Page:The Imperial Gazetteer of India - Volume 10 (2nd edition).pdf/398



27 386 NORTH-WESTERN PROVINCES AND OUDH. half of the estimated profits. Where the inferior proprietor failed to prove sufficiently continuous possession or the proper profits, he was decreed the largest area of land which he had held in his possession for twelve years before annexation. The rent on this was fixed for the whole period of settlement and cannot be changed. It was either the rent he had been found to pay for the same land before annexation, if that could be discovered, or the Government revenue assessed on the particular land that was decreed to him plus a small percentage. The tenure so created is known as sub-proprietary sír. But a special rule was inserted in the Oudh Rent Act to provide for the case of ex-proprietors whose claims were not sufficiently recent to entitle them to decrees under the rules for sír and sub-settlement. They are secured the possession of all land in their cultivating occupancy which has not come into their possession for the first time since annexation, at a rent which is 12 per cent. less than that paid by tenants - at - will in the same neighbourhood, and is liable to revision once in five years. The provision has affected only an infinitesimal proportion of the tenures in Oudh. Besides the rights retained by inferior or ex-proprietors, there are a number of small tenures held on special grants from either the Muhammadan Government or the proprietors, the conditions of tenure being settled in each case by the settlement officer or the ordinary civil court. In the North-Western Provinces, in consequence of the rare occurrence of large proprietors, the instances of two rights in the same village are infrequent. In Oudh they are much more common, and oneeighth of the whole number of villages are held in sub-settlement. Summary of Tenures.—The cultivating classes are sharply divided into those who have and those who have not a proprietory interest in the soil. When we succeeded to the Government of the country, the petty Hindu principalities, which had once covered nearly the whole of it, had been generally destroyed by more powerful invaders. The rule of Kanauj and Delhi had been long extinct; in more recent times, the Katahria Rájputs had succumbed to the Rohillás, and the Bha:lauria Chauhans to the Maráthás, and the same process had been going on over nearly the whole of the Provinces. The consequence is that there are now very few of the large estates which are the modern form of the petty principality. By far the greater part of the country is owned by village communities of the three principal types, i.e. camínduri, in which the whole land is held and managed in common, the rents and profits of the entire estate being thrown into a common stock and divided amongst the shareholders, whose rights are estimated by fractions of a rupee or of a bigha (the local unit of land measure); pattidári, in which the lands are held severally by the different proprietors, all of whom are jointly responsible to Government for the revenue, though each is