Madras
In Madras, as in Bengal, the chief administrative problem was the collection of land-revenue, which was the main source of the income of the State. Unlike Bengal, however, the British territories in Madras were acquired in different times from different powers, and had different laws and usages. The administration of land revenue had, therefore, to be based on different principles in order to suit the local needs.
In general two different systems were adopted. In the Jagir area and Northern Sarkars each village was owned by a number of Mirasdars, who possessed heritable shares, and the principal persons among them had long been accustomed to act as the representatives of the village. Accordingly settlement of the whole village was made with a committee of the principal Mirasdars in return for a lump sum.
An altogether different system prevailed in Baramahal, which was conquered from Tipu in 1792. Here the village headman collected dues from each cultivator, and paid them to the State. Alexander Read and Thomas Munro studied the details of this system and gradually evolved what is known as the ryotwari settlement. The essence of the system, which was not fully developed till 1855, is that the settlement is made with small farmers who enjoy all rights in the land subject to the payment of a fixed revenue which is collected by the State directly by its own servants. The settlement is made and renewed for specified periods, usually thirty years, during which the ryot is not liable to be ousted from the land or to pay any additional charge. In this settlement the Government share is limited to half the net value of the crop.
The two systems described above were usually adopted, and applied to territories added from time to time by conquest or cessions. But the ryotwari system found greater favour, especially as the Mirasdari gave scope for the principal people to exert oppression upon the rest of the villagers.
After the introduction of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, the system was also introduced in Madras. The Poligars in Madras, who corresponded to the zamindars of Bengal, were more like feudal chiefs with military retainers, exercising extensive judicial and executive authority within their jurisdiction. The settlement was made with them in perpetuity, on the lines followed in Bengal, and they were deprived of their military and judicial powers. So far the experiment was on the whole a success. But there were many parts of Madras which had no Poligars and here the Government tried to obviate the difficulty by creating a new class of zamindars. A number of villages were grouped into a fairly large estate and it was then sold by auction to the highest bidder. The result was extremely unsatisfactory and the system was gradually dropped, at first in favour of the Mirasdari and ultimately in favour of the ryotwari system.
The ryotwari system soon came to be the recognised form of settlement. But the Zamindari system prevailed in about a fourth part of the province, and the Mirasdari, though officially abandoned, prevails in a few isolated areas.
Along with the Permanent Settlement, the judicial system of Cornwallis was also introduced in Madras. The evolution of the administrative machinery followed here nearly the same course in Bengal. The province was divided into a number of districts, and each district into Taluks. At first the District Judge was also vested with magisterial and police authorities but these functions were soon transferred to the Collector. Gradually the office of the Collector became a very important one, and in addition to the duties of a Bengal Collector, he had important functions in connection with the assessment and collection of land-revenue.
Other Parts of British India
The system of administration evolved in Bengal was similarly extended to other parts of British India and need not be described in detail. As regards land-settlements, the ryotwari system was adopted in Bombay, and in the Upper Provinces, roughly corres- ponding to the modern United Provinces, the settlement was made with the village community and resembled the Mirasdari system of Madras. The village community does not necessarily mean a collective ownership of all the villagers, but usually that of a group of persons more or less closely connected, who were responsible both jointly and severally for the payment of the revenue, fixed for periods of thirty years. The names of Mountstuart Elphinstone and James Thomason are associated with the evolution of the system in Bombay and the U.P. respectively.
The system of the U.P. was adopted in the Punjab with slight modifications, and in both these provinces steps were taken to safeguard the interests of cultivators who were not members of the village community. In practice, a cultivator who occupied a holding continuously for twelve years was deemed to possess permanent and heritable right in it, subject to the payment of a judicially fixed rent. This right was legally recognised by the Punjab Tenancy Act of 1868. The Oudh Tenancy Act, passed in the same year, did not proceed so far, but it granted occupancy rights to nearly one-fifth of the cultivators and introduced more equitable principles in respect of compensation for improvements and increases of rents.
The judicial system of Bengal was extended to Benares, Oudh and the Doab respectively in 1795, 1803 and 1804. On account of the great distance from Calcutta separate courts of Sadar Diwani Adalat and Sadar Nizamat Adalat were set up in Allahabad in 1831.
As regards Bombay, the regulations of 1799 set up a system of judicial administration like that of Bengal, but it was revised in 1827 under Mountstuart Elphinstone. The new scheme set up Zila courts presided over by one judge from whose decision an appeal lay to the Sadar Diwani Adalat. Smaller cases were tried by lower courts in charge of Indians. Thus Elphinstone forestalled to some extent the reforms of Bentinck which were introduced all over British India, generally on the lines adopted in Bengal.
