Zamindar\u27s Land Management and Local Society

In this paper I have made a tentative attempt at throwing light upon the relationship between landlordism and local society in colonial Bengal by examining certain aspects regarding the establishment for land management.Source materials have mainly been taken from the manuscript files about the Court of Wards\u27 estates in the Dacca division.It has been found that the zamindar of eastern Bengal gradually shifted the social base of his land management from the mandal, or the village headman, to the tahsildar who was generally recruited from what I called the jotdar-haoladar class comprising both bhadraloks and well-to-do raiyats.This shift was necessitated by the falling-off of the village autonomous system as well as by the initiative of the colonial state power in delegating central control of collection of the land surplus to the new landed class, i. e. zamindars.In this process the zamindar\u27s land management system became more centralized in the sense that it came to absorb the functions hitherto carried out by the mandal.Secondly, it is notable that even at the turn of the nineteenth century quite an elaborate establishment-the tahsil establishment as I called it-was still required in eastern Bengal to exert on the raiyats various forms of extra-economic coercion: sheer physical force, litigation, and covert intimidation.In fact, about half of the tahsil establishment consisted of such muscle-men as peons, peadas, mirdhas and jamadars.This paper is a revised and enlarged version of chapter 14 of my ‘Agrarian Structure in the Dacca Division of Eastern Bengal 1870-1905’(Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Calcutta, March 1985)