Page:The Imperial Gazetteer of India - Volume 10 (2nd edition).pdf/396



384 NORTH-IVESTERN PROVINCES AND OUDH. produce to the original interest, or where the whole land is divided and the separate properties have no rational proportion to one another. (4) The cultivators themselves, paying revenue through their head-man. By the British Government, settlements for the payment of the revenue have been almost always made in the North-Western Provinces with either the village za mindárs or the village head-men, and they are now the proprietors of the land in nearly every part of the Provinces. In Oudh the case was different. There the position of the owners of large estates was found to be much stronger than it had been in the North-Western Provinces half a century earlier ; and after an unsuccessful attempt to make a settlement with the representatives of single villages, the Government finally conferred on the large proprietors, who are now known as tálukdárs, the right to engage for the revenue of all the villages for which they had paid it in the year preceding annexation. The total number of villages in the North - Western Provinces is 81,084, with an average area of about a square mile each; and by far the greater number are held by village proprietors. In Oudh there are 24,337 villages, with the same average area, of which about two-thirds are held by single proprietors of large estates, and one-third by village communities. There are altogether 337 tálukdárs, of whom 38 pay a revenue of more than £500o per annum each. The average payment by a tálukdár is between £1700 and £1800, while the average revenue of each member of the proprietary com munities is less than £5. Neither in Oudh nor in the North-Western Provinces is the village now invariably the unit of revenue demand. The principle of joint responsibility for the revenue of all the members of the proprietary body has so far been relaxed that any individual sharer or group of sharers is allowed to apply for a complete partition both of the land and of the liabilities attached to it. Two or more villages may also be assessed for revenue in the aggregate. Each separate subdivision of a village, or group of villages separately assessed, is known as a mahul, and becomes, instead of the village, the ultimate unit of revenue demand, if not of assessment. In the eastern Districts there prevails a custom by which each member of a proprietary body in the possession of more villages than one, instead of taking compact shares in the whole property, is assigned a separate share in each of the villages. The result is that one property will often consist of a number of small detached shares scattered over as many villages, and in those cases the mahál is usually the aggregate of scattered shares composing an individual property. Intermediate between the proprietors and the cultivators, are the sub-proprietors. The most common origin of this form of title was