Tirthankar Roy

WHERE IS BENGAL? SITUATING ANINDIAN REGION IN THE EARLYMODERN WORLD ECONOMY*

I

Recent studies on the economic and social history of Bengal fromthe sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries suggest that the regionexperienced an economic boom in this time span, owing to ex-pansion in the agrarian frontier, a flourishing textile industry,urbanization, trade with the western Gangetic plains, and Indo-European maritime trade. The economic boom began with theincorporation of Bengal into the Mughal Empire (c.1590), whichstimulated new urban settlements, overland trade, and growth ofcultivation. In addition to a strong state, Bengal had significantresource advantages. Thanks to a long coastline, huge riparianhighways of goods traffic, alluvial soil, plentiful water, and con-sequently high yield of land, parts of early modern Bengal hadalready been a trading and manufacturing region for centuries.Such advantages, it is proposed, had placed peasants, artisans andmerchants of Bengal in a position of strength when new exportopportunities opened up.1

* I wish to thank the participants of the panel ‘Globalizing EconomicHistoriography’ at the World Economic History Congress, Utrecht, 2009, where anearlier draft of the article was discussed. Annu Jalais graciously directed me to animportant reference. I would also like to thank Mina Moshkeri for drawing the map.

1 ‘Bengal offers the most dramatic example of export-stimulated economic growth’:John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1995), 202. John R. McLaneconsiders that commercialization in Mughal Bengal had proceeded further than inany other part of the empire, stimulated by ‘gigantic inland trade, and foreign export’:see his Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge, 2002), 6.Richard M. Eaton explains ‘the seventeenth century’s booming rice frontier in theeast’ with reference to ‘the eastward movement of Bengal’s rivers and hence of theactive delta, the region’s political and commercial integration with Mughal India, andthe growth in the money supply with the influx of outside silver in payment for locallymanufactured textiles’: see his The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760(Berkeley, 1993), 207. Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: EighteenthCentury Bengal (New Delhi, 1995), 1, begins with the assertion: ‘Bengal’s prosperitybefore the British conquest cannot be in doubt at all’. Economic history statementsoften draw upon general works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bengal. Aselection should include: W. H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar (London,1920); Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir: An Introductory

Past and Present, no. 213 (Nov. 2011) � The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2011

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtr009

(cont. on p. 116)

at Colum

bia University L

ibraries on June 9, 2012http://past.oxfordjournals.org/

Dow

nloaded from

http://past.oxfordjournals.org/

Records of European voyages in Bengal confirm the picture ofprosperity. Francois Bernier, an otherwise cynical commentatoron north Indian society in the time of Aurangzeb (1658–1707),was effusive on Bengal:

The rich exuberance of the country, together with the beauty and amiabledisposition of the native women, has given rise to a proverb in commonuse among the Portuguese, English, and Dutch, that the Kingdomof Bengale has a hundred gates open for entrance, but not one fordeparture.2

Bernier leaves the reader in some doubt as to what it was theEuropeans found attractive in Bengal, but the tone of approvalis unconditional. Similar endorsement, if more tempered in tone,can be found in the travelogues of Caesar Frederick and RalphFitch in the late sixteenth century, and Thomas Bowrey andJean-Baptiste Tavernier in the seventeenth.3 Until a few yearsafter the East India Company became the ruler of Bengal,British opinion of the region was not very different. In 1764,Robert Clive described the erstwhile capital of Bengal as being‘as rich as London’. Twenty years later, a merchant in Calcuttadescribed Bengal as ‘one of the most fertile and productiveKingdoms under the sun’.4

Global historians have made significant use of a prosper-ous Bengal in their interpretations of the early modern worldeconomy. Three examples illustrate this use. Frank Perlin callsupon historians to consider a ‘framework’ in which commercial

(n. 1 cont.)

Study in Social History (Delhi, 1969); Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market:Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c.1760–1800 (New Delhi, 2000); P. J. Marshall,Bengal: The British Bridgehead. Eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge, 2006); OmPrakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720(Princeton, 1985); Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengalsince 1770 (Cambridge, 1993).

2 Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656–1668, 2nd edn, revisedVincent A. Smith (London, 1916), 439.

3 On Caesar Frederick’s account of trade in lower Bengal, see AGeneral History andCollection of the Voyages and Travels Arranged in Systematic Order, vii, ed. Robert Kerr(Edinburgh and London, 1824), 178–81; Ralph Fitch: England’s Pioneer to India andBurma, his Companions and Contemporaries, with his Remarkable Narrative Told in hisOwn Words, ed. J. H. Ryley (London, 1899), 118; Thomas Bowrey, A GeographicalAccount of Countries round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679, ed. Richard Temple(Cambridge, 1905), 212–13. Tavernier dealt in diamonds; some of his principal cli-ents were in Bengal. See also his description of goods exported from the region, inJean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India (1676), ed. V. Ball, 2 vols. (London, 1889), ii,1–12.

4 India Office Records, London, IOR/H/392, Papers of George Smith, 11.

116 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 213

at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


manufactures and peasant production in the pre-colonial Indianregions can be seen to belong in ‘the increasingly internationalcharacter of commerce and production relations during thisperiod’. Perlin discusses Bengal in the seventeenth and eight-eenth centuries as a site of ‘rurbanization’ and ‘accumulation’.5

Andre Gunder Frank uses the Bengal discourse to integrate Indiainto the debate on ‘the great divergence’. Historians are invitedto see an equivalence between ‘India’s most productive region’and regions in coastal-deltaic China, both being ‘ ‘‘central’’ to

BENGAL IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

5 Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, Past andPresent, no. 98 (Feb. 1983), 33, 81, 93.

WHERE IS BENGAL? 117

at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


the world economy’ in the seventeenth century.6 PrasannanParthasarathi suggests that fertile land and cheap grains madeBengal manufactures attractive in the world market at thistime.7 Eastern Bengal, which was ‘largely jungle before the six-teenth century’, experienced population growth, urbanizationand agrarian prosperity in the next two hundred years, all ofwhich ‘added enormously to the productive capacity of the sub-continent as a whole’.8

The picture of the flourishing seventeenth century leads on to asequel of gathering crisis in the late eighteenth century andonward to the misery that awaited Bengal in the mid twentieth.Stories of such dramatic regress hint at only one factor to whichthe reversal of fortune could possibly have been owed, namelyBritish colonialism. Frank proposes that India began to experi-ence a decline from the mid eighteenth century as Spanish moneydried up, and the ‘rape of Bengal’ by the East India Companybegan.9 Chaudhury makes the case that ‘the decline in the trad-itional trade and industry can be discerned only in the second halfof the eighteenth century’.10 According to Perlin, a vigorous‘proto-industrialization’ began to assume exploitative charac-ter with the ‘assumption of governmental control in Bengal andCoromandel by the English East India Company’.11

How sound is the picture of early modern Bengal as a haven forcommerce and industry? Did this region really possess the insti-tutional prerequisites for sustained economic growth to takeplace? It is necessary to ask the question because contributorsto the Bengal discourse, and the global and comparative historypractitioners who employ it to infer the origins of ‘divergence’,have relied mainly upon European trade archives or Persiansources to construct their narratives. But accounts left by tradersand rulers who did not speak the language of the region cannot be

6 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley,1999), 127. See also Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe andthe Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000).

7 Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Agriculture, Labour, and the Standard of Living inEighteenth-Century India’, in Robert C. Allen, Tommy Bengtsson and Martin Dribe(eds.), Living Standards in the Past (Oxford, 2005).

8 Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200–1800’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: AGlobal History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (New York and Oxford, 2009), 40–1.

9 Frank, ReOrient, 267, 293.10 Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline, 1.11 Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, 94.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


wholly reliable as sources on the history of the region. In order totest the reliability of the mainstream account, we should also con-sider what the ordinary Bengalis thought about material life. Anyrandom sample of their thoughts would seem to contradict themainstream story. The literature of the Bengalis a century beforeand a century after the Mughal takeover too often projects a pes-simistic outlook on markets, livelihoods and states. A few illus-trations are in order.

