cult to assign to tenants in any part of the Lower Provinces a place in one or other of the above categories. They hold either from 1793 or possibly before it, at an unchanged and unchangeable rate. Or they have a right of occupancy and cannot legally be evicted, though by a civil action their rates may be brought up to the scale prevalent in the Parganá in which they reside, or in the neighbouring villages. Or they are sub-tenants or tenants without rights of occupancy, and it may be conceded that in recent times their rents have been the subject of contract. Practically in the first half of this century their rates were settled by custom and mutual understanding.
It is essential to lay stress on the occupancy right because doubts have been thrown on its existence, and attempts have been made in the interest of the Zamíndárs to prove that if ever in existence, it had perished or was so faint as not to merit legal recognition. But it is far more correct to say that if the right was not recognised by statute till long after the time of Cornwallis, it was an article of firm belief held by a large proportion of the peasantry. Payment of rent is almost everywhere in India regarded as an obligation from which no cultivator can escape. A regular discharge of this obligation is often put forward as a mark of respectability. Failure or refusal to pay would stamp the recusant as a badmáish or bad character. But then this admitted obligation was balanced, in the mind of a large number of cultivators,
