1 - Northern and Central India

Summary

The upper Gangetic region, which today falls largely within the boundaries of Uttar Pradesh, exercised a palmary influence on the evolution of the Indian landholding system in the colonial period. Here the key-stone of the arch of the British revenue settlements was formed by the ‘village republics’, which became celebrated in the Western world through a memorable descriptive passage of Sir Charles Metcalfe, and which supplied the material from which Marx and Maine constructed their influential theories of the nature and role of the ‘Indian village community’. From the Doab or mesopotamia of the Ganges and Jumna, constituting the heart of the North-Western Provinces, the settlement system which accorded modern proprietary title to holders of jointly-owned or jointly-managed village estates was extended after 1849 as far as the vale of Peshawar when the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab came under British rule. South of the Jumna the village mahalwar system was equally influential in instituting a form of village proprietorship under very different tenurial conditions, firstly in the so-called Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, annexed in 1818, and later from 1862 throughout much of the region brought within the Central Provinces. One of the key questions which the historian has to answer is how far, in the absence of substantive technological change in agriculture, the fiscal and legal apparatus of the settlement system prompted a decisive structural alteration in agrarian society.