GAZETTEER.
maintain garrisons of Uriya paiks at each of the five forts. Correspondence regarding the right to the pargana also occurred at intervals throughout the first half of the last century between the Madras Government and the authorities at Nagpur, and the question was not finally set at rest until in 1862 the Government of India ruled that it should be left to the management of Jeypore in the same manner as the rest of that zamindari, and ordered (in 1863 1[1] that the Jeypore Rája should pay Rs. 3,000 per annum for it, being compensation to Bastar for the cessation of the right to collect mahádán. 'After this adjudication everything promised fair: the rabble of spearmen kept up by Jeypore at Kótapád and other frontier villages was dispersed; the ryot ploughed the land and got in his harvests without molestation; in short, the land had peace for the first time, perhaps since 1777.' But this fair promise was belied on several subsequent occasions.
The Rs. 3,000 was for many years paid with the rest of the Jeypore peshkash and remitted by the Vizagapatam officers to the Government of the Central Provinces, and the latter paid Rs. 2,000 of it to the Bastar Chief and kept the other Rs. 1,000 because in 1819 a remission of Bastar tribute to this amount had been made in consideration of the alienation of the pargana.
The pargana was not included in the sanad granted to the Rája of Jeypore at the permanent settlement in 1803 and the Rs. 3,000 was not in any sense peshkash, Jeypore thus held the Kótapád pargana free of any peshkash at all.
This fact was brought to notice in 1888; the Rs. 3,000 was ordered to be credited to Madras, and not Central Provinces revenues; and the question as to the amount of peshkash which should be levied was raised. After considerable correspondence a provisional sanad was granted to the Mahárája in 1897 which treated the pargana as an estate held in perpetuity upon a quit-rent liable to revision from time to time, and provided for his paying for twenty years an annual quit-rent, liable to subsequent revision and in addition to the Rs. 3,000 already being paid, of Rs. 13,666, or one-fifth of the total revenue demand, gradually decreasing deductions being provided for in the first ten years on account of the cost of certain semi-military paiks which had been maintained in the pargana and were to be gradually done away with.
The Mahárája appealed against this decision on the grounds that the pargana was a feudatory state, and not part of British
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- ↑ 1 Government of India's letter in G.O., No. 1697, Judicial, dated 5th October 1863.
