It has been remarked above that the history of land-tenure in India
calls for fresh examination, unbiased by any theory as to its
development in Europe. It may, however, be added that, so far as may
be judged from the material already accessible to us, India supports
the mark-hypothesis as little as England. The negative argument may
be thus drawn out:--1. The village-groups under the Mogul empire
were bodies of cultivators with a customary right of occupation. The
proprietor of the soil, in theory and in practice, was the Great
Mogul. The dispute between the two schools of English officials early
in the present century as to whether the _ryot_ could properly be
regarded as an owner or not, arose from an attempt to make Indian
facts harmonise with English conceptions. The _ryot_ had, indeed, a
fixity of tenure greater than that of an ordinary English tenant; on
the other hand, the share of the produce which he was bound to pay
to the emperor or his delegate “amounted to a customary rent, raised
to the highest point to which it could be raised without causing the
people to emigrate or rebel” (Sir George Campbell, in _Systems of Land
Tenure_). The French traveller, Bernier, who resided in India twelve
years, and acted as physician to Aurungzebe, describes in 1670 the
oppression to which the “peasantry” were subjected, and discusses the
question “whether it would not be more advantageous for the king as
well as for the people, if the former ceased to be sole possessor of
the land, and the right of private property were recognised in India
as it is with us” (_Travels_, tr. Brock, i., p. 255).
2. Can we get behind the period of Mogul rule, and discover whether it
was super-imposed directly on a number of free cultivating groups, or
whether it swept away a class of landlords? Such an opportunity seems
to be presented by the institutions of Rajputana, which are described
by Sir Alfred Lyall as “the only ancient political institutions
now surviving upon any considerable scale in India,” and as having
suffered little essential change between the eleventh and nineteenth
centuries (_Asiatic Studies_, pp. 185, 193). “In the Western Rajput
States the conquering clans are still very much in the position which
they took up on first entry upon the lands. They have not driven out,
slain, or absolutely enslaved the anterior occupants, or divided off
the soil among groups of their own cultivating families.... Their
system of settlement was rather that of the Gothic tribes after their
invasion of the Danubian provinces of the Roman empire, who, according
to Finlay, ‘never formed the bulk of the population in the lands
which they occupied, but were only lords of the soil, principally
occupied in war and hunting.’ In a Rajput State of the best preserved
original type, we still find all the territory ... partitioned out
among the Rajputs, in whose hands is the whole political and military
organisation.... Under the Rajputs are the cultivating classes ...
who now pay land rent to the lords or their families, living in
village communities with very few rights and privileges, and being too
often no more than rack-rented peasantry” (_Ibid._, p. 197). Here,
it is true, we have a case of conquest by an invading race; but if
this be compared with the description given by Sir William Hunter
of the constitution of Orissa under its native princes, before the
period of Mahometan rule, it will be seen that the condition of the
cultivators was much the same, whoever might be their masters. Orissa
would seem to have been divided into two parts, the royal domain
“treated as a private estate and vigilantly administered by means of
land-bailiffs,” and the estates of the “feudal nobility,” known as
Fort-holders (_Orissa_, pp. 214-219). In the petty Tributary States
in the neighbourhood of British Orissa, there are said to be now no
intermediary holders between the husbandman and the Rajah, “in whom
rests the abstract ownership, while the right of occupancy remains
with the actual cultivator.” The condition of things reproduces,
therefore, on a small scale and subject to British control, what was
to be found on an immensely larger scale under the Mogul emperors.
Whether there ever were in these districts lords of land between the
prince and the peasant is not clear.
3. Sir William Hunter suggests that we can distinguish an even
earlier stage. “We know,” he says (p. 206), “that the Aryan invaders
never penetrated in sufficient numbers into India to engross any
large proportion of the soil. That throughout five-sixths of the
continent, the actual work of tillage remained in the hands of the
Non-Aryan or Sudra races; and that, even at a very remote time,
husbandry had become a degrading occupation in the eyes of the Aryan
conquerors.... In Orissa, where Aryan colonisation never amounted to
more than a thin top-dressing of priests and _nobles_, the generic
word of husbandman is sometimes used as a synonym for the Non-Aryan
caste. At this day, we see the acknowledged aboriginal castes of the
mountains in the very act of passing into the low-caste cultivators
of the Hindu village, as soon as Hindu civilisation penetrates their
glens.” He thinks it probable, therefore, that the Hindu village is
the “outcome” of Non-Aryan Hamlets such as those of the Kandhs. This
is not unlikely; but supposing the conjecture to be correct, we must
notice two essential points. The first is that the Kandh Hamlet, with
its population of, on an average, some five-and-thirty persons, is
nothing more than a cluster of independent households, placed close
together for mutual protection. The absolute ownership of the soil
is vested in each family; and the Hamlet as a whole exercises no
corporate authority whatever (pp. 72, 77, 208, 210). And in the second
place, if the Hamlet expanded into the village and the village became
that “firmly cohering entity” which it now is, land-lordship would
seem to have developed _pari passu_ (_Ibid._, pp. 212-3). At no stage
of agrarian history do we find the village community of theory, which
is “an _organised self-acting_ group of families exercising a _common
proprietorship_ over a definite tract of land” (Maine, _Village
Communities_, pp. 10, 12). Where the cultivating group are in any real
sense proprietors, they have no corporate character; and where they
have a corporate character, they are not proprietors.