56 BRITISH INDIA - AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY IN GENERAL 



extingmshed in a number of cases by the inferior owner buying out the 

 superior owner's right, the intrinsic value of which has often been small. 



The juxtaposition of dominant famiHes and of a miscellaneous col- 

 lection of inferior tribes, w^hich is common in the South Western Panjab, 

 is equally a feature of the North Western districts. But there religious 

 dislike and poHtical expediency had led the Sikh Governors, whom we dis- 

 placed, to do their utmost to depress the great Muhammadan families and 

 tribes, which in some cases had actually ruled over large tracts. The re- 

 sult was that the old tenures, except in the wilder Western tract, where 

 the Sikhs had to be content with a more or less nominal sovereignty, had 

 to a large extent been obliterated. The British officers charged with the 

 making of the registers of titles in land were faced by contending claims, 

 the actual cultivators seeking to maintain the status quo, and the old fami- 

 lies clamouring for the revival of rights wrested from them by the oppres- 

 sion of the Sikhs. The original villages of the leading clans often covered 

 very large areas, and cultivators had been located inoutl>dng hamlets, whose 

 occupants now claimed to be treated as entirely independent communi- 

 ties. Tenants in the parent villages alleged that they also possessed full 

 ownership, because in the Sikh times the old landolders had received no 

 sort of recognition of proprietorship. It is a curious fact that our officers 

 for some years after annexation viewed the claims of old families with 

 scant sympathy. Fortunately the settlements of a large part of the North 

 Western Panjab were not completed tiU after the Mutiny. The shock 

 of that convulsion again turned men's thoughts to the dangers besetting 

 a society in which everyone is on a dead level of medriocrity, and after 

 1857 there was a disposition to concede something to the descendants of 

 men who had been stripped of their rank and privileges by the Sikhs, 

 while maintaining to the actual cultivators of the soil most of the advan- 

 tages of which we found them in actual possession. In no part of the pro- 

 vince was the influence of settlement officers in moulding, and even creat- 

 ing, land tenures more strongly marked. They had in fact to seek a fair 

 compromise, and were not unsucessful in finding one. Three classes of 

 right holders emerged, the superior owner, the ordinary owner, and the 

 Hmited owner. The last and lowest class were recognized as owners of the 

 lands they tiUed, but they had no share in the village waste. Some of 

 them were not even full owners of their own holdings, but paid a proprie- 

 tory fee to the ordinary owners, who were regarded as the real village 

 community. The latter class had rights in the waste. But where our 

 officers held that the existence of a superior proprietor was proved, the 

 ordinary owner had to pay him, harvest by harvest, a seignorial fee. In 

 the west the old famiHes had, as already remarked, beea able to maintain 

 their position fairly well even under the Sikhs, and there we still find large 

 properties consisting of several, or even many, villages owned by a single 

 person or by a small group of near relatives. Here too some of the superior 

 owners, as in parts of the southwest, besides receiving seignorial dues are 

 recorded as owners of the waste. The village community in the true sense 

 of the term hardly existed in large parts of the North West Panjab. 



