In the Central Provinces they have become landholders and are
addressed by the honorific title of Thakur, ranking with the higher
cultivating castes. Several Lodhi landholders in Damoh and Saugor
formerly held a quasi-independent position under the Muhammadans,
and subsequently acknowledged the Raja of Panna as their suzerain,
who conferred on some families the titles of Raja and Diwan. They
kept up a certain amount of state, and small contingents of soldiery,
attended by whom they went to pay their respects to the representative
of the ruling power. "It would be difficult," says Grant, [93] "to
recognise the descendants of the peaceful cultivators of northern
India in the strangely accoutred Rajas who support their style and
title by a score of ragged matchlock-men and a ruined mud fort on a
hill-side." Sir B. Fuller's _Damoh Settlement Report_ says of them:
"A considerable number of villages had been for long time past in the
possession of certain important families, who held them by prescription
or by a grant from the ruling power, on a right which approximated
as nearly to the English idea of proprietorship as native custom
permitted. The most prominent of these families were of the Lodhi
caste. They have developed tastes for sport and freebooting and have
become decidedly the most troublesome item in the population. During
the Mutiny the Lodhis as a class were openly disaffected, and one of
their proprietors, the Talukdar of Hindoria, marched on the District
headquarters and looted the treasury." Similarly the Ramgarh family
of Mandla took to arms and lost the large estates till then held
by them. On the other hand the village of Imjhira in Narsinghpur
belonging to a Lodhi malguzar was gallantly defended against a band
of marauding rebels from Saugor. Sir R. Craddock describes them as
follows: "They are men of strong character, but their constant family
feuds and love of faction militate against their prosperity. A cluster
of Lodhi villages forms a hotbed of strife and the nearest relations
are generally divided by bitter animosities. The Revenue Officer who
visits them is beset by reckless charges and counter-charges and no
communities are less amenable to conciliatory compromises. Agrarian
outrages are only too common in some of the Lodhi villages." [94]
The high status of the Lodhi caste in the Central Provinces as
compared with their position in the country of their origin may be
simply explained by the fact that they here became landholders and
ruling chiefs.