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Chapter 3 – The Evidence Regarding Villages Before and After 1870

Now let us briefly glance at the evidence which was available before 1870 regarding village institutions; why it gave so much prominence to the idea of “common holding,” and why it was calculated to suggest that uniformity existed (far more than it really exists) throughout India27.

Sir H. S. Maine came to India at the end of 1862, as member of the Viceregal Council in charge of the Legislative Department; he remained till the end of 1869. His high duties confined his residence chiefly to Calcutta (in Bengal), which is the winter-capital of the Government of India, and to Simla in the Panjab Hills. On the way between one and the

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other lies Allahabad, the capital of the North-Western Provinces. Now in Bengal the village system – whatever its original form – had become almost completely overborne by the growth of the great middlemen or “Zamindars,” whom Lord Cornwallis had acknowledged as the “actual proprietors” of estates. At any rate, Bengal did not afford many opportunities for gathering information regarding village institutions. But in the North-West Provinces, Oudh, and the Panjab, the village system was not only flourishing as, in fact, the prevailing tenure feature of the country, but the villages were held by co-sharing bodies, sometimes of one family, and often of the same tribe or clan; they were of that type which has already been indicated in general terms as the “joint village.” Sir H. S. Maine’s attention was necessarily, almost exclusively, directed to this region. It was to it that a great part of the more specific evidence at his disposal related; and it happened, during his years of office, that special questions regarding the law of tenants and subordinate landholders in these parts of India were awaiting treatment by the Legislature. And when I say that a great deal of the evidence available before 1870 directly related to the Northern Provinces, it should be added that the more famous official minutes and published accounts of “the village,” though couched in general terms, and without indicating any particular locality, were chiefly based on the same northern form of village.

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Indeed, before 1870 but little specific information regarding India south of the Narbada was available. The Revenue Settlement surveys of the Dakhan or Bombay Presidency28 were still in progress, and very little was known, outside the Presidency, about the matter. There is indeed an excellent sketch of the Dakhan village, in Elphinstone’s History, which Sir H. S. Maine must have read; but it is unfortunately mixed up with some details about the other forms of village, and altogether is not such as to induce a reader already disposed to believe in a unity of type, to discover the real difference. Indeed it is a common fault in Indian books which give an account of “the village,” that they take various particulars from different places and combine them all in one general picture. Of the “Central Provinces” some of the (then recent) Settlement Reports must have been available; but a large part of the country was settled on a very artificial principle, and the documentary evidence turned chiefly on questions connected with that, so that the real form and history of the local village hardly received any notice. Of Madras – the great Southern province, where the population is of non-Aryan origin, and where the original customs are different from those of the north – hardly anything was on record, or at least known to residents in

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Upper India29. The evidence available to Sir H. Maine really applied to Hindustan or Upper India, and even then it did not, I think, give him more than a very limited idea of the Panjab villages30. The connection of the village and the tribe, so prominently illustrated in that province, never seems to have come to his notice.

The evidence, in short, consisted of (1) the Settlement Reports of the N.W. Provinces, and, perhaps, the Panjab; and (2) of official minutes and orders, among

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which I may mention Thomason’s celebrated “Directions to Settlement Officers31.”

It is not necessary to speak at any length of these documents, familiar to Indian readers, but strange to any others. It is only necessary to point out their insufficiency, and to note that they had a special character which would foster the idea that “common ownership” was a characteristic of villages in general. As regards (1) the Settlement Reports mentioned, they are only those of the first (or at all events earlier) Settlements in the N.W. Provinces. Having recently looked over some of them, I was almost surprised to see how imperfect they are – imperfect, that is, for the purpose of enlightenment about the true history of the villages. They take for granted the rough and highly unsatisfactory official classification of villages which the “Circular Orders” of the Revenue authorities had adopted – and to do them justice, had adopted merely for official purposes, as briefly embodying the distinctions that were useful from an administrative point of view. They are

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more concerned with describing the practical financial features of the assessments than with giving any kind of detailed information as to village custom. As to published Reports of the Panjab districts, I can find no indication of Sir H. Maine’s having made use of the more valuable of the first series, such as those on the Jihlam, Mukali, or Gujrat districts.

As to (2) the official minutes, some of these (e.g. Sir C. Metcalfe’s)32 are picturesque rather than definitely instructive; others are conceived in general terms, and do not refer to any local details. It must be borne in mind that none of them were written for any purpose other than that of recommending certain practical measures; that they relate only to such localities as the authors were familiar with. They were not intended to be generally or universally applied. Moreover, many great names in India, like those of Lawrence, Thomason, or Munro33, justly carry weight as regards their opinions; but it does not follow that those eminent administrators

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had either the time or the inclination to acquire or perfect the sort of information about village history, the origin of customs, and the course of clan movements, which is what is wanted for the special purpose of economic and historic inquiry. Hence their minutes must not be taken for more than their actual scope warrants. I can hardly, perhaps, include the late Sir G. Campbell’s clever essay called “The Tenure of Land in India” (in the “Cobden Club Papers”) as an official document, but it is alluded to by Sir H. S. Maine34, who recognises that it does not profess to give any detailed information. Indeed, village institutions are only very lightly and discursively touched on. The object is rather to describe the land - revenue management in general, than to explain the facts about the villages. The same may be said for the “Directions,” which, invaluable as they were as the first systematic guide to revenue practice that had appeared, contain only a few brief (and very obscure) paragraphs explaining how the joint villages should be classified for purposes of record and revenue management.