In the fifteenth century, ancestors of the Vaishnava master SriChaitanya had migrated to the banks of the Bhagirathi (see Map)to escape anarchy in Sylhet in north-eastern Bengal, and perse-cution in Jajpur on the Orissa–Bengal border. In Chaitanya’s owntimes (1486–1533), the landlord ruling an estate on the borderbetween Bengal and Orissa was robbing pilgrims; and when hebecame Chaitanya’s disciple, the same landlord accompanied hisspiritual master in order to protect him from river pirates.12

Vaishnava literature of the mid sixteenth century paints regionsdistant by only a few miles from the river Bhagirathi in much thesame colour. Robber barons lived in Nabadwip, the intellectualcapital of Bengal, disguised as elite citizens.13 Defaulting peasantswere ruthlessly tortured by landlords.14 Shortly before theMughal invasion, a poet from north-eastern Bengal described astate of anarchy in her own milieu — householders hid wealth,officers of the state failed to protect property, peasants robbedtravellers, and robbers were as powerful as kings.15 In a village inwestern Bengal, a contemporary, Mukundaram Chakrabarty, ex-plained that the constant harassment by revenue officers and ac-countants drove the family, along with many merchants andbankers, to leave the ancestral village.16 About the same time,

12 Sri Sri ChaitanyaCharitamrita, ed. Jagadishwar Gupta (Calcutta, 1902), 367–71.13 For the episode of ‘the Brahmin, the leader of the robbers’, see Sri Chaitanya

Bhagabat, ed. Atulkrishna Goswami (Calcutta, 1935), 467–9. See also the episode ofSanatan’s escape from prison, with the help of an officer who initially intended tomurder him for money, Sri Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita, ed. Gupta, 458–9.

14 J. N. Das Gupta, Bengal in the Sixteenth Century AD (Calcutta, 1914), 71–2.15 In summarizing the relevant passage, I combine three versions of the poem by

Chandrabati (c.1545–80), available in Purbbabanga Geetika [Eastern Bengal Ballads],ed. Dinesh Chandra Sen, 4 vols. (Calcutta, 1923–32), i, 202–3; Prachin PurbbabangaGeetika [Old Eastern Bengal Ballads], ed. Kshitishchandra Moulik, 7 vols. (Calcutta,1970–5), i, 262; and Dinesh Chandra Sen, The Bengali Ramayanas (Calcutta, 1920),190.

16 Sukumar Sen, Bangala Sahityer Itihas [History of Bengali Literature], 4 vols.(Calcutta, 1959–63), i, 512.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


in a village near the eastern seaboard, the romantic poet Alaol’slife was endangered by Portuguese pirates who had killed hisfather. Alaol found asylum in the Arakan state, only to risk hislife when he fell out of favour with the Arakan king.17

The so-called eastern Bengal ballads, composed mainly in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, do not suggest any im-provement in conditions of life after Mughal takeover. Not onlywas there anarchy, but there was also the effect of an unstableenvironment, intrusive communities and extortionate officers.18

With regular force, floods destroyed cultivation and drove peas-ants to ruinous indebtedness. Storms and pirates ruined theseagoing merchant. Individuals without the protection of thecommunity were exposed to persecution. Young women fallingin love outside the community were hounded by that community.The Mughal state in these accounts had at best a symbolic pres-ence. The qazi (judge in the Islamic court) commanded neitherrespect nor trust. Anyone who could hire soldiers or arm kinsmencould hope to gain control over a part of this world. Such peopleincluded bands of robbers who roamed the forested highways andplied the Brahmaputra in the guise of boatmen, while their cap-tains pursued respectable professions in the towns.

How do we reconcile these hints of pervasive risk and uncer-tainty that the literary sources convey with the strongly positivetone in which present-day historians have painted conditions ofmaterial life in early modern Bengal? One possible responsewould be to choose between growth and anarchy, but thatwould amount to disregarding either the one or the other bodyof evidence altogether. Perhaps they are both right. The ‘Bengal’which both the literary and the historical sources are consideringincluded quite different institutional environments with littleendogenous drive towards convergence. If, however, we followthat path, we must also ask, where did diversity come from? Thepresent article attempts to answer this question.

I show that Bengal was a segmented totality. There were regionswithin Bengal that did not trade very much between themselves,

17 Daulat Kazir Lorchandrani o Satimayna [Lorchandrani and Satimayna of DaulatKazi], ed. Debnath Bandopadhyay (Calcutta, 1995), 15.

18 The term ‘ballad’ has been used to refer to Bengali poetic narratives, for exampleby W. Sutton Page, ‘Bengali Ballads’, Bull. School of Oriental and African Studies, iv(1926). For a fuller description of these works and the appropriateness of the term, seebelow.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


and that were subject to such severe geographical constraints andhigh transportation costs as to make hegemonic states possessingthe institutional means to generate sufficient income for them-selves an impossible project. The account of growth-followed-by-decline is at best a generalization based on the experience ofa strip of land in western Bengal and extrapolated to a vastly moredifferentiated land mass. The segments did not necessarily live inautarky. Many outlying areas had frequent transactions with out-siders accessible to them. Such contact did not everywhere takethe shape of commodity trade and precious metal inflow. Ourconsiderably enhanced knowledge of that part of Bengal whichsupplied European traders needs to be used as a benchmark toread how regions that did not trade so much with European mer-chants nevertheless charted their own distinct modes of engage-ment with outsiders.

The argument of the article is that differences, marked by geo-graphical, cultural and political fragmentation, ran so deep that anotion of ‘Bengal’ as a meaningful unit in global economic historycannot be sustained. Indeed, any attempt to suggest otherwisewould risk looking like a projection of post-1857 political mapsand recreated cultural identities upon a time and place that hadno essential homogeneity. Nor can it be salvaged by having re-course to a core–periphery terminology wherein one zone (in themainstream view the one exporting cotton textiles) is defined asthe core and the others as its periphery (usually the grain produ-cing ‘hinterland’). Instead we should consider a notion of earlymodern Bengal as a series of parallel globalizations formed out ofinteractions between resources, trade costs, an increasingly am-bitious fiscal state, itinerant merchants, and military adventurers.Contemporary Bengali literature would be consistent with such apicture, while suggesting that this fluidity made many ordinarylives unsafe.

The ground for a reinterpretation is supplied by the hundred orso poetic narratives produced between Mughal takeover (1590)and the confirmation of the East India Company as the rulers ofBengal (1765). These tales were recovered and published inannotated editions in the 1920s to the 1950s.19 Poetic narratives

19 For standard compilations, see Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Sen; Prachin Purbba-banga Geetika, ed. Moulik. A smaller third cluster is Mafizul Islam, Rangpurer Pala-gan [Ballads of Rangpur] (Dacca, 1985).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


in Bengali in this time span came from several regions, and werequite varied in content. Perhaps the most familiar to historians aretwo clusters, Vaishnava literature and the mangalkavyas, whichwere devotional in intent, written mainly by the Hindu upper-caste literati, produced in the Bhagirathi floodplains in the west,and received patronage from the Hindu kings. Several thousandmanuscripts and manuscript fragments discovered in the 1950sand 1960s in the same broad region followed this high traditionwith more limited and more rustic resources.20 One of the lastmajor outputs in the high tradition was the Annadamangal, com-posed by the mid eighteenth-century court poet BharatchandraRay. These western Bengal devotional texts have been employedas material in constructing the cultural history of the time, andmore recently, in interpretations of kingship.21 But I rely onlymarginally on these products.

Instead, in this article, I make use of the tales that originated ineastern Bengal. These were composed in three distinct regions:Mymensingh, a large district to the east of the river Brahmaputra;Rangpur to the west of the river; and the Noakhali–Chittagongcoast. Collectively they represented a corpus quite different fromthat of western Bengal. They were secular. They were not aboutkings and chieftains in the main, which hints at an obscure anddiffused pattern of patronage. And they belonged, to a relativelygreater extent, in an oral-performative tradition. The minstrelswho composed them were not ordinarily members of the intel-lectual elite. Unlike in balladic traditions, quite a few of these taleswere autobiographical, and the others followed the lives of avaried collection of anti-heroes and anti-heroines such as sailors,soldiers, tribal headmen, merchants, landlords, gypsies, mendi-cants, fishermen, robbers and women. Most important for mypurpose, the tales engage with economic life to a far greaterextent than do those of the western Bengal corpus. We findmany references in the stories of occupations, employment rela-tions, environmental risks and political extortions, in contrastwith the devotional texts of western Bengal.

20 The main output of the project was published as Punthi Parichaya [Introductionto Manuscripts], ed. Panchanan Mandal et al., 6 vols. (Calcutta, 1951–89).

21 David L. Curley, ‘Kings and Commerce on an Agrarian Frontier: Kalketu’s Storyin Mukunda’s Candimangal’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., xxxviii (2001).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


Ballads are often used as source material for historical re-search.22 But they also present a difficulty for the historian inter-ested mainly in the societies that produced and consumed thesepoetic narratives. Traditional tales followed literary conventions,which, in turn, followed the expectations of the patrons and theintended audience. The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp hasshown that the morphology of traditional tales was amenable toanalysis.23 The presence of a predictable form makes it possiblethat what the historian might read as the immediate reality experi-enced by the poets was in fact an image or a literary device. Therehas been an attempt recently to study the morphology of theAnnadamangal.24 On the other hand, the formulaic content ofthe eastern Bengal ballads has not been discussed at all. Thematerial that I draw upon was quite different from those analysed,and while they contained a few formulaic plots of heroism andlove, they also contained much that was unconventional in medi-eval Bengal or in balladic traditions. The social conventions thatbound them and the entertainment markets that they servedremain obscure. It is even possible that the ballads consideredhere formed a category of their own that did not share many fea-tures with the tales that lend themselves more fruitfully to theformalist discourse. In other words, while I do not see a goodreason to discount the evidential value of the material, it is neces-sary to acknowledge that the cultural context of these tales re-mains under-researched. In the next section I develop further thegeographically segmented definition of Bengal; the two sectionsthat follow illustrate distinct paths of globalization.

