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ORIGIN OF THE ZEMINDAR'S CLAIMS.

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revenue which he had formerly received for his own benefit, and who still clung to the idea of a right so to receive it, would, even if entirely loyal to the new Government, put more prominently forward in his own mind, and consciously or unconsciously in his conduct, his hereditary beneficial right, than his merely official right: and thus he would be in a state of open or secret antagonism to Mahomedan ideas, which could only recognise him as an official, and which were repugnant to hereditary right. This observation applies in different degrees to all the revenue collectors who had been employed under the old system. If, moreover, through ignorance of the community below such superior collector, and from the fact that it was from his hands that the revenue was ultimately received, they were induced to look upon him as the real revenue-payer, he would grow to be considered a sort of proprietor of his district, as he had always secretly claimed to be. But the time would come when his true position would be discovered; and then, if he proved refractory, the struggle against his claims would recommence. It is quite obvious that there could be no room for any such person as I have indicated without taking away something from the village community or from the State: and when the aid of the ancient rulers became no longer necessary, or could no longer be depended upon, the interests of the village community, that is of the cultivators generally, would probably recommend themselves as better deserving protection than the interests of a powerful subject, who had dangerous claims and a constant tendency to encroach not only upon the rights of the cultivators but also upon the rights of the State. Accordingly we shall find that at more than one period the zemindars, as these superior

LECTURE
II.

LECTURE

II.

The village community.

Summary.

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DEPRESSION OF THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY.

collectors of revenue were then called, had grown sufficiently powerful to lead the Government to attempt to crush them but we shall also find that the zemindars had made for themselves a position which was after a time resumed by their successors; and that in the struggle between the hereditary and proprietary ideas derived from the old system, and the purely personal and official theory of the Mahomedans, the Hindoo ideas still held their ground, although they did not obtain a complete mastery.

The tendency of the Mahomedan rule would therefore be, as it seems to me, to depress, at any rate at first, the village community, and to make it shrink within itself; and to recognise very slightly any one below the chief collector of the revenue, whether headman or rajah: and the tendency would further be to enhance at first the rights and powers of the revenue collectors as against all below them; and thus give them the means of carrying on with success a struggle with the Mahomedan ideas, and of encroaching on the rights claimed by the State.

If this be the correct view of the case, the Mahomedans did not consciously alter the rights of any of the parties: they strove to expel the hereditary principle with respect to the officers of the revenue, and they strove equally to raise the rate of revenue: but they do not appear to have intended to alter the relations of the parties having interests in the land amongst themselves, or even to alter their relation to the State.

They might no doubt, if they had thought fit, have displaced all above the village headman, and kept the machinery strictly official: but even if they were in a position to do so, they do not seem to have actually done so; but to have recognised the rights then claimed in the

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land, and thus to have made no deliberate change at all in the nature of the rights in the land, or even in the fiscal machinery. I have endeavoured to point out some of the indirect effects of the new ideas; and we shall see that at a later stage, when in fact it was too late, the Mahomedan principles did assert themselves, but with only partial success. And whether the causes be as I have suggested or not, we find that zemindars did arise and become powerful in Mahomedan times, displacing to a great extent the village headman; and that the village fiscal organization fell into decay, and its growth and development were arrested.

LECTURE 11.

The Mahomedan rulers then collected the revenue for some time in much the same way as the Hindoo rulers had done, with the intervention in some cases of the rajah or powerful personage of the district.' They continued the same revenue machinery and collected the revenue through the Hindoo chowdhries, and, where these had existed, zemindars; as the established representatives of the cultivators, and as collectors of the revenue of a fiscal division or pergunnah. The chowdhry afterwards became the The Crory. Mahomedan Crory, administering a chucklah, or a district yielding a crore of dams or two lacs and a half of rupees a year, and he was one of the officers from whom zemindars sprung. He got an allowance of five per cent. on the collections for his remuneration, together with small allotments of the revenue for his subsistence, called nancar or nancar saverum,* to probably about the same amount.

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1 Baillie's Land Tax, xxxvii. Land Tenure by a Civilian, 33, 73. Fifth Report, Vol. I, 17.

• Fifth Report, Vol. I, 257,258. Mr. Campbell's Evidence before the Select Committee of the House of Commons (1832), 2355.

3 Fifth Report, Vol. II, 7, 14, 15. See Harington's Analysis, Vol. III, 327 Fifth Report, Vol. II, 7.

LECTURE

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Influence of Mahomedan and English ideas.

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THE INFLUENCE OF FOREIGN IDEAS.

The headman generally continued to distribute the assessment amongst the villagers, as he did even down to British times;1 and he realized the revenue from the cultivators, which he paid into the treasury, or to the superior revenue authority. In later times the headman generally sank into the position of a subordinate revenue-payer, or of a muzkooree, instead of an huzooree malgoozar; paying revenue, not direct to the treasury or the superior revenue officer as such, but paying through a zemindar or talookdar. The village community appears to have gradually sunk, and to have lost its importance as a fiscal unit, although it may have retained and perhaps intensified its social influence. Its principle, as the outcome of the joint family, was alien to the Mahomedan ideas of personal and individual right, joint families being unknown amongst the Mahomedans. The influence of Mahomedan ideas, and the effect of a period of disorder and disruption, seems to have resulted in a diminution of the importance of these village communities somewhat in the same way as a disintegration was caused by Roman progress in the family communities of Poland, Bohemia, Carinthia and Carniola, which disappeared before the new ideas.* A like effect seems to have been produced by English notions of individual rights. It is remarkable that it is in Bengal, which was ultimately brought more completely under Mahomedan, and earlier under English control, than any other part of the country where the Hindoo element still preponderates, that the notion of individual proprietary right is most complete; that the joint family is most loosely

1 Land Tenure by a Civilian, 77.

2 Land Tenure by a Civilian, 62.

3 Revue des deux Mondes, tome 101, P. 42.

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connected, and most easily dissolved; that the rights of its members are alienable and freely alienated; and that it is most practicable for a Hindoo to acquire separate property, and least difficult for a stranger to acquire land untrammelled by the restrictions of Hindoo law. It is also in Bengal that the village communities have decayed most: and that the zemindars have acquired the greatest influence. The power of the zemindars has, to a great extent, been built upon the ruins of the Hindoo system. They were at first recognised as officers, or partly as officers and partly as persons with a certain interest in the revenue derived from Hindoo times; but the indirect effect of their recognition by the State, at a time when the old Hindoo forces of joint property and hereditary right were weakened, tended to give them a larger right than they had ever ventured to claim; just as the recognition of the zemindars as proprietors at the Permanent Settlement has tended to make them in practice absolute proprietors. Thus, although little was formally changed at the Mahomedan conquest, the seeds of much practical change were sown.

LECTURE

II.

In those parts of the country where the village commu- The zemindar. nities were in vigour, the headmen seem to have retained their position to some extent, and to have dealt with the State direct as huzooree malgoozars under the old Hindoo titles of mokuddums, munduls and bhuinias (or zemindars). But in other places the ancient rajahs and revenue collectors became talookdars and zemindars, and collected the revenue as such; aumils being appointed to check or control them, with large bodies of troops under their command, cantoned in the district. These zemindars

1 Land Tenure by a Civilian, 43. Orissa, Vol. I, 244, 247, 248, 264. 2 Land Tenure by a Civilian, 33, 40, 73. Orissa, Vol. II, 222.

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