Landlords and Lords of the Land: estate management and social control in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1920

The problem of controlling and taxing the countryside is one which has remained with all governments in Asia, or indeed in the whole developing world, up to 1972. Government has inevitably tended to be essentially urban-based, centred on military power-bases, whether they be ‘Pacified Areas’, towns or mud forts, backed by military power normally concentrated in these centres. Outside the towns, however, lived the great mass of the population, and the great mass of the potentially taxable wealth, and it is upon its ability to control the rural areas that the credibility and survival of any régime must ultimately depend. It is perhaps an indication of our preoccupations with the problems of pacification and control in Asian societies that increasing interest is being shown in the patterns of rural control, in systems of traditional deference, which are usually seen as surviving much longer and much more strongly in the countryside than in the towns, and in problems of income distribution through social structures based on land. In such a situation, then, the role of the ‘estates’—of traditional and institutionalized systems of dependence and of control, of systems which were commonly used and hence studied by governments—is one which demands to be considered.