Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 9
other by those who could not claim the right of tapu by virtue of long tenure
or, more probably, by virtue of their actual residence in the village. In other
villages, such as Hawwara, cultivators who could not prove long tenure were
given the option of registering land on payment of a higher charge of bedel-i
misl. But it seems that in Bait Ra’s residence was the determining factor. This
implies a degree of contestation over registration, as Da’ud ‘Abbada implied in
his testimony. Unlike the colonial form of land registration under British rule in
north-west India in the nineteenth century, tapu registration did not distinguish
between the so-called owner of a plot of land and the person who cultivated
it; there was only one column for registering the person or persons responsible
for cultivating a certain plot or share of land and for paying the corresponding
share of the tax. The intention of the 1858 Land Code was to give tapu rights to
those in usufructuary possession. With this joint holding in Bait Ra’s, however,
a higher level of tenure was validated.
Points (2) and (3) together show that little regard was had either by villagers
or by tapu officials for the details of cultivation. Landholdings were registered as
if right stemmed from patrilineal inheritance, as in house registration, not from
the facts of cultivation.
(4) The largest individual shareholding in 1880 was of four shares held by
‘Ali, ‘Alaiyan and Hasan, sons of Muhammad al-Hamuri, who also held the
largest house (listed as sons of Muhammad Husain Hamuri). 15 ‘Ali was one of
the two headmen to sign the house register along with Lafi al-Haili. A marginal
note against the shareholding says that two of the four shares were held under
usufructuary right while ‘two shares of the vergi tax are established for the
village headman in lieu of his pay’. The note adds, ‘This custom is irregular but
has been applied from time past.’ Again this is the only explicit statement of
such a practice we encountered, though we suspect that it may have been more
widespread. It certainly underlines the dominant position of the Hamuris in
the village at the time and indicates further what might have motivated Hasan
al-Sabbah’s claim to be headman.
These four distinctive features of tapu registration in Bait Ra’s show how the
guidelines of registration, before they were standardized by the Special Commission,
could be stretched to benefit one set of claimants over another. Within the
terms of the law priority could be given to village residents over non-resident cultivators.
The irregularity of allowing a headman an extra share was duly noted in the
register, which was attested and approved in the proper manner. Only registration
of a joint holding of all landholders on one-fifth of the plough land departed from
the letter of the Land Code. At the same time tapu registration in Bait Ra’s clearly
laid the basis for subsequent conflictual social relations in the village. Perhaps the
Bani Ta‘an really had not been cultivating long enough in the village to claim the
right to tapu. In any case there was already an issue of group opposition, for Hasan
al-Sabbah claimed that he and others belonged to one group. Within a few years
several families of the excluded group had become both resident in the village and
shareholders in plough land, listed as tax-payers in 1895. They had also established
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