Stokes, Eric;
The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India
Cambridge University Press, 1980, 320 pages
ISBN 0521297702 9780521297707
topics: | history | british-india
many of the studies of the 1857 uprising in the countryside were directed to criticising and amending S. B. Chaudhuri's straightforward thesis that the rural areas rose as one man and that the principal cause was the loss of land rights to the urban moneylender and trader under the pressure of the British land revenue system. Instead my researches suggested that violence and rebellion were often fiercest and most protracted where land transfers were low and the hold of the moneylender weakest. Later studies acknowledge, however, that the mere transfer of proprietary title tells us little about its political, social and economic effects, which could vary enormously according to the strength and homogeneity of the political and lineage organisation of the peasantry. Similarly while in earlier essays the action of local communities was analysed (as it was by contemporary British officials) in terms of local caste subdivisions, there is increasing awareness that in the crisis of 1857 rural society did not abandon traditional political organisation structured along vertical crosscaste lines. Even among the Jats of the upper Ganges-Jumna Doab the got or maximal lineage was too dispersed to form a local territorial unit for political cooperation and action. Hence the importance of the local multicaste organisation of the tappa and khap as well as the still wider grouping of the dharra or faction. [S. B. Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (Calcutta, 1957), p. 21.] (this text, which is referred to disparagingly throughout, is not cited till p.159)
The force of subconscious ideology and the practical need to stabilise the tax system within an impersonal bureaucratic form of rule prompted them [the British of the E.I. Company] at the outset of colonial rule to introduce a modern form of private property right. How far the British misunderstood and distorted South Asian society in consequence has remained a matter of controversy. Certainly the British believed that they were innovating. It was a fixed article of their faith that, because the land tax imposed by rapacious native governments had traditionally absorbed the entire economic rent, effective private property in land had hitherto had no general existence. Engels, echoing Marx, gave this belief vivid expression in his aphorism that the key to the whole of the East lay in the absence of private property in land. Yet although the property arising from the perpetual or long-term limitation of the land tax was novel, the British proclaimed their purpose as being not to overturn existing rights but to give amplification and legal certainty to rights that had hitherto remained vague and inchoate. Modern critics have argued that a fundamental distortion of Indian tenures was caused by the British inability to free themselves of the notion of an absolute and exclusive form of proprietorship when interests in land were traditionally multiple and inexclusive.
James Mill and his early school of development economists had believed that,
since all social strata above the peasant lived off disbursements of land
revenue, the British had it in their power to shape society as they chose
according to the type of land-revenue system they adopted. ...
Indian nationalist writers have strenuously kept alive the notion, first
voiced by British administrators, that Indian society suffered in consequence
wanton derangement from arbitrary decisions asto what social group should be
vested with the novel form of proprietary right in land. 32
But in the intellectual sea-change of our times a number of Indian historians
are now coming round to the view that the land-revenue systems were
essentially practical adaptations to local circumstances...
[As articulated in the 1890s by Baden-Powell] almost everywhere, not merely
was the particular type of land controller dominant in a region recognised as
the agency of revenue collection and ipso facto as landed proprietor - the
large landholder in Bengal, the individual peasant landholder in the Madras
and Bombay presidencies, the corporate village coparceners in the United
Provinces and the Punjab; but also large exceptions were made within each
system to allow for local variety. p.32
[FN] The nationalist view of the effects of colonial rule on Indian society
has a long historical pedigree and borrows heavily from arguments used in
controversial policy debates by British administrators
themselves. R. C. Dutt, Economic History of India in the Victorian Age
(London, 1906); Radhakamal Mukerjee, Land Problems of India (London,
1933), and M. B. Nanavati and J. J. Anjaria, The Indian Rural Problem
(Bombay, 1944) are among the more sober authorities on which much wilder
generalisation has frequently been based. For a valuable summary and
critique of orthodox nationalist view, see Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste
in South India (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 186 ff.
The precise degree of interference with indigenous practice is impossible to
determine; but what is clear is that irrespective of the legal recognition of
tenures the British were scrupulous in avoiding interference with the social
structure. ... the 'peasant' with whom they dealt was of the elite
landholding castes, and cultivated his land with the aid of inferior landless
castes.
in the Aligarh district, for example, nominally half the cultivated acreage
changed hands in two decades before i860.
