Land, Tenancy and Agrarian Society in the Nepal Tarai

Detailed chapter description

Agrarian society in the Nepal Tarai was created through the interaction of ecology, conquest, revenue policy, land reclamation, migration, tenancy and local intermediaries. The region cannot be described accurately by importing the Permanent Settlement model from British India or by treating terms such as raikar, birta, jagir and jimidari as interchangeable forms of landlord ownership. This chapter reconstructs the layered land regime of the Tarai, with particular attention to Saptari, Siraha, Dhanusha–Mahottari and the wider eastern plains, and follows its transformation from late-eighteenth-century revenue experiments through the land-reform legislation of the 1950s and 1960s. A single field could carry several distinct relationships at once: the state might claim land revenue; a grantee might receive that revenue under birta or another assignment; a village intermediary might collect dues; and an actual cultivator might hold occupancy, tenancy or customary claims. Colonial and later administrative vocabulary often tempts historians to collapse these layers into a simple opposition between landlord and peasant. Nepal’s records require greater precision. Tenure describes the legal or fiscal basis of a claim; taxation describes obligations to the state or assignee; cultivation describes who actually worked the soil. Agrarian class emerged from the interaction of all three, not from a label alone. The plains south of the Chure were highly productive but environmentally uneven. River migration, seasonal inundation, wetlands, sal forest and malaria affected where permanent cultivation could expand and how easily officials could measure holdings. Eastern districts such as Saptari and Mahottari contained old cultivated zones as well as forest, scrub and waste lands that states sought to bring under assessment. Reclamation was therefore both an ecological process and a fiscal project. A plot became economically valuable to the state only when settlement, labour, drainage and cropping could convert it into a dependable stream of revenue.