THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULE(Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada) precluded active communication and
its commercial connections were also handicapped by problems similar to
those which have been noted in relation to southern India. Coastal Gujarat
always had maritime trade relations, but the thin strip of the west coast in
front of the steep Western Ghats was a poor and isolated region. The
‘Desh’, as the highlands beyond the Ghats are called, was also isolated in
its own way. It was sparsely populated and before the railway cut across
the Ghats and linked Bombay with this vast hinterland, the ‘Desh’
remained quite inaccessible. Nevertheless, it was subjected to a rather
intensive British impact, because this was the heartland of the Marathas
whom the British had finally vanquished in 1818 and whose tough revenue
administration they had taken over.
This was the most radical ryotwari system in India and the British took
pride in the scientific accuracy of their work in this region. The army,
entrusted with the survey work, produced excellent maps on which the
settlement officers could base their assessment of the land, analysing the
quality of the soil in great detail for this purpose. The Bombay revenue
officers were so sure of the scientific accuracy of their settlement operations
that remissions of revenue, which were often resorted to in other provinces,
were not tolerated by them. They would at the most suspend the revenue
collection in a bad year; never would they remit the amount once and for all
because they believed that this would have been an admission of a faulty
assessment. This tough system was mitigated only by the flexibility of the
ubiquitous moneylender, who provided credit whenever the revenue
authorities threatened to confiscate land for arrears of revenue. This led to
large-scale indebtedness and finally to riots against the money-lenders in
1875, greatly to the alarm of the authorities. But as only a few districts near
Pune were affected, the system as a whole was not upset. The vast
dimensions of India and the variety of regional conditions actually saved the
British from any large-scale confrontation with the Indian people. The slow
working of the administrative machinery also prevented the emergence of
widespread and explosive unrest. In all Indian districts with no ‘permanent
settlement’ revision settlements had to be conducted mostly at intervals of
thirty years. However, because the settlement staff could not tackle more
than one district per year there necessarily was a differentiation of these
settlements due to this time-lag. Every district had therefore a revenue
history of its own and grievances which were noted in one district were
absent elsewhere, or at least did not arise at the same time. This was
certainly not part of a deliberate policy of ‘divide and rule’; in effect, though,
it worked as if it had been designed for this purpose.
Economically the Bombay Presidency was also less ‘colonial’ than
eastern and northern India. Only for a brief period in the 1860s was this
region in the limelight as a major centre for the production of cotton which
was then in great demand on the world market due to a shortage of