An Agrarian History of South Asia
Chapter Three
Regions
In the fourteenth century, South Asia became a region of travel and transport connecting Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. This redefined the location of all its agrarian territories. In the wake of the Mongols, overland corridors of routine communication extended from the Silk Road to Kanya Kumari and branched out to seaports along the way. Connections among distant parts of Eurasia became numerous and routine. New technology, ideas, habits, languages, people and needs came into farming communities. New items came for local cuisine. People produced new powers of command, accumulation, and control, focused on strategic urban sites in agrarian space. By 1600, ships sailed between China, Gujarat, Europe and America. Horses trotted across the land between Tajikistan and Egypt, Moscow and Madurai. Camels caravaned between Syria and Tibet, Ajmer, and Agra. A long expansion in world connections occurred during centuries when a visible increase in farming intensity was reshaping agrarian South Asia. In the dry, interior uplands, warriors built late medieval dynasties, on land formerly held by pastoralists and nomads; and sultans established a new political culture, whose hegemony would last to the nineteenth century. Slow but decisive change during late medieval centuries laid the basis for more dramatic trends after 1500, when agricultural expansion accelerated along with the mobility and the local agrarian power of warriors and merchants. Regional formations of agrarian territory came into being, sewn together by urban networks, during a distinctively early modern period of agrarian history, whose patterns of social power, agricultural expansion, and cultural change embrace the empires of Akbar and the East India Company.
As we have seen, early medieval farming concentrated production, population, and political power in lowland riverine sites where perennial drainage and predictable rains supported intensive land use, stable food supplies, Brahmans, temples, and kings. From Mauryan times onward, wells, dams, channels, and tanks (walls of earth and stone built across routes of drainage to irrigate the land below) marked sites across the northern basins, the eastern coastal plains, and northern Sri Lanka. After the Guptas, inscriptions indicate that irrigation building accelerated in all these areas and that it reached a crescendo in the thirteenth century; which corresponds with the rise and peak of medieval dynasties, temple building, and epigraphy. By 1100, inscriptions indicate that wet and dry cultivation was now expanding into new areas. This did not involve major technological change but did alter the geography of agriculture significantly. On the whole, it seems, sedentary farmers preferred to clear drier land -- which could be irrigated by various means, most prominently, by wells -- rather than pioneering in densely forested tropical foothills and high valleys. Intensive agriculture expanded into the drier, up-river and interfluvial lands much more rapidly than into heavily wooded hills and tropical jungles. In the process, pastoral nomadism was displaced and its human and animal resources steadily absorbed into agrarian societies which thus enhanced their abilities to engage in long-distance trade, use dry land productively, and make war. The proportionately greater influence of former pastoral elements in agrarian societies in the dry interior -- from Kabul and Punjab down to the southern Deccan -- became a major mark of their cultural distinctiveness.
Tribal communities had a huge world mostly to themselves in tropical and subtropical jungles full of wild animals, wood, fruits, herbs, spices, and many other items for local use and trade, in the high mountains, central mountains, and western ghats. We have no statistics, but the population and land area committed to shifting, swidden plots -- "slash-and-burn" cultivation called jhum in many areas, but also bewar, marhan, etc., practised in a variety of ways -- surely must have increased over the centuries. Jhum was the first kind of cultivation to influence forest growth in the eastern Ganga basin, Bengal, and the central mountains, and in many places, the only kind until the nineteenth century. Jhum sites formed territories of rotating cultivation over expanding stretches of forest and it supported complex systems of exchange and interaction among different kinds of agrarian societies. The social formation of jhum and of permanent field cultivation, respectively, came to be characterised by the contrast between caste and tribal societies, and eventually, between hills and plains; and the two systems maintained their social distance and otherness, even as they interacted and overlapped. Sedentary farmers tended, in the long run, to usurp tribal territories, however, and in a broad sense these two forms of agrarian society were in competition for land, labour, and natural resources. Well into the nineteenth century, this competition was usually invisible, because jhum cultivators could move farther afield as farmers encroached upon the forest, moving into land already clear for jhum. In 1885, when W.W.Hunter, as Director-General of Statistics in British India, sent a circular to district officers to ascertain techniques of "land reclamation," he received responses that describe the interaction of peasant and tribal cultivators in Maldah, Gonda, and Nimar, on eastern, northern, and western rim lands of the central mountains. Typically, the Maldah collector said of Santhals that,
Their habit is to clear the jungle and then make the land fit for cultivation. As soon as they have done this they sell their holdings to Muhammadan cultivators and spend the price of it in feasting and drinking and move to clear new pieces of land.
Sedentary agrarian society -- especially landlords, overlords, and financiers -- did not always pay for the land, of course, and encroachments into tribal land did cause conflict in medieval times. As we have seen, many inscriptions depict the conquest and absorption of tribal cultivators by sedentary communities. But as long as forest lands remained in abundance, jhum cultivators could move away, deeper into the jungle. In general, this involved relocations at higher elevations, up the slopes away from advancing lowlanders; and eventually, tribal societies were confined predominantly to mountain forests.
In 1798, Francis Buchanan described jhum cultivation near Chittagong, and its moving borderland with rice farming on the coastal plain:
During the dry season, the natives of these places cut down to the root all the bushes growing on a hilly tract. After drying for some time the bush wood is set on fire, and ... as much of the large timber as possible is destroyed.... The whole surface of the ground is now covered with ashes, which soak with the first rain, and serve as manure. No sooner has the ground been softened by the first showers of the season than the cultivator begins to plant. To his girdle he fixes a small basket containing a promiscuous mixture of seeds of all the different plants raised in Jooms. These plants are chiefly rice, cotton, Capsicum, indigo, and ... fruits. In one hand the cultivator then takes an iron pointed dibble with which he strikes the ground, making small holes .... Into these holes he with his other hand drops a few seeds ... as chance directs, and leaves the further rearing of the crop to nature.
Buchanan goes on to say that perennial farming along the Chittagong lowlands had not supplanted jhum, and that some paddy fields were so new that they were still pocked with huge tree stumps. In the mountains, he reported jhum to be the only cultivation. The cultural contrast between hills and plains people emerged for him starkly in the fact that highland farmers were not Muslims; they worshipped what Buchanan called a form of Shiva. This indicates a more general pattern: hill peoples developed sophisticated agrarian territories in highland forests and jungles where they remained culturally independent of the agrarian lowlands. This was true in the mountain borderlands of the Deccan as well, where forest rajas ruled the land until they were uprooted by warriors and farmers under Maratha regime.
In the 1880s, jhum land was still being steadily converted into permanent cultivation all around the vast expanse of the central mountains. All along the northern basins, permanent farming communities seem to have moved much more slowly into the tropical forests than into the drier plains and high valleys. The A’in-i Akbari indicates that in 1595, high quality rice was being grown on the banks of the Ghagar and Sarju up to Dugaon and Bahraich, when wild elephants filled the land north of the Sarju, along the Rapti and Gandak, and around Gorakhpur. Paying bounty for wild elephants was still a significant item of state expenditure in Sylhet in the 1770s, and the village of Changel, in northern Bihar, was typical of that region in being "settled" by permanent cultivation only in the eighteenth century. Farmers expanded wheat, pulse, and millet cultivation into the lightly wooded land in the western basin around Agra centuries before they cut down forests south of the Yamuna and in the uplands of the Gomati, which remained jungle in 1800. The drier west of the Ganga basin had many advantages. Not only was it easier to clear and plough, but plenty of land lay all around for animal grazing, and trade routes ran in every direction. Uplands were more attractive when they were more temperate, suitable for seasonal grazing, free of malaria, and strategically situated along routes of trade. Valleys into the high mountains of the Indus basin were prominent agrarian sites in ancient and early medieval times. Taxila and Gandhara were core sites under the Mauryas. Kashmir, Kangra, and Champa have many medieval inscriptions. When the Chinese traveller, Hsuan Tsang, visited Punjab in the seventh century, he did notice fertile land around towns in the upper doabs, but he described in more detail the splendid orchards and fields in submontane tracts and all along water courses in the hill valleys.
The flatlands in the upper Punjab doabs do not seem to have been heavily farmed in the first millennium. The absence of inscriptions in what would later become the heartland of agrarian Punjab may explain its relatively low Brahman population and lack of Brahmanical cultural influence, as compared to Kangra and Champa. Early medieval dry farming developed in Sindh, around Multan, and in Rajasthan, where the Persian wheel and step-wells are attested by Kasyapa’s Krshisukti. From here, Jat farmers seem to have moved into the upper Punjab doabs and into the western Ganga basin in the first half of the second millennium. We have noticed previously that the prehistoric Saraswati once ran into Rajasthan, and the surface desiccation and deepening of ground water that are indicated by its disappearance seem to have continued to make the lower Indus basin and western plains increasingly drought prone across the first millennium. This would have encouraged Jats to move with their herds toward the hills, into western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, to farm land where more water was within reach of their wells. Jat migrations would have accompanied a slow conversion of lineages from pastoralism to farming and Rajput conquest colonisation. All these trends combined to open new agricultural territories from Panipat to Sialkot along very old trade routes running from Kabul to Agra. By the sixteenth century, Jalandhar and Lahore were thriving towns surrounded by lush farm land. By this time also, behind the Salt Range, Paxtun clans had moved down along the Kabul River to build farming communities around irrigation in the Peshawar Valley.
Wheat lands expanded west of the Ganga and in Punjab doabs astride trade routes and around old trading towns where distinctively urban commercial and administrative groups were already prominent, above all, Khatris. As farm land expanded in spaces between the plains and high mountains, new opportunities for trade arose at ecological boundaries, and this stimulated more commercially-oriented production and processing. By the sixteenth century, tobacco, sugar cane, honey, fruits, vegetables, and melons fed Punjab commercial life, along with profits from sericulture, indigo, and all the elements of cloth manufacturing. Down river, Multan featured cotton, opium, and sugarcane. Similarly in Gujarat, where early medieval farming seems to have clustered along rivers and trade routes that connected the Maurya heartland with the Persian Gulf, mixed irrigated and dry cultivation expanded into forests and plains, toward the mountains, again producing more ecological diverse farm territories that stimulated more commodity production. In the sixteenth century, ship builders worked in Broach, Surat, Navsari, Gogha, and Daman; on the plains running up to the Vindhyas, Satpuras, and Aravallis, farmers grew sugarcane, fruits, and melons; and farms produced all the elements of cotton and silk cloth manufacture. As in Punjab, in Gujarat, trade routes ran across various territories endowed with complementary natural resources; more ecological diversity in farm territories encouraged commodity crop specialisation; and a combination of agrarian activities developed that formed the basis for textile industries.
Along the coast from Gujarat south to Kanya Kumari and north-east to Bengal, the expansion of farm territories connected the sea and mountains, and sites along the coast were also connected to one another by water routes. Coastal territories collected commodities from forests, fisheries, and wet and dry farming, as intensive agriculture expanded inland. Ship building depended upon tall timbers from the uplands, and mountain products like pepper and other spices were prime commodities for the overseas trade. From the twelfth century onward, farmers were also moving upland to clear dry lands and build new irrigation along the Kaveri, Krishna, and Godavari rivers. Like the Kongu region in the Kaveri basin -- around Coimbatore -- the up-river tracts in Andhra, Maharashtra, and Berar were rich with black cotton soil. Dry farms in the interior combined with old farm societies along the irrigated coast to produce all the raw materials for the textile industry and to provide profitable sites for weaving. One community of weavers migrated from Saurashtra to set up operations in Madurai, and the mobility and versatility of many professional weaving communities in the peninsula came from their experience in the dry zones of military competition, trade, and agricultural expansion which tied together the black cotton soil of the upland interior and the corridors of the sea trade during late medieval centuries.
In Bengal, dense tropical forests posed a formidable obstacle for farmers, and farming frontiers moved steadily south and east, deeper into the delta, as they also moved north-west into Chota Nagpur and north-east into the Brahmaputra basin. Gupta-era inscriptions appear at the top of the old delta in West Bengal. Pala and Sena epigraphy has a somewhat wider distribution in the lower delta. But before the fourteenth century, land grant inscriptions still concentrated on the relatively high ground to the north, east, and west of the low, deltaic flood lands. In the fourteenth century, the shift of the Ganga delta to the east encouraged farmers to move in that direction, but in 1605, sites of Mughal documentation still clustered in the north and west, though they also extended to the Meghna River and clustered again around Dhaka. The expansion of cultivation from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century moved farming closer to the sea and into the mountains. It created a rich, expanding zone of interaction between sea lanes, mountains, and the northern basins, along the riverine highways.
