Indian History Quiz: British Land Revenue Systems and Economic Impact

The correct answer is B, Dadabhai Naoroji. In Poverty and Un-British Rule in India Naoroji gathered his estimates of India's national income and set out the theory of the drain of wealth, showing that a part of the country's wealth was carried to Britain every year without any return, through home charges, the salaries and pensions of British officials and the profits of British capital. He was called the Grand Old Man of India and was the first Indian to be elected to the British House of Commons. A is wrong because A. O. Hume, a retired civil servant, helped to found the Indian National Congress in 1885 but wrote no such work on Indian poverty. C is wrong because W. C. Bonnerjee presided over the first session of the Congress and was a lawyer, not an economic writer. D is wrong because S. Subramania Iyer was a Madras judge and public figure associated with the early Congress.

The correct answer is A, industrial goods. The Great Depression that began in 1929 pulled down the prices of primary produce such as wheat, cotton and jute far more sharply, and for far longer, than the prices of the manufactured goods the peasant had to buy. Because his revenue demand and his old debt were fixed in money terms, the Indian cultivator had to sell much more grain to pay the same sum, and rural indebtedness rose. B is wrong because opium was a government monopoly crop of the China trade and not the general standard against which farm prices are compared. C is wrong because agricultural inputs of that time, mainly seed, bullocks and manure, came from within the village and were themselves farm produce, so they fell with other agricultural prices. D is wrong because indigo had already lost its market to synthetic dyes well before 1929.

The correct answer is B, Lord Cornwallis. Cornwallis, Governor-General from 1786 to 1793, made the settlement permanent in 1793 on the advice of John Shore, recognising the zamindars as proprietors of the soil against a revenue demand fixed for ever. A is wrong because Warren Hastings experimented earlier with the farming system, auctioning the revenue of districts for five years, which the Permanent Settlement replaced. C is wrong because Lord Wellesley is remembered for the Subsidiary Alliance system and the expansion of British territory, not for revenue settlement. D is wrong because Lord William Bentinck came much later, from 1828 to 1835, and is associated with the reform of the Mahalwari settlement in 1833 and with social legislation such as the abolition of sati. A common trap is to mark John Shore, who advised on the scheme but did not introduce it.

The correct answer is B, Thomas Munro. Munro, with Captain Alexander Read, worked out the Ryotwari settlement in the Baramahal and Madras region, and extended it widely after he became Governor of Madras in 1820; the state dealt directly with the ryot, the individual cultivator, who held the land so long as he paid the assessment. A is wrong because Holt Mackenzie framed the Mahalwari settlement for the North Western Provinces in Regulation VII of 1822. C is wrong because John Shore advised Cornwallis on the Permanent Settlement and later became Governor-General himself. D is wrong because Robert Mertins Bird carried out the revised Mahalwari settlement of the North Western Provinces under Lord William Bentinck in 1833. Pair each name with its system, since matching questions on these four officers are set almost every year.

The correct answer is B, one-eleventh. The settlement required the zamindar to pay ten-elevenths of the rental he collected from the peasants to the state and to retain one-eleventh for himself, which is why the demand pressed so heavily and so many estates changed hands in the early years. A is wrong because a quarter share has no basis in the Bengal settlement. C is wrong because a half share is closer to the proportion of the gross produce the state claimed under the Ryotwari assessment on dry land, a figure candidates often confuse with this one. D is wrong because a third share belongs to older Indian practice, such as the Mughal demand on produce, and not to the Permanent Settlement. Remember the ratio along with the Sunset Law, since the two together explain the ruin of the old zamindari families.

The correct answer is C, the Permanent Settlement. Under its rules the revenue instalment had to reach the treasury before sunset on the appointed day; if it did not, the estate was liable to be sold at public auction, and many old families lost their zamindaris to Calcutta merchants in the first two decades. A is wrong because the Ryotwari settlement dealt with the individual cultivator and its hardship came from the high assessment and its rigid collection, not from any sunset rule. B is wrong because the Mahalwari settlement made the village jointly responsible and the lambardar collected the sum, with no such auction rule attached. D is wrong because the farming system auctioned the right to collect revenue in advance for a term of years, which is a different arrangement that the Permanent Settlement was designed to replace.

