Observations on Land Tenures and Tenant Right in India (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1869 Excerpt: ...No matter for how many generations the tenant's family may have rented the land, the proprietor could always re-enter on possession; and the complaint which proprietors of all ranks make is, that we have violated this immemorial rule. To sum up my conclusions--I hold that the bestowal on tenants, who do not lay claim to any property in the soil, of a right of occupancy at rents fixed for a term of years by a court of law or any public authority is erroneous in conception, an innovation on native custom, logically unsound, injurious in its operation, and politically dangerous. Erroneous in conception, because, as I have shown, the notion of tenant-right derived from mere cultivating occupation under a proprietor first arose in Bengal out of the mistake made in regarding the indigenous proprietors of the soil as mere tenants of the Zemindars, and inasmuch as they possessed rights of occupancy, and a great deal more, as being the real proprietors, in attributing the same rights to tenants elsewhere, who were of a totally different class. An innovation on native custom, for the following reasons. The existence of such a right on the part of tenants is denied by all classes of proprietors throughout India, --by the great Talookdars and Zemindars, and by the pettiest member of a proprietary community.1 It is disavowed by the tenants themselves, as the inquiry in Oudh proved, when out of near 2,000 tenants examined, there was not one who did not frankly admit that such a right was unknown under the native rule, and as recent inquiries in the Punjaub further established, when vast numbers of tenants who had been erroneously recorded as possessed of a right of occupancy, made the same admission, and voluntarily renounced the privilege. No such right is known in the i..