Everywhere, conquest colonisation added muscle to agrarian expansion. Pastoral and hunting peoples were conquered. Raja Bhoj built his massive tank near Bhopal in the eleventh century. The Kakatiyas made Telangana into land of tank irrigation in the thirteenth century; and one of their tanks, near Warangal, drains eighty square miles. In the fourteenth century, warriors from Afghanistan and Turkestan fought their way into rapidly expanding agrarian territories and built rocky fortress towns in the uplands and dry plains which became new centres of coercive power along trade routes. Fort-cities arose at Kota (1264), Bijapur (1325), Vijayanagar (1336), Gulbarga (1347), Jaunpur (1359), Hisar (1361), Ahmedabad (1413), Jodhpur (1465), Ludhiana (1481), Ahmadnagar (1494), Udaipur (1500), and Agra (1506). Delhi began its long career. Accounts of famine, plague, and food scarcity also begin to multiply, clustered around new warrior capitals. Reports of death and distress indicate that disease also migrated across Eurasia and that hard human costs were paid for war. New dynasties increased the population density in fortress and towns amidst dry landscapes with erratic seasons and precarious water supplies; and deadly sieges, droughts, and disease led to the abandonment and destruction of numerous centres, grand examples being Vijayanagar and Fatehpur Sikri. Nonetheless, after 1300, major new urban sites became permanent and they marked a new kind of territoriality, which focused on the sultan’s darbar.
Regions of warrior power formed around capitals that became sites for the articulation of commerce, war, industry, and farming; and also of regional identities and dharma. Warrior states built roads and carried their demands for revenue across old divisions among agrarian territories; and they founded and protected sites of trade at ecological boundaries and along old trade routes. Most importantly, their conquests and demands for tribute connected the dry interior regions, coastal plains, and ocean ports; so they integrated agrarian spaces that ran up to the mountains and down to the sea; and these connections made agrarian territory more commercially active. Sultans also invested in the fertility of the land. When Firoz Tughlaq built the Western Jamuna Canal along old riverbeds north of Delhi, he began a tradition of large scale state investments in irrigation that would make his capital a model for a new kind of agrarian urbanism -- a site for intersecting, often conflicting interests among warriors, farmers, and financiers, who all invested in agriculture on an increasingly commercial basis within the framework of institutions of state revenue collection.
From the fourteenth century onward, it becomes increasingly relevant for historians to ask if state power was being used to coerce commercial cropping and if warriors were impoverishing peasants with increasing (and often violent) demands for revenue. Many historians have answered "yes" to both questions, but some qualifications and further research are necessary. Certainly, subsistence-first farming strategies would have prevailed in peasant societies, but the idea was also prominent that agriculture can be profitable and provide state revenue at the same time. When peasants paid warriors, they certainly incurred a loss, but did they gain anything?
There is a tendency to see late medieval history in terms of war and conquest, but Ibn Battuta was perhaps as typical of the age as Khaljis and Tughlaqs; and in the fourteenth century, though warriors did use force to collect taxes, there was also substantial commercial revenue in farming communities over and above what would have been necessary to pay taxes. Ibn Battuta -- like Abu-l Fazl and Hamilton Buchanan -- viewed his world in commercial terms, and standing outside the state, he does not indicate that coercion was needed to generate commodities. At each stop in his journey, he observed everyday commercialism. "Bangala is a vast country, abounding in rice," he wrote, "and nowhere in the world have I seen any land where prices are lower than there." In Turkestan, "the horses ... are very numerous and the price of them is negligible." He was pleased to see commercial security, as he did during eight months trekking from Goa to Quilon. "I have never seen a safer road than this," he reported, "for they put to death anyone who steals a single nut, and if any fruit falls no one picks it up but the owner." He also noted that "most of the merchants from Fars and Yemen disembark" at Mangalore, where "pepper and ginger are exceedingly abundant." In 1357, John of Marignola, an emissary to China from Pope Benedict XII, also stopped at Quilon, which he described as "the most famous city in the whole of India, where all the pepper in the world grows."
Though we inherit most commercial evidence from coastal sites, similar observations could have been made along trade routes that connected inland ecological zones where exchange economies thrived. In the more sparsely populated, open spaces of the interior -- away from the sea -- forced revenue collections were part of war for participants on all sides, including peasants, who fled, fought, and farmed for subsistence or profit, as the season allowed. Inscriptions from the Tamil coast indicate that monetary instruments were being used to establish entitlements to agrarian assets by the ninth century; and over the centuries, as more families bought the materials for their own subsistence by exchanging goods and services, farmers sold more and more. Coercion did abound in agriculture, to be sure, but by the sixteenth century, the militant Mughal tax machine forced its way into agrarian territories which already had active money economies and substantial commercial farming. The cotton textile economy gave even rugged warrior-peasants in black soil tracts an abiding interest in commodity production. Patriarchs in farming communities could secure their entitlements to land and labour by paying tribute, and under the Mughals, if not before, the revenue system itself had become a major source of agrarian profit. Commerce and taxation evolved together and supported one another in violent territories of agricultural expansion.
Trends that begin to assemble the elements of modern agrarian environments are sufficiently visible in the sixteenth century to justify using the phrase "early modern" for the period circa 1550-1850. Doing this simply highlights some particular features of historical change during this period which are better documented from Akbar’s time onward, though some began much earlier, most importantly, urbanisation. Abu-l Fazl mentions 180 large cities and 2,837 towns, and bigger cities embellished more powerful states. Urban sites had always accumulated various kinds of powers within agrarian landscapes, but after 1550, transactions that harnessed moving elements in agriculture were tied more extensively to darbars and markets. Hierarchies of central places also emerge more clearly from Mughal times onward. Cities that defined early modern territories include Dhaka, Calcutta, Lucknow, Delhi, Agra, Lahore, Multan, Surat, Ahmedabad, Bombay, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Madras, Cochin, and Trivandrum. Some elements that define modern cultural regions -- linguistic, literary, ethnic, and religious -- were already in place in 1500, but regions become more clearly institutionalised in the following centuries. Forts and armies created strategically dominant sites for stabilising regional cultures. First Devagiri and then Ahmadnagar, Aurangabad, Junnar, and Pune defined an emerging Marathi linguistic and cultural area within regional networks of peasant-warrior alliance and religious pilgrimage; and Marathas refer to maharashtradharma, "the dharma specific to Maharashtra." By the seventeenth century, Warangal, Golkonda, and Vijayanagar redefined "Andhra desa" as a land that included both the coast and the dry interior, which was called "Telugu country" for the first time in the fourteenth century. The Hoysalas built a new, lasting centre of power in a new Kannada heartland at Dvarasamudra, named for its irrigation tank (Sanskrit = samudra) and poised above the Mysore plateau and the upper Kaveri basin. There is a telling eighteenth century map in the British Museum that depicts Mughal territory as strings of urban sites connected by routes of transportation, running from Kabul to Bengal and Berar. In each central place, a Mughal official would have drawn a similar map in his mind to connect his own headquarters to all the towns subordinate to his authority ... and so on down the line ... down to little villages. Around these sites of accumulation and mobility, regional networks of agrarian territory took physical and institutional form in hierarchies of power, authority, and influence.
In 1790, East India Company officers drew identical maps of their own territories. This kind of linear, transactional, urban territoriality had an increasing impact on agrarian space from Akbar’s time onward, and it provoked new forms of documentation to suit environments of inter-city mobility and communication. Inscriptions declined in number and significance. Portable paper documents dominate the historical record after 1550. The new records come not only from ritual sites but also from professional accountants, surveyors, preachers, travellers, merchants, and tax collectors; and they are composed in many languages. These records touch upon agriculture over much wider spaces in more standard terms than their medieval predecessors. They are concerned above all with trade and revenue. Though localised in detail, early modern agricultural data can be compiled to form general impressions. The old inscriptional corpus represented an agricultural archipelago of core sites separated by empirically empty space; its transactions were disconnected from one another. Thus there is no compendium of inscriptional data which covers even a fraction of the area covered by Abu-l Fasl’s A’in-i-Akbari. Early-modern states produced increasingly detailed, comprehensive data on the conduct of farming, during more widespread, regular, and financially complex state revenue transactions; and not only in Mughal domains. In Karnataka, "black books" came into vogue for accounts in monastic and landlord estates. Local chronicles in Assam record the first manpower census in 1510, and Ahoms started a land survey in 1681. In the seventeenth century, a number of different institutions -- states, temples, monasteries, waqf endowments, businesses, and landed estates -- generated texts to indicate that statistical accounts were becoming more popular in asset management. Mughal revenue and monetary records represent a general rise of statistical accounting. The A’in-i-Akbari measured agricultural production, manufacturing output, and trade by the value of state revenues; it converts territory into exchange value. These accounts were disciplinary devices to track people and their obligations. Institutional accounts had been produced earlier, for specific transactions and endowments, as in the twelfth century accounts of the Chola emperors who recorded all the cost and rights involved in royal temple construction. Vijayanagar inscriptions use tabular statistics in the fourteenth century and later separate numbers from text in tabular accounts using standardised units of measure. By the sixteenth century, accounting, coinage, cash calculations, commercial entitlements, and tax discipline all travelled together among urban centres of state power. They produced new landscapes of knowledge and agrarian textuality as they organised territory into regions of value and hierarchy.
The A’in-i Akbari stands alone, however. It did not become a template for imperial accounts and seems never to have been up-dated or replicated. Personal devotion to Akbar motivated Abu-l Fazl and Akbar ruled a personal empire as he moved among its urban centres. His domain was transactional, built upon personal alliances; and however wide spreading, it never produced a revenue bureaucracy. Our documentation concerning seventeenth and eighteenth century revenue conditions actually improves in the late eighteenth century when the East India Company did retrospective assessments. It seems that Mughal tax demands peaked under Aurangzeb but Company officials could not reconstruct a good record of taxation before 1700. It is reasonable to conclude that recorded rates of taxation which we find dating back to the Arthasastra and running down to 1700 -- including the A’in-i-Akbari -- represent normative guidelines for official activity more than accounts of assessments and collections. This is not to say that taxes were not collected or assessed with any regularity -- medieval inscriptions are replete with tax accounts -- but rather that there was an empirical gap between local tax practices and regional documentation, which continued through the eighteenth century and which early modern state officials worked hard to eliminate, including, no doubt, Abu-l Fazl. Eighteenth century states produced substantial evidence to indicate that they were systematising agrarian taxation, and extending and regularising procedures which had been instituted under the Mughals. The Risala-i Zira't ["Treatise on Agriculture"], commissioned by the Company in 1785, describes a process of standardisation in regional revenue practice in Bengal which had been going on for perhaps fifty years; though state taxation and accounting were much older than this and though even this standardisation was probably more normative than regulatory. The Company continued to standardise a revenue system, and its territories were defined as regions of official knowledge, regulated state income, and government authority. Maratha, Mysore, Sikh, and other regimes did the same. As the Company built its tax routines, it utilised ideas and techniques which had been practised and circulated among state intellectuals across Eurasia for several centuries, and Company intellectuals added some new ideas from England. Persian techniques for assessment, accounting, and granting entitlements moved through Mughal domains into Bengal and thus into Company blueprints for zamindari revenue settlements there. Mughal and European practices mingled in eighteenth century Maratha territories, where they produced detailed village accounts, and Maratha practices travelled with Brahman accountants via Mysore and Hyderabad into Company survey and revenue offices in Madras. English debates about land revenue and land rights adapted old ideas from many sources to build colonial understandings of agriculture. Company intellectual practices drew upon many other regimes and its agrarian discourse was thus more distinctively early-modern and broadly Eurasian than narrowly British or even European.
Early modern texts focus their attention on the power of absolute rulers and on the rights, titles, and obligations of ranked individuals in revenue transactions that delivered agrarian wealth into the treasury. Early-modern imperial taxation, as it affected most villages, seems in general to have been more in the nature of tribute, being coerced, irregular, and arbitrary. Taxation itself was ancient, going back to the Mauryas. But imperial taxation had never been widely routinised, legitimised, and integrated within local institutions that contained most tax transactions until the late eighteenth century. Inscriptions indicate that early medieval agrarian territories were defined transactionally by various transfers of wealth among farming localities through state officials, merchants, and temples. Transactions between villages and kings secured local entitlements, and these are the main business for many inscriptions. Payments for local goods and services and the transfer of local entitlements generated income for local gentry; and they in turn paid samantas and rajas to maintain their own local authority. Such payments by local leaders to secure local entitlements increased steadily after 1300. The Mughal imperial system collected wealth from a great many localities through powerful intermediaries -- zamindars and rajas -- as Mughal jagirdars inserted themselves militarily into existing territories of payment-for-entitlement. Empire evolved as a many-layered cake of authority and entitlement. The people at the top did not have much to say about what went on at the bottom. They focused rather on funnelling more wealth to the top and on regulating transactions above the ranks of rajas and zamindars. Mughal records never did dig below the level of zamindars or keep track of payments moving up the hierarchy from villages and towns, to regional centres, to the imperial capital. Eighteenth century states developed this capacity. Records from Maratha, Sikh, and Company capitals enumerate local payments-for-entitlement and could track payments to regional authorities; and some regional authorities could even regulate local systems. But such local administrative powers in wide spreading revenue transactions were tenuous and eighteenth century wars made them more costly to maintain. Before 1800, it seems, Marathas did the most local administrative regulation. The Company’s Native State treaties and early zamindari settlements continued the conventional practice of collecting revenue through intermediaries who were granted open-ended local authority in return. This kept down central costs of imperial administration and it also had the advantage of rewarding subordinate allies with the incentive to raise the value of their own territories, and thus to expand the extent of their own revenue collections. It was only after 1800 that Sikh and Company regimes developed the power to regulate the activity of subordinate authorities in local systems of payment-for-entitlement.
