Meera, a college student in Kolkata, is preparing a project on what the rule of the English East India Company meant for rural India. She plans to begin with powerful landholders who paid a fixed yearly sum to the Company. Next she will study two communities: one of hunters and shifting cultivators who gathered forest produce, and another of settled peasants who came later and cleared the forests for farming. Along the way she wants to see how new laws changed the lives of ordinary people, and her guide has given her a reading list of sources to work through.
The two communities that Meera plans to study lived in which region?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → The Rajmahal hills
Option (1) Poona — Incorrect. Poona lies in the Deccan, the western region where ryots borrowed from sahukars under the ryotwari settlement.
Option (2) The Bombay Deccan — Incorrect. The Bombay Deccan is the region further west where ryots under the ryotwari settlement fell into debt to moneylenders.
Option (3) Burdwan — Incorrect. Burdwan was a zamindari estate in Bengal. It belongs with the powerful landholders Meera studies first.
Option (4) The Rajmahal hills — Correct. The two communities are the Paharias, hunters and shifting cultivators, and the Santhals, settled cultivators who came later. Both lived in the Rajmahal hills.
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