2 - Privileged land tenure in village India in the early nineteenth century

Summary

This paper poses two questions. Why was revenue-free or revenue-privileged tenure in the form of inam or lakhiraj land apparently far less extensive in northern than in other parts of India? What role did such tenure play at the village level?

Straight political and historical considerations doubtless supply part of the answer to the first question. The North felt the full weight of Muslim imperial power over a protracted period and so was precluded from the massive alienation of revenue-bearing land to Hindu temples that occurred in the far South. Even so, religious and charitable inam in the Madras presidency, when at last brought to book in the 1860s, proved to be only a quarter or so of total inam, the great bulk of which – that is, some three-fifths – was by this time classified as personal inam. But allowing the historical argument its fullest scope, it may still be urged that the survival of extensive revenue-free or favourably rated land into the mid nineteenth century is to be explained by the particular form of the initial colonial impact rather than by endemic differences in the pre-colonial period. While settling at first with a heterogeneous mass of revenue-engagers (malguzars), the British in the North, in the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, recognised in effect only two superior tenures – the temporary revenue farm and the proprietary zamindari right (of which the taluqdari was merely a later refinement). Privileged superior tenures like jagirs, jaedads, mukararis, istumraris, and the like, were bundled roughly into one of these two forms, and hence rapidly disappeared. Practice was different in other presidencies.