The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s7.12

c4.s7.12

Further still, the rate of assessment which was paid by cultivators of the revenue assigned lands was fairly low. According to the supervisors of the Bengal Districts in the 1770s and early 1780s, the rate of assessment charged by the *Bazee Zemin* revenue assignees was around one-quarter to one-third of the rate which the British had begun to demand from the lands which were treated as *Khalsa*,⁸⁵ a category which was now just swallowing up practically all the other categories. A more or less similar phenomenon obtained in the various districts of the Madras Presidency—even as late as the 1820s.⁸⁶ Moreover, though it may seem unbelievable, the area which constituted Malabar had, till about 1750, never been subject to a land tax.⁸⁷ It had a variety of other mercantile and judicial taxes, but land in Malabar—according to British investigators themselves—never paid revenue of any kind till the peace was wholly shattered by the Europeans, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. Even during Tipu’s period, the actual receipts from Malabar were fairly small.