Preußisches Landbuch

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 834285843

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-29464

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Rauer, Karl Friedrich http://d-nb.info/gnd/12122385X

Title:: Preußisches Landbuch

Place of publication:: Kiel

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (IV, 805 S.)

Collection:: Economics Books

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THE LAST PHASE IN NORTHERN INDIA 179 in other words, that Brotherhoods did not then exist. We may, however, wait until this hypothetical student appears; for the present I prefer to take the Brotherhood as a very old Hindu institution, one which bears the marks of its antiquity on its face, and we may infer with a high degree of probability that many, though not necessarily all, the muqaddams mentioned in Moslem chronicles were repre- sentatives of a Brotherhood of the kind which has survived Moslem rule, and which is known, in some parts of India, to have existed before the first Moslem conquests. Whether some of them represented villages without a Brotherhood, is a question on which I have found no evidence. It is possible that at one time the Brotherhood was a universal institution, and that all the cases where it is not found are to be explained as instances of disintegration; it is also possible that in some circumstances new villages were established in conditions under which a Brotherhood failed to grow up; but, in the absence of evidence, speculation on these alternatives would be unprofitable. The remaining question, the existence during the Moslem period of resident peasants outside the Brotherhood, is also one on which I have found no direct evidence. The most important fact in this connection is, I think, the wide distribution throughout Northern India of the castes which have specialised in intensive cultivation—the Arain, the Mali, the Kachhi, the Koiri. It is conceivable that this distribution may have occurred in comparatively recent times, but it looks older; possibly the traditions of these castes, which, so far as I know, have never been studied from this point of view, might throw some light on the question, but for the present I must leave it open. On the whole, it seems to me to be reasonable to accept the current view that the existence of a Brotherhood was an ordinary feature in villages throughout the Moslem period; but, at the same time, it would be unsafe, in the existing state of knowledge, to assume either that the institution was uni- versal, in the sense that there was a Brotherhood in every village, or that it was exclusive, in the sense that there were no resident peasants outside its circle.

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