Bengal Before 1772: the Dewani, the Dual Government and the Anarchy
Chapter Seven
Syllabus topic 1.1.2, the ground the Plan of 1772 stands on
Pages 31 to 34 of 491
In one line
Between 1765 and 1772 the Company had the revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and none of the responsibility for governing them, and the result was so bad that it had to build courts.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: by the grant of the Diwani in 1765 the East India Company acquired the right to collect the revenues and administer civil justice in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, while the Nizamat, that is criminal justice and the maintenance of order, remained nominally with the Nawab; the resulting system, known as the dual government, separated power from responsibility and produced an administrative breakdown which the judicial plan of 1772 was designed to end.
The words you need first
A subah is a province of the Mughal Empire, and its governor is a subahdar, commonly called in Bengal the Nawab. By the middle of the eighteenth century the Mughal Emperor at Delhi was a shadow and the Nawab of Bengal was in practice an independent ruler.
The government of a province had two halves.
The Diwani is the revenue side: the right to collect the land revenue and, with it, the administration of civil justice, because in a country where almost all wealth is land, almost all civil disputes are revenue disputes.
The Nizamat is the criminal side: the maintenance of order, the police, and the trial and punishment of crime.
A zamindar was a holder of land with a hereditary right to collect its revenue and to pay a fixed sum to the government, keeping the difference. He is not quite a landlord and not quite a tax collector, and the ambiguity matters, because the Supreme Court would later have to decide whether a zamindar was in the Company's employment.
An amil was a revenue officer or agent, and a farmer of the revenue was a man who contracted to pay a fixed sum for the revenue of an area and to keep whatever more he could collect. Two of the seven proceedings MU names in topic 1.2 were brought by revenue farmers.
How the Company got the Diwani
After Plassey in 1757 the Company made and unmade Nawabs. After the battle of Buxar in 1764 it was in a position to ask the Emperor for something more permanent, and in 1765 Shah Alam II granted to the Company the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
That grant is the hinge of the whole subject. Before it the Company was a trading corporation with settlements. After it, it was the revenue authority of three provinces containing some twenty million people, and by the same instrument the authority responsible for their civil justice.
Bengal Before 1772: the Dewani, the Dual Government and the Anarchy
The dual government, and why it failed
What Clive constructed on that grant is called the dual government, and it is best understood as a deliberate division of the two halves of provincial government between two different people.
- The Diwani, the revenue and civil justice, went to the Company.
- The Nizamat, criminal justice and order, remained nominally with the Nawab, exercised through a deputy whom the Company in fact appointed.
The attraction for the Company was obvious. It got the revenue without having to answer for the government, and without alarming Parliament, the Emperor or its European rivals by openly assuming sovereignty.
The defect is equally obvious once stated. Power was separated from responsibility. The Company had the money and no duty to govern; the Nawab had the duty and no money and no power. Nobody was answerable for the ordinary administration of the country, and each could blame the other.
For the first few years the Company collected through Indian officers and did not interfere directly, which meant in practice that the collection was made by whoever could extract most. The famine of 1770, in which a large part of the population of Bengal died, was made worse by the revenue being collected as though nothing had happened.
What "civil justice" looked like in that period
There was no vacuum. Bengal had courts before the English arrived and they went on sitting: the kazi administering Muslim law, the pandit advising on Hindu law, the zamindar's own court in his zamindari, the village panchayat, and the Nawab's officers above them.
What there was not was any effective supervision or appeal, any protection for a litigant against the officer who was also collecting his revenue, or any way for an English inhabitant of the interior to be sued at all. And there was one particular gap the Company could not ignore: no judicial coercion over Europeans outside the Presidency Towns. A servant of the Company in the districts was, in practice, beyond the reach of any court in Bengal.
A worked example
Take a cultivator in Burdwan in 1770 who says the amil has taken more than the revenue due.
He can complain to the zamindar, who is the person on whose behalf the collection was made. He can complain to the amil's superior, who is a servant of the Company and whose own performance is measured by the amount collected. He can go to the kazi, who has no power over a revenue officer. He can go to the Nawab's officers, who have no money and no authority over the Company's servants.
None of those is a court in the sense of a tribunal separate from the person complained of. That is the state of affairs Warren Hastings inherited in 1772, and it is the reason his first act was to build courts rather than to reform the ones that existed.
Bengal Before 1772: the Dewani, the Dual Government and the Anarchy
Distinctions worth having straight
| Diwani | Nizamat | |
|---|---|---|
| What it covers | Revenue and civil justice | Order, police and criminal justice |
| Who held it after 1765 | The Company | The Nawab, in name |
| Chief court, after 1772 | Sadar Diwani Adalat | Sadar Nizamat Adalat |
| District court, after 1772 | Mofussil Diwani Adalat | Mofussil Faujdari Adalat |
What beginners get wrong
"The Company became the ruler of Bengal in 1765." It became the Diwan of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, which is a Mughal office. It carefully did not claim sovereignty, and the pretence lasted until 1772 in form and much longer in theory.
"The dual government means two governments." It means one government split into its two halves, revenue and criminal, held by two different persons. The problem is not duplication; it is that neither half was accountable.
"There were no courts in Bengal before the British." There were, and the Company's own plans of 1772 kept much of what it found: Muslim criminal law, the kazi and the mufti, Hindu and Muslim personal law, and the local jurisdiction of zamindars. What was new was the structure above them.
Limits and criticism
It is worth being careful here, because the paper invites a lazy answer in either direction.
The dual government was indefensible and the Company's own servants said so at the time. But the picture of total anarchy owes a good deal to the men who ended it and had an interest in describing what they replaced as chaos. What can be said with confidence is narrower and more useful: revenue was being collected by people with no obligation to administer justice, and justice was being administered, where it was administered at all, by people with no power over the revenue collectors. A system in which the same officer is both the tax gatherer and the judge is bad; a system in which nobody at all is the judge is worse. India would spend the next sixty years oscillating between those two, which is exactly what Cornwallis's three plans are about.
Quick revision
- 1765: Shah Alam II grants the Company the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa: revenue plus civil justice.
- The Nizamat, criminal justice and order, stayed nominally with the Nawab: this is the dual government.
- Its defect: power without responsibility, and responsibility without power.
- No effective appeal, no protection against the collector, and no judicial coercion over Europeans in the interior.
- The famine of 1770 exposed the whole arrangement.
- The existing courts, the kazi, the pandit, the zamindar's court and the panchayat, continued and were partly absorbed into the plan of 1772.
Bengal Before 1772: the Dewani, the Dual Government and the Anarchy
Test yourself
1. What exactly did the Company acquire in 1765, and what did it not acquire? It acquired the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa: the right to collect the revenue and to administer civil justice. It did not acquire the Nizamat, which is criminal justice and the maintenance of order, and which remained nominally with the Nawab.
2. State the central defect of the dual government in one sentence. It separated power from responsibility: the Company had the revenue and no duty to govern, while the Nawab had the duty and neither money nor power.
3. Why does the difference between Diwani and Nizamat matter for the rest of this paper? Because the court structure built in 1772 is built on it: the Diwani produced the Mofussil Diwani Adalat and the Sadar Diwani Adalat on the civil side, and the Nizamat produced the Mofussil Faujdari Adalat and the Sadar Nizamat Adalat on the criminal side.
4. Who is a zamindar, and why did his exact status become a legal question? A holder of land with a hereditary right to collect its revenue and to pay a fixed sum to the government. His status mattered because the Supreme Court's jurisdiction after 1774 extended to persons employed by the Company, and whether a zamindar was such a person was the question at the heart of the Cossijurah dispute.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.