The Zamindari System: Hereditary Landholders of Mughal India

The zamindar was the hereditary landholder and revenue collector of the Indian village, and the institution was the principal form of local agrarian leadership from the Delhi Sultanate through the Mughal period and into the colonial era. The term zamindar derives from the Persian zamin, land, and dar, holder, and was used to describe a wide variety of landholders ranging from the great rajas of Rajputana and the Deccan to the small hereditary patels of a single village. The zamindar was, in origin, a regional or local potentate whose family had held the right to collect and transmit the land revenue of a specified area since before the establishment of Mughal rule, and the Mughal empire, while seeking to bring the zamindars under effective imperial supervision, never attempted to abolish the institution. This page treats the zamindar’s status, the distinction from the mansabdar, the categories of zamindars, the role in the revenue chain, the relationship with imperial authority, the role in the eighteenth century, and the British continuation under the Permanent Settlement. The fiscal framework in which the zamindar operated is examined in the land revenue administration page, and the mansabdari counterpart is treated in the mansabdari system page.

The Zamindar as Hereditary Landholder and Revenue Collector

The zamindar’s status rested on a combination of rights that were partly proprietary, partly governmental, and partly customary. The zamindar was the recognized head of the village or group of villages whose revenue he collected, and he was, in the Mughal period, the principal link between the cultivator and the state. The state, in theory, retained the ownership of the land, and the revenue was treated as the share of the produce due to the sovereign. The zamindar, in theory, held the right to collect the revenue and to retain a stipulated portion as his nankar or customary allowance. The cultivation was carried out by a separate body of peasant farmers, the raiyat, who held the land from the village community under various customary tenures.

The zamindar’s right to collect and transmit the revenue was, in the Mughal period, generally hereditary. The Mughal state did not invent the zamindar, did not grant the zamindari as a fief, and did not, in most cases, claim the power to dispossess a zamindar arbitrarily. The state did, however, claim the right to recognize the succession of a zamindar, to demand the revenue due, to inspect the zamindar’s accounts, and to punish the zamindar for rebellion, fraud, or failure. The customary status of the zamindar was extensively documented in the village-level records, the wajib-ul-arz or customary roll, prepared under the zabti system described in the Akbar’s revenue reforms page.

Distinction from the Mansabdar

The zamindar must be carefully distinguished from the mansabdar. The mansabdar was an officer of the imperial service, holding a rank in a graded hierarchy and assigned a jagir in lieu of salary. The mansabdar could be promoted, demoted, transferred, or dismissed at the emperor’s pleasure, and the jagir was a conditional and revocable assignment. The zamindar, by contrast, was a hereditary landholder, holding his position by right of custom and acknowledged by the imperial government as the customary revenue collector of his village or group of villages. The zamindar did not hold a mansab in the formal sense, although the larger zamindars were frequently given formal mansab ranks in addition to their hereditary position.

The distinction is important for the period after the mid-seventeenth century, when the jagir system came under severe strain and many mansabdars were forced to accept jagirs in distant or unproductive regions. The zamindar, anchored in his home village, did not face the same transfer problem, and the zamindari tenure gave the local landholding families a stability that the mansabdari tenure could no longer provide. The two systems thus evolved in different directions in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the mansabdari system declined in effectiveness while the zamindari system became, in many regions, the de facto basis of local administration.

Categories of Zamindars

The zamindars of Mughal India were a remarkably diverse body. The most powerful were the great rajas of Rajputana, the Gond rajas of central India, the Rathor rajas of Marwar, the Sisodia rajas of Mewar, the Bundela chiefs of Bundelkhand, the Chandela and Raj Gond rajas of the central provinces, and the Maratha and Bhonsle chiefs of the Deccan. These great zamindars ruled substantial principalities, maintained their own courts, coined their own currencies in some cases, and commanded the military service of their own retainers. They acknowledged Mughal suzerainty, paid tribute in the form of the peshkash, and provided the emperor with contingents in time of war, but in the routine administration of their territories they were effectively sovereign.

A second category comprised the medium-sized zamindars of the plains, the deshmukhs of the Maratha country, the taluqdars of Awadh and Bengal, the dafadars of the Punjab, and the desais of the Deccan. These zamindars held from fifty to several hundred villages, maintained a household and a small military following, and exercised considerable authority over the cultivators in their territory. They were the backbone of the rural administration.

A third category comprised the small zamindars, the patels and lambardars of the village, the mukaddams of the smaller circles of villages, and the chaudhuris of the pargana. These were the immediate link between the village and the state, and they were responsible for the routine collection of the revenue, the maintenance of the village records, and the transmission of the orders of the higher authorities to the cultivators.

The Role in the Revenue Chain

The zamindar’s principal role in the Mughal revenue chain was the collection and transmission of the land revenue of his territory. The zabti assessment, made on the basis of the survey of the village lands, was conveyed to the zamindar in the form of a total demand, the kist or instalment schedule, and the zamindar was responsible for collecting the demand from the cultivators. The zamindar retained a customary portion, the nankar or malikana, as his commission, and the remainder was the mali or net revenue due to the state.

The zamindar’s relationship with the cultivator was regulated by custom and by the village records. The cultivator paid a fixed share of the produce, the batai, or a fixed cash sum, the zabti, to the zamindar. The cultivator’s obligations were, in theory, fixed and predictable, and the cultivator enjoyed customary rights of occupancy, the right to inherit the land, and the right to alienate the land in some cases. The wajib-ul-arz recorded the customary obligations of both parties.

The zamindar’s relationship with the imperial authorities was supervised by the qanungo and the higher revenue officers, the amil of the pargana and the diwan of the sarkar or province. The zamindar was required to submit annual accounts, the bahikhata, of the revenue collected and transmitted.

The Eighteenth Century and the British Continuation

The eighteenth century saw a major shift in the relative position of the zamindars and the imperial centre. The mansabdari system came under severe strain, the jagir assignments became less reliable, and the actual administration of the provinces passed increasingly into the hands of the larger zamindars, the new taluqdars of Awadh and Bengal, the deshmukhs of the Maratha country, the Sikh misls of the Punjab, and the great rajas of the east. The Mughal emperor, in Delhi or in the brief Mughal revival under Ahmad Shah, attempted to maintain a theoretical suzerainty over the zamindars, and the mansab ranks were still granted, but the actual power of the centre was minimal.

The British, who assumed the administration of Bengal after the grant of the diwani in 1765, encountered the zamindari system as the principal form of rural landholding and revenue collection. The British initially attempted to deal with the zamindars as revenue farmers, granting them the right to collect the revenue at a profit in return for a fixed annual payment. The arrangement proved unsatisfactory, and in 1793 Lord Cornwallis introduced the Permanent Settlement, which recognized the zamindars as the hereditary proprietors of the land and fixed the revenue demand in perpetuity. The Permanent Settlement was extended, with variations, to the North-Western Provinces and other regions, and the zamindars of the British period inherited the institutional position of the Mughal zamindars, although the legal status of the land and the rights of the cultivator were transformed. The zamindari abolition measures of the early 1950s were the last major legislative intervention in a tradition that had been documented, in continuous form, since the Ain-i-Akbari of the 1590s.

Sources

Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963; rev. 1999), chs. 6–7.
C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (NCHI II.1, 1988), pp. 36–67.