166 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA
probably be a mistake to regard all the Brotherhoods as
dating from the same period. The institution is undoubtedly
very old, but, in the course of its long existence, many
particular Brotherhoods may have disappeared, and many
others mav have emerged.
From what has been said already, it will be apparent
that at this period there was considerable diversity of con-
ditions in the villages of Northern India. The main types
may be described as follows. First, there was the derelict
village (wirdn), that is to say, an area recognised as a village,
but uninhabited and uncultivated, presumably because the
peasants had been driven, or induced, to abandon it. Next,
there was the village without a resident population, culti-
vated by inhabitants of other villages. These two classes
were, so far as can be judged, of minor importance, and the
bulk of the villages may be divided into those with a
Brotherhood and those without.
The Brotherhood villages may be classed as “pure”
or “mixed,” the distinction turning on the presence of
resident peasants outside the Brotherhood. The pure type
was characteristic of that part of Bundelkhand which had
come under British rule: in it, all the resident peasants
were members of the Brotherhood, and, while individual
members might cultivate land in another village as well
as in their own, the resident peasant outside the Brotherhood
was practically unknown. In the eyes of the early British
administrators, this fact served to differentiate Bundelkhand
from the country North of the Jumna, in which the mixed
type prevailed, if it was not universal. As a matter of fact,
in studying the Records, I have come across scarcely a
single village in the Doab or Rohilkhand in which cultiva-
tion was carried on only by the Brotherhood and the
village servants, though I have found cases where the area
held by other peasants was proportionately very small;
ordinarily the peasants outside the Brotherhood were an
important, if sometimes a subordinate, factor in agricul-
tural production.
The villages without a Brotherhood fall into two groups.
In the first come the somewhat numerous cases of what