[Traditional resistance movements in Afro-Asian nationalism]
Historiography of nationalism in the Third World:
Two distinct interpretations:
earlier view - elitist,
newer view - may be designated the populist.
Whatever its emotive origins in the writings of the Fanon school, the newer
interpretation has been pioneered for modern historical scholarship by work
on those regions, notably East and Central Africa and the Congo, where the
roots of the modern-educated elite and modern-style politics are
shallowest. Here the telescoped nature of political development has made it
credible to argue a historical connection between modern political activities
and traditional resistance movements and even to assert the existence of a
permanent, underlying 'ur-nationalism' which manifested its hostility to the
European presence in a distinct series of historical forms.
[Note the dismissive tone re: Fanon, similar to that for SB Chaudhuri]
[comparison with African rebellions]
... the elite groups which claim the historian's attention are composed of
those 'modernists' or 'traditionalists' who act essentially as brokers (or
link men or communicators in Lonsdale's terminology) between the indigenous
society and modernity as symbolised by the white man.
on first contact, cooperation is amore usual response than hostility, and
true primary resistance a comparative rarity. Much of what passes for primary
resistance occurs at the onset of the 'local crisis' when the first phase of
collaboration has gone sour. The internal configuration of society has
already been altered by the yeast of modernity, so that the 'local crisis'
isalways as much aninternal as anexternal one and reflects the strains of
dislocation and displacement.
Argues against a populist view of various insurrections:
[Hehe revolt in Tanganyika were caused by local pressures]
because the Germans had espoused rival peoples who were attempting to.
recover territory on the Iringa plateau from which the Hehe haa evicted
them twenty years earlier.
[Bushiri rising of 1888]
was anything but a blind xenophobic reaction to first contact with the West.
[J. Iliffe, Tanganyika under German Rule igo5~igi2 (Cambridge, 1969). Also,
'The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion', Jl. Afr. Hist., viii
(1967) ]
... the general wave of violence that swept southern Tanganyika in 1905 was of a very different character. [Iliffe] uses the term 'post-pacification revolt' to describe it and to distinguish it from primary resistance. Features : Firstly, while primary resistance engages only the power structure of traditional societies, post-pacification revolt engages the total society, the traditional power structure having been removed or profoundly modified. New forms of leadership will therefore emerge, one of which will stem from a religious ideology and strive for both mass commitment and enlargement of scale to overcome the disadvantage of compartmentalism. But the inescapable facts of compartmentalism and of uneven development will ensure that a general revolt is bound to be a loose uprising of heterogeneous units bound together only in a common hatred of Western rule. Ideology will express that hatred and supply the link that produces concert, but the fight will resolve itself into a series of local conflicts in which the leadership will vary according to the uneven pattern of development. Thus, African historiography proposes three phases for resistance against colonial forces: a) primary resistance - localized groups based on traditional society; b) 'post-pacification revolt' - on a larger scale, after traditional power structures have been destroyed or altered c) 'secondary resitstance' - on a global scale through secular and religious associations (e.g. caste sabhas, Arya Samaj, etc.). The political mythologising that has gone on since Savarkar's day has been generally so crude as to reinforce academic scepticism on the proto-nationalist character of 1857; and in the latest round of this dusty controversy R. C. Majumdar's Johnsonian refutation has largely silenced S. B. Chaudhuri's attempt to lend professional respectability to the concept of a first freedom struggle. Iliffe says that 'Maji Maji as a mass movement, originated in peasant grievances, was then sanctified and extended by prophetic religion, and finally crumbled as crisis compelled reliance on fundamental loyalties to kin and tribe.' The description could be applied quite plausibly to the 1857 Great Rebellion, although the two sets of phenomena are in their particularity worlds apart. Peasant grievances in this context imply a combined action of economic and governmental pressure strong enough to induce decisive social change and the displacement of traditional leadership. Such stark, absolute contrasts [do not exist] in India, and no sudden transformation from subsistence to cash agriculture, or from tribal to peasant society is to be observed. The question is rather at what point quantitative becomes qualitative change and the intensification of economic and governmental pressures becomes revolutionary. Even for East Africa Iliffe admits that pressure on the people was greater elsewhere, and that a peculiar conjuncture of circumstance was necessary to produce revolutionary violence. The conjuncture in northern India in 1857 was formed by the defection of the lower-level collaborators, namely a high-caste peasant mercenary army, inflamed by an intolerable religious grievance, threatened with slow displacement by lower castes and outsiders, and recruited from regions undergoing recent political and economic dislocation.
