Honoured Guests,
distinguished delegates of XX INCA International Congress, ladies and
gentlemen, When General Ahuja entrapped me into
delivering the Raja Todar Mal Memorial Lecture
for XXth INCA International Congress I had
hardly realised the significance and/or gravity
of my commitment. Having entered the same line of service, which Raja Todar Mal had helped in shaping during our middly ages; some thirty years ago, I honestly
believed that I was perhaps being summoned to deliver one of those
lectures which we very often tend to accept very casually. It is only
later, much later when I came across the brochure announcing this great
event, that I realised my own constraints. At
the very outset, therefore, I would request all of you to kindly forgive
me if you do find the next hour or so throwing up any new information
meriting any serious notice.
However, it remains my singular privilege to share with
you all, whatever little information I am able to relate to you, in this
very brief span of time.
What I propose to share with you, ladies and gentlemen,
is a very brief resume of the settlement history of these parts of the
country, which has become the twenty seventh state of this great country,
i.e. Uttaranchal. Incidentally, some people
tend to see this new administrative, sub-national political entity, as
also the tenth Himalayan
State. Perhaps, at
least to my mind, this is its true significance; its real identity. And,
its very birth, its shaping and moulding as
well; has very familiar circumstances. Interestingly, Uttaranchal's
parent state, Uttar Pradesh, also started taking its present shape
exactly 200 years ago, to be very precise in the year 1801.
It may even sound a bit too coincidental but it is an
equally interesting fact that it was again in the month of February, the
same month in which you all have assembled here, that a historical
conference of all Collectors of Land Revenue and Commissioners of Circuit
was summoned at Allahabad; the place where almost 50 millions of Hindus
have recently taken the Holy Dip at the Confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna, which
give a definite shape to the Land Settlements operations, accompanied by
correction of the records of rights and maps. This Great February
Conference, summoned by the then Governor General, Lord William Bentinck, in 1832 is regarded as the event which
provided us all a system to follow, a new system of our land revenue
management. During 1801-1832, our settlement operations were tentative or
halting at their very best, and it was during
these three decades that several experiments were undertaken by various
revenue officers, all over the province. Peter Penner,
a Canadian Historian, has very lucidly recounted the great contribution
made by William Merttins Bird and his
disciples, in his eminently readable book, the Patronage Bureaucracy. To
the historians amongst those present here, I strongly recommend this
piece of work.
It was the post-1830 period which brought to light great
revenue practioners like William Mertinns Bird and his disciple James Thomason, who
later on took over the mantle of overseeing the operations of the
Bird-Thomason school of revenue officers, who were great land reformers
of their own times. The Back-Process, the Mahalwari
system of the assessing land revenue, drastically cut short the period
taken in land settlements. This discovery dispelled all doubts, an hang-over of the Permanent Settlement followed in
the Bengal Presidency initiated by Lord Cornwallis, way back in 1793. If
I am asked to name an eminent successor to the great Raja Todar Mal, at least for the region to which we are
referring, I would unhesitatingly name William Bird. The credit goes to
Bird first and, of course, equally to James Thomason. Bird and Thomason
improved the land settlement system of a region, Oudh, which was the birth-place of Raja Todar Mal. Those of you, who may have heard of the Roorkee
Engineering College, may perhaps be aware that
it was very appropriately dedicated to Thomason. The Great Ganga Canal
was also envisioned by him. The vernacular school system was his
brain-child, to name just a few contributions made by this great
administrator.
Reverting back to our main theme, as the time is too
short to recount all the fascinating details of those innovative years,
the land revenue operations were suddenly pushed to an unprecedented
pitch. These were the days or years which laid out several systems, in
our revenue administration, which persist even to the present times! The
winter-camps, khatuani (record of rights), Khasara (field books) and the shajara
(the field-maps) verification, valuation of crops et cetra
hark back to those very days. One suddenly finds that the revenue survey
teams are reporting work from within the deep jungles of Turai-Bhabar. This place, where we are deliberating
the shape of things to come during the present century, was covered by
such thick sal and mixed-forests that one of
the Superintendents of Dehra Dun once reported
that it would take centuries for the mankind to clear the forests! To get
a taste of the forests Sir John Shore Junior was mentioning about today
you have to just visit the thick and alluring Sal forests of Sela Kuin. Of course, those
of you who have come by road must have seen a sample of such forests
which ring around our Rajaji Elephant Parks.
The need to speedily cover the newly acquired territories
through land settlements gave rise to the great revenue surveys. This was
carried eminently, very eminently indeed, by our great surveyors during
1830s to late 1850s, consolidated in the shape of the Great Trinometrical Surveys (the GTS). These Revenue
Surveys have been published officially, some through the
"Selections" series and some otherwise. The Magnetic Survey of
India work, which could not be carried to the great Himalayas,
was very imaginatively and courageously completed by that famous trio of
German brothers, the Schlag int
weit brothers. Sponsored by the East India
Company and patronized by the Prussina King,
these brothers completed a nearly impossible task. What is more
significant to me they worked very closely with the revenue officials of
these regions. The modern survey instruments they carried with themselves
was naturally a novelty for those times in colonial India.
The valiant efforts of these German brothers did not go in vain, despite
the fact that the oldest amongst them lost his life somewhere near Kashgar, in 1856 or so.
