The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c16.12

c16.12

This quotation suggests that, far from being a spontaneous, grass-roots move, the founding of villages is a large-scale operation of converting waste lands into arable. It does not involve only simple cultivators but powerful men of substance—such as the Khojas mentioned and other state officers—who have the means and influence to bring in the necessary people, divide the fields, and fix the boundaries. It is these men of substance who as de-facto sharers in the realm constitute the state. The process of state formation under the old regime—in this case under the Barīd Shāhī Sultanate of Bīdar—is the settling of villages by the powerful for turning waste into arable and appropriating the agricultural surplus. Fixing, allocating, and registering portions of land and their holders is therefore practically synonymous with "establishing a rent," as the quotation has it. This means that the state is directly involved in and dispersed throughout the countryside and its settled villages.⁸ Conversely, the village appears at its outset to be shot through with all manner of outside interests that far transcend its boundaries and tie it into a widespread network of exploitative and distributional relationships, which cannot but reflect themselves in the inner organization of the village.⁹