COMMUNICATION 71 Free trade would enable the poor peasants to get higher wages and better price for agricultural produce. Dwarakanath Tagore, for instance, wrote under a pseudonym, 'A Zamindar', "it is^admitted that vast tracts of waste land were brought under indigo cultivation, that the poor peasants had seen better days due to countrywide investment of the Indigo Planters. The peasants, who were compelled to work gratis or in lieu of a handful of paddy, could then get a wage ofRs 4/- per mensem.'584 The real story, however, was otherwise. Lalitmohan Mitra's The History of Indigo Disturbance in Bengal (1903) gave a full picture of the Indigo exploitation. But it is significant that planters5 position before and after the renewal of the charter (1834) was completely different. The indigo planters had obtained the right of purchase of land according to their capacity only after 1884. Before his journey to England, Rammohun could see the planters cultivating indigo only as commercial crops under special permission from the government and as such their exploitation was then restricted. Rammohun did not live to see the end of the tale. Rammohun's reaction to the Permanent Settlement (1793) is also very important. He himself amassed much wealth as a result of the Settlement. He earned from his Govindpur and Rameshwarpur Estates Rs 5,000 to 6,000 in 1899, excluding the revenues thereof. Yet he did not approve of the system. The major defects of the Permanent Settlement as pointed out by him, were: The landholders were benefited by it but the peasant workers were in a very miserable state; under the Permanent Settlement there should be, he felt a maximum beyond which the landholders should not be able to increase rent. The promise that ryots would get protection under the law was actually not recognised in the law under the Permanent Settlement; the Zamindars could raise rent and allocate waste land as cultivable; the court had no jurisdiction to enquire whether the enhancement was justified; and the decrees were usually issued in favour of the Zamindars. Rammohun also emphasised that as the courts were situated far off from the lands, the so-called protection of law was beyond the ryot's reach and the English judicial system was complex and costly for the peasants. The collectors themselves were magistrates and Rammohun emphasized that the English assessor in civil courts should be replaced by native persons, who had personal knowledge about the land and its problems. The author would like to draw the attention of the readers to the fact that before 1926 the peasants' cause was never raised in the form of a resolution on the Congress Platform. Even at the Gauhati session of the Congress (1926) the motion was lost on the plea that it would destroy the landlord-peasant unity. The movers of the resolution then had no alternative to forming a new party, namely, Peasants' and Workers' Party (1927).28 While the national leadership had been vacillating on the question even in 1926, let us see what Rammohun had foreseen in 1831. It would >