evstem. 



316 MANUAL OP THE NILAGIRI DISTRICT. 



CHAP. XIII, demanded a remedy. The evils lay in the Coimbatore shifting or 

 PART I. «« Bhurty " system, and in the unique custom of that district in 

 K EVENUE regard to grass and fallow lands. Under the existing system of 

 History, land tenure, under which holdings were both shifting and almost 

 undefined, the hill cultivators were able easily to raise fictitious or 

 seemingly fictitious claims to lands which strangers sought to 

 acquire, and were thus enabled either to defeat the object of the 

 applicant, or compel him to buy out the claimant in order to 

 secure possession. 

 The shifting The " Bhurty '' or shifting system was a necessary conse- 

 quence here, as elsewhere, of the poorness of soil and of the 

 poverty of the cultivators. A poor soil is easily exhausted if 

 called on to bear crops which abstract its food-producing 

 qualities or essentials. To supply the loss a recuperative process 

 is necessary. If left waste, nature herself slowly performs this 

 process, but art renders such a rest or fallow unnecessary. 

 Deep delving or ploughing, application of manure, and change of 

 crop, will supply in a few months, and far more abundantly, the 

 needs for which nature demands years. The hill cultivator 

 was poor and ignorant, and so the State allowed him to possess 

 a tract or tracts five or even ten times greater in extent than 

 the portion for which he actually paid assessment, and which was 

 shown in his annual putta. These several tracts might be miles 

 apart, and sometimes even in different ndds or villages. If 20 

 acres only were entered in the putta, the puttadar paid for, and 

 was supposed to cultivate 20 acres only ; but his claim might 

 extend to over 200 acres in scattered fields, in which he selected 

 the 20 acres, in one or many pieces, which he chose to cultivate 

 each year, according to the condition of the soil or season, or other 

 local or peculiar necessity. Nor had the separate lots which the 

 putta was supposed to reserve to the ryot been . ever properly 

 defined or limited, or even identified. They were as often in 

 posse as in esse, and the potentiality of possession really depended 

 upon the will of the headmen and the connivance of the lower 

 revenue officials. The position was rendered still more compli- 

 cated by the ancient custom of joint or undivided family holdings, 

 a system which is only now beginning to give way before the 

 growing desire for individual and separate holdings consequent 

 on theincreasing prosperity and intelligence of the people. It may 

 safely be said that, with the exception of the home-farm lands 

 of each hamlet, the rest of the area, cultivable or uncultivablc, 

 forest or swamp, included within the bounds of the several nads 

 or rural divisions was practically at the disposal of the village 

 elders and subordinate revenue ofiicials. The ill-defined and ill- 

 understood rights of Government were virtually ignored, and 

 Circar wood or waste on the agricultural portions of the plateau, 

 that is, the tracts occupied by the Badagas, to all intents and 



