Word: zamindari
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1952-1952
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Banished in India was zamindari...
Some 12 million Indians last week celebrated an independence day of their own with laughter and tears, street parades, community sings and free candy for the kids. In the state of Uttar Pradesh it was Deliverance Day, the day that marked the end of zamindari, a system of tax collecting which has held most of India's plain people in thrall since the Middle Ages...
...funeral, his son's birth. If a peasant objected to levies as high as 80% or 90% on his crops, the zamindar could seize his land (or his daughter) in payment. The zamindars gradually became the landholders, the peasants mere sharecroppers. "The most creditable products of zamindari," wrote the London Economist, "have been Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, and the Maharaj Kumar of Vizianagram, the cricketer . . . The majority have been as vicious as Thackeray's Lord Steyne, as idle as Jane Austen's Mr. Bennett, and as drunken as a Surtees squire...
Unconstitutional. For 30 years the Congress Party of Prime Minister Nehru has cried for the abolition of zamindari, but India's constitution leaves land reform to the individual states. For five, the powerful zamindars themselves fought a bill to outlaw their kind in Uttar Pradesh, largest in population of the 28 states. Last year the bill was passed, and the zamindars hired the best lawyers they could find to prove it unconstitutional. Led by Nehru, India's parliament amended the constitution against the zamindars. The Supreme Court upheld Nehru. Last week Uttar Pradesh's law came into...
| 1 |