The Mughals provided a basic vocabulary for this early modern state project. Mughal terminology spread widely to designate ranks and terms of revenue payment. That regional norms for taxation and entitlement were coming into vogue during the eighteenth century is suggested by the frequency with which ideas like "illegal exactions" appear in revenue disputes. This idea reflects a discourse of disputation, resistance, and critique concerning contested rights and entitlements in the revenue ranks. The various regional systems display similarities that derive from pervasive Mughal influence. What the Company called a revenue "farm" was a contract to collect taxes from a specific territory in return for a share of collections; and this was considered an irregular if not immoral arrangement almost everywhere. It was considered to be a degraded practice because Mughal rules stipulated that taxes be fixed and collected not by speculators but rather by ranked officers at official rates. Taxes were to be collected within a fasli year. From a Persian term for "crop" and "cropping year" the Mughal fasli year ended with the last tax payment from the last winter crop (however small), in mid-April. Other important terms in the revenue lexicon -- jagir, zamin, rai'yat, inam, watan, and miras -- indicated official revenue roles and personalities. The holder of a jagir (jagirdar) was a state official who collected revenue from a large territory to pay the emperor. This role defined the Mughal nobility and provided leadership for regional successor states. A zamindar paid revenue to a jagirdar and received revenue in turn from rai’yats. When Anglicised in the Company’s revenue discourse, "zamindar" and "ryot" were understood to represent not only roles in the revenue system but also types of property rights in land; and they were translated as "landlord" and "peasant," respectively.
The Company’s big agrarian debate concerned the practice of collecting revenue from zamindars and thus confirming their entitlements. Company officers only found an alternative procedure after 1792, when they broke into dry territories which had been pioneered by warrior-peasants in the late medieval period. Here, in Kongu and Rayalaseema, the Company acquired territory in which Mysore sultans had broken into the local nexus of payment-for-entitlement and thinned the ranks of zamindars. Maratha and Sikh regimes did much the same, but in most of the Ganga basin and Bengal, along the coast, and in the hills, the title "zamindar" had been attached to rajas, lineage leaders, and tribal chiefs who were deeply entrenched locally; or it had been acquired by financial middlemen, revenue farmers, and warrior entrepreneurs. Because Company officers believed that the Mughals had managed a bureaucracy, they looked for one traditional, authentic "native" practice which assigned specific entitlements to each peasant or tenant, but they found many instead. Over time, other terms for "farmer" or "peasant" -- such as kisan (Hindi) and krishak (Bengali) -- entered the Company’s lexicon by identification with rai’yat and also came to be translated as "tenant" in zamindari areas. This set of terms has caused endless confusion ever since, because Company officials defined each rank in the revenue hierarchy as a kind of property right and failed to situate each term in its local context, where it had meaning in practice. British officers did not know that they were dealing with an agrarian world bigger and more varied than Europe; their analysis was geared rather to the scale of England or France. But as empire builders, they were determined to create firm bureaucratic, legal definitions for these terms; and to this end, they made their official definitions and projected them back into history to fabricate authentic native practices, based on classical tradition. In actual agrarian societies, a rai’yat (ryot) could be a gentry high caste landowner who used servile labour to cultivate his fields or a landlord, or a tenant, or a self-cultivating, independent warrior-peasant. Similar variations in social content obtained for all the official revenue roles which were codified bureaucratically in the regions of Company administration.
The terms inam, watan, and miras represent important features of early modern systems of payment-for-entitlement. These were hereditary rights to resources held by people of stature within local society; and they were bought, sold, accumulated, and otherwise deployed to build local (and sometimes wider) estates. Gifts of lands to temples and Brahmans became inam and miras, and often took the form of tax exceptions or privileged, low-tax, land rights. In Maratha regions, a watan was a bundle of rights to land, services, and tax payments, which defined agrarian nobility and gentry families in agrarian communities. These terms represent transactional entitlements in the complex of payments and obligations which formed alliances among elites at the local, regional, and imperial levels of authority. Company officials who were seeking to build an impersonal bureaucracy could see this kind of personal right to revenue only as a nuisance and as a violation of the principle that in India, the emperor owned the land. But now we can see that early modern states were composed of small agrarian territories whose old, local entitlements were being redefined as they were being incorporated into imperial hierarchies. These revenue systems entailed public, symbolic enactments of political ranking. State rituals at critical moments in the fasli year constituted authority, locally and regionally; and these rituals included payments that moved up the ranks to accumulate in capital cities. Subalterns in the revenue ranks paid superiors for entitlements in acts of ritual deference that formed power positions in agrarian territory; and some of the cash that travelled up the ranks came to be counted as state revenue.
Historians have focused attention on the wealth that accrued to the Mughal nobility and to the British Raj, but as tokens of value travelled up the ranks, tokens of value also travelled down: money went up, entitlements came down. Transactions at low levels controlled most of the moving elements that mingled on the farm. Payments by family patriarchs confirmed their status in communities. Payments by the head men of villages, muhallas, castes, and sectarian and occupational groups confirmed community identity and leadership. Payments to temples, dynasts, Brahmans, and community leaders confirmed farmers’ rights to land, labour, water, and credit. In early modern times, payments that came to be called "taxation" or "rent" (depending upon who received them) became increasingly complex, numerous, and necessary in farming communities. These transactional markers of subaltern status did not always involve paying cash -- they could mean payments of goods and services-- but from Mughal times onward, local entitlements came to rest increasingly upon payments of cash that moved out of localities to join streams of revenue flowing into regional capitals. The rai'yat subaltern paid for powers over land and over people of lesser rank. The rai’yat -- whether he farmed the land with his own hands or not -- paid revenue which confirmed his status as a local patriarch in a local population of rate payers. In the rituals of revenue, states did not suppress or even undermine other kinds of power; and indeed, the sarkar depended upon the local powers of subalterns in the revenue ranks to realise the revenue. Inam, miras, and watan were some of the terms which marked local sites of transactional power. Personalities of influence and honour acquired these titles to build the local revenue foundations of early-modern states. This form of property eventually became archaic in modern bureaucratic regions of agrarian administration.
In the early modern period, as more wealth became revenue, a distinctive political economy emerged at the articulation of state institutions and farming communities, during a gradual shift in material conditions and agrarian cultures. The land itself took on new meanings. The value of farm land became the measure of agrarian territory. Land taxation increased sharply under the Mughals, again in the eighteenth century, and again under the Company. The British increase was most dramatic if not the most violent or disruptive. But after 1857, land revenue declined in real terms and also as a proportion of state revenue, though state power continued to increase. The Indian National Congress demanded an absolute reduction of the land tax, and after 1947, it fell below zero. State power still increased, but states now turned revenue back to farmers and state subsidies surpassed land revenue by 1970. Uniquely then in the early modern period, agrarian taxation funded many upward trends -- in the power of state institutions, in the size and wealth of state elites, in urban populations, in monumental building, in artistic and ritual patronage, and in the speed and volume of communication and transportation (including the railway) -- all of which were sustained by payments to the state from agriculture. At the same time, state institutions defined entitlements on the farm more widely and forcefully. From 1556 to 1860, struggles to collect revenue and to enforce state power over land rights produced rampant warfare; and the rising real value of land revenue financed Mughal imperial grandeur, rebellions against the Mughals, eighteenth century wars, and British conquest. Historians have explained the rising revenue trend primarily as a consequence of state action, and military coercion, in particular, has been assigned a central role. Agrarian factors need more consideration.
By 1600, the accumulation of wealth on major routes made strategic sites well worth fighting for. Defending, ruling, protecting, and taxing central places became more valuable and contentious as cities and towns came to include a higher proportion of liquid assets generated by trade, manufacturing, and revenue transactions. Taxes collected in town, like the food and cloth in the market, reflected the character of agrarian territory. Urban officials and merchants drew upon the wealth of the land, and what the East India Company would call "land revenue" actually included taxes on all variety of assets. As we have seen, rights to land were not just powers over dirt; they formed membership and rank in farming communities and represented a family’s entitlement to community resources. Payments-for-entitlement were thus constituents of agrarian society and tools of territoriality. The meaning of "taxation" changed radically in the nineteenth century, but before 1850, the land whose tax value increased so sharply certainly did include its old community constituents. In retrospect, it was quite sensible then for the British to think of payments that marked agrarian territoriality as being a state charge for rights of land ownership, because the people who had titles in territory made payments-for-entitlement to state officials. Weavers, merchants, iron-smiths, bankers, herders, and many others also paid taxes. But except in larger urban settings, non-farmers seem to have paid for entitlements mostly through patriarchs at the apex of local society who were also official mediators in state revenue transactions -- rajas, zamindars, deshmukhs, patels, village headmen, and the like. As agrarian sites became more valuable, the value of this role increased along with the price to be paid for performing it.
In the territories in which state taxation increased most dramatically -- and left the best records -- trade and urbanism were also enhancing the commercial value of land by stimulating demand for agricultural commodities. Indigo and other dyes, animal products, ginger, tumeric, tobacco, toddy and arrack, seri-culture, grapes and melons, fruits and vegetables of all kinds, saffron, sugarcane, oilseeds and oils, peppers and spices, chillies, opium, pulses, rice, wheat, cotton, and palm and other tree products head the list of commercial crops that pushed up land values. Commodity production depended on farm assets that needed protection, not only irrigation works and wells but also trees, terraced fields, and processing equipment like oil presses, Persian wheels, looms, and forges. Manufacturing increased at the same time, most prominently in textiles, and it is important to keep in mind that all the elements in textiles were agricultural products, so that all the labour that cleaned, spun, wove, dyed, washed, and carried the in-put and out-put of the textile trades also added value to farms. Expanding agricultural production increased demand for manufactures, from cooking pots and ploughs to houses, jewelry, and armaments. Direct and indirect commercial investments in agriculture -- in manufacturing, irrigation, and commodity markets -- increased along with investments in revenue finance -- as military competition for taxation drove up the revenue value of farms in financial markets. Much of the liquid capital for agricultural expansion moved through the very same transactions that provided revenue. Temples invested in irrigation. Warriors and financiers advanced loans and granted revenue reductions to increase the stability, intensity, and market value of production. Advances to farmers came increasingly from state authorities who thereby sought to secure their own share of the crop. (These advances were called by various names, such as taccavi in Madras.) Remember the Mastee brothers. Their tale includes the assertion that they advanced cash to farmers to lure them to the new village. We will see that zamindars in Chittagong also advanced cash to expand farming. Urbanisation circulated capital from trade and manufacturing through various circuits of investment in farming. Investing in irrigation paid solid dividends, whatever the source of the capital, and we can see from medieval inscriptions and from nineteenth century British sources alike that building and repairing of irrigation tanks relied on capital raised in a host of ways, including the use of temple funds. As the money supply increased after 1600, it pushed up the cash value of farm assets and taxes at the same time in communities endowed with commercial connections, commodity crops, irrigation, and investors. Land in these places became well worth protecting and paying to keep in the family.
Coercion and violence increased land revenue, but not only for state officials. Mughals fought for revenue, tax collectors fought for it, and the East India Company fought for it; but as more people paid more for land, more people also fought back to resist claims from above and to expand local claims. Physical fighting distinguished the etiquette of early modern payments-for-entitlement. Revenue transactions combined negotiation, ritual, status marking, gambling, entrepreneurship, and brute struggles. Fighting and paying for land became inescapable as agrarian space filled up, and subaltern resistance became more common as standing to fight and paying for rights became unavoidable. The option of flight into the forest became less and less attractive as open land for new settlement disappeared. By 1850, Bhisma’s old adage had become archaic, because even wooded lands were no longer open space for escape and colonisation: states taxed them and communities controlled them. Creating such domains of local control involved a lot of fighting and paying for entitlements, as the vast, open frontiers of agrarian expansion which had characterised the medieval period closed down. Early modern imperialism enabled agrarian communities to redefine local territoriality. Wide spreading transactional hierarchies marked empires in which every level in the ranks took payments from below and all the ranks spread out to control more and more land. The many-layered cake of imperial revenue increased the total value of state income, funnelled more wealth to the higher levels, and also expanded the agrarian base. Land values rose with more competition. State officials added force to the extension of cultivation and to the appropriation of open land by local subordinates. Agricultural communities defined territory by enclosing the land, carving it up, by fighting and paying. Empty land vanished as landscapes filled up completely with territories of entitlement. Agricultural land came to include all the land for which communities made claims with taxes, rituals, battles, and lore.
