Prachi Deshpande

Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta

“Measuring Up: Land Revenue, Native Surveyors, and the State in Early Colonial Bombay”

Abstract

This paper examines the scribal world of early colonial Bombay, through an early-nineteenth-century Marathi narrative called the Paimash Indu. Written by Veda Bhaskar, a senior writer in the employ of the early colonial state in Bombay, it describes in detail the first land revenue survey, or paimash, conducted by the British in the 1820s as part of the Ryotwari settlements in the Presidency. Conceived and executed by the colonial official Robert Keith Pringle, this survey is notable in scholarship for its utter failure, and the disastrous effects its high assessments had on agriculture and village social structure. Contemporary critics of Pringle, and latter-day scholarly analyses of the survey, based on the English revenue records of the colonial state, have attributed this failure partly to Pringle’s Ricardian economics, but mainly to the collusion between native scribal intermediaries and privileged landholders, which prevented the survey from extracting accurate information about the land and its productivity. From the fresh perspective of contemporary Marathi materials, such as the Paimash Indu, as well as the Paimash Daftar, a voluminous archive of the survey’s Marathi-Modi records, I argue for much more complex transactions between the state, its native scribes and the agrarian population, which were undergirded by multiple, conflicting ideas about agricultural productivity, as well as diverse record-keeping and knowledge-gathering practices. Colonial anxieties about disciplining these ideas and practices are key to understanding Pringle’s survey and its aftermath, which witnessed profound bureaucratic, educational as well as language practices across Bombay Presidency over the nineteenth century.

Bio

Dr. Prachi Deshpande is Associate Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She is the author of Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960 (Columbia, 2007). Her research interests are in the cultural history of writing, language and historiography.