What was the status of Property Rights in pre-Independence India ?

The earliest record of private property in India appears in the Manusmriti, or the Code of Manu, a body of ancient Sanskrit texts that set out religious and legal duties for Hindus and dates from roughly the second century BCE to the second century CE. Judges of the British Empire often turned to classical Hindu law to settle property disputes. English common law later smoothed out the conflicting texts and the divergent customary rules that prevailed across India, and it codified the more troublesome elements of a Hindu’s right to property and its transfer.

Muslim rulers, who governed across the subcontinent from roughly the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, introduced the Jagirdari system, under which nobles held temporary land grants called jagirs. In exchange, these nobles collected land revenue from farmers and funnelled it into the emperor’s military, paying for soldiers, horses, and the rest of an army’s upkeep. As Mughal rule weakened, jagirdars became de facto owners of their jagir land. British rulers inherited this Mughal land settlement system and kept dealing with the jagirdars for the revenue they could still generate, partly because staying engaged with this now-powerful group made good political sense.

The British went on to build three revenue systems, and these evolved into the land tenure systems that independent India inherited. In 1793, the British government granted Permanent Settlements of land to zamindars, the region’s landed aristocrats, across Bengal, and it later extended the same settlement to Bihar, Madras, most of present-day Odisha, Uttar Pradesh (except Avadh and Agra), and Rajasthan (except Jaipur and Jodhpur).

Other parts of India received modified versions of these settlements, including short-term land alienations. The Ryotwari system, introduced in Madras in 1792 and in Bombay in 1817-18, governed most of South India, including present-day Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, most of Madhya Pradesh, and Assam, along with the princely states of Jaipur and Jodhpur in Rajasthan. The Mahalwari system, introduced between 1820 and 1840, governed the two former provinces of Punjab (now split between Pakistan and India), present-day Haryana, parts of present-day Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, and the princely states of Avadh and Agra, now part of Uttar Pradesh.

The term “zamindar” broadly described the intermediaries across these varied tenure systems: officials who administered land on the colonial rulers’ behalf without owning it themselves. Tenants who actually tilled the land answered to these zamindars. Under Permanent Settlement, zamindars paid revenue fixed in perpetuity to the East India Company and later to British rulers directly, at rates higher than what they had paid before 1793.

The British, ironically, laid the actual ground for recognising private property rights in India, by imposing English common law onto a country where multiple, often conflicting land-holding patterns already existed. The Land Acquisition Act of 1894 became the substantive law governing eminent domain, the common law doctrine holding that the state remains the ultimate owner of all land within its territory and may compulsorily acquire private property for a public purpose, provided it pays compensation. The Government of India Act of 1935 later codified the right to property, not as a fundamental right, but by requiring that eminent domain expropriation proceed only through constitutionally valid statutory law.