CUSTOM FAILS TO KEEP RENTS DOWN 41 



muster every available fighting man were not rare in 

 those days. In the States under independent Indian 

 rulers, there was the annual skirmish with the tax- 

 gatherer, whose approach was usually resisted by 

 force of arms. Even under British rule such be- 

 haviour was not unknown. From 1805 to 181 5 in 

 the Trans-Gangetic Pargannahs of Farukhabad, ' the 

 Collector, as a matter of course, took two companies 

 of native infantry with him, and crossed the Ganges 

 to get in the arrears of the land-tax. In 1819 the 

 Board had to send their own Secretary (vencrabile 

 nomen) to collect the revenue which the Collector 

 had failed to do.'* There were, besides, raiding 

 parties of Pindaris to be encountered, as well as the 

 less formidable visitation of 'Habhuras' (gipsies), or 

 1 of Banjarahs conveying corn on pack-animals who 

 devastated the crops along the line of their march, 

 and hammered the villagers who protested.' t 



Under these conditions there was every reason for 

 the landlord to conciliate his tenants by lenient treat- 

 ment, and as these conditions had lasted from as far 

 back as the memory of man could run through the 

 troubled days of the eighteenth century, and had 

 endured under British rule for perhaps another 

 generation, the friendly relations between landlord 

 and tenant seemed to have the authority of custom. 

 But it was not a custom sufficiently strong to protect 

 the weak when the conditions of the land market 

 were altered to their detriment. In the nineteenth 

 century, under the pressure of economic forces, 

 custom, as the arbiter of rents, if it ever existed, 

 melted away and was replaced by competition. As 

 early as 1869 this tendency was noticed by observant 

 officers. ' The tendency of our rule has been greatly 

 to increase the insecurity of the cultivator's tenure : 



* Revenue Reporter, vol. iv., No. 2. 



f ' Aligarh Statistics from 1803 to Present Time,' J. R. Hutchinson, 

 1856, p. 30. 



