The agrarian system of Moslem India

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1804119261

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-188010

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Moreland, William Harrison http://d-nb.info/gnd/172263670

Title:: The agrarian system of Moslem India

Edition:: 2. ed. Reissue (d. Ausg. Cambridge) 1929; [Reprint]

Place of publication:: Delhi

Publisher:: Oriental Books, Munshiram Manoharlal

Year of publication:: 1968

Scope:: XVII, 296 S.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter VII. The outlying regions

Collection:: Economics Books

THE OUTLYING REGIONS 191 When the first Fort William was being constructed in Sttanuti, the English merchants naturally desired to obtain possession of some land in its immediate vicinity, and in the year 1698, with the sanction of the provincial Viceroy, they bought the rights (whatever they were) of the holders of these three Towns. In the sale-deed, the holders were styled zamindar, and the English understood the tran- saction as a purchase of the zamindari, or, as they rendered the word, ‘the right of renting” the Towns. In this transaction the word zamindar can be read in one of two ways Taken in its general sense, it may mean “holder of land,” denoting the fact of possession, but implying nothing as to the title on which possession is based; and this was probably the meaning current in the locality at this period. In the alternative, it might denote holding land by some particular title (whatever it was) derived from the Moslem ruler. Neither of these alternatives can be made to agree with the precise use of the word zamindar in the literature of Northern India, where, from the four- teenth to the eighteenth century, it denoted possession by a particular title antecedent to Moslem rule, that is to say its application was limited to the class which I have desig- nated as Chiefs. The founders of Govindpur and Sitanuti obviously cannot be brought within this class; and in point of fact the officials at Delhi did not describe the rights purchased by the Company as zamindari. In the year 1717 the Surman Embassy obtained a farman! from the Emperor Farrukhsiyar, which, among other provisions, confirmed the existing English tenure of the three Towns, and sanctioned the acquisition of others on the same tenure. The extant translations of the farman speak of *‘ the renting of the three Towns,’ the phrase which the English authorities took as the equivalent of zamindari; but the farman itself, which had been examined in draft in the Revenue Ministry, speaks not of zamindari, but of taluqdari, the term which, as we have seen, had by this time come into use in Northern India to denote possession, whatever the title might be. ! The text of the farmin is given alongside of the translation in I. O. Records, Home Misc., Vol. LXIX, p- 130. The sanction for the additional towns did not become operative, and consequently there are no illustrative Jocuments regarding. them.

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