ruling the country side lesson
Answers
while the British slowly started to trade they permanently fixed an revenue from the zamindars to get some money .
Many zamindar failed to pay the revenue so their lands were sold in auction .
The market prices started to increase and these permanent revenues became easy to pay by the zamindars
The collectors were said to go village to village to measure their lands and collect their revenues and pay it to the company .
Munro went out of the permanently imposed revenues and collected the high revenues from there .
the British persuaded or forced cultivators in various parts of India to produce other crops: jute in Bengal, tea in Assam, sugarcane in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), wheat in Punjab, cotton in Maharashtra and Punjab, rice in Madras.
How was this done? The British used a variety of methods to expand the cultivation of crops that they needed.
The indigo plant grows primarily in the tropics. By the
thirteenth century Indian indigo was being used by cloth
manufacturers in Italy, France and Britain to dye cloth.
However, only small amounts of Indian indigo reached
the European market and its price was very high.
European cloth manufacturers therefore had to depend
on another plant called woad to make violet and blue
dyes. Being a plant of the temperate zones, woad was
more easily available in Europe. It was grown in northern
Italy, southern France and in parts of Germany and
Britain. Worried by the competition from indigo, woad
producers in Europe pressurised their governments to
ban the import of indigo.
Cloth dyers, however, preferred indigo as a dye. Indigo
produced a rich blue colour, whereas the dye from woad
was pale and dull. By the seventeenth century, European
cloth producers persuaded their governments to relax
the ban on indigo import. The French began cultivating
indigo in St Domingue in the Caribbean islands, the
Portuguese in Brazil, the English in Jamaica, and the
Spanish in Venezuela. Indigo plantations also came up
in many parts of North America.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the demand for
Indian indigo grew further. Britain began to industrialise,
and its cotton production expanded dramatically, creating
an enormous new demand for cloth dyes. While the
demand for indigo increased, its existing supplies from
the West Indies and America collapsed for a variety of
reasons. Between 1783 and 1789 the production of
indigo in the world fell by half. Cloth dyers in Britain
now desperately looked for new sources of indigo supply.
From where could this indigo be procured?
From the last decades
of the eighteenth century
indigo cultivation in
Bengal expanded rapidly
and Bengal indigo came
to dominate the world
market. In 1788 only about
30 per cent of the indigo
imported into Britain was
from India. By 1810, the
proportion had gone up to
95 per cent.
As the indigo trade
grew, commercial agents
and officials of the
Company began investing
in indigo production. Over
the years many Company
officials left their jobs to
look after their indigo
business. Attracted by the prospect of high profits,
numerous Scotsmen and Englishmen came to India and
became planters. Those who had no money to produce
indigo could get loans from the Company and the banks
that were coming up at the time.
How was indigo cultivated?
There were two main systems of indigo cultivation – nij
and ryoti. Within the system of nij cultivation, the
planter produced indigo in lands that he directly
controlled. He either bought the land or rented it from
other zamindars and produced indigo by directly
employing hired labourers.
Till the late nineteenth century, planters were therefore
reluctant to expand the area under nij cultivation. Less
than 25 per cent of the land producing indigo was under
this system. The rest was under an alternative mode of
cultivation – the ryoti system.
Indigo on the land of ryots
Under the ryoti system, the planters
forced the ryots to sign a contract,
an agreement (satta). At times
they pressurised the village
headmen to sign the contract
on behalf of the ryots. Those
who signed the contract got
cash advances from the
planters at low rates of interest
to produce indigo. But the loan
committed the ryot to cultivating
indigo on at least 25 per cent of
the area under his holding.
The indigo villages were usually around indigo factories owned
by planters. After harvest, the indigo plant was taken to the
vats in the indigo factory. Three or four vats were needed to
manufacture the dye. Each vat had a separate function. The
leaves stripped off the indigo plant were first soaked in warm
water in a vat (known as the fermenting or steeper vat) for several
hours. When the plants fermented, the liquid began to boil and
bubble.