Zamindar

Similarly, their holdings were typically hereditary and came with the right to collect taxes on behalf of imperial courts or for military purposes.

The British also reduced the land holdings of many pre-colonial princely states and chieftaincies, demoting their status to noble zamindars from previously higher ranks of royalty.

[citation needed] During the period of British colonial rule in India many wealthy and influential zamindars were bestowed with noble and royal titles such as Maharaja, Raja/Rai, Babu, Malik, Chaudhary, Nawab, Khan and Sardar.

One of the most notable examples is the 16th-century confederation formed by twelve zamindars in the Bhati region (Baro-Bhuyans), which, according to the Jesuits and Ralph Fitch, earned a reputation for successively repelling Mughal invasions through naval battles.

When Babur conquered North India, there were many autonomous and semiautonomous rulers who were known locally as Rai, Raja, Rana, Rao, Rawat, etc.

Eight or nine crores of this are from the parganas of rais and the rajas who have submitted in the past (to the Sultans of Delhi), receive allowance and maintenance.

"[7] According to Arif Qandhari, one of the contemporary historians of Akbar's reign, there were around two to three hundred rajas or rais and zamindars who ruled their territory from strong forts under the emperor's suzerainty.

Each of these rajas and zamindars commanded an army of their own generally consisting of their clansmen and the total numbers of their troops as Abul Fazl tells us, stood at forty-four lakhs comprising 384,558 cavalry, 4,277,057 infantry; 1863 elephants, 4260 guns and 4500 boats.

However, Irfan Habib in his book Agrarian system of Mughal India, divided the zamindars into two categories: the autonomous chiefs who enjoyed "sovereign power" in their territories and the ordinary zamindars who exercised superior rights in land and collected land revenue and were mostly appointed by the Mughals.

They recognised the zamindars as landowners and proprietors as opposed to Mughal government and in return required them to collect taxes.

Although some zamindars were present in the south, they were not so in large numbers and the British administrators used the ryotwari (cultivator) method of collection, which involved selecting certain farmers as being land owners and requiring them to remit their taxes directly.

According to an estimate in the Imperial Gazetteer of India, there were around 2000 ruling chiefs holding the royal title of Raja and Maharaja which included the rulers of princely states and several large chiefdoms.

Unlike the autonomous or frontier chiefs, the hereditary status of the zamindar class was circumscribed by the Mughals, and the heir depended to a certain extent on the pleasure of the sovereign.

[19] Under the British Empire, the zamindars were to be subordinate to the Crown and not act as hereditary lords, but at times family politics was at the heart of naming an heir.