Using A’in-i-Akbari statistics, Shireen Moosvi estimates that gross cropped area in the Mughal heartland in the northern basins and western plains covered 61% of the total land area that would be covered with farms in 1910. This temporal comparison is not exact because Mughal data -- like all such data before 1870 -- does not measure cropped area but rather land in the revenue category of "cropped land." Early modern assessments do not measure cultivation, crops, or yields, but rather a kind of land value in systems of payment-for-entitlement. With this in mind, it is still useful to note that Moosvi’s ratios comparing figures for 1595 and 1910 run from an average of 85% for Agra, Bet Jalandhar, Baroda, and Surat, down to 29% in Champaner and Rohilkhand, and down to 8% in Sindh Sagar; indicating that much more of the land was being farmed in politically central, commercially well-connected parts of the Mughal domain, and that relatively less subsequent expansion of farm land was possible in core Mughal areas. Such core areas, pulsing with trade and manufacturing, provided most Mughal revenues.
James R. Hagen argues that in the lowlands and adjacent hills of the Gangetic basin and Bengal, roughly 30% of the total area was occupied by farms 1600. He estimates that this figure increased to 50% in 1700, remained at 50% in 1800, and rose to 65% in 1910 and to 70% in 1980. These estimates suggest that farm acreage expanded over 40% of the total land area between 1600 and 1980, with half the increase occurring by 1700, another huge increase in the nineteenth century, and very little in the twentieth century. Much more expansion was possible after 1600 in naturally well-endowed areas that were less developed in Akbar’s time. Outside Bet Jalandar, for instance, the Punjab lowlands were barely cultivated in 1600, and in 1800, most land south of hills remained open for grazing. Between 1850 and 1939, government built 20,886 miles of canals in Punjab, and by 1945, canals irrigated 15,688,000 acres, much for more than one crop each year. Regional disparities in the pace and timing of agricultural expansion typify agrarian history and are critical for an accurate understanding of the agrarian content of modernity. As Punjab was booming, some old areas of agricultural prosperity were hitting a resource limit.
In 1595, outside Mughal territory, higher proportions of farm land to total arable would certainly have pertained in old cores areas of riverine cultivation along the coast and in the Ganga basin. Moosvi’s figures for Baroda and Surat probably reflect conditions in many parts of the coastal plains, especially along river beds and in the deltas, except in Bengal. As Hagen’s estimate suggests, the overall increase in farm land would have been smaller in the eighteenth century, during wars, plagues, and famines that were particularly bad in the later decades. Bengal took decades to recover from the 1770 famine. W.W.Hunter reported that 35% of the total population and 50% of the farmers died in that year, and that depopulation continued in later years amidst zamindar feuds to attract tenants to their estates. Decades of strong expansion seem to have preceded the famine, however, as indicated by a surge in temple building after 1730 by zamindars and businessmen. In the Krishna-Godavari and Kaveri deltas, late eighteenth century wars broke irrigation works, deprived tanks of repairs, and displaced communities, which took a lot of land out of cultivation; and all along the eastern coast, the expansion of rice farming in the decades 1800-1850 involved the reclamation of old fields. In 1850, wide areas open for new cultivation did remain in Bangladesh, Assam, Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Sindh, and the western Ganga basin. New large scale irrigation then produced new farmland in the Indo-Gangetic plains and in the deltas of the Kaveri, Krishna, and Godavari rivers. But in territories that were heavily farmed in 1850, there was very little expansion thereafter, although even this incremental change would have further displaced hill peoples and forest ecologies in central mountains, high mountains, and western ghats.
A rough summary of the overall trend begins with the impression that less than half of all the farm land in 1900 had been farmed in 1600. Though the oldest fields were ancient, most of the land being farmed in 1600 had come into cultivation during eleven centuries after 500. Over half of the farm land in 1910 was thus created during just three centuries after 1600. This implies a substantial increase in the pace of new cultivation. In 1800, dry and upland tropical areas were still sparsely farmed and held substantial populations of pastoralists and shifting cultivators. In the nineteenth century, dramatic increases occurred in dry cultivation, irrigation building, and forest clearance; and modes of resource scarcity and competition came into being which have continued to the present day. After 1850, agrarian unrest increased with competition over land, water, and rights, amidst the final enclosure of farming frontiers. After 1880, ecological change and human dislocation caused by the expansion of farming concentrated in the higher altitudes and in the dry western plains. From 1880 to 1980, the highest rates of increase in the ratio of total farm land to total land area appear in Tripura (903%), Sikkim (698%), Nagaland (405%), Assam (333%), Rajasthan (326%), Mizoram (288%), Arunachal Pradesh (271%), and Orissa (206%). Low figures running from 103% to 122% appear in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Kerala. After 1880, agricultural expansion was very substantial (with new irrigation) in dry regions of Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Gujarat, Karnataka, northern Sri Lanka, and Sind; and (with forest clearance) in all tropical uplands, including Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. But the most dramatic change in modern times has been on the farthest frontiers of medieval and early modern agrarian territories, in the tropical high mountains and Assam. The colonisation and clearing of forests in these areas by people and states moving up from the lowlands accelerated under the Mughals and again under the British. Rapid acceleration began with the expansion of railway, but it peaked only after 1950. The percentage of land under cultivation in the high mountains remains low even today, so that agricultural expansion at high altitude still has a long way to go. But the rapid proportional increase of farm acreage in the uplands, along with forest cutting for other purposes, helps to explain the increase in conflict over land in the mountains in the twentieth century. A dramatic reduction of the high forest cover has produced a sense of crisis over the sustainability of mountain ecologies.
Demography and technology do not account for the upward pace of agricultural expansion after 1600. Population increase may have moved in harmony with trends in total farm output, but farm acreage moved ahead more rapidly than population. Rates of population growth rose after 1800 but jumped to their current pace only in the 1920s. Technologies did change in the late nineteenth century, when large irrigation works, railways, and road building opened up new areas to cultivation. But irrigation building moved along throughout the medieval and early modern period, and irrigation tank and well digging led the expansion of farming in the peninsula after 1500, as recounted in the story of the Mastee brothers. Few new tanks were built after 1800, and a good proportion of the new irrigation in the nineteenth century put new water into old canals. Wells continued to be dug at a steady pace and remained the major source of new irrigation in dry regions, right down to the present day. Like demography, technological change became a driving force in agricultural expansion only at the end; and new kinds of irrigation, seeds, and chemicals have been most important in productivity increases per acre since 1950. The long expansion after 1600 came primarily from the transformation of agrarian territoriality. States fought to enclose territory to extract more wealth as revenue; and in this effort, innovations in military technology did affect agricultural trends. At the same time, local farming communities enclosed land around their settlements to secure entitlements in the face of commercial opportunities, state demands, competition from other communities, and declining land availability. In the local context, demography would have had an influence on the rate of expansion. Agrarian struggles of the early modern period were not so much about revenue as about territory. They brought all the farming landscapes under the control of states and local communities during centuries that span Mughal and Company rule.
A modern state environment for agrarian history thus began to emerge from the sixteenth century onward. At the highest level, an imperial state extended its authority over a vast terrain that was defined by a network of urban centres, inter-city routes, and state elites. At a second level, elites in regional capitals and local men of substance formed networks of alliance within regional state institutions. Elites at these two levels confront one another continuously. Today, they articulate regional politics and nationality. In the seventeenth century, Mughals brought the Punjab and Deccan into the imperial fold and Sikh and Maratha warriors defined regional movements, representing alliances among warrior-farmers in dispersed territories of conquest colonisation. Here and elsewhere, early modern farming communities fought to control land and labour in the framework of regional networks and alliances, and agrarian regions emerged in territories defined by dominant social powers in agriculture. The cultural setting of farming also became more regionally defined by the homogenising power of early modern states.
Violence punctuated the early modern evolution of agrarian regions. State violence helped to advance agricultural expansion, as when Mughals armies cleared jungles and subdued hill tribes. All agrarian states conquered nomads and pastoralists, hastening their integration into the urban economy and agricultural communities. With Rajput, Mughal, Maratha, Sikh, and Company conquest, the sedentarisation of hunting, herding, and tribal populations continued along with the expansion of farming into forests. In the central mountains, for instance, from the rim of the northern basins to the Satpuras and Orissa, tribal groups in the uplands were increasingly brought into state systems that included lowland peasant farmers in caste societies. Dominant groups extended idioms of caste and applied institutions of ranked entitlements to create official community leaders and to form transactional hierarchies that would connect ethnically diverse local communities in regional revenue systems.
New agrarian territories were thus formed of diverse, endogamous, ethnic groups, living and working separately in their own ecological settings, spreading across the hills and valleys. Formerly independent Bhils, Gonds, and others were subsumed within an overarching military power structure erected by Marathas and expanded by the British. Formerly independent rulers of the hills entered agrarian states and farming communities. Violence occurred at many moments in such transformations of social identity and power. Efforts to enclose territory triggered militant migrations that made it more difficult to enclose territory without violence. The rapid expansion of agriculture and state power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced new agrarian territories and changed the composition of many more, provoking violence along the way. Mobility increased to such an extent that state elites sometimes coerced workers and farmers to keep up the cultivation. Migrants came from south-west and central Asia into Kashmir, the northern basins, and Bengal, where they pushed farming into the jungles and the hills. Warriors and farmers cleared Rohilkhand, Gorakhpur, Gaya, and other forested upland tracts along the Ganga basin. They expanded into high mountains and Nepal; while in Nepal, states pushed from Kathmandu westward, creating a new region of farming and of military conflict at high altitude. Colonists moved across Myanmar and into the Brahmaputra basin. Cooch Behar became a borderland between Ahoms upriver and new settlers from the west and south; as farmers high in the adjacent mountains kept their autonomy. Assam has been a zone of conflict among agrarian groups ever since. Jat lineages conquered and settled across Punjab. Bhojpuri peasants fought in armies across the plains and the Deccan. Lodhis migrated from the north into the Narmada valley. Farming expanded with conquests in Khandesh, Berar, in the upper Godavari basin, Telengana, and in the realms of Golkonda and Hyderabad. The upper Kaveri basin became a rich agricultural territory under the Udaiyar Rajas, Hyder Ali, and Tipu Sultan. The southern band of dry lands of Rayalaseema running across the peninsula from Bijapur to Chandragiri seems to have witnessed an exceptionally rapid growth of tank-fed, millet, and cotton farming under the rule of Bijapur sultans and the later Nayakas.
Considerable violence accompanied the creation of new intermediary positions in the ranks of state institutional authority. Jagirdars had to secure their own powers to collect revenue, as did zamindars and lesser authorities. The cash value of a territory would increase when subordinate and intermediary positions in the revenue ranks were filled by wealthy, well-connected people who could collect and transmit revenue effectively. These intermediary positions became more valuable as territories developed economically; and such development also stimulated and financed defections and rebellions. Subordinates would fight to deepen their control over local resources to support a drive for political independence, as best exemplified by Murshid Quli Khan, who pressed heavily on his zamindars between his appointment as Subahdar of Bengal in 1705 and his death in 1727. Local and regional struggles for independence from higher authorities were at the same time struggles for territorial control at lower levels. This basic feature of modern nationalism can be seen in the regional states of the eighteenth century. If successful, strategic manoeuvres in the regions of imperial states produced an independent ruler whose capital city grew in wealth and status, as did that of Murshid Quli Khan. His regime fostered "a sharp rise in the number of temples built by businessmen ... [who] came to constitute 32 per cent of the total number of temples, while the contribution of the zemindars fell from 87 to 60 per cent..." This chain of events was repeated many times in the eighteenth century. Subaltern insurgency and secessionist struggles -- though anathema to empire -- could actually improve local agrarian conditions and work to the benefit of local elites, despite the cost of war. Imperial fragmentation thus did not contradict economic growth in the eighteenth century any more than it did in the twentieth century.
