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Gomastha [Gumashtah] [Gomashtah] [Gumastha] [Gumasta][Gomastaus] [Gomastah] [Gomasta]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 11/14/20
Gomastha (also spelled Gumastha or Gumasta, Persian: agent[1]) described an Indian agent of the British East India Company employed in the Company's colonies, to sign bonds, usually compellingly, by local weavers and artisans to deliver goods to the Company.[2] The prices of the goods were fixed by the gomasthas. The goods were exported by the Company to Europe. Earlier supply merchants very often lived within the weaving village, and had a close relationship with the weavers, looking after their needs and helping them in times of crisis. The new gomasthas were outsiders with no long-term social link with the village. They acted arrogantly, marched into villages with sepoys and peons, and punished weavers for delays. The weavers thus lost the space to bargain and sell to different buyers; the price they received from the Company was miserably low and the loans they had accepted tied them to the Company. [2] A gomastha may also be described as ‘a paid manager of the private trader’s concerns’, who claimed ‘hardly any share in the profit and loss of his employer’s business’.[3]
Background
Main article: British East India Company
In the 18th century, the East India Company had established itself in India. Indian cotton and silk fabrics were in great demand worldwide and hence were of special interest to them. It proceeded to develop a system of management and control that would eliminate competition, control costs, and ensure regular supplies of cotton and silk goods. Given the small number of Englishmen, and their unfamiliarity with the local language and society, the Company turned to local intermediaries, and gave them legal authority to enforce contracts. The Company tried to eliminate the existing traders and brokers connected with the cloth trade, and establish more direct control over the weaver. For this purpose they appointed paid servants called gomasthas. who would obtain goods from local weavers and fix their prices.[2] The prices fixed were 15 per cent lower than market price and in extreme cases, even 40 per cent lower than the market price.[2] They would also supervise weavers, collect supplies, and examine the quality of cloth. They also prevented Company weavers from dealing with other buyers.[2]
Style of working
The Company’s agents who had the right to enforce contracts could well use the same coercive power to extort rents from the weavers. Such opportunism seems to have been common even late into the textile venture.[4] In case weavers refused signing contracts they were subjected to torture and even awarded imprisonment.
In this way the gomastas were useful in obtaining goods at a low price for the Company which made huge profits from their exports.[2]
The Company's Board of Trade records from 1793, 1815, and 1818, state that "as a rule the Company’s gomastas and other inferior servants extracted perquisites from the weavers, and not infrequently they were whipped or beaten with rattans [canes]." There were various kinds of "perquisites." One such was an extra charge: this might be a commission (dasturi), tribute (salami), or simply "expenses" (kharcha).Another was a deduction of a portion of the capital advance. Yet another was using debased currency to pay the weaver.
The gomastha and his appraisers, sometimes in collusion with Company officials, would falsely appraise cloth quality. They would charge the Company for High Quality, but pay the weaver for low quality.[6] The gomastas' profound knowledge about a particular area and their negotiating ability with local smaller merchants would be indispensable to firms.[3]
Complaints against Gomastas
A petition by the weavers of Santipur factory in 1801 contained various complaints regarding the gomasthas and their subordinates: "... [They] have taken a perquisite of one rupee upon every eight or nine rupees of the advances made us, before they will pay the money;" "He deducts half an anna out of every rupee as brokerage;" "We do not know what species of money they receive from the Government but when there is a batta [discount] on Gold Mohurs, they pay us in that coin ...".[7] In 1804, weavers of Golaghar submitted a petition against the Resident at the factory and his gomastas, alleging, among other things, that they classified their cloths into lower categories but gave them to the Company as higher quality.[8]
Notes
1. Markovits, 2000 & Glossary:xii
2. Datt & Sundharam 2007, p. 20
3. "Beyond market and hierarchies: Networking Asian merchants and merchant houses since the 19th century" (PDF), International Economic History Congress, 21–25 August 2006, Helsinki, retrieved 2008-04-11
4. Ghoshal 1966
5. "From Vanderbilt to Chittagong" (PDF), Wiley, retrieved 2008-04-11
6. Rachel E. Kranton and Anand V. Swamy (July 2007). "Contracts, Hold-Up, and Exports:Textiles and Opium in Colonial India" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-04-11.
