Petty Chieftains

• From the writings of Abul Fazal and other contemporary authors, it is clear that personal ownership of land was very old in India. The rights of ownership in land were being created all the time.
• The tradition was that anyone who first brought land under cultivation was considered its owner. There was plenty of cultivable wasteland (banjar) available in medieval times. It was not difficult for an enterprising group of people to settle a new village or to bring under cultivation the wastelands belonging to a village and become the owners of these lands.
• In addition to owning the lands they cultivated, a considerable section of the Zamindars had the hereditary right of collecting land revenue from a number of villages. This was called his talluqa or his zamindari.
• For collecting the land revenue, the zamindars received a share of the land revenue which could go up to 25 per cent in some areas. The zamindar was not the “owner” of all the lands comprising his zamindari.
• The peasants who actually cultivated the land could not be dispossessed as long as they paid the land revenue. Thus, the zamindars and the peasants had their own hereditary rights in land. The figures, perhaps also include the strength of the subordinate rajas.
• The zamindars generally had close connections on a caste, clan or tribal basis with the peasants settled in their zamindaris. They had considerable local information also about the productivity of land. The zamindars formed a very numerous and powerful class which was to be fund all over the country under different names such as deshmukh, patil, nayak, etc. Thus, it was not easy for any central authority to ignore or alienate them.
• It is difficult to say anything about the living standards of the zamindars. Compared to the nobles, their income was limited; the smaller ones may have lived more or less like the peasants. However, the living standards of the larger zamindars might have approached those of petty rajas or nobles. Most of the zamindars apparently lived in the countryside and formed a kind of loose, dispersed local gentry.
• It would not be correct to look upon the zamindars merely as those who fought for control over land and exploited the cultivators in the area they dominated. Many of the zamindars had close caste and kinship ties with the land-owning cultivating castes in their zamindari. These zamindars not only set social standard, they also proved capital and organization for settling new villages, or extending and improving cultivation. But the precise extents of such efforts have yet to be studied in detail.