I,AND TENURES IN THE PAN JAB 55 



to whom Tillers or people of influence had made grants, and by farmers of 

 the land revenue, who by a familiar process had developed out of a fiscal 

 privilege a proprietory title. Sometimes groups of men of a grazing tribe 

 or the members of an important family sank a number of wells, partly to 

 water their cattle and partly to grow a little food, in a single locaUty, and 

 built their houses on a common site. But often the well sinker had to 

 obtain the assent of some overlord, generally the head or heads of one of the 

 old tribes or families, and pay a small quit rent in the form of a fraction 

 of the produce as a perpetual acknowledgement of seignorial rights. When 

 the Sikhs took over the country the administration of a large part of it 

 was for many years in the hands of a very shrewd and capable governor, 

 intent on increasing his revenue by promoting tillage. When he felt dis- 

 posed he took over the right of allotting land for cultivation, but he wisely 

 recognized the rights of the old families to seignorial dues. The sinkers 

 of wells in favoured spots scattered about the huge waste had often no 

 bond of relationship or even of common interest. Each Uved with his 

 dependents and labourers on his own well, near which were grouped a 

 few huts and cattle pens. The proper way of dealing with tenures of this 

 sort would have been to treat the well as the revenue unit, and allot to it 

 a reasonable area, say from 50 to 100 acres, and to make the well owner 

 responsible to the State for land revenue and to the superior landowner 

 for a small seignorial fee. The waste should have been recorded as the 

 property of the State subject to rights of user for grazing and browsing, 

 so long as it was not broken up, by the old tribes of nomad graziers and the 

 well owners. What was actually done was to form groups of wells into pure- 

 ly artificial estates, to attach to them large areas of waste, and make the 

 owners jointly responsible for payment of the land reventie. The incongruity 

 of this procedure was pointed out at the time, but the attraction of a sealed 

 pattern was too strong to resist. The waste was so vast that the absurdity of 

 handing it all over as personal property to scattered well owners and a sparse 

 population of nomad graziers was fortunately perceived. Needlessly large 

 areas were however enclosed in village boundaries, and lay uncultivated 

 till many years later the State at great expense brought canal water to 

 these thirsty lands. The tracts where State ownership was reserved are 

 some of them now the sites of prosperous canal colonies, with hundreds of 

 thousands of settlers drawn largely from congested districts in the Central 

 Panjab. The vast area of sandy waste between the Jhelam and the 

 Indus was handed over entirely to a comparatively small number of fami- 

 lies. Accordingly when some years ago there was a question of excavating 

 a great canal from the Indus, it was thought necessar^^, as a preliminary 

 step, to induce the descendants of these people to surrender their rights 

 in part of what without water was practically worthless in return for the 

 promise of irrigation in the part they retained. It seems probable that 

 the recognition or non-recognition of the superior proprietory title, entit- 

 ling the holder to receive a seignorial fee, depended sometimes on the 

 idiosyncracies of individual settlement officers. The tenure has also been 



