He holds
a few villages round his residence at Pursur; but the pergunnah is
under the management of a Government officer, under the Amil of
Mahomdee. The Rajah, Syud Ashruf Allee Khan, of Mahomdee, claims a
kind of suzerainty over all the district, and over this pergunnah of
Peepareea among the rest. From all the villages tilled and peopled he
is permitted to levy an income for himself at the rate of two rupees
a-village. This the people pay with some reluctance, though they
recognise his right.
The zumeendars of Poknapoor are Kunojee Brahmins, who tell me that
they can do almost everything in husbandry save holding their own
ploughs: they can drive their own harrows and carts, reap their own
crops, and winnow and tread out their own corn; but if they once
condescend to _hold their own ploughs_ they sink in grade, and have
to pay twice as much as they now pay for wives for their sons from
the same families, and take half of what they now take for their
daughters from the same families, into which they now marry them.
They have, they say, been settled in these pergunnahs, north-east of
the Goomtee River, for fifty-two generations as farmers and
cultivators; and their relatives, who still remain at Aslamabad, a
village one koss south-east of Mahomdee, which was the first abode of
the tribe in Oude, have been settled there for no less than eighty-
four generations. They form village communities, dividing the lands
among the several members, and paying over and above the Government
demand a liberal allowance to the head of the village and of the
family settled in it, to maintain his respectability and to cover the
risk and cost of management, either in kind, in money, or in an extra
share of the land.
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