Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/56

 Xlvi

INTRODUCTION.

preferred the managieinent by his servants to the unrepressed extortions of a rabble of Muhammadan soldiers. With him had returned the Pande brothers, who had partici-' pated in his exile, and their even superior wealth, their distinguished position and abilities, and their Brahman caste, miade them not inferior to the raja himself as a mainstaiy to officials pressed from Lucknow for rents which they could not feaKze, and as a refuge to village owners groaning under the intolerable tyranny of the nazim's subordinates. Two separate estates grew up within the old territories of the raj, as one village affcier another, and often whole clusters of villages in a single year, were joined to the revenue engagements of either the rdja or the Pande, and at annexation the former held an estate of 250 the latter of 350 square miles. These events are, as it has been saidj typical of what was going on all over the province. Everywhere the r^jas were stripped of their old position and replaced by Government officials ; everywhere they retained a footing, either by peaceful residence or by the maintenance through bands of desperate outlaws of a continual state of warfare ; the officers of the king found it everywhere impossible to realize the revenue without the intervention of some powerful local chief or influential capitalist. The result was that there grew up out of the old raj system a system of large estates, consisting each of a number of villages arbitrarily collected under a single revenue engagement. The old rdj boundaries were rarely maintained, except in the distant regions to the north, where the influence of the king's government was only feebly and fitfully exercised. But the new taluqdars were almost always the old feudal lords, and in the few instances of what were known at annexation as auction taluqas, it involves no great license of historical conjecture to say that they must eventually have returned to the old chieftainships from the lands of which they had been cut out.

Before dealing with the other classes connected with the soil, necessary to define what is meant by land revenue with as much briefness as is consistent with an understanding of therelations which subsisted between the subordinate tenants andit is

their lords.

Land revenue, as it existed for time out of mind in India, was the portion of the gross produce of his fields which the occupant paid to the state. This has been assessed at different shares by different rulers and by the same ruler under differing circumstances. Akbar fixed it at one-third, and the rule in Oudh during* historical times has been for the tenant to pay one-half of the/