Introduction
Early in the 1970s, David Washbrook introduced ‘country politics’ into the study of Indian nationalism; he thereby challenged historians to explore spatial diversity in state territory through studies of the political economy of agrarian environments.Footnote 1 His method has surely been vindicated by country politics in Tamil Nadu,Footnote 2 where the dominant castes that are concentrated in different districts routinely mobilize to support competing parties.Footnote 3 But historians have veered away from territorial diversity and country politics. Agrarian environments now appear inside very large territorial frameworks of policy making.Footnote 4 Spatially diverse agrarian systems, where economic, political, and cultural power frame country politics,Footnote 5 have largely disappeared inside histories of large territorial structures, composed of elite and subaltern strata,Footnote 6 in Mughal India,Footnote 7 British colonial India,Footnote 8 and emerging national states.Footnote 9
This broad historiographic trend is one intellectual feature of the globalization of national state territorialism since 1945, and of the increasingly global marketing of national goods, services, and identities after 1980.Footnote 10 But global capitalism has thrown country politics back into the limelight. In recent history, spatial diversities in the agrarian political economy reflect the uneven development that is turning nations into motley collections of unequal spaces where people engage variously in processes of capital accumulation.Footnote 11 Cities are focal points for local powers organized to amass wealth for global capital.Footnote 12 In India, farmers’ suicides since 1995, at a rate of 15,000 annually, highlight a rustic localization of neo-liberal destitution.Footnote 13 Vast investments are tearing apart agrarian environments to support urban sprawl, mines, factories, ports, roads, and railways, and thus to feed national growth in globalization.Footnote 14
Land grab history
The forceful dispossession of agrarian assets now goes under one generic title, ‘land grab’. It is organized at many levels of scale, but most intimately by country politics. In the Sundarbans, it is all about shrimp: grabbing land for shrimp farming combines local thuggery with state policy and party politics to enrich investors who increase exports for consumers in rich countries.Footnote 15 Maoist fighters in mountain forests, struggles over the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and countless other conflicts over land grab, in hundreds of localities, participate in histories with their own local dynamics, but all are connected by networks of capital investment and state power. To write those histories requires a return to the study of country politics.
In a very long-term perspective, land grab struggles are virtually synonymous with agricultural expansion. They unfold inside agrarian—but also industrializing and urbanizing—systems of territorial power and authority, which expand spatially, over time, to form domineering state territories, gobbling up forests and forest people as they go. Increasing the total food supply has depended on increasing farm acreage, at the expense of forests, in most of Asia until recently,Footnote 16 so that turning non-farmland into farmland is a necessary transformative environmental and historical process, which underlies population growth, urbanism, and economic development everywhere, but most violently in the tropics, where nature's forests, rivers, and seas hosted countless so-called ‘tribal’ or ‘indigenous’ communities, from prehistoric times.
Tropical environments thus gave rise to the land grab imperative. Spatio-temporal transitions to agrarian domination are long, slow, and impossible to document fully, because firm evidence is scarce, and what there is has been massaged by winners in the struggles for land—that is, by literate elites. People certainly did gather wild rice to eat long before and long after they farmed rice, so its domestication is hard to pinpoint. But rice farming now seems to have begun by about 4000 BCE in the Yangtze Valley; it then spread through the wet tropics, leaving no records. But gathering and cultivating rice sustained small-scale subsistence societies for millennia in scattered regions all across the tropics, long before and long after any evidence survived to announce the creation of agrarian territories.
Land grab conquests of forest people to create agrarian territory become more visible in the first millennium, more so after the Guptas. Inscriptions chart a spatial multiplication of state territories produced by alliances among farmers, warriors, merchants, and religious elites, where Hindu temple worship and Brahman authority became dominant, as Buddhism declined.Footnote 17 Rashtrakuta, Chalukya, Pallava, and Chola imperial powers chart the southern progress of agrarian militarism with inscriptions that make it clear that fighting, farming, and donating wealth to temples, gods, and Brahmans went hand in hand. The typical post-Gupta agrarian epigraphic transaction involves a gift of land by warrior kings to Brahmans or temples, ‘protected’ by local elites who controlled land and trade. By such transactions, kings announced territorial claims and local elites harnessed royal power to buttress their own territorial authority, without necessarily paying taxes. No villages in the Rashtrakuta Deccan paid taxes to a king and each village had its own militia: ‘even the bangle sellers could drive back armed forces and fight to the end’.Footnote 18 Likewise, in the far south, landed elites in Pandyamandalam protected royal grants without obligations based on prior Pandyan royal rights to village land or produce.Footnote 19
The implication from inscriptions is therefore that agrarian territories were being built during the first millennium, from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Rashtrakuta villagers did routinely aggregate as imperial armies. Pandya and Chola kings did expand their power to control agrarian resources with melvaram shares of the crop to finance temples and Brahman agraharam settlements, along with cash taxation on merchants and artisans.Footnote 20 Inscriptions include lists of peoples conquered by dynastic alliances, who are now unidentifiable; many were probably tribal peoples living in land grabbed by farming communities.
