Land Revenue Policies and Peasant Resistance in Colonial India

Land revenue lay at the heart of British colonial administration in India. It provided the state with a major source of income, but it also reshaped older relationships among cultivators, landlords, village communities, creditors and the state. This paper examines the relationship between colonial land revenue policies and peasant resistance from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Rather than treating the Permanent Settlement, ryotwari and mahalwari systems simply as administrative arrangements, the study considers how they reorganised property rights, strengthened particular intermediaries, expanded the importance of cash payments and legal enforcement, and exposed cultivators to new forms of economic insecurity. The paper adopts a qualitative, historical and comparative research design based entirely on secondary scholarship and selected published primary materials. Particular attention is given to the Santal rebellion, Indigo Revolt, Pabna agrarian movement, Deccan Riots, Kheda Satyagraha and Bardoli Satyagraha. The analysis shows that peasant resistance cannot be explained by revenue rates alone. Revenue demands became politically explosive when combined with indebtedness, rent enhancement, commercialisation, crop failure, coercive contracts, insecure tenancies and unequal access to colonial courts. Resistance consequently took diverse forms—from armed rebellion and attacks on creditors to litigation, rent strikes and disciplined refusal to pay revenue. By the twentieth century, local agrarian grievances were increasingly connected with organised nationalism. The paper argues that colonial land policy was therefore not merely a fiscal mechanism: it became one of the principal arenas in which authority, property and rural political rights were contested in colonial India.