A History of India, Third Edition

THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULE

between assessment (jama) and collection (hasil) and it was taken for
granted that the latter would never quite match the former. The Mughal
treasury was used to the idea that the budget depended on the rains and
other vagaries of men and nature. The British revenue officers held that if
the revenue was correctly assessed, it could also be collected without any
deficit. They were encouraged by Ricardo’s theory of rent in claiming as
much as possible of the ‘unearned increment’. Ricardo had postulated that
rent accrues to the landholder due to the scarcity of land and the rise in
prices; according to his definition, rent is influenced by prices and not vice
versa. This is just the opposite of what Francis had said when he advocated
a tax on land as the only tax on the grounds that this would be passed on
to the consumer by means of higher prices. Francis’s idea was more in
accordance with Indian reality than was Ricardo’s theory, because the
latter thought of the tenant as a free entrepreneur who will lease land only
at the market rate, as determined by the general price level. The Indian
peasant, however, was not a free entrepreneur of this type: he paid more or
less grudgingly the charges imposed upon him and it did not matter to him
whether they were supposed to be rent paid to a landlord or revenue paid
to the government. British revenue officers wrote learned notes on rent and
revenue and neatly distinguished between the two, whereas in Indian
languages no such distinction was made. In the nineteenth century Francis
was forgotten and Ricardo’s doctrine prevailed—particularly at
Haileybury College, where civil servants received their training before
being sent out to India.

The uses of education

The arrogant confidence with which a new generation of rulers set out to
reconstruct India found its most famous expression in the obiter dicta of
Lord Macaulay, who was sent to India in 1835 to serve as law member on
the governor general’s council. Only a few decades before Macaulay’s
arrival in India, Sir William Jones had shown great respect for Indian
traditions; Macaulay, in contrast, simply despised these traditions about
which he knew so little. He confidently asserted that one shelf in a Western
library would contain more valuable knowledge than all the literature and
wisdom of the Orient put together. He recommended that Indians should
receive the education of ‘gentlemen’ to make them faithful replicas of their
British rulers in every respect other than blood. In this way he took his
stand in the debate between ‘Anglicists’ and ‘Orientalists’ then raging in
Calcutta. The former, like Macaulay, advocated an English education for
Indians; the latter wanted to cultivate the Oriental languages.
This was not just an academic debate: very practical problems were at
stake. The company had a small education budget of 100,000 rupees and it
had to be decided how to spend this. Moreover, the question of the