Still better evidence to show how agrarian state territorial power conquered forests and forest people appears in the second millennium. This became even more the case from Mughal times, as environmental history becomes legible on a global scale.Footnote 21 In South India, Vijayanagar inscriptions indicate a military expansion of rights to land through the payment of taxes which support imperial armies and temple cults, as well as farming elites, some of whom are today's Tamil dominant castes.Footnote 22 In the late eighteenth century, English records describe local power at work to grab land inside agrarian systems shaped by Mughals, Marathas, and Nawabs, through the English East India Company's obsession with documenting land rights, based on the payment of taxes, to increase state revenue. In that quest for revenue, the Company resembled imperial predecessors, going back to the Guptas, for whom the drive to increase state wealth helped to propel agricultural expansion.Footnote 23 Company records are better at documenting land grab history because British ideas about land focused sharply on the state's role in securing legal rights of property ownership.Footnote 24
The most detailed historical data on land grab appear in handwritten District Record manuscript folio volumes, which preserve everyday correspondence to and from District headquarters, for a century after 1770. These records appear in the Madras and Bengal Presidency at about the same time, but their utility for histories of land grab is proportionate to the severity and extensiveness of land grab struggles. As a result, they have much more to say about Bengal than Madras, because agrarian frontiers were still expanding into forests all around the Ganga-Meghna-Brahmaputra River basin,Footnote 25 where struggles, in fact, still rage in the mountains from Odisha to Tripura, Assam, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Those struggles entirely preoccupy early records of the Sylhet District from the northern borderlands of the Bengal Presidency, which reveal fascinating detail on land grab as a historical process.Footnote 26
Using District Records, I have argued elsewhere that transitions between Mughal and Company agrarian systems followed similar patterns in southern Madras and northern Bengal, in that established landed elites, who depended for property rights on imperial authority, readily transferred loyalty from one ruler to another; while more independent rights-holders resisted Company demands for increasing revenue, and totally independent rights-holders fought fiercely to retain their independence.Footnote 27 But on the ground, country politics in these two areas were entirely different. Southern Tamil districts in the semi-arid peninsula housed very old, stable, agrarian states, organized around rivers, irrigation tanks, Hindu temples, and Brahman authority for a thousand years before the first English Collectors arrived, calmly to take the reins from the Arcot nawab. High caste Tamils provided a solid local base of support for the Company Raj. Land grab was at work, but within an established system of land rights, which changed very slowly.Footnote 28
By contrast, in the northern Bengal lowlands, beneath the mountains of Meghalaya, the world's highest rainfall drains the highlands annually to form a vast inland sea. No lasting state authority seems to have existed before 1612, when Mughal troops sailed to Sylhet, conquered local Afghans,Footnote 29 and Mubariz Khan became faujdar.Footnote 30 Landed elites were a very small fraction of the population when the first resident Collector, Robert Lindsay, arrived; and they were mostly themselves newcomers who had received grants of land from Bengal nawabs. In the 60 years after 1658, Mughals granted 3,000 acres of forest tax-free to local supporters in Sylhet; and in the 40 years after 1719, nawabs surpassed that grant acreage more than tenfold. Forest acres granted explicitly for the purpose of extending permanent cultivation—on Madad-i-Maash tax-free tenures—represent 59 per cent of all sanad grant acres, and most of these acres (68 per cent) appear in nawabi sanads, after 1748. Those new nawabi elites quickly latched onto Company authority in what one early Collector described as ‘a frontier province inhabited by a turbulent and disaffected set of people’,Footnote 31 where, in 1779, one land dispute brought out 600 armed men against Company sepoys, who were ‘immediately cut down and shot’, before the attackers fled to the forest.Footnote 32
Sylhet frontiers
Two monographs describe the frontiers of state-supported agricultural expansion in Bengal before 1760 and after 1840,Footnote 33 focusing on trends inside established Mughal and British agrarian systems, respectively. Frontier Sylhet lay outside the Bengal mainstream, however, and modern historians typically exclude it from Bengal because it was moved into Assam in 1874.Footnote 34 During its time in the Bengal Presidency (1765–1874), its territorial expansion marked the official progress of frontier expansion: between 1783 and 1822, it grew 23 per cent in size, from 2,861 to 3,532 square miles.Footnote 35 More expansion occurred after 1830, when British India conquered Assam. Imperial Bengal marched through Sylhet; it remained a frontier space of mobility even after English tea planters captured southern hills and led Sylhet into Assam's ‘Planter Raj’.Footnote 36
The absence of settled state territorial authority in eighteenth-century Sylhet is most clearly indicated by the troubling fact for Company finance that Sylhet had no metallic currency to ship to Calcutta. The only coin in circulation was the cowry shell. Markets and commerce thrived, but there was no currency whose value was backed by any state authority.Footnote 37 Sylhet's currency border with Bengal proper was south of the floodplain, around the ‘more opulent’ Habiganj, on routes to Comilla and Tripura, more accessible from the Meghna River, where silver Rupees did circulate.Footnote 38 Cowry shells from the MaldivesFootnote 39 served as the cheapest coin all around the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and Africa,Footnote 40 and they were the first article of British export from the Maldives to India.Footnote 41 In the world of cowry trading, Bengal was a famous market, but in Bengal, only Sylhet had cowries but virtually no coins in its markets. The gold Mohurs and silver Rupees, which appear in Lindsay's account of his arrival in Sylhet, were rare coins of exceptional value, used in ritual settings. Sylhet people imported almost nothing from downstream, except cowries, which merchants brought from the Maldives to Chittagong and Calcutta, stored in Dhaka, and carried to Sylhet in boats that returned downstream with rice, fish, and upland products.Footnote 42
The spatial expanse of cowry country travelled from the Maldives, around circuits of Indian Ocean trade, along the Meghna River, through mountains above Sylhet, into valleys leading across Assam and Burma into Yunnan.Footnote 43 Rather than being settled agrarian state territory, Sylhet District was one unbounded part of a vast mobile space, embracing mountains, river, and sea, including people of many kinds, who travelled and settled freely along waterways and pathways in the uplands and lowlands. Upland mobility was, in fact, a basic survival strategy in the face of constant flooding. And mountain products were staples of trade through Sylhet into Bengal proper. In the sixteenth century, Abul Fazl described Sylhet, realistically, as a mountain region, separate from Bengal. He went on to list only the mountain products of Sylhet: Suntarah, oranges, China root, aloe wood, Bhangraj, and tamed birds.Footnote 44 In the late eighteenth century, the mountains and plains all around Sylhet comprised a diverse yet coherent space of exchange, travel, and production, whose cowry coins provided a means of valuation and equivalence for assorted peoples who spoke many languages and had no shared engagement with state authority.Footnote 45 People working everywhere in this diverse topography supplied markets. Khasias farmed jhum on high slopes and grew rice to sell in lower Jaintia. In high valleys and on low slopes, Khasias grew areca nuts, betel vines, and turmeric to sell in the plains, along with honey, wax, gum, ivory, medicinal plants, cloth, ‘and, in the fruit season, an inexhaustible quantity of the finest oranges, found growing spontaneously in the mountains’.Footnote 46 Mountain Khasias specialized in iron mining and smelting. They would denude whole forest tracts to stoke their cowhide blow-bag iron furnaces before moving on to exploit new fuel wood sites. Khasia iron, steel, and metal tools traversed rivers routes, along with their gold, silver, other metals, and ornaments.Footnote 47 Khasia merchants carried commodities up and down the hills and plains.Footnote 48 Elephants, wax, iron, cloth, and ivory travelled downhill, as saltFootnote 49 and rice moved up the mountains.Footnote 50 Lindsay reported that, ‘at least five hundred elephants were caught annually’ in the years he lived in Sylhet.Footnote 51 His successor, John Willes, did a brisk business in elephant tusks: in the four years before 1792, he bought 480 tusks in Cachar, and they were also available in Jaintia and Pandua.Footnote 52 Aloe wood and China root appear as Sylhet products in the Ain-i-Akbari.Footnote 53 Timber, sandalwood, cane, ivory, rubber, cotton, and silk came from Cachar and Manipur.Footnote 54 Cotton came from Tripura.Footnote 55 The mountains above Sunamganj held the finest limestone known in Bengal, which built Calcutta and preoccupied Lindsay's business ventures. In 1783, Lindsay dramatized the commercial value of the mountains by concluding personal trade agreements with mountain Khasia rajas; buying loads of limestone, burned lime, and other mountain products; loading them on six seagoing ships, built on the mountains with forest timber; and then sailing his ships on the rising flood down to Bakarganj, where his agents sold forest products and bought rice to sell in Madras.Footnote 56
This space of mobility was indeed filled with a ‘turbulent’ population, when viewed from a settled agrarian territorial perspective, including many kinds of people on the move, unwilling to stay settled under any ruling authority. When Lindsay arrived in Sylhet in 1778, unconquered Afghans and other old Mughal opponents still roamed the lowlands, and highland rulers exercised substantial influence. Khasias held most land north of the Surma and ruled all the mountains above.Footnote 57 Jaintia Khasia rajas held land north and east of Sylhet town. Cachar rajas held the lower Barak Valley. Tripura rajas ruled southern uplands and adjacent plains.
