Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v1.c20.s9.t2.30

v1.c20.s9.t2.30

Proprietary Rights in Land.—Besides the ability to alienate as demonstrated, all the overt symbols which mark the proprietary right in other countries are to be found in Mewar; that of entire conveyance by sale, or temporary by mortgage; and numerous instances could be adduced, especially of the latter. The fertile lands of Horla, along the banks of the Khari, are almost all mortgaged, and the registers of these transactions form two considerable volumes, in which great variety of deeds may be discovered: one extended for one hundred and one years;¹ when redemption was to follow, without regard to interest on the one hand, or the benefits from the land on the other, but merely by repayment of the sum borrowed. To maintain the interest during abeyance, it is generally stipulated that a certain portion of the harvest shall be reserved for the mortgagee—a fourth, a fifth, or gugri—a share so small as to be valued only as a mark of proprietary recognition.² The mortgagees were chiefly of the commercial classes of the large frontier towns; in [500] many cases the proprietor continues to cultivate for another the lands his ancestor mortgaged four or five generations ago, nor does he deem his right at all impaired. A plan had been sketched to raise money to redeem these mortgages, from whose complex operation the revenue was sure to suffer. No length of time or absence can affect the claim to the bapota, and so sacred is the right of absentees, that land will lay sterile and unproductive from the penalty which Manu denounces on all who interfere with their neighbour's rights: "for unless there be an especial agreement between the owner of the land and the seed, the fruits belong clearly to the land-owner"; even "if seed conveyed by water or by wind should germinate, the plant belongs to the land-owner, the mere sower takes not the fruit."³ Even crime and the extreme sentence of the law will not alter succession to property, either to the military or cultivating vassal; and the old Kentish adage, probably introduced by the Jats from Scandinavia, who under Hengist established that kingdom of the heptarchy, namely: