The Land and Its Revenue

Eighteenth-century Indian revenue normally passed through several pairs of hands before reaching a treasury. Hereditary chiefs (poligars) held land and armed men in exchange for tribute; nobles held jagirs, whole villages or taluks assigned in place of salary; revenue farmers bid for the right to collect and kept the surplus. Every one of them took a share, and every one was a potential rival to central authority.

Tipu Sultan attacked the whole structure. He stopped granting villages and taluks as jagirs, paying ministers, commanders, and courtiers in cash instead; he suppressed the hereditary holdings of the poligars, disarming and dispossessing chiefs who had been semi-independent for generations; and he pushed assessment and collection down to salaried amildars dealing as directly as possible with the cultivator (ryot).

This is why the reign made permanent enemies inside Mysore as well as outside it. A dispossessed poligar had every reason to welcome the British in 1799, and some did.

Rates were set against the quality of the land and the crop rather than by negotiation with a middleman: roughly one half of the produce on the most fertile land, falling to one third or one sixth on poorer ground. Those headline shares look punishing to a modern eye and were not out of line with contemporary practice; what mattered to the cultivator was that the figure was published and fixed rather than squeezed upward by whoever held the collecting right.

Assessment rested on survey and written record. The revenue regulations prescribe in detail how village accounts were to be kept by the shanbhog, how the amildar was to verify them, and what he owed the treasury — the paperwork was the point, because paperwork is what makes an official auditable.

The regulations are unusually preoccupied with expanding cultivation rather than merely taxing it — a state at war permanently short of revenue had every reason to want more land under the plough.

Taccavi loans. Cultivators without resources were to be advanced taccavi — not only cash but cattle and grain, the actual inputs needed to work land — so that they could begin or resume cultivation.

Reduced rates on new land. Ground newly broken from waste carried lower assessments for an initial period, a standard incentive applied here systematically.

Crop incentives. Tax concessions were proclaimed to encourage particular plantings — sandalwood, tamarind, betel leaf and areca, and the shikakai used for washing — deliberately steering cultivation toward valuable and exportable crops.

Irrigation. Tank repair, wells, and channel works were funded and pressed on local officers. The site that would much later carry the Krishnaraja Sagara dam was among the works begun in this period.

Land to soldiers. Grants of land to soldiers and kandachara militiamen were a significant feature of the agrarian order — settling military manpower on the land, and tying the army's interest to the state's.

The most-cited evidence is hostile. Francis Buchanan surveyed the conquered territories for the East India Company immediately after 1799, with every professional reason to find a ruined despotism, and instead recorded a countryside in better condition than four wars should have left it. Mohibbul Hasan makes this central to his assessment of the reign.

The reason that testimony carries weight is that it runs against the interest of the man giving it. Buchanan was sent to survey a conquered enemy's country for its conquerors, at the moment when a ruined and misgoverned Mysore would have been the convenient thing to find. What he described instead was a countryside of working irrigation, cultivated waste, and prosperous villages — the outcome the regulations were written to produce.

The reforms look more remarkable when set beside what other states were doing with their revenue in the same decades. The central question everywhere was the same: does the sovereign collect his own taxes through paid officials, or does he sell the right to collect them to somebody else? Almost everyone chose the second answer.

France. The wealthiest kingdom in Europe still farmed its indirect taxes to the Ferme générale, a syndicate of some forty financiers holding six-year contracts, collecting the salt tax and customs on the crown's behalf and keeping a substantial cut — around a fifth of royal income passed through their hands. The system was notoriously extractive, politically untouchable, and a direct contributor to the fiscal crisis that brought the monarchy down in the very years Tipu Sultan was abolishing the equivalent in Mysore. The Farmers-General were still in place until 1790; many went to the guillotine four years later.

The Ottoman Empire. Constantinople had gone further in the opposite direction. A decree of 1695 created the malikane — the tax farm held for life and heritable by a holder's sons — converting revenue collection into a form of property owned by a class of contractors. It solved the treasury's cash problem and permanently alienated the revenue from the state.

Iran. The comparison here is the sharpest, because Iran had been the region's great power within living memory. After Nader Shah's assassination in 1747 the country spent four decades in civil war. Revenue reverted to tuyul — assignments of land and its taxes to soldiers and notables, the same instrument Mysore was busy abolishing — and while Karim Khan Zand gave the settled population a genuine respite, the period between his death and the Qajar consolidation saw cultivators abandoning their land because the exactions on it had become unbearable. Land going out of cultivation is the exact opposite of the outcome Mysore's taccavi loans and reduced rates on newly broken ground were designed to produce.

The Indian successor states. Mughal practice, and that of the states which inherited it, ran on the jagir and the zamindar — assignments and hereditary rights of collection. This was the norm Tipu Sultan was breaking with, and breaking with it is what made him enemies at home.

Britain — the exception, and the real comparison. One state in this period had moved decisively the other way. Britain collected its excise through a large, salaried, inspected service that historians treat as the most efficient revenue bureaucracy in Europe, and it was that machinery — not superior soldiers — which let a medium-sized kingdom finance global war on borrowed money. What the Mysorean regulations describe is recognisably the same idea reached independently: paid officials rather than contractors, published rates rather than negotiated ones, written accounts that make a collector auditable.

The differences matter too, and are worth stating plainly. Mysore had no funded public debt, no bank, and no institution comparable to the one that let London borrow cheaply for decades — which is a large part of why the Company could absorb defeat and come back, and Mysore could not. Tipu Sultan's substitute was the state trading system and the deposit-taking treasury described under The Economic State: an attempt to build fiscal depth out of commerce rather than credit. But on the narrower question — who actually collects the land revenue, and on what terms — Mysore in the 1780s and 90s was closer to the most modern fiscal state in Europe than to France, the Ottomans, Iran, or its own neighbours.