Inside this space of mobility, spanning lowlands and mountains, a distinct ethnic population, called Bengali Khasias, had emerged from family alliances among mountain Khasias and lowland Bengalis. They respected the nawabs until 1785, when they began to chafe at the Company Raj and command of Khasia rulers alike. Their turbulence increased as an old territorial formation of Mughal authority, which had organized this mixed society, spanning high mountains and jungles below, crumbled. It comprised the jaghir of Omaid Rezah, whose home was in Bannychang, in the lower Sylhet floodplain. His family had received a Mughal jaghir in return for protecting Sylhet Sarkar against Khasia warriors from the mountains, and he was the last in a line of Mughal frontier commanders, called tankadars, who served the Faujdars as a forest vanguard, protecting the elite recipients of nawabi forest land grants. His jaghir expanded accordingly.Footnote 58 Omaid Rezah became the largest landholder in Sylhet, ‘the only true zamindar in the district’.Footnote 59 Inside his jaghir, a mixture of Khasias and Bengalis formed a distinctive ethnic territory, which would die away. As Lindsay's successor, John Willes, explained, Khasias who ‘inhabit the hills and come down to the plains in search of necessities of life and articles of commerce’ engage in ‘intercourse and intermarriages’ with lowland Bengalis; this produced what he called ‘the degenerate Race called Bengalee Cosseahs’, who lived mostly in Omaid Rezah's jaghir.Footnote 60
The land grab imperative
Pressure to expand permanent rice cultivation increased visibly in the 1780s, from a combination of forces, all aggravated for the peasantry by a series of torrential monsoons and devastating floods. Most notably in the District Records we see that the Company and its financiers—in London, Calcutta, and Sylhet—pressed harder for taxes to secure land rights. The nawab's regime had reportedly collected 3,50,000 Kahans of cowries in Sylhet, all spent locally, mostly on the army, and ‘little more was expected by government [in Murshidabad] than a few choice elephants, some chunam [limestone], oranges, and birds of handsome plumage’. In 1776, Sylhet's total demand rose to 8,00,101 Kahans. In 1783, the district revenue contractor, or ‘farmer’ (called in Sylhet a waddadar), Goyaram Metre (who served to 1789), raised the demand to 9,36,000 Kahans. He delivered revenues for the district collected in turn from farmers of pargana and taluks (landed estates). Farmers in general also appear to have been bankers who added revenues to private funds, paid contracted amounts, and endeavoured to profit from various gambits by which they would delay payments, justify shortfalls in payments with claims of bad harvests, collect revenues in places where they did not have contracts, and so on. Periodically, court cases revealed these machinations.Footnote 61
Tax demands on landowners almost tripled in the eight years after 1775, a much higher increase than in the Bengal Presidency as a whole.Footnote 62 Yet actual revenue collections stagnated below 70 per cent of demand until 1788, when they began a steep climb, reaching almost 100 per cent by 1790.Footnote 63 In 1785, remittances to Calcutta began a similar climb. By 1790—with the addition of land around Habiganj, previously in Dacca District—Sylhet began to look like a moneymaker, though a small one compared to the lower Bengal districts.Footnote 64
The rising cost of Company conquest pressured Collectors to raise more revenue.Footnote 65 Governor General Warren Hastings replicated Mughal imperial priorities by giving the military top priority among government institutions. Defending his priorities against critics in London, he bragged, in 1785, that the Company's military ‘insured the blessing of peace, security, and abundance to the subjects of its immediate dominion, while it dealt out the terrors of conquest to the remotest enemies of the parent state . . . while every other member of the British empire was afflicted with the plagues of wars or insurrection’.Footnote 66 When Cornwallis arrived as governor general in 1786, the military remained the top priority: his boosters in London said that England had successfully used its military ‘to revive its arts, diffuse its manufactured productions, restore its revenue, and once more, to give splendour to its empire’.Footnote 67
One result of increasing revenue extraction—valued in cowries—was that more rice and other products left Sylhet to pay revenues—valued in Rupees—than cowries came back to Sylhet in return. In the late 1780s, cowries circulating in Sylhet declined as revenue demand—valued in cowries—increased, adding to the pressure on local financiers. Cowry-Rupee exchange rates added complexity to Sylhet country politics which was absent in lower Bengal. For example, during the bad harvest year of 1783, a severe shortage of cowries occurred in Sylhet, because revenue farmers exported cowries to meet obligations in Dhaka, where cowry prices had declined during a flood of Maldives cowry imports.Footnote 68 The 1783 cowry crisis crippled Sylhet revenue collection. Tax arrears mounted, along with desertions of land by defaulters. Petitions for remissions multiplied and more litigants came to court to fight for rights to landed property.Footnote 69
Such market problems made direct access to land and food vital for peasant survival, especially in the worst of times, which arrived in the 1780s. Peasants acquired food primarily by maintaining locally effective rights to land and its produce. This became more difficult for Omaid Rezah's tenants as his authority declined over the decade. In 1790, Collector Willes described this once commanding figure as ‘a respectable old man but entirely incapable’, who could not pay his huge jamma of 34,665 KahansFootnote 70 without incurring a debt of more than one lakh of Kahans, heaped upon him by the men who managed his affairs and embezzled his wealth. Willes took the estate under his direct administration and said that insisting on full tax compliance ‘would be act of cruelty’, which would ruin Omaid Rezah and his family. Willes appointed seven tahsildars to replace the 80 or so renters who had claims on the estate.Footnote 71 Even so, at Omaid Rezah's death in 1792, his estate was hopelessly in debt, and to add injury to insult, Bannychang had drowned in the 1791 floods.Footnote 72 Ensuing struggles over the estate even brought litigants from London to fight for bits of the old jaghir in the Calcutta courts. By 1793, the Collector had carved the old jaghir into a collection of taxed parcels and the Company's army had replaced the tankadar's forces. The Sylhet budget then came to include a regular expense of 13,272 Kahans for defence of the district, raised from revenues from Bannychang territories, as talukdars came to Willes ‘in a body of some hundreds’ with complaints against Omaid Rezah's heirs and servants.Footnote 73
The dissolution of Omaid Rezah's jaghir occurred as commercial activity increased all around Bengali Khasia settlements, on routes from the Bay of Bengal, along Meghna-Kushiara river lowlands, and through the uplands around Sunamganj, leading to the mountain port of Pandua, which Lindsay described as being, along with Jaintia, Sylhet's main port for trade with Assam.Footnote 74 Conflicts pitting merchants against Khasia rajas then became another force increasing the land grab imperative.