For Northern India,
these were very turbulent years. It was the year of the first ever
concerted efforts to resist the imposition of a foreign power, the East
India Company, the year of the so called Sepoy
Mutiny. The murder of one of the Schalgintweit
brothers and the great uprising put a full stop to the survey efforts of
1830s through 1850s. Cartography was perhaps at its very best, coupled as
it was with several unheralded mountaineering feats by these pioneer
cartographers-surveyors, who had taken scores of measurements from atop
20,000 feet plus summits! Kenneth Mason very aptly salutes the efforts of
these German brothers and those early surveyors cum cartographers by
mentioning that even a summary account of their real efforts would take
years to compile! Fortunately, the Indian archives, the regional and the
national, have maintained the primary accounts of these early efforts at
revenue surveys. My narratives and anecdotes are essentially drawn from
these primary sources.
The aftermath of the great Uprising of 1857 brought the
East India Company rule to an end and brought in the direct British Crown
Rule to these parts. This cataclysmic event was precipitated in the main
by the usurpation of Oudh Kingdom
by the East India Company. Oudh,
incidentally had become the mainstay of the fast diminishing Mughal Empire, which Raja Todar
Mal had served so well. Ironically it was Oudh again, the home-place of the Raja,
annexation of which caused the end of both the warring parties, the East
India Company as well as the Great Mughal
Empire! Raja Todar Mal had held charge of the
Agra Sarcar and therefore the land revenue
system which he built for the Great Mughals was
entirely home-grown. It is therefore no wonder that the system which he
designed has lasted so long, rooted as it was in the local customs and
traditions.
Incidently, the first ever map
of the northern-parts of this region was published in 1810, a map of the Bhagirathi river-course, by that redoubtable surveyor
of the Royal Engineering Corps, Lt. Webb. It was published in the Asiatic
Researches or the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, JASB in
brief. The same Lt. Webb was at hand when it came to ascertain the claims
made by the Nepal Court,
in 1823, about the real location of a few villages, alleged to have been
occupied by the British. Lt. Webb sealed the issue by describing the
tradition by which the Indians have been naming their rivers and thereby
identifying the source of river Kali, called Mahakali
in Nepal.
This great tradition has continued through the surveys conducted during
the Great Trignometrical Survey era to the
present day topographical maps of the Survey of India. The credit for
introducing the great Himalayas to the
modern world goes to the Survey of India. The Survey of India charter
today embraces fields of geodesy, geographical studies, seismicity, indigenisation
of instruments/equipments and now even creation of Digital Cartographical
Data Base of topographical maps on 1:250,000 and 1:50,000 scales. Like in
the olden days, now the digital data being produced by the SOI, is being used by various agencies for planning
and GIS purposes. I do, however, wonder if Lt. Webb's map has so far
found its rightful place in SOI's Antique Map
Series?
General Ahuja, the present
Surveyor General, while presenting a map of Uttaranchal
on its day of creation, 9th November, 2000, was only emulating what was
done by Lt. Webb, way back in 1810! I take this opportunity to compliment
him for this thoughtful gift to the new State.
Thus, Cartography as a discipline, at least in these
parts of India,
essentially owes its origin to the rapid land revenue settlement
operations which were initiated, as has already been mentioned, way back
in 1830s. These operations were systematised
and the basic principles were enunciated in the first ever compendium of
publications brought out by our Board of Revenue, and are called the
Directions for the Settlement Officers. These Directions were
supplemented by the Directions for the Collectors of Land Revenue, in the
North Western Provinces, in mid-1840s.
This publication of 1840 vintage contains several terms
and expressions, of Persian origin, which directly descend from the days
when the ground-rules for such a work were being laid out, by perhaps the
greatest of all Finance Ministers the Middle Ages have produced, and
after whom this Memorial Lecture has been very aptly named, Raja Todar Mal. This publication is undoubtedly the best
contemporary version of which has been described by Abul
Fazl in the Ain-e-Akbari.
While I was heading the Academy
of Administration,
as its Director, I could not simply resist the temptation of reprinting
this gem of a government publication. I have made available a copy of the
reprint to the hosts of this Conference for the benefit of those
delegates who may like to have a look at it. I am sure it would prove to
be a real source of inspiration to all of you who have assembled here to
prepare a route-map for the new Millenia.
RAJA TODAR MAL
Raja Todar Mal was born in Laharpur,
in Oudh, and
rose to become the Finance Minister in Akbar's Darbar. He was made in charge of Agra
and settled in Gujarat. Later he was
made in charge of Gujarat as well. He
also managed Akbar's Mint at Bengal.
Also served in Punjab. Todar Mal once took leave of Akbar
but was recalled. He died on 8th November, 1589 in Lahore. It is commonly said that Todar Mal made a settlement of Kashmir
but Henry Beveridge doubts it.
Beveridge records that Raja Todar Mal had got leave from Akbar
and was on his way to Haridwar but he received
a letter from Akbar in which the latter is said
to have said that " it was better to go on
working and doing good to the world than to go on a piligrimage."
When Todar Mal died his body was burnt and Raja
Bhagwan Das, his
colleague in the charge of Lahore,
was present at the ceremony. Of his two sons, Dhari
was killed in a battle in Sindh. Another Kalyan Das was sent by Todar Mal to bring in the Kumaon
Raja.
(The Akbar Nama : Abu-I-Fazl : Translated from the Persian by Henry Beveridge, ICS. Pages :
61-62. Vol. III)
