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James Thomason

Little Shelford, England, 1804 - 1853, Bareilly, India

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nb2011031675
Thomason, James (1804–1853), administrator in India, was born at Little Shelford, near Cambridge, on 3 May 1804, the son of Thomas Truebody Thomason (1774–1829) and his first wife, Elizabeth, née Fawcett (d. c.1825). His father, who had been curate to the Cambridge evangelical Charles Simeon, in 1808 accepted a post in Bengal, where he became a student of Indian languages and culture, a promoter of Indian education, a noted churchman, and, for a time, chaplain to Lord Moira. Mrs Thomason founded the European Female Orphanage, Calcutta.

James Thomason was sent back to England from India in 1814 to live with his grandmother Mrs Dornford, and Charles Simeon, both powerful advocates of Christian beliefs, who moulded his firm but unobtrusive adherence to the Church of England. At Aspenden Hall School in Hertfordshire his contemporaries included T. B. Macaulay. In 1818 he moved to a school at Stanstead in Sussex, and then went to the East India College at Haileybury, where he distinguished himself in literary subjects, mathematics, and political economy. He obtained an appointment as a writer with the East India Company, and arrived in Calcutta in September 1822.

Thomason became proficient in vernacular languages at Fort William College, spent his early service in the judicial branch, and was for a while in governor-general Lord William Bentinck's secretariat. About 1825, following his mother's death, illness took him back to England, where he proposed to Maynard Eliza Grant (d. 1839). He returned to India and became registrar to the Bengal sadr court, where he developed skills in both Hindu and Muslim law, and spent a period as a district judge. Ill health again sent him to England in 1827. After his return to India, on 19 February 1829 he married Maynard Eliza Grant at Malda, where her father, William Grant, was stationed as a civil servant. They were to have some seven children. In 1832 his career took a decisive turn with his request for appointment as magistrate and collector of Azamgarh in the North-Western Provinces, to gain first-hand knowledge of district administration. Azamgarh came to have special significance for Thomason, who later recorded that ‘It was to me a field of victory, where such repute and status as I had in the service was founded’ (Temple, James Thomason, 54). He spent five years as magistrate, collector, and settlement officer at a time when the reassessment of land revenue by revenue commissioner Robert M. Bird was in train, and produced a well-known work, Report on the Settlement of Chuklah Azimgurh, in 1837. This experience influenced Thomason in favour of peasant proprietors, and, more generally, laid the foundations for his later success as lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces. In 1837 he was appointed secretary to the North-Western Provinces government, but had to return to England, this time because of the illness of his wife, who subsequently died in London in 1839. Thomason returned to Agra in 1840, succeeding R. M. Bird as a member of the board of revenue, and in 1842 he became foreign secretary to the government of India.

On 12 December 1843 Thomason was made lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces, at the comparatively early age of thirty-nine. His responsibilities were vast, including aspects of most of the civil and judicial administration of the provinces. His tenure of office was to be formative in the development of a devolved system of government. The administration of land revenue was of special importance. The settlement under regulation IX of 1833 had just been completed, and Thomason brought an acute mind to the completion of Bird's work. He was determined to set down his interpretation of land revenue principles clearly; he saw a just assessment as crucial to the happiness of the people. The assessment should determine the value of the land and establish the rights that went with it: ‘The object of this investigation is not to create new rights but to define those which exist’ (Temple, James Thomason, 145), he wrote. He was inclined to award responsibility for the revenue, and any profit accruing to cultivation, to the peasant cultivators. Joint responsibility was ‘an original and well recognised principle in all village communities ... the very bond which had held them together’, and it was essential to make the community feel ‘the strength of the bond which unites them and the necessity of common exertion for the safety of the whole’ (Metcalf, 119–20). Thomason clashed with the board of revenue in support of the village community concept.

Thomason was less doctrinaire than Bird in his interpretation of the 1833 settlement, and recognized that individual cultivators were often unable to stand alone when deprived of the talukdars as intermediate revenue holders. He was willing in principle, therefore, to accept talukdars being awarded the revenue engagements where peasant and intermediary were of the same kin and mutually anxious to maintain their connection. Thomason was, nevertheless, keen to cut the traditional share of intermediaries by about half, to 10 per cent of the revenue, despite the qualms of the East India Company directors. He was inclined to allow prompt sale of defaulting estates despite the reservations of district collectors, and took the typically early Victorian view that ‘the measures of the Government ought to be made to favour the industry of the thrifty rather than to save the unthrifty from the effects of their unthriftyness’ (Metcalf, 122).

