Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

Abstract

This book examines the politics and culture of landholding in eastern India. Professor John McLane explores the dual and sometimes conflicting roles of the zamindars, the landed chiefs, in eighteenth-century western Bengal during the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of British hegemony. He focuses on zamindari rent extraction, techniques of coercion, and the meaning of gift-giving and gift-receiving. He shows how the zamindars kept alive the rituals, patronage, and other traditions of normative Hindu kingship for their subjects in the villages while they extracted revenue from the peasantry and intermediate gentry for the government of the Mughals and then the English East India Company. The author argues that the increased commercialization of the eighteenth century and efforts to maximize land revenues imposed severe strains on the paternalistic and gift-oriented culture of Bengal's huge landlords. Hence, by 1800, the major zamindar families had surrendered their estates to high caste zamindari and government employees who maintained the often hollow forms of Hindu kingship while seeking new ways to increase their rent collections from the peasant tenantry. Professor McLane illustrates this analysis with a case study of Bengal's most important and controversial zamindari, the Burdwan raj, which owned a 5,000 square mile estate that figured prominently in parliamentary debates as well as in the fights between Warren Hastings and his enemies in Calcutta. The maharajas and maharanis of Burdwan saved the estate from dismemberment under harsh colonial tax policies through tenacity and creative legal innova- tions