VIZAGAPATAM.
Politically, this settlement was a failure. It took no account of the personal equation among the zamindars. These men had for years been treated as feudatories rather than as mere farmers of the revenue, 'rather as captains of the borders, lords of the marches chiefs of the hills, than as private landholders'; and the Government had been in part conducted through them, some of them having been entrusted with the responsibility of keeping the hill tribes in order. But under the new arrangement they were unceremoniously set aside; authority over the hill men was taken from them; their estates were declared liable to immediate attachment and sale for default in paying a single instalment of the peshkash; they were irritated by the working of the new revenue and judicial regulations; and the new police force, no longer under their control, took every opportunity, under cover of a pretence of enforcing law and order, of harassing and annoying them. Mr. Thackeray, the well-known Member of the Board of Revenue, wrote in 1819 that —
'The (police) darogahs were generally low men, such as kotwáls, turned-off writers, dubashes and butlers, the dregs of the courts and cutcherry: their peons good for nothing, batta peons, such as hang about every cutcherry and follow ever dubash. Sending such men into the zamindaris was as if the Govermnent, an hundred years ago, had sent a dozen London attorneys' clerks, with some Bow Street runners, to the highlands of Scotland, to control those proud chiefs, and establish a good police in that country.'
Owing to all these causes, the zamindars, for many years after the introduction of the permanent settlement, were in a chronic state of discontent and disaffection. Too often internal and domestic troubles accentuated their restlessness. Those of them who had been restored to their ancient patrimonies on the death of the Rája of Vizianagram in 1794 returned to them, of course, without capital or credit; and in several instances an illegitimate brother or a cousin disputed their title, got together a band of paiks, and seizing upon a portion of the estate contrived to hold it by force.
At first, troops were called out and an attempt was made to chastise these disturbers of the public peace and drive them from their fastnesses. But these expeditions were by no means uniformly successful and cost much in blood and treasure. Recourse was then had to negotiation, the only result of which was to increase the insolence of the malcontents. Fresh leaders of banditti started up in every direction, and the zamindars, believing that we were afraid to put the law in operation against them, began neglecting to pay their peshkash.
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