Company Expansion and Colonial Economy

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Lord Cornwallis is associated with the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1793, which settled the revenue with zamindars in perpetuity. That is the opposite arrangement to the ryotwari, and the two are the standard contrasted pair.
• Statement 2 is correct. Captain Alexander Read introduced the first ryotwari experiment in the Baramahal district, ceded to the Company after the Third Anglo Mysore War in 1792, settling revenue directly with the individual cultivator.
• Statement 3 is correct. Thomas Munro, who had served under Read in the Baramahal, extended the system to the Ceded Districts and, as Governor of Madras from 1820, made it the settled revenue system of the Madras Presidency. Rejecting statement 1 eliminates (a), (b) and (d) in a single step and yields (c) directly. Governing principle: Cornwallis to zamindari, Read and Munro to ryotwari in Madras, Holt Mackenzie and Merttins Bird to mahalwari in the North Western Provinces. This item is decided entirely on the first of those three pairings.

• Option (c) is correct. The commercialisation of agriculture is the standard characterisation of the nineteenth century transformation: cultivation shifted from subsistence food grains towards cash crops such as indigo, opium, cotton, jute, tea and oilseeds grown for distant markets, driven by the cash demands of the revenue settlements, by the credit of the moneylender, by the railways that opened interior markets, and by the raw material needs of British industry. Its consequences were a peasantry exposed to world price movements without any cushion, deepening rural indebtedness and a reduced margin of food security, which is why the great famines of the period coincided with rising agricultural exports.
• Option (a) is wrong and inverts the direction of change; Indian handicraft exports collapsed under competition from machine made British goods, a process usually described as deindustrialisation, and India moved from being an exporter of finished textiles to an exporter of raw cotton.
• Option (d) is wrong for a connected reason: artisans displaced from crafts largely fell back on agriculture rather than moving to towns, so the nineteenth century saw ruralisation rather than rapid urbanisation, and the urban share of population was broadly stagnant.
• Option (b) is the strongest distractor, since Indian owned cotton mills did appear in Bombay and Ahmedabad from the 1850s and jute and steel followed, but this was a limited late century development concentrated in a few centres and confined to a narrow range of industries, and it does not describe the economy as a whole in the way that option (c) does. The elimination turns on choosing the change that was general rather than the one that was real but partial.

Hence (c).

• Option (d) is correct. In the middle of the eighteenth century, before the reversal brought about by British industrialisation, Bengal was an exporter of manufactures and of high value raw produce. Cotton piece goods, above all the fine muslins of Dacca, and Bengal raw and wrought silk were the principal items; saltpetre, that is potassium nitrate, was mined in Bihar and was strategically important as the oxidiser in gunpowder, which made it a commodity European powers competed for; and opium, produced in Bihar and Bengal, was becoming the article on which the Company's China trade would later be built.
• Option (a) is wrong because it describes the export pattern of the nineteenth century rather than the eighteenth, when raw cotton and oilseeds flowed out to feed British industry, and it omits textiles altogether, which is the decisive omission for this period.
• Option (b) is wrong because sugar, salt, zinc and lead were not Bengal's staples, and salt in particular was a domestically monopolised and consumed commodity rather than an export.
• Option (c) is wrong on the direction of trade: copper, silver and gold moved into Bengal, silver bullion especially, since Europe had little that Bengal wanted and settled its purchases in specie, and this drain of bullion into India is the standard complaint of contemporary English pamphleteers. Tea came from China, not Bengal, in this period. Governing principle: for the mid eighteenth century ask what India sold rather than what Britain later extracted, and the answer is finished textiles.

Hence (d).

The question asks for the single statement that does not apply, so three of the four must describe the system correctly.

• Option (a) applies. The essence of the Subsidiary Alliance was that the allied Indian ruler kept a British force within his territory and paid for it, so the Company maintained a large standing army at the expense of the Indian states rather than of its own treasury, and it did so while stationing that army forward, on the territory of potential adversaries.
• Option (b) applies. Wellesley arrived in 1798 with the French threat uppermost, Napoleon then in Egypt and French officers serving Tipu Sultan, the Nizam and the Marathas, and the exclusion of Europeans other than the English from the courts of allied rulers was a standing clause of the alliances, so keeping India secure against French designs was an explicit object.
• Option (d) applies. The allied ruler surrendered control of external relations, could neither make war nor negotiate with another state without the Company's consent, and accepted a British Resident at his court, which reduced him to internal sovereignty alone and established British paramountcy in substance.
• Option (c) is the statement that does not apply. The Company did not secure a fixed income from the arrangement. Payment was frequently made not in cash but by the cession of territory in perpetuity, which is how the Company acquired the Carnatic, Tanjore, Surat, parts of Awadh and the Ceded Districts from the Nizam, and where a cash subsidy was stipulated it was often in arrears, the resulting default being itself a pretext for annexation. The financial result was territorial expansion rather than a steady revenue stream.

Hence (c).