II

Like any other large Mughal province of its time, seventeenth-century Bengal can be defined as a unit of administration, aquasi-independent state, a geographical space, a linguistic-cultural entity, and an integrated economy. These five ways of

22 See, for example, J. C. Holt, ‘The Origins and Audience of the Ballads of RobinHood’, Past and Present, no. 18 (Nov. 1960).

23 Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, ed. Anatoly Liberman, trans.Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin (Minneapolis, 1997); see esp. editor’sintro. A frequent criticism of the formalist agenda is that it underestimates the indi-viduality of the products and their makers.

24 Clinton B. Seely, Barisal and Beyond: Essays on Bangla Literature (New Delhi,2008).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


defining Bengal did not correspond to identical spaces. Bengalwas also an idea. In the accounts produced by European visitorsin the Mughal court, the word ‘Bengala’ referred to lands locatedin an easterly direction from Agra rather than a definite region.25

In administrative discourses in Mughal and post-Mughal peri-ods, Bengal tended to mean the region under the formal authorityof its capitals. By this definition, Bengal in the late eighteenthcentury was an area

governed by the presidency of Fort William, comprehending the wholeSubas [provinces] of Bengal and Bahar; a part of the adjoining Subas ofIlahabad, Oresa, and Berar, and some tracts of country, (such as part ofMorung, Cooch, and other provinces) which had maintained their inde-pendence even in the most flourishing period of the Moghul empire.26

Here, I consider this area to correspond to that available in earlymaps showing the officially claimed extent of the Mughalprovince.

The political unit designated Bengal was geographically di-verse, as historians recognize.27 Nineteenth-century geographersdevised a scheme to read the Indian landscape, dividing it into thealluvial, the peninsular and the extra-peninsular.28 Adapting thisschema, the geography of Bengal can be divided into three mainzones, the western uplands, the central alluvial flats and thesouthern seaboard.29 About 1700, there was very limited eco-nomic, political and cultural interaction between the threezones, and between the more accessible parts of the alluvialplains and the less accessible ones.

The alluvial flats spanned the floodplains of the Ganges riversystem, and were by far the largest of the three zones. There wasconsiderable economic, political and cultural diversity within thealluvial flats. For example, the existence of all-weather waterways

25 Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar, 120.26 H. T. Colebrooke, Remarks on the Husbandry and Internal Commerce of Bengal

(Calcutta, 1804), 114.27 Sugata Bose, for example, distinguishes four ecological zones within colonial

Bengal, the submontane north, the western plateau, and two river deltas, the one inthe east being active and the one in the west in decline: see his Peasant Labour andColonial Capital, 9–14. The seaboard plays a marginal role in this division. In the earlymodern period, the north was a less important region in economic terms, and theseaboard more prominent.

28 R. D. Oldham, ‘The Evolution of Indian Geography’, Geog. Jl, iii (1894).29 For Bengal, the threefold division was applied by Cotton Hand-Book for Bengal:

Being a Digest of All Information Available from Official Records and Other Sources on theSubject of the Production of Cotton in the Bengal Provinces, comp. J. G. Medlicott(Calcutta, 1862), 29.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


made the river banks stand out as the commercial and politicalcentre, whereas in areas further away from the rivers penetrationof trade and authority dropped away sharply. An important con-centration of commerce and culture developed along the riverBhagirathi in western Bengal, which provided relatively easyaccess to the Bay of Bengal in the south and the MughalEmpire in the west. The uplands were made up of the easternprojection of the central Indian plateau spanning Bengal andBihar. The whole uplands region, due to its common geograph-ical characteristics, came to be referred to as Chota Nagpur, thename of one state located in its centre. During the later stages ofthe Mughal campaign in Bengal, the imperial forces engaged witha number of substantial landlords who ruled Birbhum, Pachetand Hijli in the west of Bengal. In cultural and economic terms,these territories spanned the alluvial and the upland zones. Theseaboard, despite the vast waterways that criss-crossed it, wascommercially not the centre. A large part of it consisted of forests,and there were few industrial and commercial settlements. Whilethere was trade in grain, dried fish, and salt in the lower delta, thescale of these trades was not large. According to the evidence ofthe ballads, the traders who dealt in these goods lived in the coun-tryside, owned land and cultivated it for six months of the year,venturing out on trading missions only occasionally.

There was much diversity in resource conditions between thesezones. The productivity of land varied, and so did the taxablewealth. Paddy was the principal crop everywhere. And yet, asnineteenth-century agronomists pointed out, paddy yields variedenormously between rain-fed and irrigated zones, and betweenlaterite and alluvial soils. In the nineteenth century, parts of thewater-rich delta produced yields of husked rice that exceeded600 kg per acre, whereas the Chota Nagpur laterite uplands pro-duced half as much.30 On the defensible assumption that the tworegions had a similar pattern of access to water resources acentury earlier, the ratio of paddy yields between major regionsin the eighteenth century or before should not be too different.31

30 W. W. Hunter, Famine Aspects of Bengal Districts (London, 1874), 17, 36, 64, 94,100, 105.

31 Change in rice yield requires variable application of biological input. All evidenceon the matter suggests that the intensity of biological inputs in Bengal agriculture hadbeen low and invariable at least from the mid eighteenth century. For a discussion of


(cont. on p. 126)

at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


The extent of crop diversification was also considerably smaller inthe uplands.

Although Bernier mentions that Bengal could be entered by asmany as a hundred gates, most European merchants and travel-lers knew only one. Those taking the route of this gateway fol-lowed the western coastline from the Dutch outposts in Balasoreand Pipli, to Hijli at the mouth of the river Rasulpur, sailed up theriver Bhagirathi to Portuguese Hooghly and north to Rajmahal,the provincial capital, and then turned west towards Patna in theheart of the empire (see Map). Few Europeans in the seventeenthcentury travelled more than a few miles inland from the banks ofthe river. For the purpose of trade, they were not constrained bybeing so confined. Lower Bengal had no highways or roadsworthy of the name. Caravan trade and overland traffic werepresent, but these were not the main modes of moving goods.The overwhelmingly larger portion of long-distance goods trafficwas carried by the rivers. Bhagirathi, by contrast with most otherrivers of Bengal, could be navigated throughout the year. Beingnavigable, and (after Mughal annexation) the only trade highwaythat was relatively safe, peaceful, and within easy access of theprovincial capital, this river bank also became the home of intel-lectuals, merchants and military commanders.

This attraction of Bhagirathi had been long-standing. At thetime of Chaitanya, a large number of service workers left the sea-board and submontane regions to settle in the port towns in west-ern Bengal. For at least three hundred years before this time, theriver bank had seen the most stable form of state formation,flourishing commerce and education. The port Saptagram, thescholastic centre Nabadwip, the sultanate capital Gaud, andthe administrative outpost Ambua (Kalna) were all locatedon or near the river.32 The factories that the European com-panies built — Hooghly, Patna, Kasimbazar, Rajmahal, Chin-surah, Chandannagar and Serampore — were located on theBhagirathi or the Ganges. The knowledge of greater Bengal

(n. 31 cont.)

trends in rice yields in Bengal, see Tirthankar Roy, ‘Economic Conditions in EarlyModern Bengal: A Contribution to the Divergence Debate’, Jl Econ. Hist., lxx (2010).

32 A description of this world before the Mughals can be found in HaraprasadShastri, ‘Notes on the Banks of the Hughly in 1495’, Proc. Asiatic Soc. Bengal(Calcutta, 1892).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


among European traders, settlers and officers was coloured bythe experience of business and war in the Bhagirathi plains.