7. Mitra 1978, pp. 234–35
8. Mitra 1978, p. 237
References
• Datt, Ruddar; Sundharam, K.P.M. (1965), Indian economy (55th ed.), New Delhi: S. Chand, ISBN 81-219-0298-3
• Ghoshal, H.R. (1966), Economic Transition in the Bengal Presidency (1793-1833), K.L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta
• Mitra, D.B. (1978), Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 1757-1833., K.L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta
• Markovits, Claude (2000), The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947, Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society (No. 6), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 11/14/20
For the purchase, collection, and custody of the goods, which constituted the freight to England, a complicated system of operations was required. As the state of the country was too low in respect of civilization and of wealth, to possess manufacturers and merchants, on a large scale, capable of executing extensive orders, and delivering the goods contracted for on pre-appointed days, the Company were under the necessity of employing their own agents to collect throughout the country, in such quantities as presented themselves, the different articles of which the cargoes to Europe were composed. Places of reception were required, in which the goods might be collected, and ready upon the arrival of the ships, that the expense of demurrage might be reduced to its lowest terms. Warehouses were built; and these, with the counting-houses, and other apartments for the agents and business of the place, constituted what were called the factories of the Company. Under the disorderly and inefficient system of government which prevailed in India, deposits of property were always exposed, either to the rapacity of the government, or under the weakness of the government to the hands of depredators. It was always therefore an object of importance to build the factories strong, and to keep their inmates armed and disciplined for self-defence, as perfectly as circumstances would admit. At an early period the Company even fortified those stations of their trade, and maintained professional troops, as often as the negligence permitted, or the assent could be obtained, of the Kings and Governors of the countries in which they were placed.
Of the commodities collected for the European market, that part, the acquisition of which was attended with the greatest variety of operations, was the produce of the loom. The weavers, like the other laborious classes of India, are in the lowest stage of poverty, being always reduced to the bare means of the most scanty subsistence. They must at all times, therefore, be furnished with the materials of their work, or the means of purchasing them; and with subsistence while the piece is under their hands. To transact in this manner with each particular weaver, to watch him that he may not sell the fabric which his employer has enabled him to produce, and to provide a large supply, is a work of infinite detail, and gives employment to a multitude of agents. The European functionary, who, in each district, is the head of as much business as it is supposed that he can superintend, has first his banyan, or native secretary, through whom the whole of the business is conducted: The banyan hires a species of broker, called a gomastah, at so much a month: The gomastah repairs to the aurung, or manufacturing town, which is assigned as his station; and there fixes upon a habitation, which he calls his cutchery: He is provided with a sufficient number of peons, a sort of armed servants; and hircarahs, messengers or letter carriers, by his employer: These he immediately dispatches about the place, to summon to him the dallâls, pycârs and weavers: The dallâls and pycârs are two sets of brokers; of whom the pycârs are the lowest, transacting the business of detail with the weavers; the dallâls again transact with the pycârs; the gomastah transacts with the dallâls, the banyan with the gomastah, and the Company’s European servant with the banyan. The Company’s servant is thus five removes from the workman; and it may easily be supposed that much collusion and trick, that much of fraud towards the Company, and much of oppression towards the weaver, is the consequence of the obscurity which so much complication implies.1 Besides banyan, there is attached to the European agent a mohurree, or clerk, and a cash-keeper, with a sufficient allowance of peons and hircarahs. Along with the gomastah is dispatched in the first instance as much money as suffices for the first advance to the weaver, that is, suffices to purchase the materials, and to afford him subsistence during part at least of the time in which he is engaged with the work. The cloth, when made, is collected in a warehouse, adapted for the purpose, and called a kattah. Each piece is marked with the weaver’s name; and when the whole is finished, or when it is convenient for the gomastah, he holds a kattah, as the business is called, when each piece is examined, the price fixed, and the money due upon it paid to the weaver. This last is the stage at which chiefly the injustice to the workman is said to take place; as he is then obliged to content himself with fifteen or twenty, and often thirty or forty per cent. less than his work would fetch in the market. This is a species of traffic which could not exist but where the rulers of the country were favourable to the dealer; as every thing, however, which increased the productive powers of the labourers added directly in India to the income of the rulers, their protection was but seldom denied.
