What were the duties of ‘KAMIN’ in Uttarakhand during the Colonial period?
- (a)Collection of revenue from assigned villages
- (b)Managing water supply
- (c)Gathering food from the forests
- (d)Arranging marriages
Correct — A, Collection of revenue from assigned villages.
When the Company took the Kumaon and Garhwal hills after the Anglo-Gorkha War, it did not import the plains settlement. The tract was run as a Non-Regulation province, and the government's demand was realised through the hill offices already in place.
The kamin was one grade in that chain. His work was collection of revenue from assigned villages — bringing in the demand from the villages placed under him and answering for it to the grades above him.
Carry away the shape rather than the word: in colonial Kumaon-Garhwal the revenue moved upward through graded local office-holders, and a kamin held an office, not land.
- (b)Managing water supply — A hill irrigation channel does have a keeper, but that post sits outside the revenue line. The description fits the kohli of the western Himalayan kuhl systems, who maintains the channel and settles whose field takes water when.
A kamin's accountability ran upward to the revenue establishment for a defined set of villages, not to the users of a watercourse.
- (c)Gathering food from the forests — Forest gathering in these hills describes a way of life rather than a post. It is what the Raji, also called Van Rawat, of the Pithoragarh forest tracts are traditionally identified with.
An administrative title is defined by what its holder owed the state. What the kamin owed was fiscal, and it was owed for named villages.
- (d)Arranging marriages — Match-making in hill society belongs to kin and the family purohit — a domestic and ritual matter, resting on the household rather than on the administration.
A real detail sits behind this option. Kamins were entitled to trifling dues on marriages occurring within their circles, and the padhan drew perquisites at marriages and births called padhanchari. Taking a due at a wedding is not arranging the wedding.
The other pull is the plains sense of kamin as a dependent service-caste household. The stem fixes the setting as colonial Uttarakhand, where the title names a grade in the revenue chain.
Colonial administration in the Kumaon-Garhwal hills was indirect at its base. In the first years after 1815 the Company worked through the grades of office it found — padhan, kamin, thokdar, sayana — and made each answer for the land revenue of the villages attached to it.
From Traill's early settlements the engagements were taken village by village from the padhans themselves, and the intermediate grades were progressively superseded, their profits commuted into fixed money payments.
An office in this chain is defined by a fiscal duty, not by ownership. The holder answered upward for a fixed set of villages, and his standing came from the office and its emoluments.
This is the Uttarakhand-specific vocabulary of hill revenue administration, and the terms are the entry point to the whole subject. They are older than British rule — sayana grants were made under the Chand rulers, and thok and kamin assignments under the Gorkhalis — and the Company inherited them.
The same words carry into later topics — the settlement operations, the coolie-begar grievance, the village forest arrangements — because each of those worked through, or pushed against, these same office-holders.
- Kumaon and Garhwal passed to the East India Company after the Anglo-Gorkha War, under the Treaty of Sugauli signed in 1815 and ratified in 1816.
- Garhwal was divided at that point: the eastern part became British Garhwal, the western part the princely state of Tehri Garhwal.
- The hill tract was run as a Non-Regulation province; G. W. Traill, J. H. Batten and Henry Ramsay were among the commissioners who administered it.
- Revenue reached the state through graded hill office-holders: the padhan in the single village, the kamin or thokdar over a group of villages, the sayana above them.
- A kamin's influence rested on his office and its emoluments; he held no proprietary right in the village land he collected from.
- Village forests in Kumaon were placed under van panchayats by rules framed in 1931, following the forest grievances enquiry of the early 1920s.
Grades in the hill revenue chain of colonial Kumaon-Garhwal. Kamin and thokdar were largely alternative titles for the same grade, and the kamin paid his dues to the sayana above him, not to the thokdar.
- Reading kamin in its plains sense of a service-caste dependant, which pushes the choice towards a menial or ritual duty instead of a fiscal office.
- Assuming British rule swept away the hill titles in favour of plains zamindars, so that no local title could be the revenue collector.
- Treating a hill title as a landholder: the kamin answered for villages assigned to him rather than owning them.
- The same titles run through the Chand period and through British rule, so answer for the period the stem names.
The idea arrives as a term-to-function item: one title from hill administration in the stem, and four duties drawn from unconnected spheres — revenue, water, forest, kinship — as the options.
Prepare the term the way it is built. Be able to say what the padhan, the kamin, the thokdar and the sayana each answered for, and to describe how the land revenue of the hills was actually gathered.
UPSC_2003_GS1_Q902003Same device: a single named colonial-period body or office in the stem, and four candidate purposes as options, only one of which is its actual remit. What differs is the scale — the Whitley Commission was an all-India enquiry into the conditions of labour, while the kamin is a patti-level intermediary standing above the village headmen.
CAPF_GAI_2021_Q1072021Also asks what a colonial-period institution in the Indian hills was for. That question is about the purpose behind founding hill stations across British India; this one is about the duty attached to an existing indigenous office that the British retained in Kumaon and Garhwal.
UKPSC_2024_MAINS_GSV_Q192024Same state and same period — Uttarakhand under British rule — but a different layer of it. The mains question asks for an evaluation of journalism in the region's social and political awakening; this prelims item tests a single administrative term from the revenue establishment.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Kumaon and Garhwal hills came under East India Company rule as an outcome of which one of the following wars?
- (a)Third Anglo-Maratha War
- (b)Anglo-Gorkha War
- (c)First Anglo-Sikh War
- (d)Second Anglo-Burmese War
Answerb — Gorkha rule over the hills ended with the war of 1814-16, and the Treaty of Sugauli confirmed the transfer of Kumaon and Garhwal to the Company.The Third Anglo-Maratha War was fought in central and western India; the First Anglo-Sikh War concerned the Punjab in the mid-1840s; the Second Anglo-Burmese War concerned lower Burma in the 1850s.
- practice — not a real PYQ
In the revenue arrangement of the colonial Kumaon hills, which one of the following worked at the level of a single village, combining collection of land revenue with police duties?
- (a)Sayana
- (b)Thokdar
- (c)Padhan
- (d)Commissioner
Answerc — The padhan was the headman of the hill village, answerable for its land revenue and for its policing.The sayana held authority over a wide tract with an under-proprietary interest in the land; the thokdar held a thok — a fiscal division of villages, originally a military assignment — and answered for its revenue, not for one village; the Commissioner headed the province, not a village.
- practice — not a real PYQ
With reference to the administration of the Kumaon hills under British rule, consider the following statements: 1. The tract was administered as a Non-Regulation province. 2. In the early decades after 1815, the land revenue demand was realised through hill office-holders such as the padhan and the thokdar. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
- (a)1 only
- (b)2 only
- (c)Both 1 and 2
- (d)Neither 1 nor 2
Answerc — Kumaon was kept outside the ordinary regulations and run by a commissioner with wide personal powers, and in the early years after 1815 the demand was gathered through the hill offices already present rather than through a newly created class of intermediaries.Neither statement can therefore be dropped: options 'a' and 'b' each reject one that holds, and 'd' rejects both.