The Road Cess, Civilizing Missions and the World of the Landholders in Nineteenth-century Bengal

Abstract

This article follows the debate on the implementation of the road cess in late nineteenth-century Bengal. To understand how ‘cess’ was defined, it enters the discussion on the problematic category of the ‘local’. The debate in the official circles mainly addressed two questions: whether ‘cess’ was a legal tax or not, and whether cess should be a local tax or a centralized one. The thematic division of the article coincides with the chronology of the road cess in India. The Bengal District Road Cess Act was passed in 1871. The debate on the appropriate incidence of the tax—whether its burden was to be borne by travellers on these roads, or by landholders for the construction of the roads—had intensified by the 1850s. Decades earlier, in the 1810s, the revenue officers of Bengal set out to inquire into the probable existence of a road tax in Shahabad district of Bihar. This article will trace the protracted stages of the history of the road cess in India from the 1780s to 1900, traversing through the theoretical debates on the Permanent Settlement and the practical experiences of cess collection in various districts.