assigned for the maintenance of religious places: largely temples
of all sizes and celebrity, but also mosques, dargahs, chatrams,
maths, etc. Another part was assigned to the agraharams, or
what perhaps were also termed Brahmdeya in South India as
well as in Bengal. Yet, other assignments were given over to a
variety of persons: to great and other pundits, to poets, to joshis,
to medical practitioners, to jesters and even for such purposes
as defraying the expenses of carrying Ganga water in areas of
Uttar Pradesh to certain religious shrines on certain festivals.^81
Regarding the extent of such assignments from Hedgelee in
Bengal, it was stated in 1770 that ‘almost one-half of the
province is held upon free tenure’ under the Bazee Zemin
category.^82 The number of these Bazee Zemin (one may
reasonably assume the term included individuals, groups as well
as institutions) in many districts of Bengal and Bihar was as
high as 30,000 to 36,000 recipients for the district. According to
H.T. Prinsep,^83 in one district of Bengal around 1780, the
applications for the registration of Bazee Zemin numbered
72,000.
The position in the Madras Presidency was not very
different, even after all the disorganisation, dispossession and
demolition of the period 1750-1800, during which the British
made themselves masters of the whole area. As late as 1801,
over 35% of the total cultivated land in the Ceded Districts (the
present Rayalseema area and the Kannada District of Bellary)
came under the category of revenue free assignments, and it was
the task of Thomas Munro to somehow reduce this quantity to a
mere 5% of the total cultivated land. The reduction intended in
the Ceded Districts was also carried out in all other districts,
earlier in some, and later in others, and in some, the
dispossession of such vast numbers of assignees of revenue took
a long time.
The returns from the various districts of the Madras
Presidency, especially during the years 1805-1820, provide
much information on the varied nature of these revenue
assignments