GO]^
510
list are certainly towns in the ordinary sense of the word; but of the rest, the majority are merely arbitrary collections of small hamlets, many of them owing their existence to the caprice of the demarcation department. Tulsipur, for instance, in Nawabganj, with a returned population of 4,215, Ratna Garah with 3,402, Ujjaini with 2,812, are large tracts covering several square miles, and including a number of diminutive settlements, of which probably no single one has more than 500 inhabitants. Except as enormous land properties, they are of no further importance to any one than the little villages in their neighbourhood, and not nearly as important as numbers of towns with a population of less than 750 such, for instance, as Bank, the centre of an old revenue division, with its market and sugar manufactory.
At the head
of the society of the district stood the ruling Chhattri or Muhammadan families. Of these, the Goraha Bisens of
Eight of inheritance,
jjahadewa alone exemplified the pure democratic form, each member of the family being equal in position and receiving an equal portion in the inheritance of the clan. All the other great clans adhered to the monarchical constitution, the representative of the eldest branch retaining supreme political authority over the whole of the ancestral domain, while the younger branches were provided for, sometimes by an arbitrary assignment for their support. In either case, on the failure of heirs in the direct line, the portion of a younger branch reverted to the raja, and not, as with the democratic society, to the nearest of kin.
The raja's pi'incipal attributes were the collection of the Government share of the produce, wherever it had not been alienated in favour of a cadet of the family absolute authority in matters of foreign policy the right to levy rates for such purposes as the repair of the central fort or arming the clan forces and powers of justice and registration or confirmation in cases of important disputes or alienations of property among his subjects.
The exercise of the first of these rights was always interfered with, and sometimes actually restrained by the nfizim, and it depended entirely on the physical resources of the raja whether the sum exacted at Lucknow left a considerable balance out of the pargana collections for his use, or nothing Of his remaining rights, he retained full possession down to annexaat all. His position then bore a very close resemblance to what that of his tion. trans-Gogra peers had been seventy years earlier. with his bhaiband of powerful chieftains, came the village These differed from the village zamindars of southern Oudh in having owed their status in almost every case to birt from the raja or a member of the chieftain's family. The rights conveyed by these birts as against the raja varied infinitely both in degree and kind, and the variations, being local, will both be more appropriately treated of under the pargana headings. In every case they conveyed the whole management of the village, the superintendence of the grain division, and the preservation of internal security, together with a certain proportion of the Government share of the produce, and the small village dues, such as the blankets from the shepherd^ and two or three days' gratuitous labour in the year from low-caste cultivators. The position .of the remaining village servaiits After the
proprietors.
raja,