Seeks to separate the sepoy rebellion from the peasant rebellion;
a thesis strongly contested in Mukherjee's Awadh in Revolt etc.
This did not mean that military mutiny and rural rebellion were
concerted. Only rarely are there signs of this occurring. The military
system already provided a supra-caste and supra-communal organisation so
that the mutineers looked at once for outside political leadership from
traditional sources to enable them to act on the enlarged political scale
necessary to meet the British counter-attack. p.130
[Q. asked by subalterns: was it only a pragmatic move "to meet the counter
attack", or was it also a trying to meet a perceived threat to one's
traditional identity? ]
[The sepoys concentrated primarily] in the three urban centres of Delhi,
Lucknow and Kanpur (Cawnpore). With the breakdown of British authority in the
districts peasant grievances were the first to assert themselves, peasant
disturbances being particularly marked in the Doab region between the Ganges
and the Jumna. Only in the case of Muslim communities, however, was any vivid
attempt made to generalise such outbreaks by means of a prophetic religion,
the jihads of Maulvi Liaquat Ali of Allahabad and Maulvi Ahmad Ullah of
Faizabad, being the best known.
In most accounts of the rural uprisings of 1857 the moneylender, whether
described as 'sleek mahajan' or 'impassive bania' is cast as the villain of
the piece. It is he whois seen as the principal beneficiary of the landed
revolution that occurred in the first halfcentury of British rule in the
North-Western Provinces andgave the non-agricultural classes of the towns a
mounting share in the control of land. Andhis ascendancy is attributed
directly to the institutional changes effected by British rule, among the
most important of which were the transformation of the immediate
revenue-collecting right (malguzari) into a transferable private property;
the heavy, inelastic cash assessments; and above all, the forced sale of land
rights for arrears of revenue or in satisfaction of debt. 'The public sale of
land, says Professor Chaudhuri, 'not merely uprooted the ordinary people
from their smallholdings but also destroyed the gentry of the country, and
both the orders being victims of British civil law were united in the
revolutionary epoch of 1857-8 in a common effort to recover what they had
lost.'
Professor Chaudhuri elsewhere spells out the consequences of this unwitting
partnership of the moneylender and the British revenue laws:
The baniyas were mostly outsiders who purchased with avidity the
proprietary rights of the zamindars and peasants when they came under the
operations ofthe sale law. Bythis process a vast number of estates had
been purchased bythese 'new men5 anda large number of families of rank
and influence had been alienated. As village moneylenders they also
practised unmitigated usury. The English courts which offered facilities
to the most oppressive moneylenders in executing a decree for the
satisfaction of an ordinary debt against an ignorant peasantry produced
the greatest resentment amongst the agricultural population and a
dangerous dislocation of social structure. The protection thus afforded
to this class through the medium of the English courts is the sole reason
why the peasants and other inferior classes of wage earners to whom
borrowing was the only resource were so vindictive and uncompromisingly
hostile against the English during the rebellion. It was not so much the
fear for their religion that provoked the rural classes and landed chiefs
to revolt. It was the question of their rights and interests in the soil
and hereditary holdings which excited them to a dangerous degree.
[S. B. Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (Calcutta, 1957),
p. 21.] (this text, referred to disparagingly throughout, is mentioned
without citation in the preface, ignored in the introduction and is not
cited till p.159)
official accounts of the early disturbances ... all acknowledged that
resentment at the moneylenders' hold ranked as a prominent incentive for
popular violence. Spankie, the Magistrate, tried indeed to argue that
rebellion was not initially contemplated:
The plundering tribe of Goojurs was the first affected, and the Rangurs
were not far behind them. There was, however, no general outbreak until
the disturbances at Muzuffurnaggur occurred [presumably on 21 May]. Then
wave after wave of disquiet rolled through the district.. .The
assemblies of Goojurs and others became more and more frequent. Ancient
tribe or caste feuds were renewed; village after village waslooted;
bankers were either robbed of their property or had to pay fines to
protect it. The Zemindars and villagers took advantage of the general
anarchy to obtain from the Mahajuns and Buneahs their books of business
and bond debts, etc. It would appear as if the disturbances in the
commencement were less directed against Government than against
particular people and castes. When the fall of Delhie ceased to be
looked upon as imminent, the agricultural communities began to turn
their eyes towards the local treasures and did not scruple to oppose
themselves to Government officers and troops. p.163
['Narrative of Events attending the outbreak of Disturbances and the
Restoration of Authority in the District of Saharunpoor in 1857-58.'