Thomason's views of land revenue administration in the North-Western Provinces were embodied in his authoritative and influential works Directions for Settlement Officers and Directions for Collectors, both of 1844, the first complete codes of settlement compiled in India, which continued in use for many years. The place of his land revenue policy in the causes of the Indian mutiny is still debated. While some talukdars certainly lost by its working, many other factors have to be taken into account to explain the events of 1857.

Thomason contributed importantly in the area of public works. He was, probably more than any other single individual, the facilitator of two great schemes of northern India—the grand trunk road and the Ganges Canal. The grand trunk road was macadamized and had police posts, resthouses, and caravanserais established. The canal, largely the brainchild of Sir P. T. Cautley, was a vast and unique work, and the first purely British scheme of its kind in India. It stretched 350 miles from Hardwar to Cawnpore, and opened between 1854 and 1857.

Land revenue and public works were connected to Thomason's contributions to education. He thought that a carefully recorded land settlement would be an incentive to basic education. The Roorkee Engineering College, founded in 1848, provided public works training for both Europeans and Indians, and Thomason was keen to see this principle extended elsewhere in education. His first biographer called him ‘the father of primary education by the state in Northern India ... no matter lay closer to his heart than this’ (Temple, Men and Events of my Time in India, 48). Thomason's scheme envisaged a school for each group of villages, government inspection, scholarships, and the establishment of several state-funded schools as models. He wanted to ‘stimulate the people to exertions on their own part to remove ignorance’, to encourage self-improvement ‘in a manner consonant with Native institutions and ideas’, rather than ‘actually supplying to them the means of instruction at the cost of Government’ (ibid., 174–5). He also encouraged training and a more systematic approach within the administration, touring widely among his subordinates, and initiated a statistical department to produce analysis of public policy for wider debate. When the Punjab was annexed in 1849, the governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, turned to Thomason to help provide the officers necessary to administer the new territory. Thomason considered the transfer of nineteen men ‘a heavy tax’ (Mason, 303), but it was of immense significance to the British administration in India.

Thomason recognized that the British had obligations towards India, noting after the Second Anglo-Sikh War that:

it is in the quiet operations of peace, which ensue from such a turmoil, that constancy, perseverance, circumspection and diligence are called forth. That is the quiet and unostentatious labour, but also the high and responsible duty, to which we are now called to address ourselves, with regard to this great country, which God has placed in our hands. (Temple, James Thomason, 122)

He hoped that Christianity might spread within India and supported protestant missionaries in his private capacity, but was opposed to any official propagation of the religion; he would not, for example, allow any religious teaching in government schools. He was an unstinting and generous personal supporter of charities and churches, colleges, schools, and dispensaries.

James Thomason became a key figure in the East India Company's government, but at the cost of unremitting effort. In August 1853 he experienced an ill-defined but persistent decline in health; he died at Bareilly, North-Western Provinces, while staying with his married daughter, Mrs Maynie Hay, on 27 September 1853, the day that his appointment as governor of Madras was confirmed in Britain. He was buried at Bareilly church the next day. Dalhousie commented, ‘He was a first-rate man, invaluable to India and to me’ (Baird, 265). The engineering college at Roorkee was renamed Thomason College (later the University of Roorkee) as a fitting tribute.

David J. Howlett
Sources

R. Temple, James Thomason (1893) · P. Mason [P. Woodruffe], The men who ruled India (1954) · T. R. Metcalf, Land, landlords, and the British raj: northern India in the nineteenth century (1979) · A. Siddiqi, Agrarian change in a northern Indian state (1973) · E. Stokes, The English utilitarians and India (1959) · DNB · R. Dutt, The economic history of India under early British rule (1901) · I. Stone, Canal irrigation in British India (1984) · J. A. B. Ramsay, marquess of Dalhousie, Private letters, ed. J. G. A. Baird (1910) · R. Temple, Men and events of my time in India (1882)
Archives

BL OIOC · National Archives of India, New Delhi :: BL, corresp. with Captain Cautley, Add. MS 28599 · NA Scot., letters to Lord Dalhousie

Likenesses

portrait, repro. in Temple, James Thomason, frontispiece
© Oxford University Press 2004–16
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

David J. Howlett, ‘Thomason, James (1804–1853)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/27251, accessed 24 Oct 2017]

James Thomason (1804–1853): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/27251

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Last Updated8/7/24

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