In 1779, Lindsay received a delegation of Greek, Armenian, and ‘low European’ merchants, who complained of ‘Hill Rajahs compelling them to dispose of their goods at arbitrary prices’. Lindsay suspected that his petitioners had joined with forest zamindars to fight Khasia rajas for control of the mountains. To keep trade open during their struggles, he stationed a havildar at Pandua, explaining to his superiors that, because ‘trade between Panduah and Calcutta [was] always considered an object worthy of attention . . . to protect merchants a strong force was kept up [at Pandua]’.Footnote 75
By 1781, Lindsay himself controlled the limestone moving through Pandua, with hordes of Company cowries and a handful of troops. From this position, he sought quarry rights from mountain Khasia rajas, and when he arrived at their court, they ‘breathed nothing but peace and friendship’, resembling in his mind ‘[Scottish] Highlanders when dressed in the Gaellic costume’.Footnote 76 His hosts treated Lindsay to a feast of ‘six or eight large hogs . . . roasted in . . . a hole dug in the ground, lined with plantain leaves, and filled with hot stones’, and gave him rights to ‘a large portion of the mountain, where the quarries are worked . . . including the most favourable situation for access to [his] boats, so as to afford [him] the fullest command of the water-carriage’. Lindsay also received permission to build a fortified villa, which became his personal hill station.Footnote 77
As mountain trade increasedFootnote 78 and as more limestone came down the rivers into Sunamganj, troubles at Pandua increased:Footnote 79 more merchants bartered lowland and European products for mountain commodities, and more mountain rajas enriched themselves amid increasing local competition.Footnote 80 Lindsay's Khasia hosts had clearly expected him to support them, but Lindsay did not control events at Pandua, where, one day in 1783, one of his Khasia raja allies received a personal insult from the Pandua havildar. That same day, ‘toward the evening, the shrill war-whoop was heard in every direction, as the Cosseahs retired to the mountains’, and ‘not a man was seen below for several weeks. . . [until they] descended in considerable force’,Footnote 81 to attack a fort of copper merchants.Footnote 82 Lindsay responded by stationing a ‘whole Sebundy corps’ at Pandua. In March 1784, he wrote that, ‘hill people having collected additional forces, [they] have become more troublesome and . . . more formidable than ever’. By then, mountain rajas had ‘taken possession of all the neighbouring jungles’ and passes leading to Pandua. Lindsay reported ominously that it was ‘absolutely necessary to keep that port for the protection of the whole province’,Footnote 83 and by September 1784, he had built a new fort at Pandua to store merchant goods, house troops, and free his business from Khasia patrons.Footnote 84
In 1783—the year that Lindsay sent his ships triumphantly down the mountains to Bakarganj and Madras—hostilities around Pandua forced him to end his mountain holidays. At the same time, below the mountains, agrarian investors began moving into jungles inhabited by Bengali Khasias. The most prominent investor was Lindsay's friend and colleague, Gowar Hari Singh, Sylhet's treasurer (peshkar), a banker (shroff), and local revenue farmer (waddadar), who came from Burdwan. He returned there a rich man in 1791, leaving his Sylhet estates to his diwan, Krishnajivan Haldar.Footnote 85
Severe flooding, in 1779, 1783, 1791, and 1793, and calamitous floods surpassing all precedent, in 1784 and 1787, added still more pressure to attach lands more firmly to Sylhet's agrarian economy, to support secure, expansive cultivation and commerce. Such land lay on higher ground, above the floodline and under the hills, and it is there that peasants, bankers, and merchants increasingly focused their attention. Here Bengali Khasias lived in mobile settlements where they combined trade with farming, fishing, hunting, and fighting, under the crumbling authority of Omaid Rezah and the fickle protection of Khasia mountain rajas.
The land grab imperative in the uplands became increasingly pressing after the 1787 floods. A vast deluge forced the Tista and Brahmaputra rivers to shift course permanently. Fierce rain began in February and continued until the Surma River rose 32 feet. All the standing boro (winter) crop was lost. By July, the lowlands became a churning sea, where cattle drowned, granaries [golah] floated away,Footnote 86 people starved, and the living survived on famine food, ‘a small root procured by diving in the middle of the hills in six or seven feet of water . . . [which then became] the sole occupation of the inhabitants’.Footnote 87 People fled to the hills,Footnote 88 but cultivation was impossible even on the highest farms,Footnote 89 and by November, famine raged in mountains and lowlands alike.Footnote 90
In February 1788, rice prices were six times higher than normal. The boro planting suffered for lack of seed.Footnote 91 Lindsay could not ‘stir out of [his] house without being beset by thousands seeking relief’.Footnote 92 Farms on high ground did not get enough April rain to sustain boro crops.Footnote 93 Cholera and malaria must have killed prisoners and soldiers who died in Sylhet town of ‘disease’ and ‘violent fevers’, amid a general pestilence, from September 1787 through to May 1788, which continued sporadically until May 1789.Footnote 94
By September 1788, recovery was underway. Landowners then settled revenue contracts at a renegotiated median of rates set in 1776 and 1783. Bankers (shroffs) provided security for revenue at 40 per cent interest per month.Footnote 95 There was a bumper boro harvest in 1789,Footnote 96 but disruptions since 1784 had taken a cumulative toll on profits, savings, livestock, and other assets,Footnote 97 as well as on state revenue.