Battles for autonomy and supremacy waged by sultans, jagirdars, zamindars, rajas, nawabs, and the English East India Company could engage peasant and warrior allies by contributing force to local struggles for control over the land around farming villages. Regional struggles for autonomy and imperial struggles for supremacy both needed local allies in agricultural communities and added muscle to local fights for village land. In Mysore, Maharashtra, Malwa, Punjab, Rajasthan, Kashmir, and the central mountains, Mughal successor states arose from alliances between former imperial nobility and rising warrior-peasant elites who exercised a powerful hold over state revenues locally. In the wet lowlands, along the coast from Gujarat to Bengal, and in Bihar, the eighteenth century imperial nobility allied instead with medieval gentry, rajas and merchant financiers who capitalised their position in the ranks within expanding networks of trade, revenue, and manufacturing. In the 1740s, the Company’s pursuit of agrarian wealth began along the coast around Calcutta and Madras, where it confronted a confusing set of claims to revenue and proprietary authority that derived from medieval land grants, Mughal authorities, and regional states. In this context, the official status and wealth of the entrepreneurial revenue intermediary -- the revenue farmer -- who came equipped with his own military power, rose with his ability to deliver the revenue, by whatever means necessary. Company sarkar arose in this climate of agrarian violence and revenue finance.
In the evidence from early modern centuries, we can see serious shifts in the discourse of agrarian identity and territoriality. As more local wealth became state revenue, local leaders entered the ranks of empire, and farming communities became institutions of entitlement within regional systems of imperial power. New positions at the low end of the revenue ranks defined power over property that was becoming more commercially valuable under the disciplines of market exchange and state authority. Terminologies indicate change in the nature of territoriality. The term zamindar came to have widespread utility for local leaders and for revenue intermediaries of various kinds, and in contrast to the term raja, it denoted a person whose authority depended upon payments-for-entitlement. But a raja also had to pay for his independence and this status also came to be fixed as a rank within a region of state authority rather than being a claim within medieval ritual networks of samantas and maha-adi-rajas. At lower levels, similar changes occurred. In medieval Tamil parlance, kaniyatchi denoted a village sharehold, most basically, in land (kani); and its holder, a kaniyatchikarar, was a patriarch among the local gentry. This inscriptional term was displaced in eighteenth century documents by zamindar and then by another Persian term to denote hereditary rights -- mirasidar -- before being displaced after 1800 by "ryot," taken from the Mughal lexicon to denote an individual tax paying property owner who had a receipt for revenue payments that constitutes an official title to land, a patta. These displacements indicate a shift from early medieval forms of collective community entitlements, to a ranking system of entitlement and inheritance under the Mughals, and to a private property system under the Company. Through all these displacements, the Brahman and Vellala gentry retained control in farming communities as they climbed the official ranks, like the Medai Delavoy Mudaliar, Nayaka governor in Tirunelveli, and expanded their commercial horizons, like Ananda Ranga Pillai, dubash at Pondichery.
Articulations of social power and state authority created regions of community. In Bundelkhand, senior Rajput lineage leaders became rajas under the Mughals as lesser lineage brethren (thakurs) formed the regional ranks of zamindars. Each lineage ruled over a local community of farmers in subordinate castes of Lodhis, Kurmis, Kachhis, Ahirs, and Gujars. Among these latter groups, Kurmis seem to have been most prosperous in the nineteenth century, and they included families with zamindari entitlements; but at the same time, some Ahir families formed special family ties with Rajputs and consequently enjoyed special patronage. In this complex of ranked communities, individual villages were composed of several settlement clusters linked across Bundelkhand by inter-marriage, land owning, and labour movements. A region of community sentiment thus formed as Bundela Rajputs colonised from west to east; and in the process, Thakur power increased in the older regions of colonisation; so that during the 1857 rebellion, even the most prestigious Rajputs lineages in the east had little influence on events in the western districts adjacent to Malwa.
In Bengal, Francis Buchanan witnessed one phase in the regional formation of Chittagong. It began with Mughal conquest, in 1666, when Mughal troops cut jungles to promote farming, and one sanad gave a single grantee 166.4 acres of jungle to be cultivated for the support of a mosque, ordering that he "must assiduously pray for the survival of the powerful state." By 1780, Mughal authorities had made 288 grants of tax-free land in the Chittagong region to support mosques and shrines, in the same vein as temple grants in medieval inscriptions. The titles of the men who were endowed with such grants indicate that 28% (chaudhuris, ta’alluqdars, and khans) were men of substance in Chittagong when they received the grants; but other endowments went to religious leaders and holy men, the largest category being shaikh (31%). These recipients were land clearance entrepreneurs. They contracted with zamindars to finance cultivation; and zamindars then advanced funds to peasant farmers, receiving crops and labour in return. Here we see the beginnings of the intricately ranked entitlements to the land that typify the agrarian frontiers of Bengal. By 1798, regional agrarian society in Chittagong had three distinctive types of community. Elite zamindars, mostly Hindus, lived in the city, along with a large population of urban port workers and merchants. In the flatlands, up to the base of the hills, rice paddy fields were cut from jungle, dotted with mosques and shrines, and worked by Muslim peasants under Muslim men of substance who descended from the original contractors. Non-Muslim jhum cultivators had their own communities in the hills, in the path of lowland expansion. Today, descendants of these people living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are embroiled in conflict with the government of Bangladesh from a position that is strictly defined as culturally distinct from the national community of Bengalis.
In Maratha and Sikh territories, militant agrarian patriarchs fought to enhance their local claims and to enclose open space in the lowlands and adjacent mountain valleys. At the same time, urban elites accumulated assets in centres of state power and long distance trade. Status ranks came to be pegged to the titles that formed regional alliances among locally dominant warrior-farmers. Beginning with Shivaji, warrior-peasant alliances displaced Mughal imperial elites but used Mughal-derived ranks to organise competition and collaboration. Conflicting demands on local land and revenues generated minute record keeping and adjudication that elevated the status of Brahmans within the Maratha state. Dominant warrior-peasants became the local protectors of a Maharashtra-dharma that blessed dominant caste control in villages under the Maratha military. In Punjab, Sikh religious law enshrined the rule of misls in local domains of Jat control. In both regions, an increasing proportion of entitlements were being held by the allies and superiors of the village patriarchs, in towns where forts, godowns, bankers, cantonments, scholars, and courts defined regional dominions. Villages became sites of agrarian expansion, nested within regions of military alliance; religion and language became tokens of regional identity. In these territories, we find the most extensive development of village-level record keeping and administrative institutions. Maratha records were adapted locally all across the dry interior from Pune to Rayalaseema to Mysore and Coimbatore, in other areas of warrior-peasant colonisation.
In Bundelkhand, Chittagong, Punjab, Maharashtra, and elsewhere, we can see regional ethnicities forming inside early modern territoriality. Jat, Sikh, Maratha, Muslim, Bengali, Rajput, Thakur, Ahir, Ahom and other identities formed within ideologies of alliance; and the became more territorialised within the ranks of early modern states, as farmers, warriors, merchants, and revenue intermediaries allied within networks of urban influence to form agrarian regions of community sentiment. In some cases, a dominant ethnic strata emerged above ethnically diverse localities, like the Bundela Rajputs. Hindu zamindars spread across Muslim peasant villages in eastern Bengal. In the old Gupta homeland, Brahmans, Bhumihars, Rajputs, Kayasthas, and Banias comprised a powerful zamindar class, while the more substantial cultivators were Ahirs, Kurmis, and Koeris, who in turn employed lower caste groups. Elsewhere, dominant caste groups formed ethnic mini-polities. Rajputisation among tribal groups produced ethnic kingdoms in the central mountains. Kallars, Nayakas, and Maravars formed compact territories of early modern kingship, dominated by their lineages and clans in the Tamil country. Early modern states confirmed and enhanced the power of local ethnic configurations, encouraging their control of territory for the expansion of farming and state revenue. The ethnicity of power thus informed state discourse and strategy. Abu-l Fasl listed zamindars by ethnicity, showing that the parganas of Delhi subah were divided territorially among Brahmans, Tyagis (cultivating Brahmans), Rajputs, Jats, Gujars, Ahirs, and Muslims. The British continued this practice, as indicated by Francis Buchanan’s stress upon the religious affiliation of the groups in Chittagong. Localities became politically identified with dominant groups at the base of early modern states.
Patterns of agrarian culture were formed in regions of state authority. Folklore surrounding dominant groups like the Rajputs inscribed their supremacy on the land. Identities became entrenched in regions of community. In common parlance, cultivating groups would often assert that only they know how to farm the soil of their home territory correctly, or how to raise a symbolic crop like rice, millet, or cotton properly. Social identity, expertise, and control were packed into territoriality; and regions of popular culture were formed by the circulation and experience of myth and memory in drama, poetry, and song. Popular sayings collected in Tamil and Telugu at the end of the nineteenth century often assert that only the dominant farming castes know how to farm properly and that both Brahmans and low castes make bad farmers. Farming is in the blood, as Vellala farmers reported to the officials who were collecting popular ideas about farming. The power to farm (velanmai) is in farmers' nature (kunam). In this view, the land does not so much belongs to its owner as constitute being and community. Composite formations of agricultural knowledge, identity, ritual, honour, and authority composed ethnic territories that became ecological, ideological, emotional, poetic, and sacred, all at once. Local dominance by politically well-connected families and castes defined the cultural identity of land. This is another precursor of modern nationality.
As groups of various kinds preferred, gravitated to, and concentrated in specific types of location, some groups -- like jhum cultivators in the tropical highlands and pastoral nomads in the arid plains -- were also pushed into circumscribed territories. Exclusion, marginality, dependency, and poverty thus attached to people and places that were identified with each other. Places with specific natural qualities became associated with specialist inhabitants. Forest dwellers, fisher folk, even rice and wheat farmers were attached physically and culturally to natural settings, with their own cuisine, rituals, folklore, and aesthetics. Near Kanyi Kumari, a group called Shanars specialised in palmyra tree cultivation and settled in sandy tracts that were not good for farming but excellent for growing palmyras. In Bundelkhand, the Ahirs lived in villages along rivers and in ravines where forests gave them access to farm and grazing land. A geographical concentration of groups that specialise in specific types of work using specialised skills and knowledge became typical in many localities and regions. Such spatial concentration of groups on the land resulted not only from group preferences but also from battles that partitioned the landscape to form social and territorial boundaries at the same time. The Shanars and Ahirs were not allowed to own the best agricultural land, which was controlled by Thakurs and Vellalas, whose superiority was also expressed in the richness of their farms. Low caste and tribal farmers were pushed to ecological margins by more powerful groups, and violence quite often marked borderlands between forest and farm. Battles over territory marked the moving frontier of cultivation. Forms of territoriality that Ranajit Guha sees in peasant insurgencies took shape at this borderland where fighting farmers fought for territories of collective identity..
Urban centres had their own kind of people, although urbanism did not always include sharp distinctions between city and country. Abu-l Fasl did not see Mughal territory as being clearly divided among villages, towns, and cities -- and neither did early East India Company officials -- because the stature of a place depended on who lived there, and major sites of revenue collection, state authority, and economic importance had a decidedly rural appearance. As a result, it is difficult to measure exactly how urban -- or rural -- South Asia really was; and this dichotomy is actually misleading. The British practice of dubbing virtually any site outside a capital city a "village" or at best a "town" obscures the composition of agrarian landscapes, as does the modern habit of associating ruralism with illiteracy and subsistence farming, in contrast to elite, industrial, cosmopolitan cities. Manufacturing and commercial assets, educated elites, and political power often concentrated in settings that British observers called "rural" and labelled "villages." Perhaps the absence of fortifications and monumental architecture led Company officials to assume that a place was rural. Monumental, fortified centres marked the western plains, Gujarat, the Mughal heartland, and the peninsular interior; and they were common among ports along the coast; but not so much in other regions. Urbanism often blended aspects of city and country. Manufacturing and commercial activities were usually spread out among a number of nearby residential settlements. Production was most often organised in clusters of centres at walking distance from one another, rather than being stuffed into fortifications and city walls. Economic specialisation was organised largely within endogamous identity groups (defined by jati, sect, and ethnicity), each living in their own separate settlement, so that complex economic interdependence -- such as in the textile industry -- involved extensive commercial interactions among many settlements, which clustered together along routes of trade. In 1805, in Rayalaseema, one of the driest and by its appearance most "rural" of regions, about a third of the population was engaged in mercantile, manufacturing, transportation, and related occupations. State revenue was routinely collected in cash, and most farming households depended on loans and non-agricultural income from various sources. Dozens of places have such a predominance of non-agricultural occupations that they look distinctively "urban." In all the regions that produced cotton cloth for the overseas trade -- Punjab, Gujarat, Bengal and the south-eastern plains, including Rayalaseema -- exports emerged from a widespread manufacturing network in which cotton farming, cleaning, spinning, weaving, bleaching, dying, packing, and shipping were each typically done in different places where families could readily move among various activities, in and out of agriculture, in regular adaptations to seasons of rain, war, and price fluctuations. These were among the great industrial regions of the early modern world, together, and they produced the bulk of cotton cloth in world markets in 1750.
