A Critical Perspective on Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement
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| Lord Charles Cornwallis en.wikipedia.org |
Above image: Portrait of Lord Cornwallis by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783.Author of Permanent Settlement. The Permanent Settlement of Bengal (1793), was an agreement between the East India Company and landlords of Bengal to fix revenues to be raised from land.The landlords were actually revenue collectors for the company.. ........
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The Permanent Settlement of 1793, introduced by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal, remains one of the most debated revenue experiments in colonial Indian history. Conceived as a measure to ensure stable revenue for the East India Company, it fixed land revenue demands permanently and recognised zamindars as hereditary landowners responsible for remitting taxes to the state. Inspired partly by British notions of landed property and influenced by contemporary agrarian systems in England, the policy aimed to create a loyal class of landed gentry who would invest in agricultural improvement.
Modern historians, however, view the measure critically. While it provided predictable revenue to the colonial state, it failed to protect the actual cultivators (ryots), who bore the burden of high rents and arbitrary exactions. This system was not beneficial to the cultivators who never made progress and remained poor. The settlement did not cap the rents that zamindars could demand, leading in many cases to peasant indebtedness, dispossession, and periodic rural unrest. Scholars argue that the British misunderstood the complex and layered nature of pre-colonial land rights, simplifying them into a rigid system of private property that did not reflect Indian agrarian realities.
Economically, the anticipated agricultural modernization largely failed to materialize. Many zamindars, secure in their proprietary rights, acted as rent collectors rather than agricultural improvers. Frequent land sales due to revenue arrears created instability instead of the intended landed aristocracy. Historians such as R.C. Dutt and later Bipan Chandra have linked the system to rural stagnation and the commercialization of agriculture without adequate safeguards.
At the same time, some scholars note that the Permanent Settlement contributed to the emergence of a new urban elite in Bengal, influencing social and cultural developments, including the Bengal Renaissance. Nevertheless, in the long term, it entrenched structural inequalities in rural eastern India, the effects of which continued well into the twentieth century.
Today, the Permanent Settlement is widely regarded as a policy that prioritized colonial fiscal security over agrarian welfare.
"Cornwallis Code". Encyclopedia Britannica. 4 February 2009. Retrieved 24 February 2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Settlement
For Further Reading:
Marshall, P.J. Bengal: The British Bridgehead, Cambridge University Press.
Chandra, Bipan et al. India’s Struggle for Independence.
Dutt, R.C. The Economic History of India under Early British Rule.
K. N. Jayaraman