Although their nerve centre was located in the Bhagirathi zone,both the Indo-European trade in textiles and the overland tradewith northern India did achieve an integration of some sort be-tween the central alluvial flats with Bihar and Agra in the west andthe seaboard and the trans-Brahmaputra alluvial lands in the east.The eastward expansion of commerce, cultivation and militarypower was also present. Bengal was, by some accounts, the mainsupplier of rice and sugar to the imperial centre. The founding ofDacca (Dhaka) as the Mughal provincial capital increased trafficalong the eastern rivers. The expansionary impact of long-distance trade should not be exaggerated, however. OmPrakash estimates that the net employment generated by the tex-tile trade of the Dutch and the English companies amountedto about a hundred thousand ‘full-time job equivalents’.33 In aworkforce of roughly twelve to fifteen million, that number rep-resents less than 1 per cent. Such a number of workers plus theirfamilies could be fed a generous ration of rice the whole yearround out of less than half of 1 per cent of estimated cultivatedland in eighteenth-century Bengal. In 1658, the revenue fromBengal to be delivered to the Mughal imperial treasury was setat about Rs 13 million. The corresponding figure in 1722 was Rs14 million. Adjusted for inflation, these figures suggest a fall inreal collection.34 If the wealth of the government maintained aroughly stable relation with the wealth of the population, Bengalisbecame poorer in this time span. The trade in rice and salt, twobulk items for mass consumption, brought the ‘hinterland’ intoincreasing contact with the urban core. But the supplies of boththese goods came from only a few districts, and their scale remainsa matter of conjecture. According to one contemporary estimate,at the end of the eighteenth century, Bengal exported about7.5 per cent of its rice output. The proportion was surely muchsmaller in the seventeenth century.35

33 Om Prakash, ‘Bullion for Goods: International Trade and the Economy of EarlyEighteenth Century Bengal’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., xiii (1976), esp. 172–3.

34 On prices, see Najaf Haider, ‘Prices and Wages in India (1200–1800): SourceMaterial, Historiography and New Directions’, paper given at the conference‘Towards a Global History of Prices and Wages’, Univ. of Utrecht, 19–21 Aug.2004, preliminary draft available online at 5http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/papers/haider.pdf4.

35 India Office Records, London, IOR/H/392, Papers of George Smith, 31.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


Why, despite cheapness of grain and, in places, high-yieldingland, did the region not trade more and industrialize early? Theanswer to that question can be found in geography. Road trans-portation was expensive because of the streams that splintered thedelta. How expensive it was in time and money in the earlymodern period can be gauged from some figures collected later,when carriages were faster than before. In the 1830s, the overlandjourney between the two principal cities of Bengal, Dacca andCalcutta, by the fastest means (the mail carriage) was feasibleonly for six months of the year, involved twenty-two ‘stages’and twenty changes of ferry. The distance was less than 200miles.36 Overland travel from Dacca to Bakarganj in the southor Sylhet in the north-east was seldom undertaken at any time,because the rivers that it was necessary to travel on were navigablefor only part of the year, even when there was enough water inthem. Of the major rivers of the delta, the Brahmaputra was no-torious for whirlpools, and the daily tides in the Meghna couldbecome murderous for small sailing boats. Each day during theebb tide, the Meghna exposed massive sandbanks in its middle,and these sandbanks shifted position, so that even seasoned mari-ners did not know their routes through this maze. The rivers in theSundarbans opened out to snake-infested no man’s lands. Therivers that originated in the uplands dried up in winter. Even inthe best of conditions, river transportation was possible for aboutsix months of the year. The ballads specify mid June, after the firstmonsoon showers and after the first rice sowing, as being theseason when country merchants set off in their boats. And theseason came to an end by February. Consequently, vast stretchesof land within the Mughal province did not trade at all internallyfor almost half the year.

It took some time before the sense of diversity began tobe appreciated among late eighteenth-century administrators.When it did, two things happened. First, the greater knowledgeof rural Bengal imparted a sobering effect upon the discourse onthe wealth of the entire region. In the same year that Clive wroteabout the riches of the area, an official report argued that theseriches had been vastly overstated.37 ‘The great mass’ of the

36 James Taylor, A Sketch of the Topography and Statistics of Dacca (Calcutta, 1840),120.

37 Comments by William Cowper (revenue officer), in Select Committee, andCommittee of Whole House of Commons, on Affairs of East India Company Minutes of


(cont. on p. 129)

at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


Bengalis, another officer stated, ‘are not likely to become custom-ers for Europeans articles, because they do not possess the meansto purchase them’.38 In Britain, Adam Smith offered an assess-ment of Bengal in terms that anticipated Malthusian econom-ics.39 The second effect was the commissioning of fact-findingtrips. Soon after the East India Company assumed taxation rightsin Bengal, James Rennell was sent on cartographical expeditions.For the first time, he charted a reliable map of the lower delta,nearly losing his life in the process. And Francis Buchanan wassent on a tour of two segments of the erstwhile Bengal subahabout which the Company had never had any first-hand know-ledge: the Chota Nagpur uplands and the Chittagong–Arakancoast.

Fitting those two sub-regions within the territorial possessionof the Company was a particular priority because earlier regimeshad laid claims to much of Bengal, including these lands, withoutanything like administrative and fiscal control. In the next section,I explore the condition of statelessness in which the seaboard, theuplands and the more remote parts of the alluvial plains hadfound themselves until the consolidation of Company rule.

III

During much of the sixteenth century, Bengal was divided into anumber of effectively independent kingdoms. The larger of theseowed formal allegiance to the Sultan in Gaud in central Bengaland/or had been established by chiefs formerly in the employ ofGaud. Several others had no relations with this centre of power. Afierce contest raged between them over land revenue. This waslow, due not only to the poor state of cultivation in many areas,but also to the dependence of the fiscal system on village land-lords. In this scenario, the formal conquest of Bengal by Mughalforces beginning in the 1580s installed the bare framework of

(n. 37 cont.)

Evidence (Trade and Shipping, and Renewal of Charter), House of CommonsParliamentary Papers Online, 5http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk4, 1812–13(122), 22.

38 Comments by John Malcolm, ibid., 57.39 For a discussion, see Geoffrey Gilbert, ‘Adam Smith on the Nature and Causes of

Poverty’, Rev. Social Econ., lv (1997).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


an imperial administration, which had more credibility nearDacca and Rajmahal than anywhere else.

Persian sources on the lower reaches of the delta remain scarce,reflecting the limits of Mughal power in the area. In Europeantravelogues, the seaboard was remarked upon for its forests, thesnakes and tigers that made human settlements near the forestsdangerous, the rhinoceros that damaged crops, the many king-doms at war with each other, and piracy.40 According to one in-terpretation, the insecurity of life on the seaboard was mostly dueto Portuguese and Arakanese raids.41 By contrast, I consider theinternal context to be rather more important. Insecurity wasrooted in the fragmented polity, which had a mainly geographicalsource.

Early nineteenth-century geographers, affected by the ro-mance of the unknown, proposed a theory that the Sundarbanforests were not more than three hundred years old. The region,they suggested, had once seen flourishing civilizations that weredestroyed by tidal waves and slave raiders.42 While this theory isquestionable, there is no disputing the fact that the extreme rap-idity with which alluvial deposits formed and unformed in thelower delta would have made large urban settlements and gar-risons a precarious enterprise for any state. The rivers were unfitfor navigation by large ships. Military supplies could not easily beprocured from markets because few markets of sufficient scaleexisted. Mud and swamp slowed cavalry. All-weather roadswere impossible to build and maintain because of frequent inun-dations and shifting rivers. Even shipbuilding was not practisedwidely. Timber could not be removed at a comparatively low cost.Although Chittagong became a port for the timber trade in theseventeenth century, this timber came from the eastern forestsrather than the Sundarbans.

The seaboard, therefore, never saw the institutions of imperialstate take root. When the Mughals began the Bengal campaign,all of eastern Bengal had been splintered into small kingdoms.

40 For example, Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies: Being theObservations and Remarks of Capt. Alexander Hamilton, who Resided in those Parts fromthe Year 1688, to 1723, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London, 1739), ii, 24–7.

41 Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir.42 H. J. Rainey, ‘What Was the Sundarban Originally, and When, and Wherefore

Did It Assume its Existing State of Utter Desolation?’, Proc. Asiatic Soc. Bengal(Calcutta, 1867).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


Legend has it that twelve of these estates were especially powerful.However, histories of the campaign produce names of hundredsof chieftains, who resisted the advance individually rather thanaccording to any common plan.43 These chieftains commandedarmies consisting of small mobile bands of soldiers. As RalphFitch remarked, ‘here are so many rivers and Ilands, that theyflee from one to another, whereby his [the Emperor Akbar’s]horsemen cannot prevaile against them’.44 There were fewhorses and elephants, and little artillery. A capital-saving andlabour-intensive military infrastructure, consisting of smallboats, matchlocks, spears, swords and mud forts, had a betterchance. For that very reason, military debacles left little lastingimpact. The forces could be reassembled quickly, but, like themilitary infrastructure, the institutional setting was also rudimen-tary. There was no mention in the ballads of police and justice thatcommanded wide legitimacy, nor of patronage of merchants, art-ists, artisans and bankers. Unlike in the Bhagirathi zone, on theseaboard these classes were not of great relevance to the politicaleconomy. When Mughal rule had established itself in Dacca,Alexander Hamilton observed that people living towards thesouth preferred the Mughals to their own kings, ‘for the Mogultaxes them gently, and every one knows what he must pay, but thePagan Kings or Princes tax at Discretion’.45

In the southern delta, the principal urban centres in the six-teenth century were Sonargaon and Sripur, capitals of two neigh-bouring states.46 Sripur contained a shipbuilding and repairindustry, possibly managed by Portuguese sailors. The ruler atSonargaon, Isa Khan, was ‘chiefe of all the other kings, and is agreat friend to all Christians’. These words were written by Fitch,the principal European traveller to visit the region. Fitch foundSripur to have a considerable port. ‘Great store of Cotton clothgoeth from hence, and much Rice, wherewith they serve all India,Ceilon, Pegu, Malacca, Sumatra, and many other places’. Thestatement can be misread, for after all, Sripur was little more than

43 Baharistan-i-Ghaybi: A History of the Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal,Bihar and Orissa during the Reigns of Jahangir and Shahjahan, trans. M. I. Borah, 2 vols.(Gauhati, 1936), ii, passim.

