Imagine yourself to be a farmer during the British Raj(before1857) and write a short paragraph sharing all the pain that you experienced due to the rulers oppressive attitude.
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Answer:
Explanation:
Changes in land ownership and control affected how crop failures impacted human lives. Before the British colonial period, Indian agriculture was dominated by subsistence farming organized in small village communities. The farmer usually only grew enough food to feed himself and the non-agricultural people of the village community. When his crop production exceeded consumption because of favorable climatic conditions, he stored the surplus for use in lean years. The storage of food grains constituted the only remedy against famines and other crises.
At the end of the eighteenth century, village communities began to disband under the pressure of new forces. The permanent land settlement of Lord Cornwallis in 1793 impacted Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, and later extended to North Madras, forming a class of zamindars, a social elite group with the right to collect tax. The zamindars became landlords in perpetuity and were the intermediaries between the colonial rulers and the peasantry. Peasants were required to pay fixed amounts of money to the zamindars. Most of the cultivators became landless laborers: the magnitude of rural poverty was graphically described in the adage that the Indian is born in debt to the moneylender.1 To pay taxes to the government, the peasants had to borrow from the moneylender, compounding the problem because indebted peasants could not be agricultural producers.
Changes in land ownership were followed by the commercialization of agriculture, which started to emerge around the 1860s. This brought a shift from cultivation for home consumption to cultivation for the market. Cash transaction became the basis of exchange and largely replaced the barter system. The exported items in the first half of the nineteenth century included cash crops like indigo, opium, cotton, and silk. Gradually, raw jute, food grains, oil seeds, and tea replaced indigo and opium. Raw cotton remained in demand throughout. There was phenomenal growth in the export of agricultural commodities from India: the value of India’s exports is estimated to have risen by more than five hundred percent from 1859–60 to 1906–1907.
The greater portion of the profits generated by the export trade benefitted British business families, big farmers, some Indian traders, and moneylenders.