How did colonial land revenue arrangements alter the relationship between peasants and the rural economy in India? Evaluate their contribution to agrarian unrest during the nineteenth century.

The British East India Company's restructuring of rural property relations transformed land from a communally mediated means of subsistence into an alienable, commercial commodity, dismantling traditional socio-economic safety nets.

Colonial Tenurial Interventions:

• Permanent Settlement (1793): Created a class of absentee landlords (Zamindars) in Bengal, Bihar, and Odisha, reducing hereditary cultivators to tenants-at-will facing extortionate cesses.
• Ryotwari System: Direct settlement with cultivators in Madras and Bombay presidencies under inflexible, exorbitant state revenue demands payable exclusively in cash.
• Rise of Moneylenders: Rigid auction laws for revenue defaults compelled cultivators into the clutches of moneylenders, leading to widespread land alienations that ignited the Deccan Riots (1875) and Pabna Agrarian Leagues.