suffer from a tendency towards oligarchy reflecting the concentration of influence in the hands of zamindar families.