INDIAN INSTITUTIONS AND FEUDALISM.
The comparison of Indian and feudal institutions is a subject of some breadth and complexity. It would be idle, in such a paper as this, to attempt to traverse any wide extent of the complicated region of inquiry which that comparison opens to view; so I hope I may be pardoned if the remarks I venture to offer are necessarily slight. There is the more reason why they should be so, because the subject on which I have been asked to address you has little or no connection with folk-lore in the narrower acceptation of that term. In my belief, however, it has a very close connection with the general history of institutions; so that in this section what I have to say may not be altogether out of place.
Briefly stated, my object in this paper is to touch, rather than to handle, the triple question, What sort of light is the Indian evidence likely to throw on the origin of the manor, on the process of feudalisation, and on the severance of ideas of sovereignty from ideas of property in land?
Indian official literature is like a muniment-room from which the documents of merely passing consequence have never been weeded out. Amid an immense mass of material, of which part has long ceased to have any interest, and part never had any but an official interest for those engaged in the practical business of administration, there are a great many reports, or passages in reports, which possess real value in the history of institutions. I propose to turn the key of that muniment-room, and to pick out one or two passages from reports which I hope may interest you, and which will, at all events, help me to explain what I have to say on the triple question that I have just stated.
In his admirable Settlement Report of the Gonda district in Oudh, Mr. Benett makes the acute remark that the basis of Hindu political society which he describes is the grain-heap.
