Ancient Rights and Future Comfort by Peter Robb

Author:Peter Robb [Robb, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136799327
Google: SZjhAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-31T04:53:38+00:00

Chapter Six

The magic of property

It is evident that not only the perceptions of the tenancy debates but also the impulses for reform were essentially ideological. Both provided for law to triumph over custom, intervention over 'natural' progress, standardisation over variety. At the core of the triumph were the diagnosis and the remedy proposed—that is, property. Indigo abuses helped focus the willingness to legislate, as did famine and Bihari poverty, and (paradoxically) a host of other dissatisfactions with the nature and impact of British law and administration. But, as ever, as in Trevelyan quoted in the last chapter, property was the programme— whether to promote economic improvement, or to protect the subjects against an overweening state and from one another. The Tenancy Act was also, therefore, a marker of particular decisions about the nature and advantages of unequal possession, for classes and individuals.

In the definition of property rights the Irish example has been recognised as having been important.1 Several officials—MacDonnell for example—were personally interested in the Irish land question; all were aware of it, and many referred to it, as one of the great political questions of the day. Officials were familiar with the three 'F's, of fixity of tenure, fair rents and free transfer, as the embodiment of the conditions of a protected tenancy. Several of these features were translated into the Indian setting, or introduced into arguments in support of particular solutions to Indian problems. The existence of an intellectual tradition in which free transfer was regarded as an essential incident of property doubtless reinforced the reformers' insistence that tenancies should be transferable—in practice if not unequivocally in law, as we have seen—and their unwillingness to entertain the arguments, put forward by their opponents, to the effect that the ability to sell and mortgage holdings would place the raiyats in thrall to the moneylenders, the true cultivators at the mercy of intermediaries. Nonetheless, too much can be made of this Irish influence, which in any case was mainly that of general European ideas about property rather than anything more specific. Ireland's particular importance was greater at the polemical than at the ideological level: it was a fraught party issue. As such, Mackenzie questioned Garth's 'good taste', in the course of their debate, when he referred to the 'terrible fruit' of the 'confiscation' of property in Ireland. Responding nonetheless in kind, Mackenzie retorted that 'Ordinary people' had been under the impression that agrarian outrages in Ireland had resulted from 'the confiscation or non-recognition of the rights of the cultivating classes'. Holding up the spectre of agrarian outrages in India was a favourite ploy of tenancy reformers.

Such party divides apart, however, much that occurred in India was related to experience and debates within the country, and was reinforced rather than modified by the exigencies of Irish politics. The preferred remedies arose in contexts which favoured particular strategies and assumptions. The usual accounts of the opposing social propensities of colonial policy have assumed them to be opposed and consecutive: the permanent settlement gave way to the raiyatwari, and peasant proprietary policies succeeded zamindari ones.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.