But most of these sources of information had one feature which I must notice: they laid stress on one point – the “joint-ownership,” or else on the sense of unity manifested by the villages, peculiarities which were specially important from an official point of view, as making it possible for them to be held

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jointly liable for one sum of revenue assessed on the whole village35. This recognition of the village as a sort of proprietary unit is the distinctive feature of the special N.W.P. Land-Revenue System. It will be remembered that when Bengal was permanently settled in 1793, the great desire of the Administration was to put an end to the theory that Government (or the State) was the sole and absolute owner of the land; and to find for each estate some private landlord, who would at once be liable for the revenue demand, and also assure the well-being of the cultivators on the estate. Now when the work of settling the revenue extended to what were then known as the “Ceded and Conquered districts” (the N.W. Provinces) in the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were (in most cases) no landlords suitable to be recognised, but there were the independent co-sharing village bodies. At first the idea was that some one proprietor or landlord must be recognised for each; and it took all the ability of Mr. Holt-Mackenzie (Secretary to the Revenue Commission) to convince the authorities that the whole village ought to be regarded as a “corporate” body or unit, which, being jointly responsible, could be treated with through a representative. The landlord principle was saved:

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the joint body is the (ideal) landlord between the individual co-sharer and the State. Hence the joint constitution of these bodies is the theme of minutes and orders. An inquirer, pressed with such evidence, would easily conceive that “collective ownership” was the feature of villages, and that this must surely be the ancient common ownership that was believed to be universal. Add to this that in those days almost everyone believed that “Aryans” constituted the bulk of the population throughout India, so that what was true of one part would be true of another, and the idea of uniformity appears quite natural.

Since 1870 the new Settlement Reports gradually came in. We have them now for the whole of the Panjab, North-West Provinces and Oudh, Ajmer and the Central Provinces. We have excellent information on the tenures of Bengal, including the most interesting part of it – the “Chota Nagpur” districts. We have a series of valuable “District Manuals” for all the Madras districts; and in Bombay the published volumes of the Gazetteer enter fully into the tenures, and have, in fact, reproduced most of the material that is of importance in the local Settlement Reports and the special reports, such as those of Pottinger, Chaplin, Gooddine, Pedder, and others36.

Footnotes

27. In speaking of the defective evidence and of the great improvement that has since taken place, I should like to call to mind how much we owe to Sir H. S. Maine for the example of his aim and method, and for the stimulus that his works gave to inquiries which resulted in the later reports and monographs. It is only fair to remember that it is to this pioneer work that we are largely indebted for the superior character and fulness of the later records.

28. In Bombay there was a long period of tentative revenue administration, and a complete system of survey-settlement was only brought into practice from about 1847.

29. Once Sir H. Maine refers (“E.H.I.,” p. 71) to a volume entitled “Mirasi Papers,” which relates to Madras; but the question there treated is of a special kind, and would not enlighten anyone about Madras villages in general.

30. I could easily show from Sir H. S. Maine’s works that he had not been informed about the tribal villages in the Panjab frontier districts, or the features of the Jat villages in the plains. One passage (“E.H.I.,” p. 83) shows clearly that the village area known to the author was the comparatively densely populated region of the N.W. Provinces and Oudh; for in remarking on an interesting phenomenon of village growth, namely, the expansion of a single village into a number, by throwing off small derivative groups who form hamlets in the adjacent waste, in time producing a whole circle of villages, he says that this is not exhibited by “the Indian communities placed in a region of which the population has been from time immemorial far denser,” etc. Had the author been acquainted with the central and S.E. Panjab – not to mention other places – he could not have penned such a remark, for the population is not at all dense, and the multiplication of villages in this very way is quite a characteristic feature, and, indeed, is one of the most important causes of what are, or appear to be, clan-settlements or groups of villages all of one descent.

31. The author also speaks of verbal information; this, of course, cannot be criticised except to the extent of saying that it was not likely to be much in advance of the standard of published information available at the time.

I have not included any mention of books like Tod’s “Rajasthan,” or the writings of Colonel Wilks, Sir J. Malcolm, Grant-Duff, or Dr. Buchanan. No use seems to have been made of these works. And, indeed, though valuable materials for village history may here and there be found in them, it is not always apparent, and has to be disinterred from other subject-matter.

32. This well-known minute is given at p. 68 of the sixth edition of Elphinstone’s “History of India.”

33. Sir John (afterwards Lord) Lawrence had been Collector of Delhi in the forties, and had done some Settlement work there, and was afterwards Chief Commissioner of the Panjab, and ultimately Governor-General of India. Mr. Jas. Thomason was the founder of the improved Revenue Administration of the N.W. Provinces (1830–42), and afterwards was Lieutenant-Governor (1843). Sir T. Munro was the great advocate of the Madras Revenue System, and was made Governor of the Province (1820)

34. “V.C.,” p. 106.

35. This sum the co-proprietors distribute among themselves (so that the amount payable by each is known), according to the custom and constitution of the village. The process is known as the bachh.

36. I have purposely said nothing about the great advance in ethnographical knowledge, and in the editing of coins and inscriptions which throw light on early history and the dynastic changes and tribal movements that India has witnessed.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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