In a district record room, a historian finds an old Company file from the 1790s. It reports a large public sale of several estates that belonged to a powerful landholder of western Bengal. He had fallen behind in his payments to the Company. The officer who arranged the sale later wrote a puzzled note about the buyers. The same bundle holds a list showing that many other estates in the province passed to new owners in these years. A loose sheet carries a newspaper sketch of village produce being taken to a market.
The landholder in the file had to pay a revenue fixed by the Company under an arrangement that came into operation in 1793. Which arrangement was it?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → The Permanent Settlement
Option (1) The Decennial Settlement — Incorrect. The Decennial Settlement was a ten-year settlement with the Bengal zamindars made just before 1793. In 1793 its rates were made permanent, and the arrangement in force from then was the Permanent Settlement.
Option (2) The Ryotwari Settlement — Incorrect. The Ryotwari Settlement was the system later introduced in the Bombay Deccan. There the revenue was settled directly with the ryot, the cultivator himself.
Option (3) The Mahalwari Settlement — Incorrect. The Mahalwari Settlement was a later system of north India in which revenue was settled with the village or estate as a whole. It came after 1793 and belonged to a different region.
Option (4) The Permanent Settlement — Correct. The <strong>Permanent Settlement</strong> came into operation in 1793. Under it the Company <strong>fixed the revenue each zamindar had to pay</strong>, and the estates of those who failed to pay were auctioned.
NCERT (2026-27): “1.1 An auction in Burdwan |