Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924073057352).pdf/259

 RAE 251 gested the plan of the new gateway. Not only did this chief generally refuse to pay any revenue himself, but he rendered it impossible to collect in the neighbouring villages, by destroying the crops of zamindars who were more inclined to acquiesce. At one time he was caught and shut up in the Dalmau fort in consequence of a quarrel with the merchant who stood security for his villages, but he soon made his escape to the jungles, and it was found that he was a more intolerable nuisance as a proclaimed outlaw than he ever had been before, and he was brought back by the bribe of village rent-free. To this he soon added eleven more, and after he had been cut down in the Dalmau kachabri in 1795 A.D., his brother, Lál Sáh, and nephew, Rám Bakhsh, continued the same policy, and in 1810 A.D. engaged for 29 villages, 21 of which belonged to other zamindars, "who," writes the tahsildar, "still attend my kachahri in person, though I am obliged to let their villages remain in the Gaura engagement." This report gives a tolerably faithfuil picture of the state of affairs throughout the district, officials attempting to collect direct, and resisted by chieftains who would not tolerate interference in their neighbourhood, and acquired by force an estate reckoned by single villages instead of their old general superintendence of a pargana, as their still older and still more vague supremacy within the limits of their ráj. The last twenty years of the eighteenth century saw the taluqa proper in its infancy; and it is not probable that it would ever have attained its pre- sent enormous development, but for the introduction of the contract sys. tem. The immediate effects of this both in enlarging the taluqas held by the ancient local chieftains, and in introducing strangers who were attract- ed by the position of landed proprietor, have already been described minutely and clearly in the chronicles of Oonao, and I need not go over the same ground again. It is easier to discern the various revolutions which have taken place in their internal polity than to ascribe a beginning to the village cominuni- ties. They seem to have originally consisted of a society of labourers, each in the possession of the lands in his immediate cultivation, and pre- sided over by a leading member who collected and apportioned the inci- dence of the Government revenue. For these services he was remunerated by a light assessment on his peculiar holding, and the right to a due known in royal farmáns as muqaddami, which has perhaps survived in a number of forms to the present day. Within the reach of history there was probably no village in which more land had not accumulated in the hands of two or three influential families than they could till themselves without the help of tenants or hired labourers, still I am induced to believe that for some time after Akbar, villages in the exclusive proprietary pos- session of one non-cultivating family were the exception and not the rule. Where villages were assigned to Chhattri zamındars, all the rights of the former cultivating proprietors rapidly disappeared. Even in villages not thus appropriated, the common and unrestrained right of sale favoured accumulation of property, and, on the principle that wealth gathers wealth, we often find that one rich family had become the sole proprietors, and, in imitation of their Rajput neighbours in the same position, assumed the title