Mr. Hodgson's Description of the Village of Pudu-vayal. "75 



Muhammedan terms are used to express them. The boundaries of all sub- 

 divisions of territory, including more than one village, are defined by the 

 limits of the villages included in such subdivisions : they have not any 

 boundaries of their own. The grant of a province including many 

 villages would therefore be defined by a list of those enumerated in 

 tlie grant.* The boundaries are supposed to have been fixed when 

 the villages were first settled (or, as the natives express it, when the 

 villa"-e was born), and they frequently contain large tracts of uncultivated 

 land, and even of land overgrown with brushwood or forest-trees, called 

 jungle. 



The village in question was made over by grant, in the year 1784', to a 

 servant of Sir Eyre Coote. The conditions of the grant were, that he 

 should collect the revenue payable to the sovereign according to the custom 

 of the village ; that he should pay to the sovereign (the East-India Company) 

 out of that revenue, a reserved sum annually amounting to three hundred 

 l)agodas, or about £120 ; that he should retain for his benefit the difference ^ 

 between £120 and the annual revenue he might by custom be entitled to 

 receive from the cultivators of the soil. The grant neither specified the 

 amount of the revenue which the grantee was entitled to collect, nor the 

 rate at which he was to collect it. It gave him, by grant, the sovereign's 

 rights ; it left those rights to be ascertained by custom, and, in case of dis- 

 pute respecting the rights of either party, left the question to be decided by 

 such authorities as the sovereign had appointed. 



The lands within the boundary of this village consist of two kinds: one of 

 which is irrigated by means of the water of the monsoon rains, preserved 

 during that season in a reservoir called a tank ; the other is not capable 

 of irrigation, but is rendered productive by rain as it casually falls. A tank, 

 in the part of India to which this description refers, is composed of a bank of 

 earth carried along the declivity of a plain, so as to collect and retain the 

 water running from a higher level. The tank of this village is a small one, 

 of which the bank is not more than three-eighths of a mile long. 



The total extent of land within the boundaries of this village is canis 

 548,t divided as follows : 



• 



In this manner the grant of a Jaglr, in 1765, to the Company by the Nabob of the 

 Carnatic, was a grant of villages, specified in a list or schedule attached to the grant, 

 f A caiii is 67,600 scjuare feet. 



L 2 



