Tree Clearers and Tax Pioneers: ‘Kut’ and ‘Jama’ Land in East Central Indian Villages.

Abstract

Indigenous discourses of land in east central Indian villages contain competitive claims of
descent from jama (revenue groups) and khunt-katta (forest clearing). Within this, adivasis
express landed belonging through accounts of archaic roles, services and rewards: desh, inam,
malikana, barabhai and rahdari. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and archival research
of Borasambar, a forested area, I show how Indic and Islamicate ideas from precolonial
Maratha rule and colonial Central Provinces law, became embedded in the land culture of
revenue-villages. Here, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, pre-cadastral surveys were
conducted to ascertain eligibility of occupants for protection against eviction based on evidence
of land improvement. During this time, the area of land allocated to cultivators was described
through measures of seed called kut. Contemporaries related this practise to ‘kankut’, kan
(grain) and kut (estimate) with eighteenth century practices of revenue assessment and
historians traced it to the fourteenth century. Cadastral surveys after 1890, investigated land
more closely, adapting vernacular understandings of actual crop productivity to establish rent
value of various classes of land. Terms from this period: bahal, bahali, berna, aat and mal are
used in local land markets, during sale, mortgage, contract-farming. Land concepts indicate the
journey of standardising practices around land to extract predictable value through time and
indicate the prioritising of possessive property rights as the means to achieve this. Vernacular
discourses evoke complex values, meanings, sensibilities and dependencies around land
through which communities remember the obligations of obtaining and maintaining possessive
rights.