Lastly the grant of proprietary and transferable right to
land has afforded a new incentive and reward to the successful
moneylender. Prior to this measure it is probable that no considerable
transfers of land occurred for ordinary debt. The village headman might
be ousted for non-payment of revenue, or simply through the greed of
some Government official under native rule, and of course the villages
were continually pillaged and plundered by their own and hostile armies
such as the Pindaris, while the population was periodically decimated
by famine. But apart from their losses by famine, war and the badness
of the central government, it is probable that the cultivators were
held to have a hereditary right to their land, and were not liable to
ejectment on the suit of any private person. It is doubtful whether
they had any conception of ownership of the land, and it seems likely
that they may have thought of it as a god or the property of the god;
but the cultivating castes perhaps had a hereditary right to cultivate
it, just as the Chamar had a prescriptive right to the hides of the
village cattle, the Kalar to the mahua-flowers for making his liquor,
the Kumhar to clay for his pots, and the Teli to press the oil-seeds
grown in his village. The inferior castes were not allowed to hold
land, and it was probably never imagined that the village moneylender
should by means of a piece of stamped paper be able to oust the
cultivators indebted to him and take their land himself. With the
grant of proprietary right to land such as existed in England, and the
application of the English law of contract and transfer of property,
a new and easy road to wealth was opened to the moneylender, of which
he was not slow to take advantage. The Banias have thus ousted numbers
of improvident proprietors of the cultivating castes, and many of them
have become large landlords. A considerable degree of protection has
now been afforded to landowners and cultivators, and the process has
been checked, but that it should have proceeded so far is regrettable;
and the operation of the law has been responsible for a large amount
of unintentional injustice to the cultivating castes and especially
to proprietors of aboriginal descent, who on account of their extreme
ignorance and improvidence most readily fall a prey to the moneylender.