Landed Property and Credit in Colonial India

The chapter tries to identify three dimensions of land rights – the type of ownership, tenants’ rights, and the right to transfer – to categorise the diversity of land tenures in colonial India. Also, the chapter focuses on the first two dimensions, the type of ownership (raiyatwari and zamindari) and the rights of tenants. This chapter introduces the third dimension, transferability. This leads to discuss credit, for two related reasons. In a largely agricultural economy once population has grown sufficiently and land becomes the scarce factor, it is potentially the most important form of collateral. And to the extent land is actually used as collateral or seized in lieu of repayment, credit transactions can become a cause of land transfer.