Patidars

The Patidar are a caste found primarily in the state of Gujarat, India. They were formally recognised as a separate identity in the 1931 census of India, having previously been classified as Kanbi. They are among the most studied of Indian castes and the process leading to their recognition is a paradigmatic example of the invention of tradition by social groups in India.

The rise to socio-economic prominence of the Kanbi community in Gujarat and its change of identity to that of Patidar can be attributed to the land reforms of the British Raj period. The Raj administrators sought to assure revenue from the highly fertile lands of central Gujarat and to do this they instituted reforms that fundamentally changed the relationship that existed between the two communities of the region, being the peasant Kanbi and the warrior Kolis. Those two communities had previously been of more or less equal socio-economic standing but the emphasis of the land reforms better suited the agricultural peasantry than the warriors.

Governments in India had always relied on revenue from land as their major source of income. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, the extant administrative systems fell apart and anarchy prevailed. The British colonisation of the country took place over a period of many years and had to adapt to the various local land tenure arrangements that had arisen as Mughal power waned. These systems of ownership could be broadly classified as landlord-based (zamindari, vanta or magulzari), village-based (mahalwari, narva) and individually-based (ryotwari).

In Gujarat, the British administrators found that all three systems existed. However, the Kanbis had tended to adopt the village-based model and the Kolis had adopted the landlord-based variant. The village-based system entailed that organisations had been formed to jointly own a village and to share responsibility in some fixed proportion for the land revenues. The division of responsibility might be arranged by the amount of land held by each member (the bhaiachara method) or by ancestry (the pattidari system). Working with this village model enabled the British to impose a fixed revenue demand that was payable whether or not the land was cultivated and which gave the landholders the right to sublet and otherwise manage their lands with minimal official interference. It simplified revenue collection and maximised income when compared to a system based on individual responsibility for revenue, in which allowances had to be made for land being out of cultivation. It also allowed a degree of communal self-determination that permitted the rise of economic elites with no reason to engage in political challenges, and hence the rise of the communities then known as Kanbis. Some Kanbis became sufficiently wealthy that they were able to enter the world of finance, providing lines of credit to others in their community.

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