The Landed System.
If we consider the system from the period described by Arrian, Curtius, and Diodorus, we shall see in the government of townships each commune an ‘imperium in imperio’; a little republic, maintaining its municipal legislation independent of the monarchy, on which it relies for general support, and to which it pays the bhog, or tax in kind, as the price of this protection; for though the prescribed duties of kings are as well defined by Manu[[33]] as by any jurisconsult in Europe, nothing can be more lax than the mutual relations of the governed and governing in Hindu monarchies, which are resolved into unbounded liberty of action. To the artificial regulation of society, which leaves all who depend on manual exertion to an immutable degradation, must be ascribed these multitudinous governments, unknown to the rest of mankind, which, in spite of such dislocation, maintain the bonds of mutual sympathies. Strictly speaking, every State presents the picture of so many hundred or thousand minute republics, without any connexion with each other, giving allegiance (an) and rent (bhog) to a prince, who neither legislates for them, nor even forms a police for their internal protection. It is consequent on this want of paramount interference that, in matters of police, of justice, and of law, the communes act for themselves; and from this want of paternal interference only have arisen those courts of equity, or arbitration, the panchayats.
But to return to the freehold ryot of Mewar, whose bapota is the watan and the miras of the peninsula—words of foreign growth, introduced by the Muhammadan conquerors; the first (Persian) is of more general use in Khandesh; the other (Arabic) in the Carnatic. Thus the great Persian moralist Saadi exemplifies its application: "If you desire to succeed to your father’s inheritance (miras), first obtain his wisdom" [496].
While the term bapota thus implies the inheritance or patrimony, its holder, if a military vassal, is called Bhumia, a term equally powerful, meaning one actually identified with the soil (bhum), and for which the Muhammadan has no equivalent but in the possessive compound watandar, or mirasdar. The Caniatchi[[34]] of Malabar is the Bhumia of Rajasthan.
The emperors of Delhi, in the zenith of their power, bestowed the epithet zamindar upon the Hindu tributary sovereigns: not out of disrespect, but in the true application of their own term Bhumia Raj, expressive of their tenacity to the soil; and this fact affords additional evidence of the proprietary right being in the cultivator (ryot), namely, that he alone can confer the freehold land, which gives the title of Bhumia, and of which both past history and present usage will furnish us with examples. When the tenure of land obtained from the cultivator is held more valid than the grant of the sovereign, it will be deemed a conclusive argument of the proprietary right being vested in the ryot. What should induce a chieftain, when inducted into a perpetual fief, to establish through the ryot a right to a few acres in bhum, but the knowledge that although the vicissitudes of fortune or of favour may deprive him of his aggregate signiorial rights, his claims, derived from the spontaneous favour of the commune, can never be set aside; and when he ceases to be the lord, he becomes a member of the commonwealth, merging his title of Thakur, or Signior, into the more humble one of Bhumia, the allodial tenant of the Rajput feudal system, elsewhere discussed.[[35]] Thus we have touched on the method by which he acquires this distinction, for protecting the community from violence; and if left destitute by the negligence or inability of the government, he is vested with the rights of the crown, in its share of the bhog or rent. But when their own land is in the predicament called galita, or reversions from lapses to the commune, he is ‘seised’ in all the rights of the former proprietor; or, by internal arrangements, they can convey such right by cession of the commune.
The Bhūmia.
Such are the rights and privileges derived from the ryot cultivator alone. The Rana may dispossess the chiefs of Badnor, or Salumbar, of their estates, the grant of the crown—he could not touch the rights emanating from the community; and thus the descendants of a chieftain, who a few years before might have followed his sovereign at the head of one hundred cavaliers, would descend into the humble foot militia of a district. Thousands are in this predicament: the Kanawats, Lunawats, Kumbhawats, and other clans, who, like the Celt, forget not their claims of birth in the distinctions of fortune, but assert their propinquity as “brothers in the nineteenth or thirtieth degree to the prince” on the throne. So sacred was the tenure derived from the ryot, that even monarchs held lands in bhum from their subjects, for an instance of which we are indebted to the great poetic historian of the last Hindu king. Chand relates, that when his sovereign, the Chauhan, had subjugated the kingdom of Anhilwara[[38]] from the Solanki, he returned to the nephew of the conquered prince several districts and seaports, and all the bhum held by the family. In short, the Rajput vaunts his aristocratic distinction derived from the land; and opposes the title of ‘Bhumia Raj,’ or government of the soil, to the ‘Bania Raj,’ or commercial government, which he affixes as an epithet of contempt to Jaipur: where “wealth accumulates and men decay.”
In the great ‘register of patents’ (patta bahi) of Mewar we find a species of [498] bhum held by the greater vassals on particular crown lands; whether this originated from inability of ceding entire townships to complete the estate to the rank of the incumbent, or whether it was merely in confirmation of the grant of the commune, could not be ascertained. The benefit from this bhum is only pecuniary, and the title is ‘bhum rakhwali’[[39]] or land [in return for] ‘preservation.’ Strange to say, the crown itself holds ‘bhum rakhwali’ on its own fiscal demesnes consisting of small portions in each village, to the amount of ten thousand rupees in a district of thirty or forty townships. This species, however, is so incongruous that we can only state it does exist: we should vainly seek the cause for such apparent absurdity, for since society has been unhinged, the oracles are mute to much of antiquated custom.
Occupiers’ Rights in the Land.
In those districts which afforded protection from innovation, the proprietary right of the ryot will be found in full force; of this the populous and extensive district of Jahazpur, consisting of one hundred and six townships, affords a good specimen. There are but two pieces of land throughout the whole of this tract the property of the crown, and these were obtained by force during the occupancy of Zalim Singh of Kotah. The right thus unjustly acquired was, from the conscientiousness of the Rana’s civil governor, on the point of being annulled by sale and reversion, when the court interfered to maintain its proprietary right to the tanks of Loharia and Itaunda, and the lands which they irrigate, now the bhum of the Rana.[[40]] This will serve as an illustration how bhum may be acquired, and the annals of Kotah will exhibit, unhappily for the ryots of that country, the almost total annihilation of their rights, by the same summary process which originally attached Loharia to the fisc.