Village Communities and Land Tenures in Western India Under Colonial Rule
Contents: Acknowledgements. Introduction. I. Report on the village communities of the Deccan: 1. Village communities. 2. Nature of Huks. 3. Ready Money Grants, Enams. 4. General observations. II. Land tenures in the Bombay presidency: 1. Character of land tenures; systems of survey and settlements. 2. The survey tenure. 3. Tenures in the Deccan. 4. Tenures in Gujarat. 5. Tenures in the Konkan. 6. Inam Tenures. 7. Land Tenures and land revenue administration in the town and island of Bombay. 8. Land tenures in Sind. 9. Suspensions and remissions of land revenue. Glossary. Index.
"The two documents Report on the Village communities of the Deccan by R.N. Gooddine (1852) and Character of Land Tenures and System of Survey and Settlement in the Bombay Presidency by J. Monteath (1914) presented in this volume explore the nature of village communities and land tenures under British rule in Western India. The portrayal of village communities in the existing writings as static and unchanging institutions and as tax-gathering tools for the state or redistributive agencies of social surplus is extremely inadequate and unsatisfactory for the correct understanding of the functioning of these institutions.
Originating in deep antiquity, they have to be seen as a complex and dynamic ensemble of social relations. Unlike Russian Obschina, Indian village communities were not premised upon the principles of egalitarianism but arose to cope with the competing and conflicting claims of various groups and classes to the social surplus.
Village communities were grounded in the hierarchical foundations of the rural societies and tried to institutionalise the existing social disparities. They began to crumble under the impetus of market economy and the increasing intervention of the colonial state when the process of class polarisation went beyond this institutionalised limit. Also, the continuous restructuring of social relationship reflected in the changing tenurial patterns accumulating by slow degrees resulted in the long run in ultimately dislocating the existing social structure. The historical records show that the central contention of the neo imperialist writings regarding the fundamental continuity between the precolonial and colonial social structure is not sustainable." (jacket)
