3 - Collecting rents and revenues

Summary

Accepting duties of rent collection from a raja-zamindar was a way to share in kingship. From the time an intermediary received betel and clothes from his raja's wardrobe, he began to participate in the noble condition of sovereignty. However modest his powers and income, he was now a patron to whom clients brought requests and expressed respect. He could use his discretion to distress or forgive the tenant in arrears. When he met dependent jotdars or fed guests at a wedding, his renters would be aware he stood on the multi-runged ladder of kingship. Best of all was transforming a temporary right to rents of an area into a perpetual holding to which he could retreat as the superior landholder rather than as someone else's employee. Henry Vansittart described the urge in 1766:

When a man rises himself either by the army or finances – he is desirous of getting his native village and two or three about it, that he may keep his holydays in pomp with his family or if a foreigner, he covets an estate in land, that he may secure to himself a retreat of the time when fortune may cease to smile. He accordingly either purchases from a Zamindar, or gets a grant from the Nawab of five or six villages at a rent much below their real value.

Whether a small cog in the rent-collecting hierarchy or the holder of several villages, an ambitious man typically sought a share of the rents in order to fulfill some aspects of a ruler's dharma, such as celebrating “his holydays in pomp.”