Ryotwari Settlement: Land Revenue System in British India

Ryotwari Settlement: Land Revenue System in British India

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Where the Permanent Settlement had bound land revenue to a class of hereditary zamindars in Bengal, the Ryotwari Settlement took the opposite course — assessing and collecting revenue directly from the individual cultivator, or ryot, with no hereditary intermediary standing between the peasant and the state. Pioneered in Madras and later extended to Bombay, Sind, Assam, and Coorg, the Ryotwari system was shaped as much by financial necessity and Utilitarian theory as by genuine administrative experiment, and its consequences for the agrarian societies of South and Western India remain the subject of continuing historical debate. This article traces the genesis of the Ryotwari Settlement, its evolution and features in Madras and Bombay, and the wider controversy over its social and economic impact.

Factors and Forces that Shaped the Ryotwari Settlement (Genesis of the Settlement in Madras Presidency)

• The establishment of British rule in South and South-Western India brought entirely new problems of land settlement.
  • Lord Cornwallis had expected his Permanent Settlement, or the zamindari system, to be extended across the rest of India. When Wellesley arrived in India, he and Henry Dundas of the Board of Control shared this same faith in the Bengal system, and in 1798, Wellesley ordered its extension to the Madras Presidency.
  • Here, however, officials faced the problem of finding a sizeable zamindar class comparable to Bengal’s — they believed no zamindars with large estates existed in this region with whom a land-revenue settlement could reasonably be made, and that introducing the zamindari system would upset the existing state of affairs.
  • Many Madras officials, led by Reed and Munro, recommended that settlement should instead be made directly with the actual cultivators.
  • Nevertheless, between 1801 and 1807, the Madras authorities did introduce the zamindari system across large areas under their control — recognising local poligars as zamindars, and, where no such figures could be found, aggregating villages into estates that were auctioned off to the highest bidder.
• Before this process could go very far, however, British official circles grew increasingly disillusioned with the Permanent Settlement, which provided no means of raising government income, even as the increased income from land accrued entirely to the zamindars.
  • This distrust of large landlords was partly a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, which insisted on the primacy of agriculture and celebrated the yeoman farmer within agricultural society — ideas that clearly shaped Scottish officials such as Thomas Munro and Mountstuart Elphinstone, who took the lead in reforming the Company’s revenue administration.
  • This was also the period when Utilitarian ideas began influencing Indian policy, and among these, David Ricardo’s theory of rent appeared to point towards revising the existing system.
    • Rent, in this theory, was the surplus generated by land — its income minus the costs of production and labour — and the state, it was argued, had a legitimate claim to a share of this surplus at the expense of unproductive intermediaries, whose claim rested solely on ownership rights.
    • The theory thus provided an argument for eliminating the zamindars altogether and appropriating a larger share of the growing income from newly acquired land.
  • Yet theory alone rarely dictated policy in India. A far more powerful driver of the new settlement was the perennial financial crisis of the Madras Presidency, worsened considerably by the rising costs of war — and it was this fiscal pressure that formed the true genesis of the Ryotwari Settlement in Madras.
• The Ryotwari Settlement was ultimately implemented across the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, and later extended to Sind, Assam, and Coorg.

Ryotwari Settlement in Madras (Features of the Settlement)