-- The History of British India, vol. 3 of 6, by James Mill
Watts and Collet wrote to the Court of Directors from Chandernagore on 16 July 1756 “that the Nabob never intended to drive the English out of his province but would have been satisfied with a sum of money”. They asserted that they had forwarded a letter to this effect to Drake from Hooghly through the Dutch Director, but Drake did not agree with them. It may be that the Nawab’s resentment was too intense to be removed in the manner suggested by Watts and Collet. But it can be reasonably said that complete expulsion of the English was not his deliberate and premeditated design. He wrote to Pigot, the Governor of Madras, “It was not my intention to remove the mercantile business of the Company belonging to you from out of the subah of Bengal, but Roger Drake your gomasta [gomastha] was a very wicked and unruly man and began to give protection to persons who had accounts with the Patcha in his Koatey [Kothi-factory]. Notwithstanding all my admonitions, yet he did not desist from his shameless actions. Why should these people who come to transact the mercantile affairs of the Company be doers of such actions?” [Hill, op, cit., I, p. 196.] Drake and his Council did not make sincere efforts to reach an agreement with the Nawab. The little they did was half-hearted and belated. A letter was, if the testimony of Khwajah Wajid’s Chinsura diwan Shri Babu (Shiva Babu) is to be credited, sent by Drake to the Nawab at his persuasion and through him; but it was too late, hostilities having already commenced. [Letter to Court from Watts and Collet, 17 July 1756, para 1.]...
To procure commodities, the Company sometimes advanced money to dalals, merchants and manufacturers. They were thus “invested with a prior right to the goods for which they contracted, and hence their purchase in India acquired the name of investment.” Usually at the commencement of each year the Council in Calcutta despatched to the respective factories lists of investments to be collected, musters (samples) of raw silk and cotton piece-goods to guide them in selecting goods, and also bullion or money for payment. The Company tried to keep the merchants under effective control by taking securities for the money advanced to them (dadni), exacting penalties for their failure to honour their contracts in time, duly warning them against supplying goods of inferior quality, insisting on settlement of accounts in the English factories, not admitting in this any arbitration by the “subjects of this country,” and sometimes even holding the securities responsible for payment of the dues in arrears. But, in spite of all this, the merchants often failed to supply the full quantity of goods according to the terms of their contracts, and asked for bigger advances. So in June 1753 the Company abandoned the method of procuring investments by entering into contracts with merchants and introduced the practice of getting them direct from the aurangs [Aurung: The place where goods are manufactured] through their gomashtahs or agents. [Letter to Court, 18 January, 1754.] To meet the growing demand for garhas, the Council in Calcutta permitted the Kasimbazar factory to start some new aurangs at Ilambazar, Nanur, Moortally and Kagram. [Letter to Court, 9 September 1754, para 27.] In conformity with the orders of the Court of Directors the Council in Calcutta encouraged the weavers to settle in the Company’s territory in Calcutta for manufacturing different kinds of cloth. [Letter to Court, 18 January 1754.]...
Notwithstanding its temporary success, the new method of procuring investments did not ultimately produce satisfactory results. It vested the gumashtahs and the agents of the Company with powers “which they frequently abused", as Verelst justly tells us, “to their own emolument; and an authority given to enforce a just performance of engagements, became, notwithstanding the utmost vigilance of the higher servants, a source of new oppression." During the post-Plassey period their influence “proved so destructive of industry" that the Council in Calcutta restored “the old method of forming the investment, by contracting solely with merchants, in different parts of the country.” [Verelst, A View of the Rise, Progress and Present State of he English Government in Bengal (1772), p. 85.]
