THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULEsettlement, but one which was to be revised at regular thirty-year intervals.
The basic rule adopted for this settlement was that half the net rental assets
should be claimed as revenue. Rent was assumed to be a function of market
prices, but since this did not work in India as smoothly as in Ricardo’s
theory, the rule was finally turned upside down. The revenue officers now
settled both rent and revenue in such a way that the rent was fixed at about
twice the amount of the revenue which the officers thought they could
obtain from the land. This made the revenue officer an extremely powerful
person in the Northwestern Province, as this area extending from Delhi to
Allahabad was called. Following the annexation of Oudh, the same
administrative tradition was extended to that part of the country.
The depression of trade and the tough revenue settlement, combined
with a shortage of money, greatly affected this region in the 1830s and
1840s and finally contributed to the revolt which coincided with the
Mutiny of 1857. Earlier, as the heartland of the Mughal empire, this area
had been dotted with many towns which housed the local administrative
elite and also served as markets. Such centres declined under British rule.
Only Allahabad prospered as provincial capital, and Kanpur emerged as a
major industrial centre of northern India.
The Agra Division, as the British administrators called the districts
ceded to them by the nawab of Oudh in 1803, was adversely affected by
the policies of the new rulers. Reports of itinerant medical doctors in the
service of the company show that this was a fertile region with large tracts
of forest which helped to maintain its ecological balance. Within a short
time the British deforested the area both for security reasons and for
getting charcoal used for making bricks in innumerable kilns. They also
encouraged the growing of cash crops. Combined with the introduction of
stiff revenue settlements this led to a rapid exhaustion of the soil. What
was once a fertile tract soon became a drought-prone one and by the 1840s
the region’s degraded soil could no longer support the agricultural regime
imposed upon it by the British.
The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, as they were named in 1901,
were a very large and heterogeneous territorial unit of British India. Its
eastern part, where rice is the main crop, witnessed a large increase of
population and of poverty; its western part, particularly the districts
around Meerut where wheat is grown, was more prosperous. The rural
areas in general were dominated by Hindu folk traditions. The fairly large
Muslim minority of the United Provinces (about 17 per cent of the
population) was mostly settled in the towns (about 44 per cent of the
urban population).
This dichotomy was paralleled in language and literature: Urdu, the
lingua franca of the Mughal empire, was associated with urban Muslim
culture; Hindi and its many dialects was the idiom of the rural Hindus.
Movements such as that for the recognition of Hindi in Devanagari script