• The Ryotwari experiment was first launched by Alexander Reed in Baramahal (Madras Presidency) in 1792, following its acquisition by the Company, and was carried forward by Thomas Munro from 1801, when he took charge of the revenue administration of the ceded districts.
  • It was introduced in Kanara in 1799–1800 by Thomas Munro; in the districts of Bellary and Cuddapah in 1801–02, again by Munro; in Nellore, Arcot, and Coimbatore in 1807; and across the Madras Presidency as a whole in 1820, when Munro became Governor of Madras.
• Instead of collecting revenue through zamindars, officials began collecting it directly from villages, fixing the amount each village was to pay, before proceeding to assess each individual cultivator, or ryot, separately — thereby evolving the Ryotwari System proper.
  • Captain Reed, assisted by Thomas Munro, fixed the state demand at 50% of the estimated produce of the fields — a figure that in practice worked out to more than the whole economic rent. The same system was subsequently extended to other regions, and the first assessments proved extremely severe, causing widespread hardship.
• Under this system, land revenue was no longer collected by zamindars but was deposited directly by the ryots, or cultivators, into the government treasury.
  • The cultivator effectively became the landowner, with no intermediary standing between him and the state for the purpose of revenue collection.
  • Every “registered” holder of land was recognised as its proprietor and held directly responsible for paying land revenue to the state — with the right to sub-let, transfer, mortgage, or sell his holding, and immunity from eviction so long as he continued to meet the state’s revenue demand.
  • The system thus created a genuine individual proprietary right in land, but vested this right in the peasant rather than in a zamindar class — Munro himself preferring the land to rest in the hands of “forty to fifty thousand small proprietors” rather than “four or five hundred great ones.”
  • Munro’s system nonetheless drew a significant distinction between public and private ownership: it defined the state itself as the supreme landlord, with individual peasants as landowners who obtained title merely by paying annual cash rents, or revenue assessments, to the government.
  • Under this arrangement, land revenue was periodically increased — typically every 20 to 30 years.
• As it eventually evolved, this became a field-assessment system, under which rent payable on each field was to be permanently determined through a general survey of all lands.
  • Annual agreements were then to be concluded between the government and each cultivator, who retained the choice of accepting or rejecting the terms offered. If he agreed, he received a patta, which served as his title to private property; if no cultivator could be found for a given plot, the land might simply lie fallow.
  • For the system to be genuinely attractive and equitable, it required a detailed land survey, assessing the quality of soil, the area of each field, and its average produce, with revenue fixed on this basis.
  • This, however, was merely the theory. In practice, estimates were often little more than guesswork, and the revenue demanded was frequently so high that it could be collected only with great difficulty, if at all — with peasants routinely coerced into accepting unjust settlements.
  • The Ryotwari system was, consequently, almost entirely abandoned soon after Munro’s departure for London in 1807.

Second Phase of Ryotwari

• Around 1820, circumstances changed once again as Thomas Munro returned to India as Governor of Madras.
  • His justification for reintroducing the system this time rested on the argument that Ryotwari was the ancient Indian land-tenure system, and thus best suited to Indian conditions — though this appeal to the past served, in reality, the interests of empire.
    • Munro believed the British Empire required a unified concept of sovereignty, and that the Ryotwari system could provide its foundation. The security and administration of the empire, he argued, demanded the elimination of overmighty poligars and the direct collection of revenue from individual farmers under British supervision.
    • He justified this position historically, arguing that land in India had always belonged to the state, which collected revenue from individual peasants through a hierarchy of officials remunerated through grants of inam land — and that the power of this “landlord-state” had rested on military strength; when that strength declined, the poligars had appropriated land and thereby usurped sovereignty, a process of alienation that now needed to be reversed.
    • In making this argument, Munro brushed aside the contrary observations of men like Francis Ellis, who held that property rights had traditionally been conferred on the community or tribe rather than the individual, and that families possessed a variety of rights over communal assets.
  • At the same time, Munro insisted that this system would actually reduce the revenue burden on farmers while yielding a larger overall revenue for the state, since no intermediary would retain a share of the surplus.
  • London, too, welcomed the scheme, since it placed authority and power directly in British hands in a way the Cornwallis system could never achieve. With the Madras government chronically short of funds, it moved to introduce the Ryotwari Settlement across most of the presidency.