-- Fort William-India House Correspondence and Other Contemporary Papers Relating Thereto, Vol. I: 1748-1756, Edited by K. K. Datta, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of History, Patna University, Patna
Gomastha (also spelled Gumastha or Gumasta, Persian: agent[1]) described an Indian agent of the British East India Company employed in the Company's colonies, to sign bonds, usually compellingly, by local weavers and artisans to deliver goods to the Company.[2] The prices of the goods were fixed by the gomasthas. The goods were exported by the Company to Europe. Earlier supply merchants very often lived within the weaving village, and had a close relationship with the weavers, looking after their needs and helping them in times of crisis. The new gomasthas were outsiders with no long-term social link with the village. They acted arrogantly, marched into villages with sepoys and peons, and punished weavers for delays. The weavers thus lost the space to bargain and sell to different buyers; the price they received from the Company was miserably low and the loans they had accepted tied them to the Company. [2] A gomastha may also be described as ‘a paid manager of the private trader’s concerns’, who claimed ‘hardly any share in the profit and loss of his employer’s business’.[3]
Background
Main article: British East India Company
In the 18th century, the East India Company had established itself in India. Indian cotton and silk fabrics were in great demand worldwide and hence were of special interest to them. It proceeded to develop a system of management and control that would eliminate competition, control costs, and ensure regular supplies of cotton and silk goods. Given the small number of Englishmen, and their unfamiliarity with the local language and society, the Company turned to local intermediaries, and gave them legal authority to enforce contracts. The Company tried to eliminate the existing traders and brokers connected with the cloth trade, and establish more direct control over the weaver. For this purpose they appointed paid servants called gomasthas. who would obtain goods from local weavers and fix their prices.[2] The prices fixed were 15 per cent lower than market price and in extreme cases, even 40 per cent lower than the market price.[2] They would also supervise weavers, collect supplies, and examine the quality of cloth. They also prevented Company weavers from dealing with other buyers.[2]
Style of working
The Company’s agents who had the right to enforce contracts could well use the same coercive power to extort rents from the weavers. Such opportunism seems to have been common even late into the textile venture.[4] In case weavers refused signing contracts they were subjected to torture and even awarded imprisonment.
The publication of the two-volume Report of the Commissioners for the Investigation of the Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency in 1855, (henceforth the Report) drew attention to torture as a structural problem of policing, rather than an aberrant and extraordinary instance. The Report was initially meant to explore complaints about torture in the extraction of revenue in Madras presidency. The government of India extended the scope of the report to include the relationship between torture and policing. This itself is instructive of the dissonant relationship between attempts to extract revenue at all cost, (revenue demands rose at least threefold during the first few years of settlement in Madras) and the attempt to impose an equitable judicial system on native subjects.
-- Problems of Violence, States of Terror, by Anupama Rao
In this way the gomastas were useful in obtaining goods at a low price for the Company which made huge profits from their exports.[2]
The eighteenth century marked the gradual dissolution of the Mughal Empire in India and the establishment of British rule, initially under the auspices of the East India Company. The company, in search of quick profits, assumed control of Bengal’s lucrative textile industry, which produced one-third of all cotton textiles used in Europe at the time. It appointed its own network of much-hated middlemen, the most important of whom were called gomastas, under the agency system of 1753. In the words of a former company employee, " . . . [the gomastha] makes [the weavers] sign a bond for the delivery of a certain quantity of goods, at a certain time and price, and pays them part of the money in advance. The assent of the poor weavers is in general not deemed necessary .... Rights to the production of individual weavers were freely traded among the gomastas as if their clients were slaves. Those who refused to participate in the system were flogged, and on occasion killed. The prices the weavers received were, by one estimate, 20 to 40 percent less than they could have gotten in the marketplace.