R. Spankie to F. Williams, Commissioner, Meerut, 26 Sept. 1857, para.11,
in Narrative of Events regarding the Mutiny in India of 1857-58 and the
Restoration of Authority Calcutta, 1881), 1, p. 468. ]
Resistance to Government figured early nevertheless. On 22 May Spankie took a
force along the Rurki road to Gurhow, 7 miles east of Saharanpur, where a
bania's house had been looted, and then took prisoner the head men
(lambardars) of Kunkuri and Phoraur, where the villagers had refused to pay
their revenue.9 A few days later Robertson, the Assistant Magistrate, was
despatched to Deoband with a detachment of the 4th Lancers in response to a
plea for protection from the Hindu traders of the town. He was startled at
the*determined hostility manifested by the nearby Gujar villages, especially
Babupur, Sanpla Bakal and Fatehpur, which bordered the Kali Nadi some 4 miles
east of Deoband. Robertson had visited the area in the course of settlement
revision work only six weeks earlier and now found the transformation
bewildering. 'Troops might mutiny, but I could hardly realize this rapid
change among peaceful villagers.'10 Their resistance decided him against
moving with his unsteady troops against the formidable Pundir Rajputs of the
Katha, a region immediately west of Deoband: 'the experience of the previous
day had not been lost sight of. . .It showed me clearly that the zemindars
were one with the lower orders; that rebellion, not plunder alone, actuated
the mass of the population.'
Firstly, it is to be observed that rebellion was centred in the 'thirsty
tracts, where canal irrigation had not reached and where wells failed to give
an adequate water supply. These were precisely the tracts recognised by
settlement officers after the Mutiny as severely assessed and in need of
relief, and yet curiously they had managed to resist the encroachment of the
moneylender more successfully than any other portion of the district. p.168
[The mahajans owned less land in these areas.
AM: but could that be because these were not profitable owing to the severe
assessment?]
But what really is in question is whether the moneylender was the prime cause
of the Gujar uprising or whether he was simply one of the symbols of a new
and hated order of things under which the old Gujar mode of life was
failing. The evidence, when read together, all suggests that the rebellious
Gujars were giving expression to a frustration born of their inability to
make good in the new rural economy. Such a supposition gains powerful support
from the contrast presented by the Gujar communities of the canal-irrigated
tracts even in the violently disturbed Nakur and Gangoh parganas. So far as
the evidence goes there would appear to have been no rising in these tracts,
and one may reasonably assume that the miracle of transformation upon which
Wynne reported so ecstatically in 1867 had already taken effect:
The Gujars to whom by far the bulk of this group belongs, have, like
others of Rampore, been reclaimed from the improvident habits and the
tendency to cattle lifting which characterize their brethren in the rest
of the pergunnah. This happy result is due to the canal. The reward which
the use of canal water held out to industry was so great, so immediate,
and so certain, that all the traditions of caste succumbed to the prospect
of wealth, so that the Gujars throughout the region watered by the canal
are the most orderly, contented and prosperous of men. p.170
[Saharanpore S.R. (Allahabad, 1871), H. le Poer Wynne to H. D.
Robertson, 17 May 1867, para. 92, p. 99]
The mahajan unquestionably played a significant role in prompting the Mutiny
disturbances, but it was different and more complex than generally
supposed. It is nevertheless easy to understand how the accepted picture has
been constructed. By the mid 1860s the mahajans were in possession of some
18% of the agricultural land in the Saharanpur district, most of their gains
having been made by the time of the 1857 outbreak. Among the earliest
casualties had been the magnate class. The provincial Gazetteer in 1875
looked on them as a thing of the past: 'few of the old respectable families
retain their estates which have fallen principally into the hands of the
Saharanpur moneylenders'.29 But these had been neither numerous nor
ancient. The hold established over the cultivating communities caused graver
concern and by 1854 the Government had been sufficiently alarmed to institute
a general inquiry throughout the N.W. Provinces. Ross, the Collector of
Saharanpur, emphasised in his reply that the peasantry parted with its land
only under extreme necessity and that a widespread sense of grievance was
manifest. 'The unjust and fraudulent spoliation thus alleged to be committed
through the ready instrumentality of the Civil Court is the theme of loud and
constant complaint among the agricultural class', he wrote in March 1855.