44 Ralph Fitch, ed. Ryley, 119.45 Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies, ii, 25.46 These towns were located on the northern bank of the confluence of the Ganges

and the Brahmaputra, within 5–20 miles of Dacca.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


an overgrown village, where the town residents lived in straw-mathuts, in fear of tigers and foxes, wore little clothing, and subsistedon ‘rice, milke, and fruits’.47 Fitch mentions no article of import,nor any silver. Fitch also visited the king of Bakla, the southern-most major kingdom. Since he does not mention either an over-land journey or changing ship, it would seem that Bakla waslocated at the mouth of the river. The Ain-i-Akbari mentionssome years later (c.1590) that the town was destroyed by a giantwave from the sea, taking two hundred thousand lives with it.The Bakla kingdom re-emerged to play a role in the subsequentpolitics over control of the Sundarban islands.

In the interstices of a fractured polity, the Portuguese marinersentrenched themselves. The Portuguese presence in the easterndelta began with the arrival of John D’Silveyra from the Maldivesin 1517 to erect a factory at the mouth of the Meghna, and hissubsequent employment with the king of Arakan as a naval cap-tain. While their trading station later shifted to Bandel, because of‘the Dangers their ships run in coming thither in the South-westMonsoons’, Jesuits and mercenaries stayed on.48 Owing to therisk of sandbanks, the most common gunships were the one- ortwo-masted galliots carrying no more than ten cannons and a fewdozen men, the flyboat of about 100 tons, and the flat-bottomedpink, good at negotiating shallow waters, rather than the largerfrigates and carracks. The Portuguese and the Dutch were themaster-builders of these light gunships. The Dutch never settledhere; the Portuguese did. They were hired by the landed states intwo distinct capacities, as artillerymen and as naval commanders.The king of Jessore (well inland) had an army with which he beatoff advance parties of the Mughals; this army and the police reliedon Portuguese mercenaries. Sripur hired them; so did theMughals themselves. In the early seventeenth century, a partner-ship formed between the Arakan state, the Portuguese and theBakla king, all interested in taking firmer control of the islands.49

47 Ralph Fitch, ed. Ryley, 118–19.48 Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies, ii, 26.49 The following description of the partnership between the Arakan kingdom and

the Portuguese relies on F. C. Danvers, The Portuguese in India: Being a History of theRise and Decline of their Eastern Empire, 2 vols. (London, 1894), ii, 170–81; H.Beveridge, The District of Bakarganj, its History and Statistics (London, 1876), 34–40; J. C. Jack, Bakarganj (Bengal District Gazetteers, xxxvi, Calcutta, 1918), 18–20.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


In this case, the Portuguese functioned as sailors rather thansoldiers.

The Arakan–Portuguese partnership represented the strongestmilitary power around 1600. The Arakan state commanded mus-keteers (eighty thousand joined a campaign against the Mughalsin 1609) and a considerable number of skilled Burmese swords-men, but not an effective navy. Here Portuguese partnershipmade a difference. Both these forces tend to be seen as opportun-istic. More likely, they entertained colonial ambitions. Whenthey had their chance, Portuguese soldiers quickly settled onand cultivated the land. The Arakan state had more obviousimperial designs, fuelled by the disintegration of the monarchyin Pegu.50 Both forces were moreover interested in the outerislands as a deterrent to the Mughals.

Had this partnership lasted, a loosely constituted empire com-bining naval and landed power might well have emerged on theseaboard. However, as Persian sources amply illustrate, althoughthe farangian-i-harmad (Franks commanding armadas) and theArakanese were allies, they shared a deep mutual distrust.51 Thepartnership foundered over control of Sandwip in the early seven-teenth century. Sandwip was a prize possession because of its salttrade, fertile soil and strategic location. It was successively ruledby Mughal agents, the Arakan state, and the Portuguese heroes ofthe Pegu campaign, after persecution of the Portuguese in theArakan capital had turned Sandwip into a battle front. The pro-tagonist of the campaign was the enigmatic Sebastiao GonzalesTibao (the Gawsawal Firingi, in Baharistan). It is not necessaryhere to repeat the well-known story of how Gonzales conqueredSandwip, and of the four-cornered rivalry that followed betweenthe Portuguese, the Mughals, the Arakan state and the Bakla

50 On the rise to prominence of the Arakan state in the seventeenth century, and itssignificance for the historiography of European influence upon the south-east Asianpolity, see Michael W. Charney, ‘Crisis and Reformation in a Maritime Kingdom ofSoutheast Asia: Forces of Instability and Political Disintegration in Western Burma(Arakan), 1603–1701’, Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient, xli (1998). On the geo-politics of the seventeenth-century Bay of Bengal, see Cayetano J. Socarras, ‘ThePortuguese in Lower Burma: Filipe de Brito de Nicote’, Luso-Brazilian Rev., iii(1966). See also Rila Mukherjee, ‘Mobility in the Bay of Bengal World: MedievalRaiders, Traders, States and the Slaves’, Indian Hist. Rev., xxxvi (2009); SanjaySubrahmanyam, Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay ofBengal, 1500–1700 (Delhi, 1990).

51 Baharistan-i-Ghaybi, trans. Borah.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


landlord, which culminated in his losing it. The closest equivalentto a Portuguese territorial state on the seaboard ended in 1616.

Thereafter the Portuguese soldiers and sailors, numbering sev-eral thousands, divided into loose communities. Some of thesecommunities continued overland as employees of the zamindars(Mughal revenue officers, who were effectively proprietors oflanded estates). A few of them turned zamindars themselves,whereas the others ‘gradually sunk to the level of the natives’.52

Other bands settled near Chittagong and raided the mouth of theriver. Between 1615 and 1665, when Chittagong and Sandwipremained in Arakan control, the Portuguese and the Arakaneseshared an interest in the slave trade. Despite the recapture ofSandwip, and the expulsion of the Portuguese from Hooghly in1670, Mughal authority in the islands was weak at best. Predatoryraids by the Arakanese continued even after the East IndiaCompany obtained the taxation rights of Bengal, and reachedas far as Calcutta.53 Rennell’s tours in Bakarganj between 1764and 1767 led to the mapping of towns and estates belonging to thelanded gentry among the Portuguese.54 On the other hand, de-scriptions of Chittagong in the early eighteenth century painted apicture of a town living on uncertain means, which included vari-ous kinds of pillage. The Portuguese were the ‘domineeringLords’ in this officially Mughal town. And yet, the poverty ofthe town was such that it was a ‘matter of indifference whom itbelongs to . . . The Government is so anarchical, that everyonegoes armed with Sword, Pistol, and Blunderbush, nay, even the

52 The Journals of Major James Rennell, First-Surveyor-General of India: Written for theInformation of the Governors of Bengal during his Surveys of the Ganges and BrahmaputraRivers, 1764 to 1767, ed. T. H. D. La Touche (Calcutta, 1910), 39. On the post-historyof the Portuguese in the Dacca region, see B. C. Allen, Dacca (Eastern Bengal andAssam District Gazetteers, v, Allahabad, 1912).

53 Historical documentation on slavery in Bengal is thin. Some material was col-lected on practices prevalent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,when abolition was already the deliberate policy in the British territories. See WilliamAdam, The Law and Custom of Slavery in British India, in a Series of Letters to ThomasFowell Buxton (Boston, 1840), letter V; Captain Fisher, ‘Memoir of Sylhet, Kachar andthe Adjoining Districts’, Jl Roy. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, ix (1840). Also useful, though inthe main concerned with Malabar and Canara, is East India: Copies of the SpecialReports of the Indian Law Commissioners: (C.) No. I. Papers Connected with LawCommissioners’ Reports on Slavery in India and (C.) No. II. On the Examinations ofAbsent Witnesses, Parliamentary Papers, 1842 (585), 470–532. Moreland, India atthe Death of Akbar, 91–3, describes the institution based mainly on Persian andGoan sources.

