The Origin of Property in Land / With an introductory chapter on the English manor by W. J. Ashley

by Fustel de Coulanges

NOTE A.—ON THE VILLAGE IN INDIA.

It has been remarked above that the history of land-tenure in India calls for fresh examination, unbiased by any theory as to its development in Europe. It may, however, be added that, so far as may be judged from the material already accessible to us, India supports the mark-hypothesis as little as England. The negative argument may be thus drawn out:—1. The village-groups under the Mogul empire were bodies of cultivators with a customary right of occupation. The proprietor of the soil, in theory and in practice, was the Great Mogul. The dispute between the two schools of English officials early in the present century as to whether the ryot could properly be regarded as an owner or not, arose from an attempt to make Indian facts harmonise with English conceptions. The ryot had, indeed, a fixity of tenure greater than that of an ordinary English tenant; on the other hand, the share of the produce which he was bound to pay to the emperor or his delegate “amounted to a customary rent, raised to the highest point to which it could be raised without causing the people to emigrate or rebel” (Sir George Campbell, in Systems of Land Tenure). The French traveller, Bernier, who resided in India twelve years, and acted as physician to Aurungzebe, describes in 1670 the oppression to which the “peasantry” were subjected, and discusses the question “whether it would not be more advantageous for the king as well as for the people, if the former ceased to be sole possessor of the land, and the right of private property were recognised in India as it is with us” (Travels, tr. Brock, i., p. 255).

2. Can we get behind the period of Mogul rule, and discover whether it was super-imposed directly on a number of free cultivating groups, or whether it swept away a class of landlords? Such an opportunity seems to be presented by the institutions of Rajputana, which are described by Sir Alfred Lyall as “the only ancient political institutions now surviving upon any considerable scale in India,” and as having suffered little essential change between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries (Asiatic Studies, pp. 185, 193). “In the Western Rajput States the conquering clans are still very much in the position which they took up on first entry upon the lands. They have not driven out, slain, or absolutely enslaved the anterior occupants, or divided off the soil among groups of their own cultivating families.... Their system of settlement was rather that of the Gothic tribes after their invasion of the Danubian provinces of the Roman empire, who, according to Finlay, ‘never formed the bulk of the population in the lands which they occupied, but were only lords of the soil, principally occupied in war and hunting.’ In a Rajput State of the best preserved original type, we still find all the territory ... partitioned out among the Rajputs, in whose hands is the whole political and military organisation.... Under the Rajputs are the cultivating classes ... who now pay land rent to the lords or their families, living in village communities with very few rights and privileges, and being too often no more than rack-rented peasantry” (Ibid., p. 197). Here, it is true, we have a case of conquest by an invading race; but if this be compared with the description given by Sir William Hunter of the constitution of Orissa under its native princes, before the period of Mahometan rule, it will be seen that the condition of the cultivators was much the same, whoever might be their masters. Orissa would seem to have been divided into two parts, the royal domain “treated as a private estate and vigilantly administered by means of land-bailiffs,” and the estates of the “feudal nobility,” known as Fort-holders (Orissa, pp. 214-219). In the petty Tributary States in the neighbourhood of British Orissa, there are said to be now no intermediary holders between the husbandman and the Rajah, “in whom rests the abstract ownership, while the right of occupancy remains with the actual cultivator.” The condition of things reproduces, therefore, on a small scale and subject to British control, what was to be found on an immensely larger scale under the Mogul emperors. Whether there ever were in these districts lords of land between the prince and the peasant is not clear.

3. Sir William Hunter suggests that we can distinguish an even earlier stage. “We know,” he says (p. 206), “that the Aryan invaders never penetrated in sufficient numbers into India to engross any large proportion of the soil. That throughout five-sixths of the continent, the actual work of tillage remained in the hands of the Non-Aryan or Sudra races; and that, even at a very remote time, husbandry had become a degrading occupation in the eyes of the Aryan conquerors.... In Orissa, where Aryan colonisation never amounted to more than a thin top-dressing of priests and nobles, the generic word of husbandman is sometimes used as a synonym for the Non-Aryan caste. At this day, we see the acknowledged aboriginal castes of the mountains in the very act of passing into the low-caste cultivators of the Hindu village, as soon as Hindu civilisation penetrates their glens.” He thinks it probable, therefore, that the Hindu village is the “outcome” of Non-Aryan Hamlets such as those of the Kandhs. This is not unlikely; but supposing the conjecture to be correct, we must notice two essential points. The first is that the Kandh Hamlet, with its population of, on an average, some five-and-thirty persons, is nothing more than a cluster of independent households, placed close together for mutual protection. The absolute ownership of the soil is vested in each family; and the Hamlet as a whole exercises no corporate authority whatever (pp. 72, 77, 208, 210). And in the second place, if the Hamlet expanded into the village and the village became that “firmly cohering entity” which it now is, land-lordship would seem to have developed pari passu (Ibid., pp. 212-3). At no stage of agrarian history do we find the village community of theory, which is “an organised self-acting group of families exercising a common proprietorship over a definite tract of land” (Maine, Village Communities, pp. 10, 12). Where the cultivating group are in any real sense proprietors, they have no corporate character; and where they have a corporate character, they are not proprietors.