The recovery came with investments in cultivating higher ground (which, in lowland Sylhet, still averages only 50 feet above sea level). The District treasurer, Gowar Hari Singh, launched the bidding at a government auction in 1783, during the cowry scarcity, when he had privileged access to Company cash. In 1784, as the flood began, he bought two large parcels of the upland Langlah pargana (sub-district), which came to him because its zamindars had refused to pay the 25 per cent increase in the tax demand imposed in 1780.Footnote 98 No purchasers appeared when Lindsay put the estates up for sale at auction,Footnote 99 so he asked his peshkar to provide much-needed cash in return for land rights.Footnote 100 Gowar Hari Singh's land speculation flourished under Lindsay's protection and patronage. When he bought his first estate at auction, he got a bargain. His new land owed little arrears, compared to others sold that year, and he paid far less for it than the average percentage of arrears and jamma paid by other buyers that year. In 1784, however, he and other buyers engaged in risky opportunities, which emerged from Lindsay's desperation to raise cash after the 1783 cowry crisis. In 1784, buyers of land at government auction paid about twice the jamma due on the land, and about twice the arrears; for one Langlah parcel, Gowar Hari Singh paid even more.
These buyers saw opportunity in government auctions that put land into the hands of well-connected investors, even if this meant bending the rules to provide quick revenue, as Lindsay did to benefit Gowar Hari Singh at the expense of the old Langlah zamindars.Footnote 101 In May 1784, Lindsay still had some attachment to the old zamindars and he petitioned to lower their jamma, saying Langlah was one of six estates ‘daily going to decay because the revenue with which they are assessed is far greater than the Zemindars can possibly afford to pay without ruining their Talookdars and Ryotts with exorbitant exactions’.Footnote 102 But a year later, to defend its sale to his friend, Lindsay said that Langlah zamindars ‘did not pay one single Cowry’ in revenue on the ‘highest and best land in Sylhet, which was ‘over-run with wild beasts’ because they oppressed their tenants, who deserted the land.Footnote 103 By the time of this latter report, Gowar Hari Singh's speculation would have begun to pay dividends, as the 1784 floods forced families from the lowlands to seek good high ground to farm. In 1786, Lindsay again petitioned to reduce the Langlah jamma, formerly paid partly in elephants, because, he said, the estate was still too full of jungle to pay tax rates appropriate for cultivated land.Footnote 104
These transactions indicate the workings of the market in property rights. The market appears buoyant, even before 1784, and in the north, must have benefited from commercial expansion around Sunamganj. John Shore provided a rough contemporary measure of land market buoyancy, when in 1791 he told the Board of Revenue that he had ‘never known of any instance in Bengal in which the price of revenue lands sold, out of Calcutta, exceeded the revenue of two years’.Footnote 105 The sale price of 31 per cent of the 14 estates sold at auction in Sylhet between 1781 and 1784 exceeded two years’ jamma. Gowar Hari Singh's two upland purchases in 1784 were for 195 per cent and 282 per cent of jamma, respectively.Footnote 106
Floods in 1784 and 1787 boosted the market value of upland jungles, by promoting forest clearance and new shail (autumn) cultivation, which bolstered recovery from floods in 1791 and 1793. Observers compared the horrors of 1791 to 1784:Footnote 107 on 15 March 1791, an earthquake occurred, followed by torrential storms that destroyed the boro crop and drowned Ajmeriganj, Beejoorah, and Bannychang.Footnote 108 Yet the overall harvest in 1791 was adequate, because of good crops in the second half of the year,Footnote 109 which must have come from high ground not farmed in 1784, whose owners came forward to buy lowland properties destroyed by flood.Footnote 110 In 1793, owners of the uplands bought at government auction in 1781–1784 could well afford to pay a 43 per cent higher jamma (86,715 Kahans) than their land bore when they bought it (60,485 Kahans).Footnote 111 In 1793, 35 small estates in the uplands sold at government auction for an average price six times the jamma, and all but six went for more than twice their jamma.Footnote 112
Battles for higher ground
The 1787 floods caused new problems for investors in land and commodity trades in the northern uplands, because they ravaged the mountains as well as lowlands. As famine raged, struggles for survival became violent. That violence involved mountain Khasias and ‘inhabitants of the Lowlands under the mountains’, whose combined force had become ‘formidable’. Lindsay then ‘dispatched Lieutenant Davidson with a 100 men in addition to those already sent in order to reduce them to obedience’, ordering Davidson ‘to proceed to Lahore’ (in the foothills) and ‘strike terror’ accordingly.Footnote 113 Two days later, Davidson reported that famine had devastated the hills to which his enemies had fled on his approach.Footnote 114
In a long report on the state of the country, in November 1787, Lindsay emphasized that the military protection of northern frontiers ‘against incursions of Hill people’ had been a central concern of the Mughal government. He argued that rapidly increasing revenue demands and the indefinite boundaries of landed property aggravated conflict in a region where ‘ryots are of unsettled disposition and have no fixed abode or native place like others’, moving in ‘wretched hordes’ as need be from one place to another.Footnote 115 In one of his last official letters, he said that floods and Khasia incursions had killed off the 1788 revenue. Zamindars had paid him nothing for eight months and would never repay securities advanced by shroffs. As remedies, he prescribed lower taxation on insecure farms, fierce protection from Khasia incursions, and a fixing of boundaries for the district and all its landed property.Footnote 116
His successor, John Willes, only pursued the latter two remedies, and focused first on mountain Khasias. Citing ‘Mr. Lindsay's narrative’ and tingeing his prose with apprehension, he wrote: ‘Government have been informed of the uncivilized state of these [Khasia] people, of the minute division of their country into small independencies, and their incessant disputes with each other which are frequently decided on the bordering lowlands in the Company's jurisdiction.’ He then exaggerated the frequency of Khasia attacks and stoked fear of French intervention, by saying the French commissioner ‘has lately felt himself authorized to form connections with the Cosseah Rajahs, inhabitants of the Hills whose depredations have been so frequently felt in this district’. He described how the Company had ‘courted the Rajahs who look up to its authority’ and he warned that the French sought alliances that would divide Khasias into ‘French and English Rajahs’, whose quarrels would spill into Sylhet. To woo the mountain rajas, he sought permission to distribute presents among them, not to exceed Rs. 2,000 in value per annum.Footnote 117 With his request approved,Footnote 118 annual expenditures for such presents then entered the Sylhet budget.Footnote 119
