India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey.

  • John Strachey
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: India, its administration & progress / Sir John Strachey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    455/552 page 425
    it became necessary to legislate for tbe prevention of agrarian disputes. In Behar the case was more serious. This great province of Bengal has an area of 32,000 square miles, and a population of more than nineteen and a half millions. There is hardly any part of British India possessing greater natural advantages of soil and climate, and no part where the condition of the agricultural population is more precarious, or the margin of subsist- ence smaller. This was a cause of much anxiety to Lord Lawrence when he was Viceroy, and he stated his belief that legislation would become necessary for the protection of the ryot, “ and make him what he is now only in name, a free man.” In 1878, Sir Ashley Eden, then Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, described the ryots of Behdr as “ poor, helpless, discontented men, bound down to a state of extreme depression and misery, tenants of the richest province in Bengal, yet the poorest and most wretched class we find in the country. . . . The loose system of zemindari accounts, the entire absence of leases and counterparts, the universal preval- ence of illegal distraint, the practice of amalgamating holdings so as to destroy evidence of continuous occupa- tion, are evils which necessarily prevent any possible development of agricultural prosperity among the tenant class, and place them entirely at the mercy of their landlords.” The Indian Famine Commissioners of 1880, not long afterwards, pressed the same subject on the attention of the Government. “ Where,” they said, “ as in Behar, the relations of landlord and tenant are those of a high-handed proprietary body on the one hand, habitually disregarding the law, and on the other a tenantry, ignorant, very helpless, and sunk in the most abject poverty, the onus of bringing complaints ought not to be laid
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image