Problems

• In practice, the system gradually took quite different forms from what Munro had originally envisioned — raising government revenue income, but placing cultivators in severe distress.
  • In many areas, no proper survey was carried out at all, and a ryot’s tax was assessed arbitrarily, based on village accounts — a method known as the putcut settlement.
    • Revenue was fixed on a ryot’s entire farm, rather than on each individual field — even though fields might vary considerably in irrigation and productivity.
  • Where a survey was actually undertaken, it was frequently, in the words of contemporaries, “ill-conceived and hastily executed,” resulting in over-assessment.
  • Contrary to Munro’s original insistence that cultivators be free to take up as much or as little land as they chose, this “right of contraction or relinquishment” was effectively withdrawn by 1833.
  • Cultivating peasants were consequently impoverished over time, growing increasingly indebted and unable to invest in extending cultivation.
    • Except in Coimbatore, there was practically no land market in Madras at all, since purchasing land would have meant taking on an extortionate revenue burden.
  • Nor did the Ryotwari system eliminate village elites as intermediaries between the government and the peasantry.
    • The privileged rents and special rights of the mirasidars were recognised, and the caste privileges of the Brahmans respected, leaving the existing village power structure largely intact — indeed, further reinforced under the new system.
    • This process was supported by a body of colonial knowledge, produced collaboratively by British officials and Tamil writers, which held that mirasidars belonging to “good agricultural castes,” such as the Vellalas, were the original colonists and skilled agriculturists.
      • Such stereotypes positioned traditional village elites like the mirasidars as central to the British ideal of a settled, sedentary agricultural community, allowing them to entrench themselves comfortably within the subordinate ranks of the revenue establishment — some even purchasing lucrative tracts of irrigated land after securing official appointments.
  • After 1816, revenue officials combined both revenue collection and police duties in the countryside — a concentration of power that inevitably led to coercion, bribery, and corruption among subordinate officials of the Collectorate.
    • The excesses of these officials were revealed in extensive and often gruesome detail in the Madras Torture Commission Report of 1855, underscoring the urgent need for reform, and members of the British Parliament themselves raised questions about the torture inflicted on defaulters.
  • As a result, the peasantry sank ever deeper into poverty, falling increasingly into the clutches of moneylenders in order to pay their land revenue.

Third Phase of Ryotwari Settlement

• In 1855, an extensive new survey and settlement plan was drawn up on the basis of 30% of gross produce, with actual field work beginning in 1861.
  • A rule of 1864 limited the state’s revenue demand to half the net value of the produce (50% of the rental) of the land, with settlements fixed for a term of thirty years — though many of these instructions remained largely on paper.
  • The reformed system introduced in 1864 did bring some measure of agricultural prosperity and an extension of cultivation, though this progress was interrupted by two major Madras famines — in 1865–66 and 1876–78 — even as recovery across the Presidency as a whole proved comparatively rapid.
• The historian Dharma Kumar offers an important reassessment of this period:
  • Contrary to prevalent myths, she argues, the statistics do not support the view that land was increasingly concentrated in the hands of rich farmers and moneylenders.
  • Inequality, in her analysis, increased only in prosperous, well-irrigated tracts such as the Godavari delta, while elsewhere it actually declined.
  • There is likewise no clear evidence, she affirms, that indebtedness resulted in widespread dispossession of land — debts varied considerably in nature, and absentee landlordism, except in Tirunelveli, declined almost everywhere else.
  • She notes, however, that wherever tenants did exist, they enjoyed almost no protection anywhere in the presidency.

The Impact of the Ryotwari System on the Agrarian Society of Madras

• By redefining property rights, the Ryotwari system in practice strengthened the power of village magnates wherever they already existed, thereby intensifying social conflict — though this impact varied considerably by region, depending on existing social structures and ecological conditions.
• David Ludden’s study of the Tirunelveli district shows how the locally powerful mirasidars manipulated the new system to secure privileged rents, converting their earlier collective rights into individual property rights.
  • The Madras government, since 1820, showed almost no interest in protecting tenant rights, despite the tenants’ active, if ultimately futile, resistance to mirasidari power. Ludden argues, however, that mirasidars in the wet zones fared considerably better than their counterparts in the dry or mixed zones.
• Willem van Schendel’s study of the Kaveri delta in Tanjavur district similarly reveals a “golden age” of the mirasidars, who entrenched their control over land and labour, intensifying the polarisation of local society.
  • Their power eroded somewhat in the second half of the 19th century, owing to growing social and economic differentiation within their own community, with older families gradually giving way to newer commercial groups — though this by no means marked the end of mirasidari power in local society.
• Among other Tamil districts, conditions were broadly similar in the wet taluks of Tiruchirapalli, while in South Arcot and Chingleput, privileged landownership rights were increasingly challenged by the actual cultivators. In other, more expansive tracts of Tamilnad, where cultivable land remained abundant, the agrarian structure was instead dominated by a large body of owner-cultivators alongside a smaller group of middle landowners.
• In the Andhra districts of the Madras Presidency, too, the Ryotwari system resulted in growing differentiation within the peasantry.
  • By the early 20th century, an affluent group of large landholders had emerged — termed the “peasant-bourgeoisie” by the historian A. Satyanarayana — who controlled sizeable farms and leased out surplus land to landless tenants and sharecroppers, while the intermediate strata, too, enjoyed relatively stable economic conditions.
  • The poor peasantry, by contrast, who formed the majority of the rural population, lived in squalid conditions — exploited by richer ryots, creditors, and lessors — and were often forced to hire themselves out despite wretched circumstances, remaining tied throughout to small plots of land.

