Midnapore District Company, Raiyats and Zamindars 1760-1885

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The book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. The idea of this work dates back to 1988 when I accompanied my supervisor Dr. Premansu Kumar Bandyopadhyay, then Reader in the Department of Islamic History and Culture, University of Calcutta, for a visit to the District Record Office at Midnapore. He was very much impressed with the availability of wide varieties of revenue records reflecting the land revenue of the district since 1760 and the inter-relationship between the Midnapore raiyats and the zamindars and jotters on the one hand and the District Magistrate and the District Judge and the Board of Revenue in Calcutta on the other, most of which are yet to be published. I hail from the district of Midnapore and my home town Panskura only thirty miles off the Midnapore town. My grand father was a doctor; my late father although was a medical student of Calcutta Medical College and Mymensing Medical College of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), but all through his life lived on the management of the vast landed property built up by my grand father, and I have a basic idea, although in a crude form, of the inter relationship between the Midnapore village raiyats and zamindars and jotedars. This is the background of my early image of the land economy as in operation in the rural Midnapore. Hence on completion of my M.A. in the Department of Islamic History and Culture, when I approached my teacher Dr. Bandyopadhyay for a Ph.D. programme, we had series of discussion about the problems of such an academic enterprise and after few months on knowing my eagerness and my socio-economic root he suggested to work on the land revenue and the socio-economic condition of the people of the district since its annexation to the territory of the East India Company in 1760, and I gladly agreed to embark on this subject.

I would like to record here my grateful thanks to our former Vice Chancellor late Dr. Bhaskar Raychoudhury for awarding me a three years Research Fellowship. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my teacher supervisor Dr. Bandyopadhyay for his constant academic support, guidance and encouragement at every stage of this research project. 1 am specially thankful to him for providing me with the transcripts of Midnapore revenue and judicial records he sent me retrieved from the depository of the secret committee of the court of Directors in the India Office Library in London. These documents are not available in the State Archives of Calcutta, nor in the National Archives of New Delhi. All are of immense help in the progress of my research and have enriched my dissertation. My thanks are also due to my teachers of the Department of Islamic History and Culture of the Calcutta University, viz. Professor Sushil Choudhury, late Professor Muhammad Qamruddin, Professor Aniruddha Ray, Professor Ranjit Sen and Dr. M. Osman Ghani for their support.

I would also like to record here my grateful thanks to our present Vice Chancellor Professor Suranjan Das, when my research work was in progress, Professor Das, then in the Department of History, was very kind to clarify some questions on the land revenue in the colonial India. I am grateful to three examiners of my thesis, viz, Professor Dilbag Sing of the Jawharlal Nehru University of Delhi, Professor Mafakkarul Islam of the Dhaka University and Professor Rakhal Nath of the Kalyani

University for their kind recommendation in favour of my thesis. I find no word to express my indebtedness to my late father Syed Zahed Ali, my mother Syeda Razeka Khatun and to my elder brother Syed Khaled Ali for their kind and constant support and financial help in the most difficult times I passed through during the period of my research. My thanks are also due to my colleague Kazi Sufior Rahaman, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Islamic History and Culture, and to my friends of student life Partima, Jharna and Debashis for their encouragement. My thanks are also due to Professor Jamil Ahmed, Head of the Department of Islamic History of Moulana Abul Kalam Azad College, Kolkata. I am ever grateful to the staff of the Midnapore District Record Office, West Bengal State Archives, Calcutta, National Library, Calcutta and the Central Library of the University of Calcutta for their kind and laborious service extended to me. Mrs. Rayhana Hannan of Dhaka, Bangladesh was kind enough to send me the copies of books published in Bangladesh for which I am grateful to her. Last but not least, I am grateful to Sri Manoranjan Dey of Debayan Computer Centre for type setting, D.T.P. work and proof reading, but the mistakes, if any, are mine. Mr. K. K. Bagchi of Messers KP Bagchi & Company of Calcutta offered me a valuable service in selecting my thesis for publication for which I am very obliged to him.

Recent interest in micro-level research on the British colonial administration of Bengal districts has led to a number of publications.

The ground work of such study has already been prepared by some classical works which are worth mentioning. Baden-Pawell, Moreland and Habib have produced a formidable, broad and analytical land revenue history of India, of which the district land revenue is an integral part, Hunter's Annals of Rural Bengal provides some quantitative guide lines of the study of various aspects of Bengal districts. Sinha's work Economic History of Bengal though encompasses the whole province but with its statistical analysis and economic data one can project an initial structure of a district level research. Mention may be made of the significant contribution of Gopal, Guha, Frykenberg and Islam on the theoretical and operational aspects of the land settlement of Bengal without a thorough comprehension of which one can hardly embark on a micro-study of the revenue history of Bengal districts. Generally the economic history of the Bengal districts in the British period like that of other districts of the British provinces is primarily confined to the official publication of the District Gazetteer, the manual and hand-book of the district and settlement officers. But for an empirical study on any aspects concerned. Besides, Gazatteers are not only undocumented but are the summarised narratives of the districts and, therefore quite inadequate to make a critical review of the district concerned. Nevertheless as observed by S.B. Choudhury' the District Gazetteers still serve as the initial handbook of information of any researcher who intends to start a serious study on any district, the nucleus of the British colony superstructive in India.

For the micro-level work on any district one has to depend primarily on the district revenue and, judicial records as well as the relevant records of the province concerned and all the monographs so far published on Bengal and other British provincial districts are based on such records.

On the Bengal districts, the monographs so far published are, broadly speaking, of two types. One is structurally designed in the format of the District Gazetteers but fully documented with reference to the primary source material with attempts to highlight the critical review of the socio-economic aspects of the district concerned. The other type is fully confined to one or two vital aspects of the district administration which are of great significance both to the rulers and the ruled and which shape and guide the interaction between the people and the colonial government in the context of the class conflict in the colonial society in India. Mohsin's work on Murshidabad and Gupta's on Birbhum' district fall in the former category while that of Serajuddin' is of the later type, which provides an analytical picture of the land revenue administration of the district of Chittagong during the early part of the Company's rule in the district with special reference to the tenural settlement of land when the revenue settlement in the province was still in an experimental stage. Serajuddin's work may be set forth as a model in order to assess whether it was repeated or revised in the land revenue settlement of other districts in the same period. Works on various district by the Indian and European authors both in Bengali and English are numerous. Works on Jessore and Khulna, on Faridpur, to on Bagura" etc. may be mentioned here, but all belong to the former category and the micro-study on the revenue question and its correlation with the socio-economic condition of the district are absent. The work of Bhattacharya makes a difference in this context.