54 Journals of Major James Rennell, ed. La Touche, 136.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


Priests are obliged to go armed, and often use their Arms to as badEnds as the Licentious Laity’.55

Some of the eastern Bengal ballads originated in the Chitta-gong area, and dealt with the lives of peasants and merchants.The peasants faced the despotic landlord — who is typified inthe tale ‘The Battle of the Chaudhuris’. The Chaudhuris were anorth Indian family who captured an estate in Noakhali fromthe descendants of a legendary Brahmin general who protectedthe residents from raiders. The tale, composed in the earlyeighteenth century, relates the exploits of Rajchandra, a youngprince, and his brutal minister Ram Bhandari; the story ends witha devastating battle between two neighbouring kings. The mer-chants, on the other hand, faced a dangerous stretch of water,such as the infamous kalapani (black water), and raiders fromthe sea. The pirates formed their own settlements along the Chit-tagong coast.56 They used as lookout posts the uninhabited is-lands that were submerged during high tide.57 The ships theyraided carried bamboo, dried fish, salt and rice. None of thesegoods interested them. On one occasion, the stinking cargo of acaptured ship almost led to its abandonment by the pirates. Theywere mainly after the cash, including Burmese bullion that themerchants sometimes carried with them. The ballad evidencedoes suggest Portuguese interest in slavery, but does not confirmthe statement made by Bernier and Tavernier that they raidedvillages in search of slaves. The Arakanese predators, however,penetrated deeper. ‘The land became abandoned [the word usedis awrajawk, literally ‘stateless’] due to the constant attacksfrom the Mogs [Arakanese]’, one author lamented. That someof these communities of attackers also lived a long time in the

55 Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies, ii, 26–7. Francis Buchanan visitedChittagong in the late eighteenth century. For his account of what was still aPortuguese town, see Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798), ed. Willem vanSchendel (New Delhi, 1992), 123.

56 For ‘The Battle of the Chaudhuris’, see Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Sen, iii, 1031–138; on the pirates, who kept watch on the coast at Ujantek, see ‘Nurunneha and theTale of the Grave’, ibid., iv, 1302: ‘As merchant ships pass by, they chase the ships inspeedy boats. Ruthless at heart, the pirates are tireless fighters on the sea. They takeeverything, kidnap the crew, and sink the ship’.

57 References to and descriptions of such islands can be found in ‘Nasar Malum’,ibid., iii, 1239; and in ‘Nurunnesa and the Tale of the Grave’, ibid., iv, 1302.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


conquered lands is hinted by reports of buried treasure in theouter islands.58

Interestingly, oppression did not follow one trajectory all thetime. The king appears in these stories as an opportunist, ratherthan as a despot. In the Chaudhuri case, conversations betweenrulers and subjects were conducted in the style of arguments be-tween equals.59 Where they could, the subjects organized them-selves and resisted the small bands of soldiers that accompaniedRajchandra. When the qazi of Shafla port desired the wife of Amirthe merchant, Amir’s family organized an army made up of northIndian mercenaries and together with his own fleet attacked theqazi’s domain.60 As in the case of the kings, so with the pirates andraiders, the relationship between the oppressed and the oppress-ors was uncertain and opportunistic. The Bengali merchant oftenentered into partnerships with the Arakanese, though such col-laborations were weakened by fundamental distrust.61 Boats thatwent past the outer islands always carried arms (‘sticks, spears,powder and guns’). They needed expert sailors as well, for it wasstill a disaster to go off course and finish up on one of the unin-habited islands.62 Fishermen went out to sea in groups, and in onebattle they overpowered the Portuguese.63 The landed gentrysettled slaves, washermen and barbers, as tenants around them.These groups, according to one family history, served as a pro-tective buffer in case of pirate attacks.64

In the cluster of ballads that originated in the trans-Brahma-putra region, we encounter the same ingredients as in the sea-board stories, namely, dangerous travel, weak and predatorykings, oppressed peasants and merchants, and counterattacks.

58 In one episode in ‘Nasar Malum’, the Arakanese visited the home of the peasantGafur and his panic-stricken family, looking for buried treasure left behind whenfleeing from the Mughals: ibid., iv, 1241.

59 This is illustrated in the episode where Rajchandra, leading a hunting party,attacked a marriage procession as it was going through the forest. The bearers of thepalanquin carrying the bride argued with him as equals before being overpowered.Ibid., iii, 1036, 1081.

60 Ibid., 910.61 When a joint trade venture between a wealthy Arakanese and Nasar, a ship’s

captain, faltered because Nasar fell into the hands of the pirates, Nasar feared theprospect of returning to his partner, ‘A foreigner after all, he will cut my throat’: see‘Nasar Malum’, ibid., iv, 1247.

62 Ibid., 1238–40, 1246.63 Ibid., 1304.64 Introduction to ‘Nurunneha and the Tale of the Grave’, ibid., 1586.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


The dangers of travel arose from navigation difficulties in theBrahmaputra. In some places, the crossing involved a journeyof almost thirty miles, with guides of doubtful reputation, upontreacherous waters that ended in miles of virtual wilderness.65 Inthese territories, the oppressors included agents of the state. Inone ballad, when the qazi had his amorous advances refused bythe wife or daughter of a merchant, he simply issued a notice toseize the merchant’s property.66 In another, a zamindar tortureda rich tenant on the basis of a rumour that he had come uponhidden treasure, and a moneylender was arrested on the pretextthat his cows had been grazing on the zamindar’s land.67 But thevictims could also organize themselves. In Mymensingh, thepowerful and wicked king of Rangchapur met his match inMadan Sadhu, a merchant.68 If on land the king possessed themeans to oppress, the merchant could do the same on water.69

Indeed, sometimes the local kings, who were little more than sub-stantial landlords, were vulnerable. The hero of ‘Rupabati’, theraja of Rampur, decided to escape to the forests when the sultan ofGaud expressed an interest in his daughter.70 In another versionof the same story, the minister who desired the princess was de-feated in battle by a force raised by peasants and fishermen.71

Rulers and subjects being near-equals, powerful subjects triedto set up their own rule. A cluster of biographical ballads dealtwith the lives of robbers. Unlike Robin Hood, these robbers werenot outlaws. No aura of heroism or defiance surrounded them;they were simply professional robbers. These included Manik-tara, a robber herself and partner of Basu, Kenaram and Nizam.In later life Maniktara and Basu, in Olsonian fashion, watchedover the merchant boats on the Brahmaputra in return for

65 ‘Upon crossing the Brahmaputra, the passengers thanked their gods / For somany would fail to cross the river / Among the boatmen, some were good, othersrogues / Who knifed the passengers in broad daylight / Struck them with an axe, ortied them up to throw them in the water / Having robbed all belongings, they wouldhand over the booty to their Ustad’: see ‘Maniktara or the Story of the Robbers’, ibid.,ii, 600.

66 ‘Molua’ (c.1700), ibid., i, 101.67 ‘Kamala’ (seventeenth century), ibid., 155; ii, 454.68 ‘Bhelua’, ibid., ii, 548, 579.69 Mohua, a gypsy girl who left her companions and went off with a Brahmin boy,

received shelter from a foreign merchant sailing the Brahmaputra. The merchant triedto murder the boy and abduct Mohua. Ibid., i, 64–6.

70 ‘Rupabati’, ibid., ii, 245.71 Prachin Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Moulik, ii, 161.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


protection money.72 Nizam operated on the seaboard, and thestory relates his conversion to god. However, the Sufi saint (pir)who converted him did not set any condition that he should giveup being a robber, and clearly he did not.

To conclude, the ballads painted a picture of a society in whichpolicing was weak because the kings were weak. In this world,property was privately owned, private property was valuable,but the propertied needed to devise their own mechanism forresisting opportunistic attacks from kings and robbers alike.More than systemic anarchy and pillage, the stories suggest tous a society where security was supplied by communities ratherthan by the agents of the state. The state more often representedone community among several. Without adequate physicalmeans of creating strong and lasting state power, all those whoowned valuable property were equally weak or equally strong.This was a world of political competition, and, like all unregulatedcompetition, it gave rise to huge transaction costs.

When we look towards the uplands along the western border ofBengal, we encounter a region that shared a fundamental simi-larity with the seaboard, namely the absence of imperial hegem-ony combined with fragmentation of the polity. Nevertheless,the sources and pathways of institutional change in the uplandswere quite distinctive, relative to the two other regions.

IV

In the sixteenth century, roads and navigable waterways were sofew in the uplands that the region did not seriously interest thelong-distance trader. Although marginal in respect of commoditytrade, and unlike segments of the seaboard and the alluvial flats,the uplands were exposed to periodic attempts by the agents of theMughal state to reorganize taxation on land. Even in this respect,the uplands appeared to have followed a different course. Relativeto the other regions, land produced little of value, and much of theagricultural land (being located within forests) was almost in-accessible to the agents of the state. These conditions gave riseto a property rights regime that reinforced the isolation of the

72 Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Sen, i, 233–6. Mancur Olson used the parable of aroving bandit who found it more sensible to become a sedentary tax collector toillustrate the origin of the government: see his Power and Prosperity: OutgrowingCommunist and Capitalist Dictatorships (New York, 2000).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


peasantry from the state. But, from the late eighteenth century,this administrative and physical isolation was coming to an end,the property regime began to change, and a proportion of thepeasantry lost access to land while gaining access to a growinglabour market. An externally induced region of transformation,the uplands of Bengal illustrate the working of a different agent ofchange — land and labour markets rather than merchant capital.

