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even if it was not so before. The rule was passed in the spirit of 

 compi'omise allowing to Mirasidars such rights as they possessed if 

 they were found not to be inconsistent with good policy, and the same 

 policy required that all puttadars should be treated alike to put an end 

 to interminable disputes as to whether a puttadar was an ancient 

 occupant or a Payacari, The well-known work of Sir Henry Maine 

 on Village Communities has established the fact that throughout the 

 whole of India^ and probably throughout the whole of the ancient 

 world, property in land was vested in yillage communities whose 

 rights extended not only to cultivated lands, but also to the waste 

 lands of the village, and customs and forms of property derived from 

 this tenure survive to this day in the greater part of India. Regard- 

 ing waste lands Sir H. Maine writes as follows : — " The waste or 

 common land of the village community has still to be considered. 

 One point of difference between the view taken of it in the East and 

 that which at all times seems .to have been taken in Europe deserves 

 to be specially noted. The members of the Teutonic community 

 appear to have valued the village waste chiefly as pasture for their 

 cattle, and possibly may have found it so profitable for this purpose as 

 to have deliberately refrained from increasing that cultivated portion 

 of it which had been turned into the arable mark. These rights of 

 pasture vested in the commoners are those, I need scarcely tell you, 

 which have descended but little modified to our own day in our own 

 country -, and it is only the modern iinprovements in the methods of 

 agriculture which have disturbed the balance between pasture and" 

 tillage, and have thus tended to multiply Inclosure- acts. But the 

 vast bulk of the natives of India are a grain and not a flesh eating 

 people. Cattle are mostly regarded by them as auxiliary to tillage. 

 The view, therefore, generally taken (as I am told) of the common-land 

 by the community is that it is that part of village domain which is tempor- 

 arily uncultivated, but which will some time or other be cultivated and 

 merge in the arable mark. Doubtless it is valued for pasture, but it 

 is more especially valued as potentially capable of tillage. The effect 

 is to produce in the community a much stronger sense of property in 

 common -land than at all reflects the vaguer feeling of right which, in 

 England at all events, characterises the commoners. In the later 

 days of the East India Company, when all its acts and omissions were 

 very bitterly criticised, and amid the general re-opening of Indian 

 questions after the military insurrection of 1857, much stress was laid 

 on the great amount of waste land which official returns showed to 

 exist in India, and it was more than hinted that better government 

 would bring these wastes under cultivation, possibly under cotton 

 cultivation, and even plant them with English colonists. The answer 

 of experienced Indian functiionaries was that there was no waste land 

 at all in India. If you except certain territories which stand to India 

 Proper much as the tracts of land at the base of the Rocky Mountains 

 stand to the United States — as for example, the Indo-Chinese province 

 of Assam — the reply is substantially correct. The so-called waste, 

 lands are part of the domain of the various communities" which the 

 villagers, theoretically, are only waiting opportunity to bring under 

 cultivation. Yet this controversy elicited an admission which is of 

 some historical interest. It did appear that, though the Native Indian 

 Government had for the most part left the village communities entirely 

 to themselves on condition of their paying the revenue assessed upon 



