IAS Prelims (GS) Preparation 2018
Day # 9 (April 1, 2017)
Topics of the Day: History 8th NCERT part I chapter 3 and 4 key points
Chapter – 3
-On 12 August 1765, the Mughal emperor appointed the East India Company as the Diwan of Bengal.
-As Diwan, the Company became the chief financial administrator of the territory under its control.
-In 1770 a terrible famine killed ten million people in Bengal.
-After two decades of debate on the question, the Company finally
introduced the Permanent Settlement in 1793. By the terms of the settlement, the rajas and taluqdars were recognised as zamindars. They were asked to collect rent from the peasants and pay revenue to the Company.
-In the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency (most of this area is now in Uttar Pradesh), an Englishman called Holt Mackenzie devised the new system which came into effect in 1822. He felt that the village was an important social institution in north Indian society and needed to be preserved. Under his directions, collectors went from village to village, inspecting the land, measuring the fields, and recording the customs and rights of different groups. The estimated revenue of each plot within a village was added up to calculate the revenue that each village (mahal) had to pay. This demand was to be revised periodically, not permanently fixed. The charge of collecting the revenue and paying it to the Company was given to the village headman, rather than the zamindar. This system came to be known as the mahalwari settlement.
-Mahal – In British revenue records mahal is a revenue estate which may be a village or a group of villages.
-Ryotwar (or ryotwari ) was tried on a small scale by Captain Alexander Read in some of the areas that were taken over by the Company after the wars with Tipu Sultan. Subsequently developed by Thomas Munro, this system was gradually extended all over south India.
-Read and Munro felt that in the south there were no traditional
zamindars. The settlement, they argued, had to be made directly with the cultivators (ryots) who had tilled the land for generations. Their fields had to be carefully and separately surveyed before the revenue assessment was made.
-The British persuaded cultivators in various parts of India to produce other crops: Jute in Bengal, Tea in Assam, Sugarcane in the United provinces, Wheat in Punjab, cotton in Maharashtra and Punjab, rice in Madras.
-William Morris, a famous poet and artist of nineteenth-century Britain.
-Faced with the rising demand for indigo in Europe, the Company in India looked for ways to expand the area under indigo cultivation.
-There were two main systems of indigo cultivation – nij and ryoti.
-Within the system of nij cultivation, the planter produced indigo in lands that he directly controlled. He either bought the land or rented it from other zamindars and produced indigo by directly employing hired labourers.
-Bigha – A unit of measurement of land. Before British rule, the size of this area varied. In Bengal the British standardised it to about one-third of an acre.
-Under the ryoti system, the planters forced the ryots to sign a contract, an agreement (satta). At times they pressurised the village headmen to sign the contract on behalf of the ryots. Those who signed the contract got cash advances from the planters at low rates of interest to produce indigo. But the loan committed the ryot to cultivating indigo on at least 25 per cent of the area under his holding.
-In March 1859 thousands of ryots in Bengal refused to grow indigo. As the rebellion spread, ryots refused to pay rents to the planters, and attacked indigo factories armed with swords and spears, bows and arrows.
-Worried by the rebellion, the government brought in the military to protect the planters from assault, and set up the Indigo Commission to enquire into the system of indigo production.
-When Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa, a peasant from Bihar persuaded him visit Champaran and see the plight of the indigo cultivators there. Mahatma Gandhi‟s visit in 1917 marked the beginning of the Champaran movement against the indigo planters.
Chapter 4
-Birsa was born in a family of Mundas – a tribal group that lived in Chottanagpur.
-Birsa himself declared that God had appointed him to save his people from trouble, free them from the slavery of dikus (outsiders).
-Birsa‟s followers began targeting the symbols of diku and European power. They attacked police stations and churches, and raided the property of moneylenders and zamindars. They raised the white flag as a symbol of Birsa Raj. In 1900 Birsa died of cholera and the movement faded out.
-Jhum cultivation, that is, shifting cultivation was done on small patches of land, mostly in forests. The cultivators cut the treetops to allow sunlight to reach the ground, and burnt the vegetation on the land to clear it for cultivation.
-Shifting cultivators were found in the hilly and forested tracts of northeast and central India.
-The Khonds were a community of hunters and gatherers living in the forests of Orissa.
-The Van Gujjars of the Punjab hills and the Labadis of Andhra Pradesh were cattle herders, the Gaddis of Kulu were shepherds, and the Bakarwals of Kashmir reared goats.
-Bewar – A term used in Madhya Pradesh for shifting cultivation.
-Hazaribagh, in present-day Jharkhand, was an area where the Santhals reared cocoons.
-The traders dealing in silk sent in their agents who gave loans to the tribal people and collected the cocoons. The growers were paid Rs 3 to Rs 4 for a thousand cocoons. These were then exported to Burdwan or Gaya where they were sold at five times the price.
-Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tribal groups in different parts of the country rebelled against the changes in laws, the restrictions on their practices, the new taxes they had to pay, and the exploitation by traders and moneylenders. The Kols rebelled in 1831-32, Santhals rose in revolt in 1855, the Bastar Rebellion in central India broke out in 1910 and the Warli Revolt in Maharashtra in 1940.