Tenant-Mirasidar Disputes during the Permanent Settlement

Place, feeling that he had few alternatives, resigned from the Board of Revenue in 1802, arguing that the special commission for introducing the Permanent Settlement had appropriated many of the functions of the Board of Revenue when it was introduced into the Jagir. Moreover, he resigned because he believed that the Mirasidars of Chingleput would no longer possess an idealistic champion in the face of the proposed changes that the special commission sought to introduce into the Jagir with the Permanent Settlement. In this context, Place wrote in 1802 that he felt particularly grieved because, although he had tried to reform the proprietary relations in the Jagir, he was now being excluded from an activity for which he possessed special knowledge.^[9] The fundamental argument Place advanced was that the tax assessment should not be made with the Zamindars or Mutahdars but rather with the Mirasidars of their respective villages. Otherwise, “the hereditary proprietors of the land are bereft of all interest in it.” Unfortunately, Place said, the Mirasidars had “no advocate to represent their situation.”^[10] Reversing his earlier attacks on the mirasi system, Place began in 1799 to invoke knowledge constructed interactively with other Company employees, with his Tamil and other informants, with the Mirasidars themselves, with the tenants, and with laborers. The ideas that he articulated drew on local Tamil and Sanskrit ideas mixed with ideas brought from England regarding cultural renewal. That is, his opposition to the special commission led him to participate in the process by which the mirasi system was constructed into an essentialized, monologic “original” Tamil proprietary form.

Both the proposals and actions of the special commission and the work of Edward Greenway, the collector responsible for introducing the Permanent Settlement, followed the system introduced in Bengal as a strategy for lessening the weight of government on the countryside. The Jagir was divided up into a set of mutahs or tax subdivisions; these fifty-seven mutahs were auctioned as units, purchased by individuals called Zamindars or Mutahdars. Under the terms of the Permanent Settlement tax system introduced in the Jagir, the Zamindars who purchased their mutahs or zamindaris at auction in June 1802 were permitted to alienate their holdings. The assessment aimed, among other things, to assign the task of “governing” the countryside to the Mutahdars, who could then presumably derive the benefits from the increasing value of the land. That is, the Company presumed that the Zamindars would absorb the costs of tax collection and thus the Company would be saved both expense and trouble. At the same time, the Company would be assured of uninterrupted income from the Jagir.^[11]

The mutahs or estates included a large number of Mirasidari and non-Mirasidari villages, whose fate did not dramatically alter with this new arrangement. Under the Permanent Settlement, the strength of the Mirasidars in individual villages, however, remained largely untouched and it may even have been to some degree augmented by this tax settlement. Moreover, under the Permanent Settlement, with some exceptions, settlements with individual villages continued. The Zamindar’s tax assistants made agreements with village Mirasidars for the next year’s tax. Zamindars or Mutahdars themselves remained responsible for the payment of a set of permanently set tax demands, sums that had been set by Greenway in consultation with the special commission whose job it had been to oversee the implementation of this tax assessment system in the Jagir. In addition, the settlement only applied to 1,881 villages of the 2,246 in the Jagir. The remaining 365 villages had been already alienated to various individuals who previously had been a part of the previous tax-collecting or “watching” system of the Jagir in the late eighteenth century; these included the Nattars and the Palayakkars.^[12] Thus, during the period of the Permanent Settlement, the Zamindar or Mutahdar, though he had purchased his mutah and had the right to alienate it, simply became an individual placed at the top of a large number of villages controlled by Mirasidars.

One of the most important effects of this tax assessment was to change the Jagir pasankarai villages (those held in joint possession) into arutikarai villages (those held in separate possession). Ellis described how this process was accomplished: the inhabitants or Mirasidars of pasankarai villages came together to draw lots “in the usual manner, but under condition that they should hold permanently the several portions of land included in the lots that fell to them and for which they afterwards applied to the Collector for certificates.”^[13] In other words, the redistribution system that had operated from time to time in years past would cease altogether from that time onward. The tenants-at-will or Parakkudis under the Mirasidars were, for the first time, often given certificates indicating this position. However, the opposition of the Mirasidars usually prevented the occupancy tenants or Ulkkudis from acquiring certificates. The state supported the Mirasidars in the expression of juridical power, Ellis arguing that it should be the Mirasidars who had the sole right to grant the certificates to the Ulkkudis or occupancy tenants, since this right would place the Mirasidars “in the situation to which they consider themselves exclusively entitled.” From the state’s perspective, giving the Mirasidars the piravēttikam or general management of the village aligned the interests of the Mirasidars and the state. This consolidation of interest would “prevent the meddling and vexations [vexatious] interference of the Sircar [state] officers.” Alternatively, were the state to exercise the responsibility of granting the deeds, said Ellis, a wedge would be driven between the government and the people, while the Mirasidars would be jealous of the independence of the tenants (especially if these tenants were supported by state tax employees).^[14] In his view, the state should have given over the right of dealing with the tenants entirely to the Mirasidars. In this way, the mirasi system and the Permanent Settlement could be construed as complementary, with mutual benefits going to many authors of this dialogic process.

