Page:The Marquess Cornwallis and the Consolidation of British Rule.djvu/46

40 Dacca. A Bázár is simply an assemblage of ten, twenty, or fifty and more houses and shops for the retail of all articles of subsistence. By a Hát is meant a place where vegetables, fruits, and the necessaries of life are exposed for sale, generally on two special days in the week. Sometimes each permanent bázár has its bi-weekly market or Hát.

But quite as often a Hát is held in an open space where there is not a single permanent structure of any kind. On Hát days such places are resonant with the hum of two thousand voices of buyers and sellers. On other days the Hát is a lifeless, untenanted, vacant space. It is very significant when we consider the point of absolute ownership claimed for Zamíndárs, that there was a considerable amount of discussion on paper whether these Ganjs, Bázárs, and Háts should not be taken entirely away from the Zamíndárs, and separated from their estates. The opinion actually prevailed in some quarters that the rights and privileges of the Zamíndárs were to be confined to arable and pasture, to fisheries and forests alone.

In some parts of the Province, the Zamíndárs did not even claim the Ganj at all. Shore mentions the cases of men who had become proprietors of Ganj and Bázárs without any Zamíndárí rights. In the end, all three descriptions of markets were handed over to the Zamíndárs within whose estates they were found; and amongst their rights and privileges none, to this day, is more valued or often more