An Analysis of the Landholdings in Villages in a Taluk in South India

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The project aims to analyze an important land revenue record in south India, the Settlement Register, to clarify the historical change in the caste system and Landholdings between 1865 and 1925. The record or Settlement Register contains detailed information for each plort of land of each village and was compiled therr times for each village, ie, 1865, 1895 and 1925. We have collected the microfilm copies fo the Settlement Registers for about 60 villages ( totally about 180 volumes) in Lalgudi Taluk in Tiruchirapaslli District, Tamil Nadu, India.The project consists of three phases. The first one is to input the information available from the Settlement Registers into the computers and make a machine-readable data file. Within two years of our project, we constructed a data base which contains data from about two thirds of total volumes.The second phase is to read the data thus computerised and aggregate them to compile tables which show the caste-wise and size-wise distribution of the landholdings for each Village and for each year. We have completed the compilation of tables for 22 villages.The third phase is to analyze the compiled tables to assess the historical changes in the landholdings between 1895 and 1925. Our analysis indicates that the landholdings of upper castes decreased progressively and instead a large number of small landholders of lower castes appeared in this period.