Willes believed that increasing trade with the hills would increase conflict ‘if every trader be allowed to form whatever connections he thinks may be conducive to his own interests’, and he sought authority to regulate private trade in the hills, saying that, ‘these [commercial] connections have within the last six months brought forward four times the Number of Principals ever known before’.Footnote 120 He knew that trade was beneficial and lively in both directions, with ‘wax, ivory, Muggadooties etc coming from the countries without our dominions under the Rajahs of Cutcher and Jointah and the Cosseah Rajahs of the Ponduah Hills’ and with ‘salt and grain etc coming from the Company's territories’. But he warned that free trade could be dangerous, because trade in weapons could tilt the military balance. He said, ‘if Hill people acquire arms’ and ‘learn the [use] of them from the wandering lowland Europeans, Moguls, Greeks, and Armenians who infest this district . . . the Company's territories even as low as Dacca may be subjected to [mountain Khasia] incursions . . .’; he added that Lindsay had ‘stopped several foreigners who were going off to the Hills with arms for the purpose of barter’ and that ‘within these [past] few weeks [in May 1788] a large part of armed Moguls have been stopped and prevented from going off to the Hills to assist in the predatory wars of these inimical Rajahs’.Footnote 121
Willes soon discovered that mountain Khasias were not his only problem, nor, indeed, his main problem. In July 1788, as he negotiated with hill rajas to rebuild markets destroyed in battle and bring merchants back to Pandua,Footnote 122 he discovered problems posed by Bengali Khasias.Footnote 123 In December, one Bengali Khasia leader, Ganga Singh, ‘calling himself the Zemindar of Barrakeah’, burned to the ground a neighboring zamindari and killed its proprietor, Baroo Chaudhury, also a Bengali Khasia, in a land dispute that had become a ‘blood feud’.Footnote 124 Ganga Singh then captured both sides of a river connecting mountain trade with Sylhet.Footnote 125 Then, Willes also learned that Pandua had fallen completely to mountain Khasias, while Bengali Khasias under Ganga Singh and his confederate, Aboo Singh, zamindar of Dewallah, expanded control over land below the hills in ‘open hostility to the Company’, seizing people, goods, and boats on the river.Footnote 126
Ganga Singh was a complex character, whom Willes described as a Bengali Khasia who ‘possesses territory on the hills and also holds many pergannahs on the lowlands . . . . [and] rents many villages from dependent Zamindars of Sylhet’. Willes found that ‘this practice of letting and selling lands to the Cosseahs [had] been adopted by many of the Sylhet Zamindars’ and he thought ‘it extremely injurious to the Company's interests’. Despite this complex situation, Willes had a simple remedy: ‘nothing but coercion will suit the dastardly and savage disposition of the Bengalee Cosseahs of the lowlands’.Footnote 127
In 1789, Willes formulated a strategy for handling his frontier problems, amid new discoveries and changing circumstances. He proposed that a strict boundary be drawn at the base of the northern mountains, so that Khasias might settle in the plains as Company subjects without hill rajas taking this to be an extension of their territory.Footnote 128 But at the same time, he discovered, to his surprise, that Khasia tankadars in the lowlands held tenures under the Company to protect Sylhet from hill Khasias.Footnote 129 When he proposed seizing all of Ganga Singh's land, claiming the sale of this land had been forced upon sellers,Footnote 130 he met hill rajas who offered to buy Ganga Singh's Barrakeah estate.Footnote 131
Willes requested military force to settle all borders with mountain Khasia rulers,Footnote 132 including Jaintia, once and for all,Footnote 133 at the same time as Ganga Singh and Aboo Singh expanded their efforts to control mountain-lowland borderlands.Footnote 134 In April 1789, war began on two fronts: in the mountains around Pandua and in the jungles behind Sunamganj and Chhatak, at the base of the hills. In April and May a sepoy and reinforcements arrived,Footnote 135 many suffering ‘violent fever’.Footnote 136 The Surma River then swelled with ‘violent rains’, preventing a land expedition against mountain Khasias, Ganga Singh, Aboo Singh, and Bengali dacoits. The expedition would have required 30–40 boats, deemed too expensive, so military action was postponed. Attacks on Company positions continued: one prison guard was killed,Footnote 137 and rebel Khasias and Bengali Khasias continued to control ‘137 Bengalee villages scattered throughout the district’.Footnote 138 In June, Willes sent for additional troops. Logistics were difficult, he said, because, ‘the country being now inundated the troops can only proceed by water’, yet ‘this [flooding] by having opened the Bunseah River . . . [also] affords more direct communication with Sylhet from Ajmeri Ganj’.Footnote 139
Ganga Singh escaped to the hills, where Aboo Singh attacked the Pandua fort, killing its commander.Footnote 140 Eighty sepoys who marched to Pandua found their powder and guns soaked with rain, and then realized the advantage of Khasia bows and arrows,Footnote 141 but on 20 June, they managed to relieve Pandua, without bloodshed, presumably because Ganga and Aboo Singh had fled to the mountains.Footnote 142 More sepoys then arrived in Chhatak, which became the Company’ military base of operations.Footnote 143
Meanwhile, Willes pondered civil measures to settle the borderlands. He of course demanded punishment and expropriation for Khasias and dacoits, ‘of which . . . there are not less [than] three or four thousand in . . .Sylhet’, and for ‘many zemindars [who] are notoriously the supporters of these bandits and share the profits’.Footnote 144 His land grab policy was simply to colonize jungles with tax-paying farms, and he proposed giving grants of land, rent free, for a specific term ‘to whomever may offer to bring any part of it under cultivation’.Footnote 145 In response to criticism from the Board of Revenue that he proposed to establish state property in jungles, he said this:
My motive for wishing that the janglah lands should be considered as absolute property of the Company was that men of property and abilities . . . relying on faith of Government be induced to attempt at their own expense clearing and bringing into cultivation such parts of the country as at present only afford harbour for wild beasts . . . an application to the Chaudries for such grants would generally be unsuccessful.Footnote 146
He also argued, quite rightly, that this had been Mughal policy, which faujdars had been expected to execute for the protection of sanad holders. Success beyond what the Mughals were able to accomplish could only be secured with more troops. He said the Company's ‘passive stance’ toward Khasias had encouraged their aggression: ‘The more we have given way the more the Cosseahs have encroached . . . leading to the loss of whole Pergannahs from Panduah to Lohore, and the destruction of uplands [in] Chumtallah’ and elsewhere. Under the Mughals, he said, ‘Jaintia people made constant inroads’, but since Major Ellington's expedition ‘they have been perfectly passive’. Willes also proposed a boundary to separate Khasia and Bengali territories. Stating that Khasias are ‘not inherently warlike’, he promised that they might be kept under control with little force, but for their entanglements with ‘Bengalee Chaudries’ in localities where ‘irruptions never take place wherein the Cosseahs are not abducted by the Company's landholders [and] frequently after an irruption the Revenue to the Company is [seized] and the Bengalees and Cosseahs divide the produce’.
