Note 16 — INTRODUCTION.

Land Tenures.Besides the class of vernacular terms that belong to the administration of the province, certain technical words connected with the tenure of land are of frequent occurrence in this history. For each of these, in addition to the English equivalent which as far as possible has been given in the text, some explanation seems necessary. During the period to which this history refers, the superior holders of the land of the province belonged to two main classes, those whose claims dated from before the Musalmán conquest and those whose interest in the land was based on a Musalmán grant. By the Musalmán historians, landholders of the first class, who were all Hindus, are called zamíndárs, while landholders of the second class, Musalmáns as a rule, are spoken of as jágírdárs. Though the term zamíndár was used to include the whole body of superior Hindu landholders, in practice a marked distinction was drawn between the almost independent chief, who still enjoyed his Hindu title of rája, rával, ráv, or jám, and the petty claimant to a share in a government village, who in a Hindu state would have been known as a garásiá.16