Urbanism was spread out, dispersed, and embedded in agriculture. Bulls could plough the land and pull carts when the land was dry and hard. Seasonal migrations to work, trade, and fight were very common, so the physical and occupational mobility that we identify with urbanism in modern times typified large parts of the early modern countryside. Concentrations of urban activity clustered along river routes, and at river crossings, but then they also spread out over adjacent land. An urbane location in the central place hierarchy of an early modern region was not defined so much by its physical appearance as by the rank of the officials in it and by the character of elites who gave it distinction. A state revenue headquarters could include a large population that was spread among many settlements and small centres could become important sites of revenue collection. Central sites like temples, shrines, and monasteries were often set apart and situated among the fields that supported them. Many important places had a rustic appearance. Detailed data from the Tamil country show that, in 1770, the great urban centre of Kanchipuram was actually a constellation of settlements, temples, and monasteries, supported by hundreds of land grants spread all over the southern coastal plains. The urbanism of Kanchipuram came from its symbolic and economic centrality, not from its enclosure of a large population within a dense city space. Near Kanya Kumari, along the Tambraparni River, many sites of revenue collection that the Company called "villages" in a census of 1823 had small populations but substantial concentrations of manufacturing, processing, and commercial activity as well as very high population densities. After all, when a small place became sufficiently wealthy, its leaders would want to make it a separate revenue jurisdiction -- to declare their local independence -- so that small territorial units of social power proliferated in fertile lands and in booming commercial and manufacturing regions. Ambasamudram, a centre on the Tambraparni River, had sixteen subordinate villages in its jurisdiction in 1477 but only three in 1823, by which time it had a population of only 3,952, because in the interim, it had spawned more and more independent sites of local political authority. Some of the smallest 1823 census sites in Tirunelveli had high concentrations of looms, mat frames, gunny frames, toddy shops, arrack shops, and other commercial assets, in addition to artisan and merchant castes. The urban centre of the Tirunelveli region consisted of three close-by centres, each with their own identity -- a temple town, a fortress town, and a centre of manufacturing -- whose populations were not counted or administered together until 1993. This sprawling composite urban site was broken up in all the census operations before 1991 and thus it was empirically hidden as an urban feature of the landscape. This Tirunelveli urban complex included about 25% of the population in the central river valley in 1823, but was buried under quaint category of "moffusil town." Agrarian South Asia seems not to have been as rural as British observers led us to believe; and early modern urbanity was more rural than we typically image. The economic simplicity of the pre-modern countryside is largely a figment of the modern urban imagination. We get a more accurate picture if we imagine many localities with urban economic, social, and cultural characteristics strung together by networks of mobility to form urban agglomerations of various sizes. Urbanism lay inside agriculture rather than being set apart and its internal transport system moved at a walk or a boat’s pace. It did not confine labour in tightly bounded city spaces, separating workers from everyday farming activities. It relied on the proximity of non-agricultural workers to local supplies of food and raw materials. Its manufacturing was closely connected with agriculture, not only economically by exchange relations, but spatially by locational decisions that formed localised proximity among specialised producers, resources, and markets. Then as now, the movement of labour among economic activities animated urbanism. But then, the locational advantages of specific urban sites were formed socially by residential decisions among groups who partitioned the landscape into what we can call ethnic territories, each composed of specific combinations of social groups. The availability of open land for new settlements and the mobility of the population discouraged concentrations of capital and labour inside city walls, so that efforts to attract and hold labour and capital in particular places were very prominent political activities; the accumulating attractions of a place defined its urbanity.
Regions of urbanism, ethnicity, empire, literature, and territoriality made the land look very different in 1800 than in 1200. We have some evidence to suggest the quality of change in the way that people thought about the land; and changing meanings of the Tamil term for "forest" -- kadu -- indicate something about cultural change in agrarian societies in the peninsula. In Old Tamil poetry, composed around the turn of the Common Era, kadu meant "burning ground," and land was so full of forest that they poets needed many words to capture its meanings. Three of their five poetic milieus were forest: kurinji was tropical mountain forest; mullai was deciduous woods along hillsides, where animals threaten travellers; and palai was dry flatlands, thick with prickly scrub and robbers (marava hunter-pastoralists). Only one milieu had comfortable domesticity: the irrigated villages (marutam), watery lowlands, like those along the Tambraparni or in the Kaveri delta. By early medieval times, the Tamil landscape had been simplified textually into a stark dichotomy between nadu and kadu, where kadu meant the untamed, rugged, forest without cultivation or civility. Nadu denoted agrarian territory, which dotted the coast. A series of cultural identifications were thus established. The kadu was wild, inhabited by unruly folk who need to be brought into the orbit of royal authority. The nadu was civilised, controlled by Brahmans and Vellalas; it had trading towns, irrigation, temples, gods, and ceremonial order. The agricultural borders of wet lands, dry tracts, or a small settlement (in the dry tract) could also be referred to as kadu, which term became a part of many place names to indicate original settlement in the forest. Kings and chiefs sought to incorporate the land and people of the kadu into their domains. Wars of conquest and incorporation brought labourers from the kadu into the ambit of the nadu, people of the kadu being hunters, pastoralists, and long-fallow farmers. Many medieval Tamil chiefdoms depended on pastoral people, whose names and settlements populate the inscriptions. But such political settings and their ecologies were wiped out by agricultural expansion, causing striking discontinuities between the composition of medieval and early modern territory. By 1700, the political power of pastoralists had diminished to nothing. By 1800, Tamil language formulations of agricultural knowledge differed from both their medieval antecedents and from their Malayali, Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi contemporaries, not only because of linguistic change, but also because Tamil farmers ignored the tropics to the west, destroyed pastoralism which survived in the northern peninsula, and were bent on destroying the long-fallow dry regime that still survived on the Tamil plain and dominated much of the Tamil uplands. Linguistic cultures made sense of particular types of agrarian space.
After 1300, probably after 1500, kadu took on the meaning of "dry land," whether cultivated, fallow, or waste, and by 1800, this meaning was prominent. Dry farming -- using strong bulls to plough deeply and to lift deep well water to nourish garden crops -- increased the relative value of dry land. In addition, many of the best dry land farmers in the Tamil country were immigrant Telugus, allied with the Nayakas from Vijayanagar, who typified the political landscape of the eastern coast after 1500, ruling the country from their rustic forts. Nadu lost its specific territorial meaning to become merely a term for "country," a usage that is now enshrined in "Tamil Nadu." By 1800, the Tamil vocabulary had formed a basic contrast between dry farmland (kadarambam = kadu {dry land} + arambam {tract}) and wet land (nirarambam = nir {water} + arambam), and thus between dry cultivation (punsey) and irrigated agriculture (nansey). The superiority of irrigated land is clear because punsey connotes meagreness and nansey, goodness. But the forest -- kadu -- had by now changed its cultural form and moved from the exterior, to the periphery, and to the centre of the Tamil agrarian lexicon. As it became more central, its meaning became more varied. In proverbs collected in the 1890s, it means "forest," "waste," "open pasture," "closed pasture," "dry farmland," or "dry field." Subba Rao, the editor of a collection of agricultural sayings, avers that kadu, "translated as 'forests' must also be taken to include pastures," and he continues, "in these days, as the country is filling up, these should no longer be the wild common-grazing grounds on which hitherto dependence has been placed, but also enclosed and cultivated pasture fields..." (emphasis added).
The animal economy was also domesticated within the confines of farming villages, and the separate cultural space of pastoralists had totally disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century. On the saying, "To ruin a kadu, let loose goats," he comments: "the destructive results of grazing sheep and goats are alluded to, though here again the word kadu may either be the jungle or the field with a crop on it," because goats eat the field stubble that could fertilise the next crop as surely as they destroy open pasture or wild scrub land. Subba Rao's mention of "enclosed and cultivated pasture fields" indicates a feature of kadu that also appears in eighteenth century revenue surveys, which show enclosed pasture as being included in tax payers’ land. A number of proverbs from the 1890s prescribe "fencing in" land, and where these do not refer to fencing small garden plots watered by wells (normal practice today), they clearly advise the enclosure of land which had been previously open for common access. One saying can be rendered, "Look at the kadu of a man who has closed it off (from use by others) and you will see the cattle of a man who knows how to graze livestock properly." Likewise, another reads, "Sow your seeds and shut the door." People should not be allowed to use dry land as common land. In the 1800s, dry land, forest, and livestock became sufficiently valuable and private property rights well enough established that forceful enclosure became desirable for dominant caste farmers, to keep the neighbours' animals off their fields, to keep their own grazing land for themselves, and to make proprietary claims on village commons.
The property value of kadu came from two main sources. As pasture, its value derived from livestock. One old saying reads, "Rich kadu make strong cattle; strong cattle make prosperous people; prosperous people make rich temples; rich temples make rich kings." In 1802, Benjamin Heyne reported that in upland Karnataka, cattle were the farmers' most valuable asset, without which he was ruined: "...it is the last of his property arrested by his creditors and if he owes anything to the sarkar they will be seized but never actually taken from him." Sayings in Tamil and Telugu villages indicate the second major source of kadu value. A Telugu saying reports, "there is no want in a house where the spinning wheel and churn are at work; and the Tamil saying argues, "there is no famine (panjam) for a man with milk and cotton plants." Cotton is an archetypal dry land (kadu) cash crop. Rivalled after 1880 by oilseeds and ground nuts, cotton was never surpassed as the prime crop for the best black soil. Among dry crops, cotton is the one that Tamil sayings have yielding "potfulls [of money]" and cash (panam). It is labour intensive and thrives with the deep ploughing of rich black soil (karisal). It wants strong bulls, well fed. Closely associated with the rearing, buying, and grazing of bulls and cows throughout the peninsula, cotton farmers provided raw material for cloth exports and then for raw cotton exports which doubled every few decades after 1840. Cotton cultivation underlay the expansion of cotton manufacturing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Dry land used for commercial production encouraged the privatisation of dry land property rights, so that kadu became entangled in the politics of agricultural commodity production.
The prominence of commercialism in agrarian life produced a body of everyday wisdom concerning the role of markets and moneyed men in farming. In general it seems that kinship, religious rituals, alliances among dominant families, ethnic or caste identities, and royal authority were valued as intrinsic to agriculture, so that commercial exchange and calculations within this set of social relations seemed quite natural; but at the same time, professional money lending and financial speculation seemed exogenous if not anathema inside farming communities. A cultural opposition between landed and commercial groups is reflected in the division between "left hand" and "right hand" castes in the Tamil country, and it pops up repeatedly in Tamil proverbs, which posit a natural enmity (jenmapakai) between velanmai (the power of farming) and parsimony, cost accounting (settu) as well as merchants (setti). The cultural power of the farmer (velanmai) is said to be lost when he adopts the merchant's habits or succumbs to merchant control: "The man who takes a loan to farm is like a tree climber who lets go with his hands." The conflict here is between farmers and merchants -- two sets of prominent caste groups in agriculture -- not between farmers and the profit-making, for profits had long been part of velanmai. These sayings represent the pride and fear of dominant caste landowners who are already enmeshed in commodity production.
Commercialism was deeply entrenched in agricultural discourse in many regions during the early modern period. In the Tamil country, all varieties of land and capital assets became known in local parlance for their commercial value. In the Tirunelveli region, revenue records show a series of equations among types of land, their produce, their market value, and their revenue assessment. Dry land (punsey) typically produced millets, oilseeds, pulses, and cotton; and it varied in value according to its soil type. The best black soils were controlled by the most powerful warrior-farming castes, Nayakas and other Telugus, who had the strongest bulls and the richest granaries. The middling red soil territories were held predominantly by Maravas, the second tier in the hierarchy of warrior-farmers, and tracts full of the worst sandy soils were held by lower castes, mostly Shanars. Dry lands had their own modalities of revenue assessment and market evaluation. Officials measured the area of cultivation was measured with a sangili (chain) or in rods. The length of the measuring device differed from place to place, but everywhere in the peninsula, people seem to have talked about dry land in terms of its linear area -- a practice that may have come from estimates of land area by the number of rows a team of bulls could plough in a day, a method of reported by Heyne in Mysore. Everywhere in the south, dry land also appears to have been assessed for revenue purposes according to cultivated area (not by the crop) and by soil type, in cash. Tax-related agricultural knowledge preserved by Company records indicates that Tamils systematically distinguished wet and dry land as objects of commercial evaluation and taxation. Dry land taxes were collected in cash, in the manner of customs duties. Wet fields (nansey), were taxed predominantly in kind, on the assumption that they produced rice. Wet land gained in value from irrigation, not soil type, which was not recorded. Cultivated area was not so important as grain output, so that lands were measured for assessment by the volume of seed sown upon it, not by its linear area. The term for "land tax on wet land" was, appropriately, varam, "share," and social power in the wet lands derived from shares of the paddy crop.