To sever connections between peoples in the mountains and plains, he proposed, ‘. . . that the Cosseahs never be allowed to purchase lands or become residents within the Company's limits’. His argument was this:
It can answer no good purpose. A Cosseah never cultivates the soil. He employs Bengally Ryotts, comes down at the time of the Harvests, and carries off the Produce. The Cosseahs have obtained stronghold of this district either by the artful management of the Bengalee Chaudries or by agreements taken from such Chaudries whom they have forcibly taken off into the hills.
In October 1789, Willes obtained further support for his plan to separate Khasia and Bengal territory from depositions acquired at the ‘apprehension of daring marauders’,Footnote 147 which documented a ‘combination [among] the Zemindars, native Collectors, and Dacoits of Bazoo, whereby since the irruptions of the Cosseahs the Pergunnas Autgong, Silberris, Bunsicoorah, and Rundugah have been totally desolated’. He found that Zulkuddah Khan, zamindar of Bazoo, had long protected dacoits, who ‘are his slaves’, and paid him part of their profits as hush money. In combination with Ramkrishen, the Naib Collector, Zulkuddah Khan commanded 17 boats and 150 men to ‘murder Company ryots and ruin the country’. These activities occurred under the guise of revenue collection, with the bandits posing as Company officials to steal Company cash from villages, which, if they encountered resistance, they destroyed.Footnote 148
Thus, Willes discovered that, though Khasias had participated in the destruction of parganas which he had toured in February 1789, his original attribution of local devastation primarily to Khasias had been seriously mistaken and had been planted in his mind by implicated local informants. Realizing that local landowners and officials could stoke rebellion, Willes began to imprison refractory Chauduris, Patwaris, and renters for tiny revenue arrears, to set an example and avoid the cost of selling countless small estates to their local allies. The first prisoners were three Chaudhuris of Denarpore on the northern frontier.Footnote 149
By the end of 1789, a new agrarian order had begun to emerge on the northern frontiers, where Willes sought to sponsor investors in agricultural expansion. But Bengali Khasias remained a problem. The war to grab their land was more than brutal. Sepoys massacred Bengali Khasias around Ganga Singh's home village, after his men had captured 33 Khasia and Bengali prisoners, seized 290 cattle, and stopped grain and salt going to the hills (perhaps to supply Ganga Singh). When Company troops were attacked, Cheape, the commander, wrote that he had been forced ‘to use military rigour with the particular advice of your Tahseeldar by burning and destroying every village I came near, and putting to death as many of the enemy as were unable from their wounds to make their escape, a rigour which I find absolutely requisite to be continued for the preservation of the detachment committed to my care and the better regulation of the Company Purganas’.Footnote 150 Horrified by this report, Willes ordered the sepoys to ‘encamp . . . elsewhere in safety . . . without being reduced to adopt such disagreeable measures’.Footnote 151 Then he ‘entreated’ Cheape ‘in the strongest terms to show in the future all possible leniency to such persons as may be unfortunate to be wounded as contrary conduct if persisted would reflect the greatest disgrace on the English Character and I further again request that in no instance the Sepoys be allowed to fire on any person except when in the direct act of opposition’.Footnote 152
On 2 February 1790, sepoys captured Ganga Singh.Footnote 153 Immediately ‘about 400 Cosseahs under Menon Sing, a relation of Aboo Sing, came down from the hills and burnt villages around Chhatak’,Footnote 154 where it took several months for the Company to re-establish control. Cheape again blocked grain moving into the hills, but Willes reported that, ‘it is difficult to prevent Cosseahs from getting grain altogether’, because ‘the Cosseahs of Sadah Bazar have always behaved quietly and allowing them provisions they of course sell it to the others’. Willes ordered Cheape not to break up bazaars, because it would affect revenue,Footnote 155 but again, Willes could not control events at Chhatak, where in early April 1790, a ‘most extraordinary act of violence’ occurred, when Sepoys attacked Punah Terub Punjee, whose Khasia residents, Willes said, ‘are well affected to us’.Footnote 156
Creating Bengali territory
Aboo Singh's retreat into the mountains, during the 1790 monsoon, ended the Company's wars that were aimed at securing northern upland jungles for Bengali peasants and tax payers. This land grab not only opened space for Bengali colonization inside Company territory, it also fractured an old social space to institutionalize what became a permanent separation of (mountain) Khasias from (lowland) Bengalis, in order to restrict ‘intercourse and intermarriages’, whose profusion had produced the so-called ‘degenerate Race called Bengalee Cosseahs’. As Willes explained most effectively, state problems addressed by the new boundary did not arise from the inherent character of the Khasia ‘race’, but rather from Khasia and Bengali miscegenation, and the resultant Khasia-Bengali alliances. These threatened the Company's territorial order by mixing lowland popular culture with the wild, unruly culture of the mountains, where people did not respect the symbols or comply with the rituals of state authority. The threat posed by Khasias came not from Khasia culture itself, which, if properly contained, seemed harmless. Rather it derived from its potential to influence people at the lowest levels of state authority in agrarian frontiers of British India where, after 1790, rules governing geographies of culture, commerce, and land use came to coincide more effectively with rules prescribed at the highest ranks of state authority and passed down to every locality through the ranks of bureaucracy, law, and official knowledge.
