As landlords the Banias were not at first a success. They did not
care to spend money in improving their property, and ground their
tenants to the utmost. Sir R. Craddock remarks of them: [134] "Great
or small they are absolutely unfitted by their natural instincts to
be landlords. Shrewdest of traders, most business-like in the matter
of bargains, they are unable to take a broad view of the duties of
landlord or to see that rack-renting will not pay in the long run."
Still, under the influence of education, and the growth of moral
feeling, as well as the desire to stand well with Government officers
and to obtain recognition in the shape of some honour, many of
the Marwari proprietors are developing into just and progressive
landlords. But from the cultivator's point of view, residence on
their estates, which are managed by agents in charge of a number
of villages for an absent owner, cannot compare with the system of
the small cultivating proprietor resident among tenants of his own
caste, and bound to them by ties of sympathy and caste feeling,
which produces, as described by Sir R. Craddock, the ideal village.