Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v1.c20.s9.t2.22

v1.c20.s9.t2.22

Such are the rights and privileges derived from the ryot cultivator alone. The Rana may dispossess the chiefs of Badnor, or Salumbar, of their estates, the grant of the crown—he could not touch the rights emanating from the community; and thus the descendants of a chieftain, who a few years before might have followed his sovereign at the head of one hundred cavaliers, would descend into the humble foot militia of a district. Thousands are in this predicament: the Kanawats, Lunawats, Kumbhawats, and other clans, who, like the Celt, forget not their claims of birth in the distinctions of fortune, but assert their propinquity as "brothers in the nineteenth or thirtieth degree to the prince" on the throne. So sacred was the tenure derived from the ryot, that even monarchs held lands in bhum from their subjects, for an instance of which we are indebted to the great poetic historian of the last Hindu king. Chand relates, that when his sovereign, the Chauhan, had subjugated the kingdom of Anhilwara³ from the Solanki, he returned to the nephew of the conquered prince several districts and seaports, and all the bhum held by the family. In short, the Rajput vaunts his aristocratic distinction derived from the land; and opposes the title of ‘Bhumia Raj,’ or government of the soil, to the ‘Bania Raj,’ or commercial government, which he affixes as an epithet of contempt to Jaipur : where “ wealth accumulates and men decay.”