[Cited J. Vans Agnew to F. Williams, 28 Jan. 1863, para. 46; Saharanpur
S.R. 1871, Appx, p. 11. ]
Despite their high farming the Jat communities of the western portion of
the Muzaffarnagar district suffered some loss of land to the moneylender in
the pre-Mutiny decades, yet their losses were as nothing when contrasted
with those of the Sayyid communities in the eastern parganas who remained
pointedly quiet in 1857...
[continues the racist stance of caste/race-based distinctions - only
those (castes) revolt who are most fit to revolt... ]
The threshold of tolerability might be lower than 10% for armed Gujar or
Jat communities while losses of up to 60% of their land (as in pargana
Bhukarheri in Muzaffarnagar) would be borne passively by disorganised
Sayyid gentry communities. 179
[a possible cause of Sayyid passivity is hinted at in "disorganized"]
The differential rates imposed on the Jat peasantry in the 1830s and 1840s by
Plowden and Sir Henry Elliot in parganas Budhana, Kandhla, Shamli and
Shikapur were recognised after 1857 as intolerably oppressive and on any
reading stand out as the major grievance of the Jat rebels. p.178
[FN] Revenue rates per acre on the cultivation:
Kandhla Rs. 2-4-8 Khatauli Rs. 1-11-6
Budhana 2—3—7 Jansath 1—4—6
Shamli 2—10—0 Muzaffarnagar 1—8—2
Shikapur 2-6-7
[assesment at Shamli / Shikapur is more than double that at Jansath]a
But the absolute pitch of the assessment could hardly of itself have been
sufficient motive. the Jats managed to meet it by the admirable skill and
industry... What one suspects rankled deeper than being taxed more heavily
than other castes was to find their ancestral lands mulcted [punished by
taxation] so savagely in contrast with their caste brethren to the east,
especially in the fertile portions of parganas Khatauli and Jansath.
[Shamli was govt hq, and was attacked
Inayet Ali Khan (nephew of Mahbub Ali, the Kazi of Thana Bhawan in
the Muzaffarnagar district to the south) raised the green flag of
Islam and stormed the Government buildings at Shamli. 171
also, Shamli witnessed within-muslim (Shia-Sunni?) killings :
at Shamli Edwards noticed how the attackers had entered the mosque
and slaughtered fellow-Muslims within its walls.
[R. M. Edwards, Magistrate, to F. Williams, 3 April 1858]
However, Stoke's language still reeks of casteist, quasi-racist groupism:
A decayed Muslim gentry living alongside an impoverished Gujar and
Rangar peasantry were combustible materials readily ignited,
especially when the powerful Jat brotherhoods of Shamli and the
Rajputs of Budhana made common cause with them. 183
No contrast could be more absolute than that between the ferocity of Jat
rebellion in western Meerut (which later spread north into Muzaffarnagar) and
the conspicuous 'loyalty' displayed by the Jats of eastern Meerut and
Bulandshahr. The only sufficient explanation, apart from the differing
incidence of the revenue demand, is that in the western portion the Jats were
organised into bhaiachara village communities within a clan organisation,
while in the eastern they dwelt as sub-proprietors or occupancy tenants in
landlord estates, among which the huge patrimony established by Gulab Singh,
the loyalist Jat raja of Kuchchesar, was pre-eminent.
On the eastern side of Muzaffarnagar district... the Jats a prospering
caste, for whom the opening of the majestic Ganges Canal in April 1854
offered splendid prospects...