The Ryotwari Settlement in the Bombay Presidency

• The Ryotwari system in the Bombay Presidency began in Gujarat following its annexation in 1803, and was later extended, once the Peshwa’s territories were conquered in 1818, under the supervision of Munro’s disciple, Mountstuart Elphinstone, between 1823 and 1825.

Elphinstone’s and Chaplin’s Reports

• Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827, submitted a detailed “Report on the Territories Conquered from the Peshwa” in October 1819, emphasising two crucial features of the earlier Maratha administration:
  • The existence of village communities as the basic units of local administration.
  • The existence of mirasi tenure — where mirasdars functioned as hereditary peasant proprietors, cultivating their own fields and paying land tax to the state at fixed rates.
• Chaplin, Commissioner of the Deccan, submitted two further reports in 1821 and 1822, drawing on past revenue practices and offering several valuable suggestions.
• Initially, the British had collected revenue in these territories through the Deshmukh and the village headman, or patil — but as this yielded less revenue than hoped, officials began collecting directly from peasants from 1813–14 onward.
  • The same abuses that had plagued the Madras system soon reappeared in Bombay, as the revenue rates fixed turned out to be extraordinarily high.
  • With frequent crop failures and falling prices, peasants either mortgaged their land to moneylenders or simply abandoned cultivation, migrating to neighbouring princely states where revenue rates remained lower.
• A land survey was subsequently undertaken by the officer R.K. Pringle, who classified the land and fixed revenue at 55% of the net value of produce.
  • This scheme, first introduced in the Indapur taluk in 1830, was soon found to be deeply flawed, with produce estimates proving highly erroneous — resulting in over-assessment and the oppression of the peasantry.
  • In disgust, many cultivators abandoned their fields altogether, and large tracts of cultivable land fell out of cultivation.
• The Pringle scheme was accordingly abandoned and replaced, in 1835, by a reformed Bombay Survey System, devised by two officers, G. Wingate and H.E. Goldsmid.
  • This new settlement aimed practically at lowering the revenue demand to a reasonable level that could realistically be paid on a regular basis.
    • The actual assessment of each field depended on what it had paid in the immediate past, expected price movements, and the nature and location of its soil.
    • Crucially, this assessment was placed on each individual field, rather than on a cultivator’s entire holding, allowing each cultivator to relinquish any particular field or take up others that remained unoccupied.
  • This new assessment began in 1836, based on a thirty-year settlement, and had covered most of the Deccan by 1847 — though, like its predecessors, it remained largely based on guesswork and tended to err on the side of severity.