Not all actors benefited, however. Both during Place’s tenure in the 1790s and when Ellis wrote in 1814, one of the major dynamics in the Jagir had become a power struggle waged between the Mirasidars and the tenants (particularly the occupancy tenants or Ulkkudis). During the desertions of 1796, for instance, Place said that although some Mirasidars deserted from Karanguli, they did so before they made any agreements for the payment of the taxes on their villages, while others did so even after they had agreed to pay a given tax.^[15] However, some 118 people from this Karanguli area petitioned the Board of Revenue in June 1796, complaining that “the inheritance of some of our villages were given in writing to the inferior inhabitants and Poycarys [Ulkkudi Payirkkaris or occupancy tenants].”^[16] Another mirasi petition from the Karanguli area to the Madras board complained of “our villages [being] rented to Poyakers [Ulkkudis or occupancy tenants] or Strangers on whom our Meerassees have likewise been bestowed.”^[17] The Mirasidars of Perumbedu in the present-day Ponneri taluk north of Madras deliberately neglected the cultivation and would not make agreements with Place. He noted that not only did the Mirasidars possess the best lands but that those lands were now “overrun with weeds and yielded not even half of what they would have done.” However

what appeared most unaccountable was that not withstanding a short cultivation and the advantage…of the water course from the [Kortiliar] River, almost the…whole stock of water in the tank had suddenly disappeared or been drained off in little more than two months.…It appeared the Inhabitants [Mirasidars] had willfully, but secretly let off from their fields in the night, what they had let into them in the daytime; and by thus shamefully exhausting it, put it equally out of their power as that the Circar [the state], to carry on any further cultivation.^[18]

In other words, the Mirasidars had tried to make water unavailable in the likelihood that their lands would be given to the Perumbedu occupancy tenants to cultivate. By contrast, the occupancy tenants who had been brought into Perumbedu by Place had agreed to every request and then done everything they had agreed to. As a result, the taxes collected from Perumbedu were mainly from occupancy tenants, not from Mirasidars.^[19]

During his time as collector, Place tried to manipulate the uncooperative Mirasidars by getting occupancy tenants to undertake agrarian projects and tillage that the Mirasidars were unwilling to do. It was the produce of just such tenant labor that enabled Place to bring in such considerable amounts of tax revenue in 1796–97. Crole, writing in 1875, noted that Place had found no less than 1,827 out of 17,821 shares to be held by “such persons [occupancy tenants] who were called ‘kani kudis [Tamil “kāṇi kuại”].’ ”^[20] What complicated this finding was that Place originally believed that he was within his rights to replace Mirasidars if they did not cooperate and especially after they deserted the Jagir for the Nawab’s territory. As we have seen, Place changed his mind in 1799 and ultimately came to believe that Mirasidars could not be removed by government fiat. Nonetheless, the crisis in the Jagir between 1795 and 1799 helped to fuel the fights between Mirasidars and occupancy tenants. It was to obviate this problem, which was also to some extent exacerbated by the Permanent Settlement, that Ellis sought to prevent the government from having the right to issue certificates to tenants and instead to direct interactions specifically to the Mirasidars.

The discussion about what was mirasi and what was not arose precisely because of the great tension that existed between occupancy tenants and Mirasidars. The Mirasidars sought to use the state’s dialogically produced definition of mirasi to exclude the occupancy tenants, while the occupancy tenants tried to use the state’s requirement for more taxes as a way to be included in the mirasi system. The competition over both the definition of the mirasi system and the land itself helped to intensify the sedentarization project engaged in by Company employees and the local population (whether they were Mirasidars, tenants, or Pannaiyals). The discussion over mirasi—which one historian has termed “massively irrelevant”—therefore became a central activity for everybody concerned.^[21]

This tension between the Mirasidars and the occupancy tenants continued to grow throughout the century following the time of Ellis. In midcentury, a dispute arose over the practice of a collector named Cochrane, who had been in the habit of entering the names of the occupancy tenants or Payirkkaris in the 1853 cultivation accounts of Nanjepuram and Tallavarampundy (both located in the present-day Kanchipuram taluk).^[22] Later, Collector Smollett decided that, since the practice had led to much contention, and since the interest of the Payirkkaris could best be supported by a strict enforcement of their engagements with the Mirasidars when complaints were made, the system would be abandoned that year. “It was well intentioned but has not given satisfaction to the meerasidars.”^[23] By that time, the struggle of the Mirasidars to resist the invasion of the occupancy tenants into mirasi land was so strong that the government had begun measuring the losses incurred. The tax value of the land left deliberately uncultivated by the Mirasidars to prevent the tenants occupying it was being represented in monetary terms by the state.^[24] This measurement had been undertaken to indicate how much money the state was losing specifically due to the intransigence of the Mirasidars in refusing to take on tenants who would widen the scope of their cultivation.