© 2026 LearnInShort
Before there was a national movement there was a revenue receipt. The East India Company had won Bengal's diwani in 1765 and now had to answer a purely administrative question: from whom does the state collect the land tax, and how much, and how often? The three answers it gave over the next sixty years — Permanent Settlement, Ryotwari, Mahalwari — decided who owned Indian land for the next century and a half.
Treat this as one case study rather than three lists. Each system is a contract, and the whole of it is settled by three questions: who signs, how much is fixed, and can the amount be revised. Answer those three and the map, the dates and the officials attach themselves.
It also explains the rest of the syllabus. The indigo revolt, the Deccan riots, Champaran, the drain theory and the demand for swadeshi all grow out of these contracts. Peasant anger did not arrive from nowhere; it arrived from a receipt.
1. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal was introduced by:
2. Under the Ryotwari system, the revenue settlement was made directly with:
3. The Mahalwari system, framed under Regulation VII of 1822, is chiefly associated with:
4. The book 'Poverty and Un-British Rule in India', which set out the drain of wealth theory, was written by:
5. The 'Sunset Clause' of the Permanent Settlement provided that:
6. The play 'Nil Darpan', which exposed the condition of the indigo cultivators of Bengal, was written by:
7. The Indigo Revolt, in which cultivators refused to sow indigo for the planters, broke out in:
8. Which of the three land revenue systems covered the largest share of British Indian territory?