• Pair 1 is incorrect. Aurang is a Persian term for a warehouse or manufactory, the depot where goods were collected from weavers and artisans before export by the Company. It has no connection with the treasury.
• Pair 2 is correct. The banian was the Indian intermediary, financier and agent who supplied capital, local knowledge and access to markets for Company servants and their private trade.
• Pair 3 is correct. Mirasidars were hereditary landholders, chiefly in the Tamil country, who held mirasi rights and were recognised as the parties liable to pay revenue to the State. Correct pairs are 2 and 3, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (d) admit the aurang error and (c) drops the banian pair.

The decisive constraint is the time frame, the first half of the nineteenth century. Cheap machine made Lancashire cloth, admitted at low duties after the ending of the Company monopoly in 1813, destroyed the market for Indian handloom products and produced the deindustrialisation described by contemporaries and by later nationalist economists, so (a) is correct.

• Option (b) is wrong because mechanised mills in India began only with the Bombay cotton mill of 1854 and the Calcutta jute mill of 1855, both in the second half of the century.
• Option (c) is wrong because the first railway line ran from Bombay to Thane in 1853 and network expansion followed later.
• Option (d) is wrong because the policy ran the other way, with light duties on British imports and heavy duties on Indian goods entering Britain.

The decisive cause was the synthesis of artificial indigo, achieved by Adolf von Baeyer and commercialised by BASF from 1897, which collapsed the world price of the natural dye and destroyed the profitability of Indian plantations. Hence (b).

• Option (a) is wrong on timing and effect, since the Blue Rebellion of 1859 to 1860 in Bengal ended the system in the lower Gangetic districts a full generation earlier but did not cause the general decline; peasant resistance was a consequence of the crisis in Bihar rather than its cause.
• Option (c) is wrong because national leaders took the question up only after the industry was already dying, Gandhi's Champaran intervention coming in 1917.
• Option (d) is wrong because government regulation was slight and generally sympathetic to planters. The key word in the stem is inventions, which points squarely at synthetic dye.

• Statement 1 is correct: Francis Xavier was among the original companions who founded the Society of Jesus with Ignatius of Loyola in Paris in 1534.
• Statement 3 is correct: the Feast of St Francis Xavier is observed in Goa on 3 December every year.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the decisive statement, hinging on a precise distinction: he died in 1552 on Shangchuan Island off the Chinese coast while attempting to enter China, and his body was subsequently brought to Goa, where it is enshrined in the Basilica of Bom Jesus and exposed for public veneration at intervals. The church exists, but the death did not occur in Goa. Hence 1 and 3, giving (c). The item rewards separating the place of death from the place of burial, which the statement deliberately conflates.

• Statement 1 is incorrect on chronology. The Gajapati dynasty of Odisha was broken by the middle of the sixteenth century, its territories passing to the Golconda sultans and then to the Mughals, whereas the Dutch reached the Coromandel coast only in the first decade of the seventeenth century, establishing themselves at Masulipatnam and Pulicat under grants from the Golconda rulers and local authorities. A Gajapati grant to the Dutch is therefore impossible.
• Statement 2 is correct. Afonso de Albuquerque took Goa in 1510 from Yusuf Adil Shah of Bijapur, and Goa became the seat of the Portuguese Estado da India.
• Statement 3 is correct. Francis Day obtained in 1639 a grant of the site that became Madras from the Nayak of Chandragiri, a representative of the by then much reduced Vijayanagara authority, and Fort St George was raised there.
• Statements 2 and 3 holding, (b) is correct; options (a), (c) and (d) each admit the anachronistic Gajapati grant.

This question was dropped by the Commission and carries no marks.

• Statement 2 is correct and is the well known Sunset Clause of the Permanent Settlement of 1793. If the fixed revenue was not paid by sunset on the appointed day, the zamindari was liable to be auctioned, a provision that produced large scale transfers of estates in the early decades.
• Statement 1 is where the question breaks down. The Ryotwari Settlement, associated with Thomas Munro and Alexander Read in Madras and with Elphinstone in Bombay, was not introduced by Cornwallis at all, so a question stem anchored to revenue collection by Cornwallis cannot coherently ask about it. On content, the Ryotwari system did provide for remission of revenue in years of bad harvest, unlike the rigid Permanent Settlement, so the statement is arguably correct in substance while being misattributed in framing. That contradiction between an accurate statement and an incoherent stem is the most probable ground for the drop.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminator. Disarmament was central to the policy, and the taluqdars lost not only their estates but also their armed retainers and their forts, which were dismantled, a humiliation that is standard textbook explanation for why they joined the revolt in 1857 with such force.
• Statement 2 is correct, since the Summary Settlement of 1856 proceeded on the assumption that the taluqdars were interlopers with no permanent stake in the soil who had usurped rights over village communities, and it therefore settled directly wherever it could.
• Statement 3 is correct and is the reasoning behind statement 2, because the Company preferred the Mahalwari and ryotwari logic of dealing directly with cultivators or village bodies, expecting both higher revenue and a stable peasant base.

Hence 2 and 3 are correct and (a) follows, while (b) and (c) admit the false claim about arms and forts, and (d) drops the accurate statement of British intent.