Like the state's share in the crop, shares in village land (pangu) that measured stature in the community had acquired market value long before 1800. Garden cultivation, tree crops, houses, shops, and a long list of commercial as well as artisan assets were counted, taxed, and described in commodity terms in the eighteenth century. As kadu travelled from the periphery to the centre of farming, the landscape as a whole was commodified. By 1800, markets permeated agrarian life.
The centralisation of state power increased under early modern regimes. But even powerful rulers like Murshid Quli Khan or Tipu Sultan did not control the everyday activity of all their local officers, and neither did the East India Company. These regimes focused on standardising the institutional transactions that brought revenue from villages to the capital and sent orders back out into the country. States became more bureaucratic and centralised as transactions became more rule-driven, less personal. By 1700, rulers in distant parts of the world used very similar administrative technologies so that agrarian societies experienced empires similarly in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Local officials would be well known to farmers. In regular contact with village leaders, they exerted influence in local affairs. Regional royalty lived in town. They would discipline the local officers now and then, either personally or through intermediaries, and they could be appealed to occasionally. Imperial potentates lived at a great distance. Composed substantially of rumour, ritual, and myth, their identity was abstract. In such political settings, empires increased their power by standardising state operations and cultivating loyalty. The general strategy was to use one’s own men to discipline all those who carried state authority, so officials would carry out instructions from above and pass on revenue from below without being closely monitored. Rulers improved transportation to speed the flow of information and troops, as standardisation spread cultural commonalities among the men who organised the state. Centralising states thus defined territories in which administrative elites acquired common languages and identities. A status culture of elite sentiment formed among intermediary groups in regional states, rooted locally and also connected to the capital.
State discipline and ritual conditioned the identities, interests, and sentiments of key people in the countryside and produced regions of agrarian politics. But agrarian conditions limited what states could accomplish. Early medieval dynasties had spawned local gentry who were similar in outlook and loyalties, and late medieval conquerors had spread their influence far and wide, but under medieval conditions, no ruler could contain agrarian forces of political dispersion. The Mughals increased the density and reach of agrarian territories under their standard; and amidst increasing competition for land, successor states did the same, deepening the discipline of revenue institutions and broadcasting the Mughal vocabulary from places like Arcot, where Mughals had never tread. When the Nawab of Arcot allied with the East India Company to bring revenue from as far afield as Kanya Kumari, Kurnool, Vizagapatnam, and Malabar, an administrative elite of Marathi and Tamil Brahmans fanned out in a new administrative territory, which became Madras Presidency. Likewise in Bengal, Punjab, Awadh, Maharashtra, Mysore, and Kerala, eighteenth century states built regions of ritual, intrigue, and alliance. But farming communities also fought for the land as regional states cast their net, and the interaction of local and imperial power became a central theme in the agrarian history of modernity.
Today, local territorialism is still intense in South Asia, and in part, reflects local resistance to the centralising state. But it also reflects a legacy of empires which have fostered local power to secure local loyalty, producing nested layers of territoriality. Imperial strategies of this kind flourished in the transactional environment of early modernity and shaped British rule. In Eurasia, they have long facilitated rough-and-tumble imperial expansion and stability -- even as they limit a state’s ability to centralise -- amidst countless, particularistic identities, loyalties, and attachments to land. In South Asia, as in Central Asia and the Middle East, lineage and clan organise many localising loyalties. As in Southeast Asia and China, tribal societies formed separate territories in tropical forests and mountains. Sectarian, ethnic, and caste solidarities added to the intricacy of localism over centuries of migration and resettlement, as different groups concentrated in their own particular places. Micro-ethnicities developed strong local attachments to landscapes that were carved into homelands for hundreds of thousands of groups that clustered together on the land. Urbanisation generated new kinds of localities. As a result, differently composed agrarian societies developed in differently endowed agrarian territories. By 1700, for instance, agrarian urbanism along the coast had developed strong attachments to the Indian Ocean world of commercial activity, while in the interior regions, from Kabul to Mysore, urban society was much more attached to the authority of warrior sultans. Imperial incorporation became more difficult for the Mughals as they pushed away from their own homeland into their southern periphery, where the military culture of the Mughal-Rajput nobility could not generate firm loyalties among Marathas. In Bengal, business interests entangled with Europeans companies around Calcutta and Murshidabad became the financial basis for a post-Mughal regime. In all the eighteenth century states, commercial networks sustained the rising power of men whose shared sentiments, mentalities, interests, and identities were based on the urbane, mercantile, political economy of their own local home territories. From the 1740s, when the Company began fighting its way into regional revenue systems around Calcutta and Madras, its most critical allies were elites who combined commercial wealth and state authority in settings of agrarian urbanism. The Company used its own men to discipline its subordinates, but like the Mughals, it had to incorporate a great diversity of localities into its administration to build an empire..
By 1820, the Company had replaced the Mughals, but even the modernisation of British India after 1860 did not erase the localism which the Company had built into its empire. It began in the 1740s, when Company forced itself into revenue transactions around Madras and Calcutta, receiving revenue from local contractors who also conducted trade, finance, and military business on its behalf. These men had independent power. Some were Company merchants acting as free agents. Some were businessmen and bankers with investments in trade and revenue -- portfolio capitalists -- entrepreneurs working at the broad intersection of states and markets. But at lower levels, people who paid revenue worked in the ranks of local officials and community leaders. Many revenue interests focused on the land, and many people sought to entrench their own position by paying for entitlements. Decisions by men of rank at all levels influenced the formation of modern agrarian polities, even as the British imagined their Indian empire to be purely the product of their own power. Tipu Sultan, Poligars, Marathas, Pindaris, Sikhs, Afghans, Gurkhas, and rebels in 1857 fought hard for territory; they formed a zone of high military resistance to the Company that stretched from the tip of the peninsula up through the Deccan, Malwa, Bundelkhand, Awadh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Nepal and into high mountains bordering Afghanistan. Warriors against the British were also involved in local military struggles when the British arrived demanding tribute and subordination. They saw the British as a part of their own political environment and what mattered to them was their own position. Forming unequal alliances to secure subordinate rank in a new imperial system could improve one’s position and many warriors, kings, local officials, and community leaders took this option rather than fighting to the end. Many had done the same before. Native State rulers mostly followed this path of strategic alliance. Some, like the Nizam of Hyderabad, became crucial military allies for the Company. Scholars have not yet paid much attention to the reasoning behind these fateful decisions, or to their political context or historical implications.
When the Company captured territory, it moved immediately to settle the revenue and to writing legal codes and administrative policies to standardise revenue transactions. Local men of rank were forced to come to terms with the new sarkar. Taxes ascended the official ranks and entitlements descended from the sarkar to the village. The results varied wildly from one part of the new empire to another, in part because making British India took more than a century. Imperial expansion began in 1757 (with the acquisition of Bengal and Bihar), rushed ahead from 1790 to 1820 (Madras Presidency, Northwestern Provinces, Bombay Presidency), added more territory before 1857 (Punjab, Awadh, Sindh, Central India, Lower Burma), and finally subdued Awadh and other sites of rebellion (including Bundelkhand) after 1857. Old regimes left many different kinds of entitlement behind; administrative politics varied within British regions; and policies changed with Company charter renewals in 1793, 1813, 1833, and 1853. The process of settling the revenue changed in character as the top and bottom of the imperial hierarchy shifted, and after 1870, major differences in agrarian policy and law remained, among and within regions. Native states and Nepal had their own rulers, who inherited eighteenth century territories. Though the British intervened regularly in the Native States, their official autonomy usually prevented deep British meddling in the organisation of agrarian administration. Hyderabad, the largest Native State, is a case in point. Its nobility was confirmed in control of the countryside by the Nawabs, despite pressure to raise more state income and to recognise tenant rights; and the ossification of this landed aristocracy became the context for the Telengana peasant revolution in the 1940s. Even the dozens of tiny states in Gujarat and Rajasthan retained their own property systems down to the 1950s.
Inside British India, local influence on the agrarian system came from several directions. Most basically, local personnel entered the administration bringing with them old identities, roles and skills. Key people in the country became influential, especially men of rank. These were patriarchs with entitlements confirmed by official honours and by past revenue payments. They had serious local problems that needed tending to. Many were involved in conflicts over entitlements when the British arrived. Armies and gangs were loose and demanding tribute. Competitors were fighting for pasture, forest, and open land around farming settlements. Dams, channels, tanks, and fields were broken. Farm workers were being scattered by local distress and running off with the season, which made farm labour unpredictable and costly. Local men of substance wanted the new government to settle such matters in their favour. Revenue settlements became political negotiations with the people deemed by the British to be most legitimately entitled to pay for revenue in return for titles to land.
Land settlements comprised a formal code of unequal alliance between the new sarkar and local leaders, a legally binding template for subsequent transactions, not only for tax payments, but also for dispute resolution, reassessment, and policy reform. Land settlements formed a legal constitution for an agrarian Raj. The sarkar became part of the local agrarian order. Like their predecessors, the British defined an agrarian citizenry by their official transactions with household head men, whose proprietary entitlements the state would define, document, legitimate, regulate, protect, and of course, tax.
Between the 1780s and 1820, working in London and with urban intellectuals in Calcutta and Madras, Company officers developed the ideas that would create a unified theory of British rule and help the administration adapt to regional and local circumstances. Orientalist scholars saw Europe and India as comparable, related civilisations; so as in Europe, also in India, classical texts held the key to basic cultural principles. William Jones and his contemporaries dismissed Muslim rulers as invaders and tyrants; and when the Company was fighting Tipu Sultan, the Company erased the legitimacy of Muslim authority in its theory of agrarian governance. The Company established itself as the protective ruler of a land of Hindu tradition. This was in some sense a recuperation of the idea that the righteous ruler is a protector of dharma, and like medieval kings and Marathas, the Company defined dharma in its own terms. Jones found the essence of India in Sanskrit texts, especially in texts on dharma. The principle was quickly established that diligent investigations could reveal all the salient facts about the real India, to inform British governance, and it was determined that agrarian India was everywhere organised by the rules of caste society and by principles of varnashramadharma that represented traditional norms and a spiritually sanctioned social order. Around 1810, we can see a shift in the organisation of Company accounts of the rural population: they were subsequently compiled according to the rank order of castes (jati) within the varna scheme (Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra), even where this set of categories had not been applied in earlier English accounts and was not in vogue in local society. In the Company scheme, Hindu and Muslim law codes needed to be kept separate, and Muslims treated separately. Family law and proprietary institutions needed to be adjusted by the Raj to suit the traditions of the people, whose literary elites, mostly Brahmans, were the experts on tradition. Orientalism provided a flexible tool for weaving together revenue settlements and for adjusting colonial dharma to local conditions.
In 1793, the Act of Permanent Settlement granted a new kind of entitlement to zamindars in Bengal, in return for high, fixed cash payments, collected strictly on schedule. Defaults would trigger the transfer of zamindar titles at auction. These men were thus made legally into landlords with ownership rights over and above the tenants who paid rent to cultivate zamindari property. As we will see, more ranks were formed within this two-tiered zamindari scheme, but from the state’s point of view, zamindars were the legal owners of land and all subsidiary rights accrued to people living in their estates. Some estates were large, territorially compact, and stable, sometimes based upon old royal lineages; and others were small, fragmented, and spread over many scattered plots and villages, cobbled together from the bits and pieces of revenue farms or lineage holdings. In 1801, some zamindars were also anointed in Madras Presidency under the authority of the 1793 Act, and here they had virtually all been rulers of large, compact territories of conquest colonisation. Such men became the agrarian foundation for the new regime in Bengal, Bihar, and the central Ganga basin, where they used their existing powers and Company authority to claim all the land within British territory. The character of their social power and the fate of their family fortunes were quite diverse. They included old rajas, former state officials, bankers, and revenue contractors. Some ruled their estates as real lords of the land and others merely had their men visit the villages now and then to collect the rent. Some held onto zamindar titles for many generations; some lost them by default within a few years; and everywhere, the turnover of zamindar land ownership in decades after 1793 moved property rights around quite considerably. But all these were men of high social status and rank; and in the regions that came to be defined by zamindar institutions, they formed a class that was capable of sustaining the Company’s revenue. When one defaulted, another zamindar could always be found to pay the revenue. In Madras and Bombay Presidencies, however, though warrior rajas in territories of conquest colonisation did come forward to become zamindars, they controlled but a fraction of the total revenue. The term "zamindar" had been used in the eighteenth century to designate virtually any person who paid revenue for land, but the 1793 Act stipulated that ranks must exist to separate landlords and tenants, and they often could not be found. Some influential Company officers also craved to enhance the revenue, eliminate revenue intermediaries, and extend state power into the villages beyond what was possible under Permanent Settlement and zamindari property law. With such motives, Thomas Munro and his allies resisted the broad application of the 1793 Act in Madras. Munro fought for twenty five years against the imposition of the Calcutta system; and at the same time, Utilitarians and Evangelicals savaged the Orientalists. New renditions of ancient tradition were thus contrived to justify new revenue policies.
