The Land and Agriculture

Abstract

BY the middle years of the nineteenth century the land revenue systems and consequent tenurial structure throughout British India exhibited a pattern of striking provincial variation. The large Bengal Presidency, the first great territorial acquisition, boasted a zamindari system, in which the British had conferred rights of revenue payment and landlord and magisterial status on the zamindar overlords. Throughout most of the south and west ‘however’—in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies — revenue settlements had attempted to break through to the actual cultivators of the soil, ensuring a ryotwari or peasant proprietary tenure. In the later acquisitions of the Punjab, the North-west Provinces and finally Oudh, a hybrid system of mahalwari settlements was widespread — here effective ownership of most land was vested in cultivators but land revenue was rendered communally by the village.