The Impermanent Settlement: Bengal’s Riparian Landscape, 1793–1846

Abstract

In 1793, the East India Company (EIC) drafted the Permanent Settlement, a legal regime designed to stabilize property ownership and incentivize landowning zamindars to improve the agricultural productivity of their land by fixing their tax obligations in perpetuity. The EIC imposed this legal fiction of stability over the unstable riparian landscape of Bengal. As accretion and erosion continued to alter the size of zamindari holdings along riverbanks, the EIC’s bureaucracy was overwhelmed with petitions from landholders demanding reassessment of their settlement based on the material conditions of their property. Despite several regulations designed to bring alluvial land under the Permanent Settlement, the EIC was never able create a legal mechanism that could accommodate the fluctuations of the landscape; they refused to alter their foundational premise that once the landscape was permanently measured and ordered, it would bring monetary and moral improvement to the zamindars which, in turn, would increase their acceptance of EIC rule. Because of this gap between the law and the material conditions it governed, the ability of the Permanent Settlement to regulate the impermanent landscape of Bengal remained incomplete. By 1846, the EIC responded to this contradiction with a moratorium on all alluvial assessment, thus allowing them to maintain their legal fiction in the face of mounting environmental challenges.