78 FIXITY OF TENURE 



payable by non-occupancy tenants for land of similar 

 quality and with similar advantages of situation. * It 

 is important to remark on this,' says Mr. B. H. 

 Baden-Powell, * that everywhere in India the loss of 

 a proprietary (or superior) position on land and the 

 descent from a landlord, or a co-sharing right,* to a 

 tenant does not always or frequently imply the actual 

 loss of cultivating possession of at least a part of the 

 land. To this day, if an unthrifty village co-sharer 

 gets into the toils of the money-lender, and first 

 mortgages his land and then submits to the foreclosure 

 of the mortgage, he does not leave the land ; he culti- 

 vates as before, only that now he is the tenant of the 

 purchaser, and has to pay rent in cash or kind. And 

 the same thing always happened when a purchaser or 

 other person, obtaining the lordship by grant or 

 aggression, was not of the agriculturist class. He 

 could not till the fields himself, and unless (excep- 

 tionally) he wanted a better class of tenant, he would 

 retain the quondam owner or holder of the fields. 

 Very often a new overlord would be unable to get 

 other tenants, or circumstances compelled him to con- 

 ciliate the existing holders.'! 



[d) Tenants who have held the same land con- 

 tinuously for twelve years have a right of occupancy 

 in such land. 



{e) Non-occupancy tenants are tenants of less stand- 

 ing than twelve years ; they were known in former 

 Acts as tenants-at-will. 



It was in the definition of the tenants in these two 

 last classes that the most important changes of the 

 law were made. With regard to [d) occupancy tenants, 

 ' the same land ' is so defined as to mean ' any land 

 owned by the same landlord.' In order to prevent 

 landlords from resisting the accrual of occupancy 



* A co-sharer = a member of a body of joint proprietors of an 

 estate. 



■\ 'A Short Account of the Land Revenue/ etc., p. 138. 