To liberate Madras Presidency from Calcutta’s Permanent Settlement, Munro argued that collecting taxes directly from ryots in their villages would lower tax rates for farmers and also increase government revenue. But to legitimate his land settlements, he had to show that they also served the principles of native tradition, that they followed indigenous precedence. He compiled evidence for The Fifth Report on East India Company Affairs to prove that ryotwari, not zamindari, better suited British India. To win his case, Munro had to discredit officials like Francis Ellis, who had textual and ethnographic evidence to show that Munro was wrong. Ellis had studied old gentry villages along the coastal plain, while Munro had studied warrior peasant dry villages in Rayalaseema and Kongu. Ellis argued that, yes, the village was the basis for traditional social order, but no, peasants did not traditionally own their own land individually; rather, they held the land as community property, with each family having a set of shares in all community assets. Munro would have nothing of this. He insisted that ryots were all individual peasants, as much individualists as English farmers; that they had always been family property owners who lived in their own village societies, regulated by caste tradition; and that only extortionate Muslim overlords like Tipu Sultan had forced them to accept revenue intermediaries and zamindars standing between themselves and the ruler. Munro vanquished Ellis, became governor in 1820, and established ryotwari as the definitive legal basis for land settlements in Madras. His formulations became official wisdom, and they radically homogenised the agrarian landscape. His stereotype of the village as "a little republic" dates from 1806. Published by Mark Wilks, in 1810, during the campaign to write The Fifth Report, it would be a pillar of modern administration. Its most famous reformulation came in a minute by Charles Metcalfe for the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East India Company, in 1830, which had a powerful influence on Karl Marx. It reads in part as follows:
The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds to revolution; Hindoo, Patan, Mogul, Mahratta, Sik, English are all masters in turn; but the village communities remain the same .... If a country remain for a series of years the scene of continued pillage and massacre, so that villages cannot be inhabited, the scattered villagers nevertheless return whenever the power of peaceable possession revives. A generation may pass away, but the succeeding generation will return. The sons will take the place of their fathers; the same site for the village, the same position for the houses, the same lands, will be occupied by the descendants of those who were driven out when the village was depopulated...
As colonial conquest moved ahead, many bouts of research and debate about tradition and policy moved from villages to capitals, to Parliament, and back again; so that as the sarkar pushed up its revenue, year by year, land settlements came to include the ideas and interests of many local men with expert knowledge, authority, and influence, especially Company officers, landowners, and the urban intelligentsia. The empire institutionalised authority at three levels. Local authority lay in the village, the taluk (township), and the district (county). Regional authority accumulated in provincial and native state capitals. Imperial authority descended from London, Calcutta, and New Delhi. Documents produced by and for the higher levels took pride of place in the colonial archive, and this imperial perspective became most compelling for nationalists and national historians. Documentation at the lower levels pertain more directly to agrarian communities and gather dust in provincial and district record rooms. The character of all the colonial records changed over the nineteenth century as the railway, steamship, printing industry, science, and imperial bureaucracy developed modern powers over agrarian administration. Agrarian South Asia was steadily homogenised empirically as London set standard forms to be filled out by bureaucrats in every locality of the realm. Administrative practice and law involved debate at each level, and for people in farming communities, the lower levels were most powerful, but these did not get much attention in provincial and imperial capitals, where localities appeared to be identical sites for the implementation of policy. National cultures came into being in big cities and initially connected provincial capitals to one another and to London; which produced a two-tier imperial polity, in imperial and provincial public arenas, from which national movements spread into the countryside. Modern political history has been understood primarily as a process operating at the higher levels of empire and nationality, from which it moved out into the villages.
But power also moved in other directions. The logic of land settlements allowed the majority of early-modern patriarchs to reproduce their own local authority in agrarian territories that were not actually as homogeneous as they appeared to be in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and New Delhi. Imperial and national policy makers did not control agrarian governance as much as they imagined, and local struggles often determined the character of local institutions. In the western regions of the northern basins, militant lineages of warrior-peasants, most prominently, Jats, fought to free their entitlements from zamindars. In Punjab, where zamindars had been removed under the Sikh regime, the Company settled quickly with locally dominant Jat lineage, in 1848. The wars in 1857 have been studied primarily as an anti-imperial struggle, but locally they involved battles for control of agrarian territory across a huge area spanning eastern Punjab, Awadh, Bundelkhand, and Malwa. Here as elsewhere in the zone of high military resistance, warriors fought not only against the Company but also for control of territory; they fought the Company because it threatened their rank, status, entitlements, and income -- their identity and position in agrarian society. These struggles and many more accentuate the political character of land revenue settlements, and the imperial importance of stabilising property entitlements by giving it to the strongest local contenders. After 1857, in Awadh, the biggest landed aristocrats were confirmed as the rulers of the countryside. Adjusting policy to garner loyalty among key people in the country stabilised the empire, and the local social forces that spoke to the state most effectively in the nineteenth century have been prominent ever since.
Agrarian regions took a more definite shape as the empire subsumed every locality within its homogenising intelligence and provincial governments assumed responsibilities not only for collecting revenue and maintaining law and order but also for administering development. A transition is visible in the middle decades of the nineteenth century toward a more modern, bureaucratic, centralised empire, more involved in managing its agrarian resources. By the 1840s, Parliament was gathering information routinely from the provinces for compilation and analysis in London. An imperial picture of agrarian India was taking shape as the Great Trigonometrical Survey was claiming comprehensive accuracy in mapping. Parliament investigated bonded labour and means to make improvements in cotton cultivation. In the 1840s, when prices were low and complaints were increasing against Company officials for coercive tactics in revenue collections, questionnaires considered administrative and legal reform and sought means to expand British investments in India. In Madras, the Torture Commission concluded that native officials needed to be replaced with more obedient, well-trained, British bureaucrats. In Calcutta, officials responded to entreaties from sugar planters in Trinidad by sending ship loads of indentured plantation workers to replace freed slaves. In London, arrangements were made for major capital investments in Indian railways and Arthur Cotton was arguing for big state investments in irrigation. In all this flurry of activity, during the 1840s and 1850s, we can see early examples of a modern discourse on agricultural development. It began to project a power to transform agrarian conditions that moved out from London to provincial capitals and into the villages. In the global perspective of empire -- which we can see in 1844 Parliamentary hearings that considered what to do to about the threat posed by boll weevils in Georgia, and concluded that increasing cotton supplies from India and Egypt was the only answer -- modern science and technology travelled from Europe to the East, as raw materials and workers moved in the opposite direction; and British India became a unified agricultural territory for analysis and improvement, under the gaze of a hierarchically structured, scientific system. As surveyors set out to map every inch of India, detailed lithograph maps appeared in British books with accounts of economic products and business opportunities. During Lord Dalhousie’s tenure as governor-general (1848-1856), "rural India," "Indian agriculture," "peasant India," and "village India" became objects of discussion, not only in official accounts, but also in journalism and social theory, as in the work of Karl Marx.
Provincial governments turned his new information into programs of improvement and their political institutions most clearly shaped modern agrarian polities, because provincial capitals constituted the effective apex of authority on most agrarian issues. Provincial boundaries marked territories of law, transportation, local languages, and irrigation building. Each province had its own terms for entitlements, which defined its agrarian citizenry. In Bengal, Bihar, Awadh, eastern Uttar Pradesh, and the Central Provinces, the men who mattered most for the state in the country were the large landlords: zamindars, talukdars, malguzars. In Madras and Bombay Presidencies, Sindh, Assam, Arakan, and lower Burma, they were instead substantial ryots and village leaders. In Punjab and Western Uttar Pradesh, they were smaller zamindars and leaders of joint property communities, organised around kinship units (biradari). All the administrative territories of modern agrarian political history were inscribed on early-modern regions and the legacy of the Mughals is particularly apparent. Where strong military alliances had succeeded the Mughals in the eighteenth century, native states appeared (in Rajasthan, Malwa, Bundelkhand, Baghelkhand, Saurashtra, Kashmir). Where successor states maintained Mughal zamindari ranks, zamindar settlements emerged under the British (in the northern basins and central mountains -- Bengal, the United Provinces, and Central Provinces). Where Mughal successor states broke through the ranks of zamindars to form direct connections between regional rulers and agricultural communities, the Company followed suit: here we find joint property communities (Punjab) and village Ryotwari settlements (Bombay and Madras). Big states on the Mughal periphery became independent states (Nepal) and native states (Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Mysore).
More than a third of the land area of South Asia came by treaty into native states and independent dynasties. Though they came under heavy-handed influence and pressure from the British, these rules had the power to create their own agrarian institutions. Native states concentrated in areas that were distant from the central sites of Company power in the eighteenth century; and in these regions, Company authority would have been most expensive to establish and maintain. They were also most prominent in the zone of high military resistance, in the peninsular interior (Hyderabad and Mysore), in Rajasthan and adjacent areas of Saurashtra, in a ring of the central mountain landscape running from Malwa to interior Orissa, and in the high mountains (Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim). These were also areas that were dominated politically by on-going conquest colonisation at the time of British accession. The archives of native states are quite unlike those of British India, so the documentary basis for writing the agrarian history of South Asia remains highly fractured and disparate even in modern times. "British territory" (that is, land outside the native states in British India) has been the main object of historical studies. A very old historical separation of different kinds of agrarian regions has thus remained even under the homogenising force of modernity; and it was only partially overcome by the profusion of integrating technologies, from the railway and monetary system to English education and electronic media. Regions like Rajasthan, Kashmir, and Telengana, which have good documentation for agrarian history under the Mughals, virtually drop out of agrarian historical research after 1800. Other areas -- like Assam, the Central Provinces, and Uttarakhand -- become visible as never before under the British. The high mountains in the north-east and north-west remained under separate administrative agencies, separated from lowland administrations. Sri Lanka and Myanmar came under Colonial Office administration rather than under the authority of the India Office in London -- and its historical literature has been fully detached from the history of British India. Strategic areas of special administration in the eastern and western high mountains generated records that are also detached physically and thus historiographically from other regions. As a result, it is quite impossible to write a modern agrarian history that is both comprehensive and sensitive to all the regions.
A very sketchy picture of the institutional geography that organises modern agrarian history can be achieved by superimposing colonial settlements on farming landscapes. Native and independent states are prominent in the high mountains (Kashmir, Nepal and Terai, Bhutan), the western plains (Sindh, Rajasthan [Jaisalmere, Marwar, Mewar, and Ajmer], northern Gujarat, Saurashtra, and Malwa), the central mountains (Baghelkhand, Chotanagpur, Jharkhand, interior Orissa, Bastar) and the peninsula interior (Mysore, Hyderabad). Regions of special administration were established in high mountains in the west and east (in Baluchistan, Himachal, Kangra, Uttarakhand, along the Karakoram Range, and in Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, and Assam). The areas for which the most continuous, accessible historical record is available from medieval to modern times are those that came under direct British administration and their institutional geography divides roughly into two groups of territories. Zamindari and malguzari regions covered the northern river basins and the valleys and plains in the central mountains. Here, agrarian colonialism meant landlordism (in western Punjab, Ganga basin, Bengal, and Assam, and also in many western mountain regions, in Uttarakhand, the Indus valley, Sindh, and Bundelkhand). The expansion of cultivation and legal struggles produced various admixtures of private farmer and peasant holdings, which became ever more prominent in territories of (later) malguzari settlements in the Central Provinces (Chhattisgarh, Khandesh, and Berar). Regions of ryotwari and mahalwari (village) settlement covered the peninsula, including most of the coast and the interior (Madras and Bombay Presidencies), and also Myanmar, Ceylon, and eastern Punjab. These regions had some zamindars and native states, but the British regime for the most part enforced individual farm property rights. Here, the land of individual owners -- ryots -- was assessed individually and revenue was collected in return for a pattah that became a title to private property. In Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and the Nagpur territories (across Chhattisgarh and much of the central mountains), the British applied a motley combination of zamindari and ryotwari modes, depending largely on local circumstances. Like all ryotwari and mahalwari revenue settlements, these were temporary; that is, the amount due to the state vary according to periodic assessments by state officials.