OR CUTTACK. 239 



of the country, and those officers called by the Moguls Talukdars or by 

 whatever other name, who exercised hereditarily the management and col- 

 lection of the domains of the state ; 2nd. the confused and inaccurate appli- 

 cation of the term Zemindar by the natives of the country themselves, long 

 before the accession of the British Government, which was probably a prin- 

 cipal cause of the want of discrimination above noticed ; 3rd. the failure to 

 distinguish between the inheritance and sale of an office (a practice probably 

 peculiar to the Hindus) and the inheritance and sale of the land with 

 which that office was connected and concerned. 



On the real and essential difference existing between the two classes in 

 Orissa, properly called Zemindar and Talukdar, I have already said enough. 

 The former were the feudal Chiefs or Barons of the land, holding their 

 estates by a title of property, and accountable to their sovereign only for 

 the performance of such services, military or otherwise, as the condition 

 of their tenure imposed. The latter were the hereditary Officers of Re- 

 venue and Police, on the widely extended domains of the superior Raja 

 himself. 



With regard to the second source of error which is indeed intimately 

 connected with the first, I would observe that we may trace four different 

 senses in which the term Zemindar has been at different and successive 

 periods used and understood in this country. In the days of Akber and 

 his successors down to some period of Aurangzeb's reign, it was confined 

 strictly to the old feudal Lords and Chiefs such as I have before described, 

 who were the ancient original Bh6yans, Bhupatis, or Zemindars. 2nd. At 

 different periods of the Mogid and Mahratta government, Zemindaris were 

 occasionally created in imitation of the Hindu practice, either by separating 

 off a number of villages from adjoining Pergunnahs, or by allotting one or 

 more Pergunnahs of the khaliseh land, as fixed assignments, to some distin- 

 guished Chief or able Revenue Officer, Musselman or Hindu, to answer a 

 particular purpose. These creations were apparently common in Bengal, and 