The correct answer is C, the village or mahal. The word mahal means an estate or a village, and in this settlement the demand was fixed for the whole mahal; the village headman, called the lambardar, collected the shares from the co-sharers, and the village as a body was jointly responsible for the full amount. A is wrong because assessment field by field on the individual cultivator is the mark of the Ryotwari system of Munro. B is wrong because a settlement made with the zamindar as proprietor of an estate describes the Permanent Settlement of 1793, although Mahalwari villages too sometimes had a dominant co-sharer. D is wrong because no revenue system in British India assessed a whole district as one unit; the district was only the administrative area under a Collector who supervised the settlement.

The correct answer is B, the Ryotwari system. It was applied in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies and in parts of Assam and Coorg, which together made up about half of British India, the largest share of the three settlements. A is wrong because the Permanent Settlement, though the earliest and the most famous, covered only about a fifth of British India, chiefly Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, the Benaras division and the northern districts of Madras. C is wrong because the Mahalwari settlement covered roughly thirty per cent, in the North Western Provinces, the Central Provinces and Punjab. D is wrong because the taluqdari arrangement of Awadh and parts of Gujarat was a local variant of landlord settlement and never a system of all-India extent. The order to remember is Ryotwari, then Mahalwari, then the Permanent Settlement.

The correct answer is B, moneylenders. The cotton boom of the American Civil War years ended, prices fell, the revenue demand was raised, and the Deccan ryot who had borrowed heavily turned on the Marwari and Gujarati sahukars, burning their bonds and account books in 1875. The government appointed the Deccan Riots Commission and passed the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act in 1879 to limit the transfer of land for debt. A is wrong because the revolt against indigo planters was the Indigo Revolt of 1859 and 1860 in Bengal. C is wrong because the grievances of Assam tea garden labour produced a different kind of protest over recruitment and penal contracts. D is wrong because agitation against Bengal zamindars took the form of tenancy movements such as the Pabna agrarian unrest of 1873.

The correct answer is B, Romesh Chandra Dutt. A member of the Indian Civil Service who later presided over the Congress, Dutt documented in The Economic History of India how revenue policy, the decline of handicrafts and the pattern of trade impoverished the countryside, and his work stands beside Naoroji's as a classic of economic nationalism. A is wrong because Ranade, though a pioneer of Indian economic thought and the author of Essays on Indian Economics, did not write this book. C is wrong because Gokhale is remembered for his budget speeches in the Imperial Legislative Council and for founding the Servants of India Society in 1905. D is wrong because Surendranath Banerjee was an organiser and journalist, the founder of the Indian Association in 1876, and his writing was political rather than economic.

The correct answer is B, Bombay and Thane. The line of about thirty-four kilometres was opened in 1853 during the governor-generalship of Lord Dalhousie, who had set out the policy of railway construction in his famous minute. The railways were built by private companies under a system of guaranteed interest, so the risk lay with the Indian taxpayer, and the routes ran from the interior to the ports to carry raw material out and manufactured goods in. A is wrong because the Howrah to Hooghly line came in 1854, as the first in eastern India. C is wrong because the first line in the Madras Presidency, from Royapuram to Arcot, was opened in 1856. D is wrong because the line in the Delhi region came later still. The 1853 date with Dalhousie and the Bombay to Thane route is the fact examiners want.

The correct answer is B, 1765. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764 and the Treaty of Allahabad, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II granted the Company the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha in 1765, which made it the revenue authority of the richest provinces of India and began the system of Dual Government. A is wrong because 1757 is the year of the Battle of Plassey, which gave the Company political mastery of Bengal but not the formal right to collect revenue. C is wrong because 1772 is the year Warren Hastings ended the Dual Government and began direct collection through English Collectors. D is wrong because 1793 is the year of the Permanent Settlement, which fixed the demand for ever on the zamindars of these same provinces.