100 Report on the District of Azimgurh. [Feb. 



decrees of Court, our mistaken practice has introduced much confusion. 

 It became customary to consider the recorded Malgoozar the absolute 

 proprietor of the whole share, for which he paid the revenue ; and 

 hence the sale of his rights and interests was held to be a conveyance 

 of the whole share ; a transfer of the names was made in the Collector's 

 books, or, in technical terms, Kharij Dakhil was taken out, and it 

 became no easy matter to determine what really was transferred. No 

 doubt recorded Malgoozars have often taken advantage of this mis- 

 apprehension of their rights seriously to injure their co-parceners and 

 enrich themselves at their expense, but great injustice has also been 

 caused the other way. A Putee has raised money on mortgage, or 

 stood security in the name of its recorded Malgoozar, and received all 

 the benefit accruing from either transaction ; and afterwards, when the 

 terms of the contract have come to be enforced against them, have 

 endeavored to throw the whole weight on the Sudder Malgoozar 

 alone. The Government has frequently been thus a loser by accepting 

 a Sudder Malgoozar as security in the full amount of his recorded 

 liability. Cases of this sort must of course be decided each on their 

 separate merits. I would only mention one rule, which I have found 

 arbitrators adopt. Co-parceners living together, and holding their 

 property jointly and undividedly, are held to be bound by the act 

 of their recorded managers. The presumption in such cases is strongly 

 in favor of common agreement to the act, and they must be very 

 strong and peculiar circumstances which could establish a right of 

 exemption from all the liabilities implied in the deed. 



51st. Talookahs are not always held by an individual, but they 

 frequently are held either by one person or by a few living together, 

 and exercising their rights as one. Any collection of villages held 

 together, either by one person or by many, is in the common usage of 

 the district called a Talookah ; but I employ it here in the more res- 

 tricted sense in which it is generally received in the Western Pro- 

 vinces, as meaning a collection of villages, each having a separate 

 community of its own, which by some act of the ruling power had 

 been assigned to an individual, who was to collect the revenue from 

 them, and pay over a certain portion of it to the Government. 



52nd. Of such Talookahs there are not many in Azimgurh, nor are 

 the few that exist of any great size. Talookah Baz Bahadoor perhaps 

 is the only one which deserves very particular notice. Baboo Baz 

 Bahadoor was a j unior member of the family of Gautum Rajahs of 

 Azimgurh, already mentioned. He obtained from the Rajah of the 

 time several villages. Some of them were waste, and he brought them 

 into cultivation ; some of the village communities were weak, and 