–- Passage from, Nobel Peace Prize awardee and economist Muhammad Yunus's From Vanderbilt to Chittagong[5]
The Company's Board of Trade records from 1793, 1815, and 1818, state that "as a rule the Company’s gomastas and other inferior servants extracted perquisites from the weavers, and not infrequently they were whipped or beaten with rattans [canes]." There were various kinds of "perquisites." One such was an extra charge: this might be a commission (dasturi), tribute (salami), or simply "expenses" (kharcha).Another was a deduction of a portion of the capital advance. Yet another was using debased currency to pay the weaver.
The state of currency in Bengal from the early years of the eighteenth century was complicated. Coins of different mints in India, or coins of different years struck at the same mint, differed in value. “According to the trade usage of each different market they were liable to different rates of discount, and in order to make exchanges possible the values of actual rupees of every kind were expressible in terms of an ideal rupee known as the current or nominal rupee.” [Wilson, Early Annals of the English in Bengal, II, part I, p. liii.] Thus in Bengal at the beginning of the eighteenth century, 100 sicca rupees were equivalent to 112-1/2 current rupees. Subsequently, a hundred newly struck Murshidabad sicca coins were equal in value to 116 current rupees. But after three years of circulation their value diminished to 111 current rupees and they were then known as sanwat rupees. [Verelst, View of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the English Government m Bengal (1772), pp. 94-95.]
At Madras, where the English Company had a mint of their own, variations in the value of the rupee did not prove to be as troublesome as in Bengal. 89-1/2 ounces of dollar silver could always be converted into a little “more than 218 rupees, allowing two per cent for the cost of coining”, [Wilson, op. cit., II, part I, p. liii.] and so long as the Mughal Court was in the south these passed without any difficulty in southern India and in Bengal. But after the death of Aurangzeb, when the Mughal court was transferred to the north, the Bengal Government no longer required Madras rupees for remittance of imperial revenues, and their value in Bengal consequently went down, a high rate of batta (discount) being charged on them. [Letter to Court, 2 January 1752, para 36.] The Company could not now get for its silver the same number of Bengal coins as before. In June 1752, they had to sell bullion to Jagat Seth at 201 sicca rupees for 240 sicca weight and paid to their merchants 106 Madras rupees for 100 siccas “which was the lowest batta they could take them at.” [Letter to Court, 18 September 1752, para 69.] In the beginning of 1753 siccas were not available at less than 111-1/2 Arcot rupees and 109-1/2 Madras rupees for a hundred. [Letter to Court, 1 January 1753, para 8.] A year later the Kasimbazar factory complained of “scarcity of siccas”. [Letter to Court, 4 January 1754, para 68.] In March 1755 the Council in Calcutta noted that there was no demand for bullion. [Letter to Court, 1 March 1755, para 5.]
To prevent new coins from being replaced by old ones in circulation, there was the practice of charging discount or batta on a coin according to the period of its circulation. Further, there was then absolutely no uniformity of currency in Bengal, because, besides the Madras rupees and the Bengal coins, coins of mints situated in other parts of India poured into the province as a result of its having a favourable balance of trade. These coins were very often debased either by the mints or by some interested persons. The shroffs (money-changers) availed themselves of the opportunity afforded by this debasement to charge batta at arbitrary rates for the exchange of such coins. All this must have created disadvantages for the local traders as well as for the Company.
As the proprietor of the premier banking house of the time, Jagat Seth of Murshidabad had considerable influence in the matter of currency. Watts wrote to the Council in Calcutta on 8 February 1753 that he was "the sole purchaser of all the bullion that is imported in this province by which he is annually a very considerable gainer.” For purchase of investments the Council in Calcutta not only received from Bombay and Madras whatever treasure they could spare but also occasionally borrowed money from Jagat Seth and some minor bankers, which they repaid in bullion. [Letter to Court, 22 December 1748, paras 8 and 12; 4 February 1751, paras 72-75; 20 August 1751, paras 77-78.] Cowries formed the lowest medium of exchange in Bengal and were generally used for small transactions.
