ABSTRACT
The raiyatwari settlement introduced in South India by the colonial government in the early nineteenth century constituted a revolution. It did so not because of its very excessive tax assessment or its demand for cash payment, though both of these surely had a critical impact; rather it was revolutionary in assigning an autonomous identity to every landholding. A plot of land, demarcated, numbered, assessed, and, if a raiyat agreed to be registered as revenue-payer, allotted to him, came to the centre of the stage. The plot could now absolutely and independently express the relations among the different forces concerned. In pre-colonial South Indian society, on the other hand, relations in land could never be isolated from other relationships, and rights in land had been just one of the expressions of those relations. The study of land ownership, therefore, is naturally of limited value in defining the social structure of pre-colonial South Indian society, which was not necessarily stratified according to land ownership in the exclusive sense of the modern period.