The diversities within Bengal made a difference to the nature ofsources available for the early modern period. The history of theChota Nagpur uplands is not well served by literary material. Theregion itself had few towns or intellectual hubs. Although part ofthe uplands belonged to Bengal, there was cultural isolation of theuplands from the literate Bengal of the Bhagirathi plains, eventhough the two regions were barely a hundred miles apart.73

The region received few, if any, European or literate Bengali trav-ellers. There were occasional exceptions, of course. About 1510,Sri Chaitanya travelled with one companion from Nadia toMathura through the forests of ‘Jharikhand’ (literally, ‘forestedland’). Along the forest roads, the tigers and bears became docileon seeing him. One tiger apparently even danced in ecstasy callingout ‘Krishna Krishna’. But the indigenous peoples who lived inthe hills and forests were not so lucky in the way they weredescribed. ‘The forest-dwellers are pure evil’, his biographerwrote, without further explanation.74 Such sentiments of theplains elite towards their uplands brethren reflected the almosttotal lack of contact, partly due to simple geography. The ChotaNagpur plateau was surrounded on all sides by forests. Wheeledtraffic was almost impossible on these forest roads, and even aslate as the eighteenth century, hill passes through which the trav-eller would enter the plateau were not fit for bullock carts.75

Commerce was of little consequence in this area. Although itwas rich in minerals, and iron-working was present everywhere,the major part of the output was locally consumed. Transporta-tion was rudimentary because the major rivers in the region werenot navigable in the dry seasons, were dangerous in monsoon, and

73 The kingdoms on the fringes of the Chota Nagpur plateau produced familyhistories. These carried little information on the people themselves. The folk songsof the region compiled from the late twentieth century are more informative, but noton the pre-colonial past.

74 Sri Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita, ed. Gupta, 385.75 Jagdish Chandra Jha, The Kol Insurrection of Chota-Nagpur (Calcutta, 1964), 22.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


had no known bridges before the railways of the late nineteenthcentury.

The uplands were populated by communities the colonialsources called ‘tribes’: the main tribes, the Mundas and theOraons, were interspersed with Kherias, Hos, Birhors andBhumijs. Mundas and Oraons together were referred to asKols, and the land where they had settled was Kolhan.76 Thepopulation lived on agriculture that concentrated in the river val-leys. The monsoon rains had high run-off, leaving little possibilityof storing water. In the Kol region, there were in 1840 ‘no agri-cultural works on a large scale, such as tanks and bunds to meetthe exigencies of a dry season . . . There is no farmer or landholder[among the Hos] with capital enough to go through with such awork’.77 The soil in some parts of the plateau was good, and rainswere sufficient to sustain rice cultivation. Without the prospect ofextensive irrigation and multiple cropping, the agriculturalregime provided subsistence at best.

Nevertheless, the region felt the pressure of agrarian and fiscalexpansion as Mughal rule consolidated in Bengal. The pressurewas uneven and intermittent. The battles necessary to subjugatethe local chieftains would not have been worth the revenue to behad from this resource-poor region. The revenue demands, con-sequently, often involved tiny sums of symbolic value. Effectiveauthority was vested in chieftains who ruled from the more ac-cessible parts of the uplands. In standard accounts, these chiefshailed from the Hinduized sections of the upland communities.The best-known of the kings ruled Palamau, which was relativelyeasily reached from the river Son on its western border.78 In thesewestern fringes of the uplands, Tavernier saw in the mid seven-teenth century the remnants of diamond mining in the bed of

76 On the Kols and their region of ancestry, see E. T. Dalton, ‘The ‘‘Kols’’ ofChota-Nagpore’, Trans. Ethnological Soc. London, vi (1868).

77 Lieutenant Tickell, ‘Memoir on the Hodesum (improperly called Kolehan)’, JlAsiatic Soc. Bengal, ix (1840), 804.

78 Augustus Prinsep, ‘On the Traces of Feudalism in India, and the Condition ofLands Now in a Comparative State of Agricultural Infancy’, Jl Roy. Asiatic Soc. GreatBritain and Ireland, viii (1846). Francis Buchanan travelled in Chota Nagpur in the lateeighteenth century and reported on the origins of the local states. See ‘Journal ofFrancis Buchanan (Patna and Gaya Districts)’, ed. V. H. Jackson, Jl Bihar andOrissa Research Soc., viii (1922). On the Mughal military campaign in Jharkhandand its consequences, see Muzaffar Alam, ‘Eastern India in the Early EighteenthCentury ‘‘Crisis’’: Some Evidence from Bihar’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev.,xxviii (1991).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


the river Koel, an industry in which the Mughals had beeninterested.79

Although Mughal penetration in the uplands remained limited,there were nevertheless some changes in administrative practicesin the kingdoms following Mughal contact. The kings in theregion tried to install a jagirdari system of rights and taxation( jagirs were territorial revenue assignments, usually enjoyed bymilitary commanders). With the jagirdars came service profes-sionals into the domain of these chieftains, including weavers,blacksmiths and plains-peasants. The kings did not haveenough soldiers to enforce jagirdari right everywhere. In someinstances, land grants made by the kings led to dispossession ofthe old settlers from landed property, and their conversion intoserfs. By and large, however, interaction between the uplandspopulation and the kings remained limited. There is at least onecase where a Munda headman, upon receiving demand for highertaxes, receded deeper into the forest and established a newdomain.80 In the usual case, a quit rent from the villages, settledaccording to the number of ploughs per village, was the com-promise agreed upon.

As a result of such isolation of cultivators from the state, in theeighteenth century the alluvial plains and the uplands had de-veloped very different property regimes. The plains had better-quality land, states which had the institutional means to identifyand protect that land, and taxes that were assessed on identifiableplots. The uplands did not generate enough taxes or possess afiscal administration. The Mundas had political organization, butno fiscal administration. Taxes were not assessed on land but onwork, and the right to cultivate was a loosely defined territorialright derived from the payment of a fee calculated on the level ofeffort, rather than on the right to cultivate an identifiable plot.81

79 Tavernier, Travels in India, ed. Ball, ii, 65. Nothing very much was heard of dia-monds in this area after Tavernier. Presumably the mines had already been nearlyexhausted when he arrived here.

80 N. K. Basu, Hindu Samajer Garan [The Structure of Hindu Society] (Calcutta,1949), 24–5.

81 J. Hoffmann, ‘Principles of Succession and Inheritance among the Mundas’, JlBihar and Orissa Research Soc., i (1915), 6: ‘the proprietary right rises in the firstinstance naturally out of creative or formative work. Hence the man who first turnsa piece of jungle or a plot of wasteland into arable land, becomes ipso facto the owner ofthat land even as he who shapes a piece of wood into an axe-handle or a plough,becomes the owner of that handle or plough’. Hoffmann’s testimony was influentialin the legal recognition of collective property in the uplands. See also Sarat Chandra


(cont. on p. 142)

at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


Village headmen had the power of custom to allocate lands toindividual families.

When the taxation right of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa was de-livered to the East India Company by the Mughal Emperor(1765), the uplands had an ambiguous status in the deal. It wasby default taxable and yet was barely taxed. The first British entryinto Chota Nagpur occurred in 1772, via an agreement with aneastern chieftain to secure help to fight Maratha incursions. In1780 a notional district was formed out of the areas borderingBihar, with a single officer acting as judge, magistrate, collector,and battalion commander. Policy with respect to the uplandspopulation depended much on the predilections of this com-mander. One of them in the 1820s invited the headmen inBirbhum into an agreement to police the hill passes. The decisiveadministrative step during the early Company rule, however, wasthe Permanent Settlement in 1793. The chieftains became pro-prietors of land, a privilege that entailed responsibility for thepayment of taxes.

Wherever it could, the government tried to extract a higher taxthan before, and in turn the zamindars put pressure upon theformerly rent-free tenure holders.82 They gave out land grantsto contractors from outside the region, while auction purchasersbought pieces of estates located in the uplands. Many local officeswere created, people paid money to buy these offices, and theythen became linked to the fiscal system with a minor interest in therevenue. The lowest level of such offices was that of headmenbased in the revenue village.83 The new sub-landlords were nothappy with the plough tax, and tried to introduce tax on land andon consumption. There were cases of dispossession of land,which was read by the victims as dispossession of territorialrights. At the turn of the eighteenth century, a few criminal

(n. 81 cont.)