To avoid the inconveniences arising out of the exchange of bullion the English Company sought the permission of the Mughal Emperors, Aurangzeb and Shah Alam I, to establish a mint near their settlement at Fort William on the ground that the mints at Rajmahal, Dacca and Satgaon were far away. [Wilson, op. cit., II, part II, pp. 263 and 276-77. There was a mint at Patna.] But the Mughal Government did not then allow this infringement of one of its sovereign rights. The Company obtained from Emperor Farrukhsiyar permission for free use of the Nawab’s mint at Murshidabad for three days in a week to coin their own bullion. But they could not avail themselves of this permission because of strong opposition from Murshid Quli Jafar Khan. [Wilson, op. cit., II, part II, p. 232; Letter to Court, 31 January 1752 para 77.]
In 1751 the Nawab’s Government ordered that “all money whether bullion or rupees” should be sent to the mint at Murshidabad “to be coined there into Siccas or disposed of to Jugutseat” [Letter to Court, 17 February 1751/2, para 2.] and that the Europeans should not make payments to their merchants in any coins except new siccas. Fearing that the enforcement of this order would prove prejudicial to their interests, the English, French and Dutch companies directed their respective chiefs at Kasimbazar to act “in concert” in this matter and to make a representation to the Nawab’s Government to grant the usual currency to bullion and the different types of coins. This joint action produced the desired effect. The English continued their efforts to obtain permission of the Nawab's Government for establishing a mint in Calcutta, [Letters from Court, 23 January 1754, No. 3, para 57 and No. 4, para 1; Letter to Court, 30 January 1755.] and they ultimately succeeded in getting it from Sirajud Daulah in February 1757.
-- Fort William-India House Correspondence and Other Contemporary Papers Relating Thereto, Vol. I: 1748-1756, Edited by K. K. Datta, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of History, Patna University, Patna
The gomastha and his appraisers, sometimes in collusion with Company officials, would falsely appraise cloth quality. They would charge the Company for High Quality, but pay the weaver for low quality.[6] The gomastas' profound knowledge about a particular area and their negotiating ability with local smaller merchants would be indispensable to firms.[3]
Complaints against Gomastas
A petition by the weavers of Santipur factory in 1801 contained various complaints regarding the gomasthas and their subordinates: "... [They] have taken a perquisite of one rupee upon every eight or nine rupees of the advances made us, before they will pay the money;" "He deducts half an anna out of every rupee as brokerage;" "We do not know what species of money they receive from the Government but when there is a batta [discount] on Gold Mohurs, they pay us in that coin ...".[7] In 1804, weavers of Golaghar submitted a petition against the Resident at the factory and his gomastas, alleging, among other things, that they classified their cloths into lower categories but gave them to the Company as higher quality.[8]
Notes
1. Markovits, 2000 & Glossary:xii
2. Datt & Sundharam 2007, p. 20
3. "Beyond market and hierarchies: Networking Asian merchants and merchant houses since the 19th century" (PDF), International Economic History Congress, 21–25 August 2006, Helsinki, retrieved 2008-04-11
4. Ghoshal 1966
5. "From Vanderbilt to Chittagong" (PDF), Wiley, retrieved 2008-04-11
6. Rachel E. Kranton and Anand V. Swamy (July 2007). "Contracts, Hold-Up, and Exports:Textiles and Opium in Colonial India" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-04-11.
7. Mitra 1978, pp. 234–35
8. Mitra 1978, p. 237
References
• Datt, Ruddar; Sundharam, K.P.M. (1965), Indian economy (55th ed.), New Delhi: S. Chand, ISBN 81-219-0298-3
• Ghoshal, H.R. (1966), Economic Transition in the Bengal Presidency (1793-1833), K.L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta
• Mitra, D.B. (1978), Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 1757-1833., K.L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta
• Markovits, Claude (2000), The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947, Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society (No. 6), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris