The village agricultural lands were jointly held by the village communities and members were responsible for the payment of the land revenue. What was this system ?

Question

The village agricultural lands were jointly held by the village communities and members were responsible for the payment of the land revenue.  What was this system ?

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Correct — option (2), Mahalwari. The stem gives the defining feature of the system in its first clause: the land is held jointly by the village community, and the community's members carry the liability for the revenue jointly as well. That is the mahalwari settlement, and the word itself explains it — the unit of assessment is the mahal, the estate or village as a whole, not an individual landlord and not an individual cultivator. The revenue demand was fixed on the mahal, the village body was collectively answerable for it, and the headman or lambardar collected the shares from the co-sharers and paid the state. If any co-sharer defaulted, the rest were liable for his share, which is the practical meaning of joint responsibility and the feature that separates this system from both alternatives. The settlement was introduced in the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, later the North-Western Provinces, by Regulation VII of 1822, framed on Holt Mackenzie's minute of 1819, and was revised under Lord William Bentinck by Regulation IX of 1833, the field work being carried out under Martin Bird. The revision was needed because the original demand had been pitched so high a proportion of the rental value that it could not be realised. In its mature form the mahalwari settlement was applied across the North-Western Provinces, the Punjab, parts of the Central Provinces and, after the annexation of 1856, Awadh. Test the stem against the other three and the distinctions are clean. Under zamindari the proprietary right and the whole revenue liability rest on one person, the zamindar; under ryotwari the state deals directly with each individual cultivator, whose liability is his alone; and 'patwari' is not a revenue system in the first place but the village record-keeper. Joint holding plus joint liability leaves only mahalwari.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Under the zamindari or Permanent Settlement, made by Lord Cornwallis in 1793 in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, proprietary right in the land was vested in a single individual, the zamindar, who was recognised as owner and who alone was answerable for the revenue. Land was not jointly held by the village community and liability was not shared among its members — indeed, the Sunset Law provided that if the zamindar failed to pay by the appointed day his estate was sold, a purely individual consequence. The stem's 'jointly held' rules it out.  (c) A category error, and the most instructive distractor in the set. The patwari is not a system of land revenue at all but a village-level official — the record-keeper and accountant who maintains the land records, notes crops and holdings and assists in assessing and collecting revenue. The office existed under Mughal administration and continues in many states today, cutting across every settlement type. A question asking 'what was this system' cannot be answered by the name of a functionary, and a candidate who recognises the office rather than the system rejects the option immediately.  (d) The ryotwari settlement, developed by Alexander Read in the Baramahal and carried through by Thomas Munro in the Madras Presidency and later applied across Bombay, Assam and Coorg, was made directly with the individual cultivator, the ryot. The ryot was recognised as the proprietor of his holding, paid the revenue himself, and was answerable for his own land and no one else's; there was no intermediary landlord and no joint village liability. Since the stem specifies joint holding by the community, ryotwari is excluded by the very feature that defines it.

Concept: British land revenue policy in India settled on three systems, and they differ on one question: with whom does the state make the bargain? Under the Permanent Settlement or zamindari, the bargain is with an intermediary landlord who is made the proprietor and whose revenue is fixed in perpetuity — the state's revenue cannot rise even as prices and rents rise, which is why the arrangement was never repeated after Bengal. Under ryotwari, the bargain is with the individual cultivator, who holds directly from the state, with the assessment revised periodically so that the state shares in rising values. Under mahalwari, the bargain is with the village as a corporate body: the mahal is assessed as a unit, the co-sharers hold jointly and are jointly liable, and the settlement is periodically revised. Each system was a wager about who could be relied on to pay and who would invest in the land. All three, in different ways, made the revenue demand rigid and monetised — payable in cash on a fixed date regardless of harvest — which pushed peasants towards moneylenders, and the transfer of land to non-cultivating creditors became a standing feature of nineteenth-century agrarian distress.

State PCS 2026 Q29 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q29 — History PYQ with Answer