Lord Cornwallis sold the
peasantry of Bihar into virtual slavery The British, who ruled
India from Calcutta, proved in many ways even less kind to the state. The
permanent settlement of Lord Cornwallis sold the peasantry of Bihar into
virtual slavery. It tried to turn the erstwhile tax farmers into English style
country squires, but the new `zamindars’ showed very soon that they had not
forgotten their old rapacious ways. While they paid a fixed and often quite
nominal land rent to the state, they bled the peasants white. In time their
descendants appointed overseers and in inspectors backed by an informal police
force of goondas to do their dirty work. An entire parasitic class came into
existence which, not content with taking away half or more of the produce,
forced the peasants to work for no payment in their houses and fields. Those
who rebelled against this system were evicted from their lands, and were often
killed or forced to flee from their village.
For over five
generations this inhuman system has succeeded in snuffing out the spirit of an
entire people. During the Bihar earthquake of 1934, when the ground cracked and
threw out jets of sand which destroyed thousands of village wells throughout
north Bihar, rescue workers and the local district officers found that the
inhabitants were content to drink contaminated water from muddy streams and ditches, but no one
had taken the initiative to organize a joint effort to dig out the sand from
the wells!