"The passing of the land from the hands of the peasant proprietors into the hands of non-cultivating landlords brought about increasing polarization of the agrarian society." Critically examine.

Answer:

Colonial land settlements, above all the Permanent Settlement of 1793, converted customary rights into transferable property and drove land from cultivators to rentier landlords, moneylenders and traders. The result was a sharply polarised countryside of large holders and a swelling class of tenants and labourers.

How the transfer occurred

• The Permanent Settlement made zamindars proprietors and the revenue demand fixed but severe.
• The Sunset Law auctioned estates for arrears, transferring land to urban buyers.
• Land became saleable and mortgageable, so debt led directly to dispossession.
• Commercialisation and cash revenue pushed peasants to moneylenders and thence to loss of land.
• Ryotwari areas saw similar transfer through indebtedness despite direct settlement.

The resulting polarisation

• A class of absentee, non-cultivating rent-receivers emerged, with layers of sub-infeudation beneath.
• Former proprietors sank to tenants-at-will, sharecroppers and landless labourers.
• Rack-renting and insecurity of tenure depressed investment and productivity.
• Rural indebtedness deepened, culminating in risings such as the Deccan Riots of 1875.

A qualification

• Polarisation varied by region and was sharpest in permanently settled Bengal.
• Some rich peasants prospered and themselves became creditors and landholders.
• The Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act of 1879 acknowledged the problem without solving it.

The statement is thus well-founded. As R.C. Dutt argued and later scholarship confirms, colonial property law dissolved the older agrarian order and replaced it with one sharply divided between rentiers and a dependent peasantry, a polarisation whose consequences persisted well beyond independence.