A History of the Mahrattas v1.c7.155

v1.c7.155

¹ [The Balāute, or Balūtē, were those persons who received a balūta or yearly allowance of grain in return for services rendered to the village community. Roughly 10 per cent. of the grain produced in the village lands was paid to them (B.G., Ahmadnagar ; East India Papers, iv. 752). According to Colonel T. B. Jervis' MS. studies of the Marātha people, the original twelve village servants were divided into three classes, and obtained their share of balūta according to the class they were in. In the first class were the carpenter, shoemaker, ironsmith and Mahār ; in the second the washerman, potmaker, barber and Māng ; in the third the waterman, astrologer, gurāv and silversmith. In some villages the Kulkarni claimed to share in the third class. ‘I say nothing about Alooteh (Alāvtē or Alūtē), as part of the village community, for no two persons agree with respect to the constituents of this class, and it is scarcely reasonable to suppose that the cultivator could ever have supported, by fees in kind, twelve additional persons when he paid 50 per cent. to Government. And I am told the Bullooteh and Hakdar rights stood him in an average of 25 per cent., leaving him only 25 per cent. for his own maintenance and agricultural charges. . . . The fee in kind appears to be a percentage on the produce, but it is not uniform throughout the country, and very rarely indeed could I get either the cultivator or Boollootehdar to state specifically what the one gave, or the other looked upon himself entitled to receive, annually. It depended very much, I was told, upon the crops, and also upon the extent of services performed for each individual cultivator.’ (J.B.B.R.A.S., vol. xxii, p. 57.) See also Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, 1896, p. 18 n. Wilson (Glossary of Indian Terms) regards Alūtē as a ‘mere alliterative form’ of Balūtē, ‘the collective designation of the persons whom it is customary in some of the provinces of the Dekhin to retain as village servants in addition to the Balūtē, or regular village servants ; they include superannuated members of the Balūtē or their widows, religious mendicants, and the helpless and lazy in general.’ He