The new state border also became a boundary of ‘free trade’ separating groups who could and could not be trusted by state officials to obey the rules of the state. This involved prohibiting European merchants from operating personally inside Khasia territory, including Jaintia and Cachar.Footnote 157 To engage in limestone trades, Europeans had now to procure a licence from the Collector to buy stone at Sunamganj or Companyganj.Footnote 158 Khasia traders from the northern mountains were likewise prohibited from operating personally in Sylhet, but not Khasias from Jaintia or Cachar, who could be trusted because they ‘are considered as quiet and inoffensive and are not as some of the Cosseah Rajahs desirous of living by oppression and plunder’.Footnote 159
In 1790, the Collector extended the Sylhet property system up to the new northern boundary. Land buyers entered a state-managed land market where—as in the case of commerce—individual rights rested on ethnic classifications. The Collector prohibited all Khasias and Bengali Khasias from owning land in Sylhet District, on the grounds that all the land they already owned had been acquired illegally, and that they could never abandon alien mountain methods for establishing property rights.Footnote 160 The Company then expropriated all Khasia property. Even major figures like Ganga Singh must have either lost their land to become tenants and labourers, or turned themselves into Bengalis, at least for official purposes. North of the Surma River, clearing jungle to make farms then involved clearing all the Khasias from records of land rights and expelling them from the land or turning them into tenants and labourers.
In 1792, the first recorded auction of Khasia taluks went to Lal Barker, who bought land assessed at 3,728 Kahans (with arrears of 4,503 Kahans) for 4,845 Kahans, or 130 per cent jamma.Footnote 161 A year later, the Collector reported that he had completed the sale of all the land expropriated from rebellious villagers, except for a ‘trifling remainder of Cosseah land’.Footnote 162 Lal Barker's purchase typifies two apparent patterns: most buyers bought very small parcels of land, and former Khasia land sold at much lower prices than other land on auction,Footnote 163 especially in the ‘devastated parganas’ toured by Willes in 1789.
The general reason for the extreme cheapness of some land at government auctions appears to have been that it remained covered with jungles, where substantial numbers of Khasias still lived. In addition to the physical problems of extending cultivation in the jungle, and to the social problems of assimilating or expelling Khasias, high tax rates continued to plague potential investors in the jungle. Jamma remained pegged to the productivity of cultivated land, and thus to the jungle's future potential, rather than to its current productivity. Owners of jungle found it difficult to expand cultivation, not only because initial capital costs were high, labour scarce, and local markets meagre, but also because their property rights rested on state tax demands poorly calibrated to encourage, let alone subsidize, investment.
All this did not prevent forest investments, but encouraged Bengali investors to concentrate on already farmed land, which they might sell—or allow to go to government auction, where they would reap any excess in the sale price over arrearsFootnote 164 —to reap dividends. Sale proceeds might eventually go into clearing forest for new cultivation, but investors concentrated their investments only on already cultivated land, despite much lower tax rates on forest. One obvious reason for this investor strategy was simply that jungles yielded no cash for paying even the lowest jamma. As more estates than ever before went to auction, in 1792 and 1793, their jamma rose as their proportion of jungle declined, and only a small number attracted no bidders, despite harsh floods in 1791 and 1793. Larger estates covered with jungle remained unattractive investments.
It thus appears that a substantial jungle remained for habitation—if not ownership—by Khasias, north of the Surma, as Bengalis cultivated smallholdings. By 1797, much of the land north of the Surma, formerly owned by Khasias and Bengali Khasis, had been occupied by Bengali cultivators, who ‘[had] become very willing and eager to enter into regular engagements to pay Revenue’. Collectors believed that Khasias had held this land by force and failed to bring it to cultivation, and ‘scared away farmers’, so that when the Company ‘secured the area and confined Cosseahs to the hills’, peace came to the region along with people who had now reclaimed farmland, even though few immediately turned forest into farms. This land had not been included in previous land surveys and its cultivators were now anxious to secure their rights, by having land duly recorded in their names. Collectors hoped their jamma ‘[could] be used to defray the cost of Tannahs that defend district against Cosseahs’.Footnote 165
Forest colonization eventually brought new farms into the official geography of land use all across Sylhet District, where a profusion of new land rights appeared in the Hustabood land surveys and Bandobast revenue accounts. In 1783, only about 4,000 tax payers held official property rights in Sylhet, but by 1795, there were ‘26,000 persons and upwards by whom the small jumma of this district is paid, many of these paying from a single Cawn of couries to five hundred and [only] a few any considerable sum above it’.Footnote 166 By 1798, the number of tax-paying landowners had increased to 27,000.Footnote 167 Data on estates sold in 1793 indicate the small size of most landholdings:Footnote 168 37 per cent paid less than 10 Cawns jamma, 66 per cent less than 30 Cawns, and 83 per cent less than 100 Cawns.Footnote 169 In the 1790s, the estimated district population was about 49,300, so that landowners would have comprised a bit more than 5 per cent of the total population. Estimating landowners’ immediate families at five persons each, we can reasonably imagine that 27 per cent of all the people in Sylhet District lived in landowning families.
Permanent Settlement was a boon for the local landed Sylhet families who could afford to pay land taxes and invest in agricultural expansion. At the end of the eighteenth century, one of Sylhet's statistically average villages would have held a tiny population of 67 people and four taluks. An average taluk would have represented 18 people, perhaps few more than one family, its dependants and servants. Willes often asserted that each taluk typically belonged to one extended family.Footnote 170 Cultivation expanded in and around small estates of landed village families, and as Sylhet Collectors never tired of repeating, its vast predominance of small landowners distinguished Sylhet from most of the Bengal Presidency, where larger estates and their landlord-tenant-banker relationships dominated agrarian life.
The intermediary financier role of waddadar also gave way to a more bureaucratic role played by zillahdars. Willes divided the district into ten zillahs and gave superintendence of each to a zillahdar. He called this mode of settlement his Talukdari Plan. With this plan, he freed himself from having to consider ‘what rights the ancient Zamindars possessed or what remains to them’—a problem Collectors faced elsewhere in Bengal—and he did not have to worry about ‘any injustice in taking [Talukdars] from under [Zamindar] authority’. In Sylhet, each talukdar family owner of the village taluk could be consider a zamindar, under the legal framework of the Permanent Settlement.Footnote 171 Country politics in Sylhet had thus produced a distinctive land grab variant of the Company's agrarian system on northern Bengali frontiers.