Roy, The Mundas and their Country (1912; Ranchi, 2004); and discussion in P. P.Mohapatra, ‘Class Conflict and Agrarian Regimes in Chotanagpur, 1860–1950’,Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., xxviii (1991); Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, PeasantHistory of Late Pre-Colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi, 2008), 716–19; SangeetaDasgupta, ‘The Journey of an Anthropologist in Chhotanagpur’, Indian Econ. and Soc.Hist. Rev., xli (2004).

82 K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘British Imperium and Forested Zones of Anomaly inBengal, 1767–1833’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., xxxiii (1996).

83 S. T. Cuthbert, ‘Extracts from a Report on Chota Nagpore’, Jl Roy. Asiatic Soc.Great Britain and Ireland, viii (1846).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


cases came before the magistrates’ courts alleging violenceagainst defaulters. These cases did not halt the process. Thefirst major shock came with the 1831 Kol Insurrection. The vio-lence in the uprising was everywhere directed initially at the out-siders, though its level was so intense that it quickly engaged theCompany troops. This pattern was to repeat itself several timesmore in the nineteenth century.

The extensive literature on these rebellions leaves little roomfor debate on their proximate causes, which were increased rev-enue demand, intrusion of outsiders, and dispossession of her-editary rights to land.84 The literature attributes the collapsemainly to a predatory capitalism of a colonial type. The tribalmisfortune illustrated the darker side of the colonial moderniza-tion project. Greedy capitalist and revenue-hungry states, ac-cording to this view, employed repression and fraud to destroyindigenous land rights. More recently, environmental history hasemphasized the colonial policy of exclusive control over forests,both because of the resource value of the forests, and from a desireto extend colonial authority over a marginal zone.85

It is difficult to argue, however, that the collapse was a necessaryconsequence of either colonialism or pillage. The nature of trans-formation of the uplands agrarian economy was due in part to itsown pre-colonial property regime. In the alluvial flats, peasantproperty was intrinsically more valuable and protected by thestate in return for the payment of taxes. In the uplands, whichentailed a right to cultivate lands of poorer quality for the paymentof a nominal fee, the legal obligation to protect rights had neverbeen well developed. The precise plot was not mapped, the cul-tivators were unknown, and land rights were not supported by theinstitutions of a fiscal state, such as courts of law and cadastralsurveys. When the administrative isolation of the uplands ended,

84 For example Jha, Kol Insurrection of Chota-Nagpur. The literature on the Santals islarge, partly because the Subaltern Studies Group used this example to illustrate ar-guments about subaltern identity. For economic history of the rebellion, see ElizabethRottger-Hogan, ‘Insurrection . . . or Ostracism: A Study of the Santal Rebellion of1855’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, xvi (1982); Chaudhuri, Peasant History. For asubaltern analysis of the rebellion, see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of PeasantInsurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, 1983). A rare Bengali eyewitness account of the1855 rebellion can be found in the eastern Bengal ballads.

85 For a representative statement of the argument, see Nandini Sundar, Subalternsand Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854–2006, 2nd edn (New Delhi,2007).


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


and its accessibility improved by means of road and railway pro-jects, a convergence of the two property regimes was inevitable,which led to an asymmetryof rights. The zamindar’s private prop-erty was recognized in courts of law but the collective property ofthe indigenous peasantry was not.

Even before the nineteenth century, the plains and the uplandshad begun to converge on another route. The inequality in agri-cultural conditions between the uplands and the alluvial zoneshad for a long time involved a limited movement of populationbetween them. To this factor was now added the loss of access tocultivation rights. In 1827, the magistrate of Ramgarh reportedthat a large number of Kols annually left the district to work on theindigo plantations of Bihar and Bengal.86 From the next decade asteady flow of Kol emigrants moved towards the tea plantations inSylhet, Cachar, Assam and the Dooars. From the 1840s, Oraonsenlisted in large numbers as indentured labourers bound forMauritius and the Caribbean.87 In the second half of the nine-teenth century, flows of migrants were much greater, and alsopartly seasonal.

Large gangs of them are to be seen leaving their homes in December afterthe harvest has been gathered in. Marching up to the tea districts on foot,they often work there for the best part of a year, returning home again atthe close of the tea season in October and November.88

As the overseas and domestic plantation work slowed thereafter,many Oraons joined the coal and iron mines in the eastern part ofthe region.

On a very limited scale, circulation of labour, including militarylabour, between the uplands and the plains had a prehistory,which we know from the fact that the creators of the easternBengal ballads noticed groups from the uplands. The balladscontain references to the hiring of ‘Dhangars’ (the Bengaliname for Oraons) to work in construction in Bengal in the seven-teenth century. The hero of one Mymensingh ballad was ahunter-cum-soldier named ‘Munda’, who fell in love with aBengali Brahmin girl, with unhappy consequences for both.89

86 F. B. Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpore: A Little-Known Province of the Empire, 2nd edn(London, 1910), 175.

87 Tirthankar Roy, ‘Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies: The Labour Contractor andIndian Economic History’, Mod. Asian Studies, xlii (2007).

88 Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpore, 171.89 ‘Sheeladebi’, in Purbbabanga Geetika, ed. Sen, iv, 1253–70.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


This Munda, whose provenance is uncertain, raised an armymade up of his kinsmen from the forest, which, despite their brav-ery, failed in the presence of royal artillery. An interesting char-acteristic of this tale is the ambiguous sentiment that Mundaevoked in the Bengali poet. His affair with the Brahmin girl wassympathetically portrayed, whereas his defeat and death at thehands of the Tripura forces is described as good riddance ratherthan as the end of a tragic hero. Such evidence notwithstanding,the scale of labour transfer between Bengali regions before theeighteenth century had been quite limited, and involved the mili-tary market as well as the economic market. The nineteenth cen-tury, by contrast, represented a much larger and more purelyeconomic transfer.

V

I propose in this article that a consideration of geography, statecapacity and patterns of interaction between local and exogenousforces invites us to rethink the place of Bengal in the standardnarratives of global history. In suggesting a reinterpretation, Imake use of descriptions of material life available from contem-porary literature, a corpus so far under-utilized as evidence foreconomic history. The resultant narrative reminds global histor-ians of three potential hazards of their craft: to read the pattern ofglobalization based mainly on evidence of long-distance trade; toread standards of living of a large region from conditions of tradethat engaged a small proportion of the population; and to under-estimate the risks that weak states and hostile environments posedto early modern livelihoods.

A major aim of the article is to understand the political contextof property in early modern Bengal. The common assumptionthat incorporation into the Mughal Empire made a significantdifference to local institutions is questioned. Over a vast areawithin the Mughal province of Bengal, imperial commandmade little difference. The small isolated kingdoms that ruledthese regions did not have the physical means to establish credibleadministrative machines or stable institutionalized relationships.The meaning of a fragmented polity was variable, however.Property in the alluvial zones was valuable and privately owned.In the uplands, land had little value as a taxable asset, merchantcapital was weak, and property rights were joint cultivation rights.


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


While the desire to control assets gave rise to conflicts in the al-luvial zone, in the uplands the desire was weak to begin with.

Out of this contrast, there emerged different pathways andpossibilities for globalization. In the seaboard, the global be-came a part of the local, and outsiders joined in the competitionfor assets, at times with destabilizing effects. Reflecting the syn-drome, the eastern Bengal ballads are obsessed with the fragilityof fortunes. The uplands were less prone to such risks. Politicalfragmentation had three important consequences: reduced inten-sity of conflict over property, increased isolation in respect oftrade, and an institutional division between the plains and thehills. In these zones, the end of isolation came in the wake ofnew land rights, and globalization took the form of labour migra-tion. In contrast with the seaboard and the uplands, in the alluvialflats — or more precisely along the river Bhagirathi within thealluvial zone — the three consequences of fragmentation rein-forced each other. The states were relatively rich and possessedinstitutions for policing and justice; land was fertile, transportcosts relatively low, and the level of exposure high both beforeand after European entry. Unlike the Portuguese colonizationproject on the seaboard that withered away in four-cornered con-tests, British colonization succeeded because it targeted a richerstate in this zone.

A revised account of early modern Bengal also suggests a re-interpretation of colonial Bengal. The colonial period saw a realpolitical convergence between regions, supported in the lateeighteenth century by the East India Company’s military suc-cesses, and, in the nineteenth century, by new and vastly morepenetrative technologies, namely, railways, steamboats, bridgesand the telegraph. Economic and political integration of the threeregions increased the circulation of capital, labour and govern-ment personnel between them. The Bengali identity began toencompass a wider physical space than before, and encouragedexploration into the poetic narratives that supplied one of themotivations behind the present article.

London School of Economics and Political Science Tirthankar Roy


at Colum

bia University L


Dow

nloaded from


Tirthankar Roy

Documents

Transcript of Tirthankar Roy