The Decline and Fall of the Bengali Race: A Historical Investigation

Cornwallis’ gifts to Bengal–the love of landed wealth, the love of litigious landed income, the attachment to illusions of status and attendant to all of this, a disdain for trade–are perhaps at the root of the disappearance of entrepreneurialism in Bengal

There once was a Bengal where traders prospered and bankers flourished, where fishermen and weavers, farmers and painters all produced and exchanged goods for their mutual benefits. And then came Cornwallis.

This unlucky general who had surrendered at Yorktown, was able to wound but not kill Tippu, the Tiger of Mysore. He then turned his attention to rural Bengal. More than two hundred years later, the very thought of that moment sends shivers up the spine. How fortunate would Bengal have been if only Cornwallis had gone to sleep! But that good fortune was denied to the people of Bengal.

Cornwallis the Obtuse, introduced what historians refer to as the Permanent Settlement of Land Revenue. The idea that farmers were leaseholders of the sovereign to whom all the land belonged, and were bound to pay a “rent” to the state was an old one in India and had been formally codified by the venerable Raja Todar Mall himself.

The intermediaries who were appointed to collect these levies served at the pleasure of the sultan and the nawab. When a Mansabdar died, his rights reverted to the sovereign and a new one, usually not his son, was appointed. This whimsical and variable method of governance so popular and venerated in India was anathema to the pompous and aggressively English Cornwallis. He wanted something entirely non-whimsical and entirely fixed. So he auctioned off the revenue collection rights to the highest bidder who was now called a zamindar.

Cornwallis wanted to create a landed aristocracy—a set of Squire Browns in tropical Bengal—and being unbridled by any need to refer the matter to the people—the man went ahead. And he made the zamindari system permanent and inheritable. Perhaps he dreamt of converting Bengal into a version of Plantagenet England!

The zamindars turned out to be anything but aristocrats attached to their lands. Instead, they grew to resemble the Protestant landlords of Ireland who squeezed their tenants bone dry and then some. And prosperous Bengal began to resemble Ireland—-the same wretched peasantry, the same idiotic landlords, the same recurrent famines. Contrary to Cornwallis’ hopes, the zamindars developed no love for their lands. They preferred to live in large mansions in Calcutta. It is said that most zamindars did not even know where their lands were! They were absentees with a relish.

To make matters worse, Cornwallis forgot that the essence of English aristocratic land tenure was the law of primogeniture. This, of course was not implemented in Bengal. Hindu inheritance laws have been consciously designed by humans to make life difficult for everyone and lucrative for lawyers. If on Mondays, they preferred Mitakshara, then one can be sure that on Wednesdays, they would switch to Dayabhaga. And now, our new rulers actually allowed us to write wills. So we could happily introduce new complications.

Within a few years, there was no zamindari in all of Bengal which was not neck-deep in litigation. There was no investment in land, little by the way of upgradation of tools, methods and processes—-just a surfeit of hapless peasants toiling away supporting effete zamindars, their mistresses and their lawyers. And zamindari became such a socially upscale vocation, that many families who were prospering in trade and industry actually shut down their businesses and acquired zamindaris. They could now live in Calcutta and consume asserting all along that they had never heard of Weber and the Protestant ethic. This love of landed wealth, the love of litigious landed income, the attachment to illusions of status and attendant to all of this, a disdain for trade—-these were perhaps at the root of the disappearance of entrepreneurialism in Bengal.

Dwaraknath Tagore was a businessman. His son was a Maharishi who sent his son to the boondocks of East Bengal to supervise the family estates and write poetry in his spare time. It just did not occur to the Maharishi or the Gurudev that they too could start a factory, open a shop and so on.

The purpose of this long digression on the history of Bengal is not merely to criticize Cornwallis, but to make a case for conservatism on the part of all rulers. Rulers who think that they can “plan” and “enforce” a utopian future of their liking, be it an aristocratic or a socialist one, must understand that shrill changes to time-honoured laws can have unforeseen consequences.

And it is the poor toilers a half a dozen generations later who will pay the price for tyrannical social engineering. The moral of the story is simple: Citizens beware. The Cornwallises of the world and their rosy futures can be a snare that can first trap and then shackle us for a long long time.