The General Impact of the Ryotwari Settlement

• The broader impact of the Ryotwari Settlement on the agrarian society of western India remains the subject of a major historical controversy, not least because it contributed to a rural uprising in the Bombay Deccan in 1875.
  • The American Civil War (1861–65) temporarily boosted demand for Bombay cotton, pushing up prices, and Survey officers used this temporary boom as an opportunity to raise assessments by between 66% and 100%, without granting cultivators any right of appeal to a court of law.
  • The Deccan subsequently witnessed agrarian riots in 1875, prompting the government to respond with the Deccan Agriculturists’ Relief Act, 1879, which offered relief against moneylenders — though it did nothing to restrain the excessive state revenue demand that lay at the root of the crisis.
• Historians remain divided on the true significance of these events.
  • Neil Charlesworth does not believe the Wingate settlements, actually introduced between 1840 and 1870, brought about any dramatic change in western India.
    • He notes that the settlements reduced the village patil to the status of an ordinary peasant and a paid government employee — but argues that the erosion of the patil’s power had begun well before British rule, with British administration merely completing a process already well underway.
    • Nor did the settlements universally displace village elites: in Gujarat, the superior rights of the bhagdars, narwadars, and the Ahmedabad taluqdars were respected, ensuring greater political and social stability in these regions. It was only in the central Deccan that a genuine power vacuum emerged, creating openings for a more active role by Marwari and Gujarati moneylenders (banias).
  • A different school of historians holds that, for the peasantry, the new settlements actually made revenue assessment less burdensome and inequitable — arguing that even if peasants became heavily indebted by the mid-19th century, such indebtedness was long-standing and not primarily a consequence of the land-revenue demand, and did not, in itself, lead to large-scale alienation of land, since Marwari creditors had little real interest in acquiring cultivators’ land.
    • H. Fukazawa endorses this interpretation, asserting that there is no evidence of land being increasingly bought up by traders and moneylenders.
    • Ian Catanach believes that dispossession and land transfer from agriculturists to non-agriculturists did indeed occur in the Deccan by the mid-19th century, but argues this did not necessarily cause the Deccan riots.
  • By contrast, Ravinder Kumar and Sumit Guha argue that the Ryotwari Settlement caused significant social upheaval by undermining the authority of village headmen, triggering a genuine “status revolution” in Maharashtra’s villages — discontent that, in their view, ultimately propelled the Deccan riots.
• The social effects of the Ryotwari system, in both Madras and Bombay, were perhaps less dramatic overall than those of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal — yet it remains difficult to argue for simple continuity, since the older institutional forms that did persist were now differently restructured under colonial rule.

An Overall Assessment: The Limits of Ryotwari “Ownership”

• Despite its rhetoric of peasant proprietorship, the Ryotwari Settlement did not, in practice, bring into existence a genuine system of peasant ownership. The peasant soon discovered that the earlier multitude of zamindars had simply been replaced by one great zamindar — the state itself.
  • Indeed, the government later openly asserted that land revenue was, in effect, rent, and not a tax.
• The ryot’s rights of ownership over his land were further undercut by three key factors:
  • In most areas, the land revenue fixed was exorbitant, leaving the ryot with barely enough for subsistence even in the best of seasons.
  • The government retained the right to enhance land revenue at will.
  • The ryot was obliged to pay revenue even when his produce had been partially or wholly destroyed by drought or flood.
• The system was, moreover, never truly permanent.
  • Settlements remained temporary, and farmers always suspected that their net average income had been wrongly assessed, leaving the land revenue payable effectively inflated.
  • Government officials, for their part, consistently expected higher revenue — despite the system’s ostensibly scientific basis, officials frequently mishandled the determination of revenue and simply raised the rates.
  • Corruption among revenue officials compounded these problems: Company revenue officials were often harsh and strict in collecting land revenue, driving farmers, out of fear, to borrow from the mahajan at high rates of interest — leaving a large proportion of them permanently in debt.
  • There was, additionally, no aid during natural calamities: the government offered farmers no assistance in raising production, leaving them to their own initiative, and provided no relief against drought or floods — farmers were required to pay land revenue in all circumstances regardless.
• The two great evils of the Ryotwari system, particularly in Bombay, were thus over-assessment and uncertainty.
  • There was, moreover, no provision for appeal to a court of law against over-assessment — the collector would simply inform the cultivator of the rate at which his land had been assessed for the future, warning that he could retain the land on these new terms if he chose, or relinquish it if he did not.

In summary, the Ryotwari Settlement represented a deliberate departure from the Permanent Settlement’s zamindari model — replacing hereditary landlords with a direct fiscal relationship between the individual cultivator and the colonial state, framed in the language of ancient Indian tradition and Utilitarian rent theory alike. In practice, however, it neither delivered genuine peasant proprietorship nor eliminated existing rural hierarchies such as the mirasidars, and its record — one of chronic over-assessment, official corruption, and periodic agrarian unrest culminating in the Deccan riots of 1875 — continues to generate sharp historiographical disagreement over how deeply, and how unevenly, it transformed the agrarian societies of Madras and Bombay.