Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/354

316 lands were given them on a service-tenure. They were required to attend the land-owning Pathan tribesmen in their raids and fights, to furnish grain and grass for their guests, to provide the guest-house with beds and blankets, to take turns in watch and ward, and occasionally to work in building and reaping. By degrees several of the khans, strong men, tribal leaders, assumed privileges, and in particular collected fees from these hamsayas on the occasion of births and marriages. As clan encroached on clan, hamlets were established on the boundaries of tribal tracts, the occupants being in part some of the poorer tribesmen and in part these hamsayas or fakirs. No tax, no rent, no share of the crop was paid. These occupants of boundary hamlets held solely on condition of warding off attacks and joining expeditions. The other services were excused on account of the distance from the original settlement. " The personal character of some of the khans", says the late Major James, from whose Peshawar Settlement Report these particulars are taken, "enabled them at this time to make further innovations, and they frequently acquired such power as to enable them to settle villages on their own account, realising a certain portion of the produce, and even to remove proprietors from one locality to another." Again and again in India has that demand for a portion of the produce been the foundation, as it is still the symbol, of political authority. In this case local circumstances, chief amongst which was the stubborn, jealous, democratic character of the Pathan tribesmen, led to another development. But here we see a tenure so far servile that it included liability to the corvec, side by side with a purely military tenure curiously like the tenure of a feudal vassal. Surely this is feudalism in the making in a society as purely tribal as that of the Germans of Tacitus, and even further removed than that of the Germans of Tacitus from Roman influences both of Church and State.

These hamsayas had no lands to surrender. They acquired lands by the arrangement which gave them protection. But in the case of men already in the possession of lands, the hand of the oppressor and the protector was too often one and the same. One plunderer may agree to keep others at bay if steadily bribed by possible victims. The Des-Kavali, or district watching-fees of the Poligars of the Carnatic— many of whom, in the confusions of