in the west, when they talk of a purbi (literally someone from the east, an inhabitant of the middle or lower ganges) they automatically add the adjective dhilA meaning rather unenterprising. one cannot but agree with the epithet. we are a long way from the robust northern castes - Gilbert Etienne, Studies in Indian Agriculture 1966 ... over the course of the nineteenth-century, Lakshmi, the fickle goddess of fortune, betook herself with uneven tread westward from the lush verdure of Bengal until she has come to fix her temporary abode on the Punjab plain between Ludhiana and Lyallpur. The explanation has been applied over a narrower geographical span. Historians have become accustomed to tracing back the decisive east-west shift in economic power and activity in the U.P. region to the railway age of the 1860s and 1870s.1 It was then that the thriving economy of the Benares region, founded on the export of cash crops like sugar, indigo, opium, and rice, and backed by an important handloom textile industry and a great entrepot trading centre at Mirzapur, began to lose out to the new centres of manufacture like Kanpur and to the wheat and sugar producing regions of the upper Ganges-Jumna Doab. [suggests that popular theories such as overpopulation [Radhakamal Mukerjee in Bholanath Misra, 1932] etc are not the cause of the shift. also considers caste-based differences such as the Jat "capacity for work".] Professor Etienne, in his book Studies in Indian Agriculture: the Art of the Possible, has contrasted the superior energy and purposiveness of the agriculturalists in his sample village in Bulandshahr district with their dispirited counterparts in the Benares district. Like Darling and generations of European observers before him, he ascribed the dynamic informing agriculture of the western region to the dominance of the Jats and their fighting traditions, so that even in agricultural economics it would seem that the biblical adage holds true: the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence until now and the violent take it by force.
Preface vii Introduction I 1 eThe first century of British colonial rule: social revolution or social stagnation? 19 2 Privileged land tenure in village India in the early nineteenth century 46 3 Agrarian society and the Pax Britannica in northern India in the early nineteenth century 63 4 The land revenue systems of the North-Western Provinces and Bombay Deccan 1830—80: ideology and the official mind 90 5 Traditional resistance movements and Afro-Asian nationalism: The context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion 120 6 Nawab Walidad Khan and the 1857 Struggle in the Bulandshahr district 140 7 Rural revolt in the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: a study of the Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar districts 159 8 Traditional elites in the Great Rebellion of 1857: some aspects of rural revolt in the upper and central Doab 185 9 The structure of landholding in Uttar Pradesh 1860-1948 205 10 Dynamism and enervation in North Indian agriculture: the historical dimension 228 11 Peasants, moneylenders and colonial rule: an excursion into Central India 243 12 The return of the peasant to South Asian history 265 Glossary 290 Index 299
1. Halqua Patwari or Lekhpaal Each Village is assigned to a particular halqwa patwari who maintains the record of ownership of land(khatauni/Jamabardi), record of cultivation on the land (Kharsa Girdawari), map of the village called 'Aks Sizra' mutation register and other records of the village. In every cropping season, ie. Kharif, Rabi & Zaid, the halqua patwari inspects every field and records the cultivation data. He also initiates mutation(ie. change in ownership) and gives certified copies of land records. 2. Registrar Kanungo The work of Lekhpaal is supervised by a Reg. Kanungo, whose main duties are : a. General Supervision over Patwari b. Supervision over Village Maps c. Checking of patwari's records and statistics 3. Naib Tehsildar & Tehsildar The work of Lekhpaal and Reg. Kanungo is further supervised by both the Naib Tehsildar and Tehsildar. It is the duty of Naib Tehsildar and Tehsildar that the land records are maintained correctly and all subordinate staff discharge their duties efficiently and properly. It is also the duty of Tehsildar and Naib Tehsildar that 'Khatauni' are prepared as per the schedule given in the Act. 4. Khatauni Khatauni is the register of all persons cultivating or otherwise occupying land in a village as prescribed according to Uttar Pradesh Land Revenue Rules. It is prepared in Form P-VI. It is a document prepared as part of record-of-right. It contains entries regarding ownership, cultivation and various rights in land. It is revised every 6 years. This duration of six years is called Fasli-year. 5. Khasra: (Record of Cultivation) It is a register of harvest inspections(parhtaal). The Lekhpaal conducts the field harvest inspections in the month of October, February & April, wherein he records facts regarding crop grown, soil classification, cultivable capacity of the cultivators. The first six monthly inspection starting from Ist October is called as "Khariff" parhtaal while the second commencing from Ist February is called "Rabi" parhtaal. In the month of april the "Zaid" parhtaal is done. 6. Measurements of land Linear Measure 1 inch = 2.54 centimetres 1 foot = 30.48 centimetres 1 yard = 91.44 centimetres 1 mile =1.61 kilometres 1 Ghatta = 8.25 feet Square Measure 1 square foot = 0.093 square metre 1 square yard = 0.836 square metre 1 square mile = 2.59 square kilometre*= 259 hectares 1 acre = 0.405 hectares 1 Acre = 4 Bigha 16 Biswa (4840 Sq.Yds) 1 Bigha = 20 Biswas (1008 Sq.Yds) 1 Biswa = 50 Sq.Yards