RYOTS, the name by which the cultivators of the soil in Hindustan arc designated. The ryots pay rent out of the produce of their land to a sovereign proprietor, and, so long as they pay the rent demanded of them, have a claim to the continued occupation of the land.
The economical condition of the Asiatic cultivator may be described as being made up of the three following circumstances :—I. He is an hereditary occupier, or, in other words, has an hereditary claim to the occupation of the land which he cultivates. 2. The amount of rent which he pays is, in practice. determined by the sovereign power. 3. There exists a number of classes intermediate between the hereditary occupier and the sovereign, all entitled to various portions of the revenue which is yielded by the land, but none having any proprietary right. The number of these intermediate classes, arising out of the tendency of all offices connected with the land to become hereditary, has contributed greatly to the ignorance prevalent among Europeans of the position of Asiatic cultivators.
Such being the general features of the economical condition of the ryot, his actual position necessarily depends most on the amount of rent paid by !dm to the sovereign, and the manner in which the rent is pea The amount of rent was fixed by the Laws of Menu at a sixth, an eighth, or a twelfth of the crops, according to differences in the soil, in the degree of labour necessary to cultivate it, and in the general pros perity of districts; but in times of urgent necessity, of war or invasion, the same laws allowed the king to take even so much as a fourth. (' Institutes of Menu,' c. iii., 130; x. 118, 120.) A sixth part of the produce had come to be the uniform tax in Hindustan when the Moliammehms became its masters. (` Sacontala.) But we find in Strati.), that when Alexander invaded India, a fourth of the produce was generally taken as rent. The despotic sovereigns of the East did not long continue,to observe their ancient laws, sometimes openly violating them, at other times evading them by a resort to indirect taxation. Indeed before the Mohammedan period there are instances of oppression by Hindu governments, under which the ryots were allowed to retain no more than a fifth or sixth of their crops.
The form in which the rent is paid has even a greater influence on the condition of the ryot than its amount. In ancient times the rent was always paid'in produce. Whenever, in later times, it has been denten ded in money, the consequences have been ruinous to the ryot, chiefly owing to the want of markets. When the ryot is compelled to pay in money, which, owing to the want of a ready market, he has a difficulty in doing, his obvious resort is to a money-lender. The money which he borrows for the purpose of relieving himself of immediate difficulty is borrowed at a high rate of interest. The immediate difficulty is
thus got rid of at a great sacrifice, and the ryot becomes dependent on the money-lender. In 1860 considerable discontent was created among the ryots in Bengal by the system asserted to have been adopted by the European indigo manufacturers : these, it was at least asserted by the ryots, made agreements with the zemindars that certain portions of the land should be devoted to the cultivation of the indigo plant, to be sold to them, in consideration of certain advancements of money at rate which was milieus to the cultivator. The attempt to enforce these agreements by law occasioned several tumults, and the dispute is not yet (1861) settled.
The agency by means of which the rents are collected, though less important than the form of payment, has also a considerable influence on the condition of the ryot. Under the ancient Indian governments, the agents of the prince to whom districts were assigned transacted immediately with the ryots, either singly or in villages. The Latter mode was the more general, by which the government levied a certain sum on each village, and left it to the villages to settle the individual quotas among themselves.
As regards the payment of rents, there were two kinds of arrange ment prevailing in the villages. In some villages the land was culti vated in common, and each cultivator had a share of the produce assigned, according to certain fixed rules ; these were called koacharry (brotherhood) villages. in others, each ryot cultivated separately his own spot of Land, and paid rent for it separately : these went by the name of puftfrday (partnership) villages.
The heads of villages paid the rents collected to the heads of dis tricts (des adikars); these again to the heads of larger tracts of country. The system of government detailed in the Institutes of Menu' enumerates lords of one town or district, of ten towns, of twenty towns, of a hundred towns, and a thousand towns. All these lords received assignments of land, and a per centag,e on their collections besides.
The heads of districts (des ada.ars) came afterwards to be represented by one class of zemindars, namely, those whose duties were confined t o the superintendence of police. The class of zemindars however which is the best known is that class in which the duty of collecting the revenue was added to the superintendence of police. This is not the place to speak of these functionaries, or to trace the changes in their duties and position until the commeueement of the British dominion. [ZEstIvuan.] A full and interesting account of ryot rents will be found in Mr. Jones's Essay on the Distritaitiol of Wealth and on the of Taxation. The reader is referred also to Mr. Mill's History of India, by Wilson, vol. i.