while in the various Persian chronicles they were referred as zamindars and marzabans. When Babur conquered North India, there were many autonomous and semiautonomous rulers who were known locally as Rai, Raja, Rana, Rao, Rawat, etc. Mehtab Chand (1820–79) (zamindar of the Burdwan Raj) as a young man, c. The zamindars also promoted neoclassical and Indo-Saracenic architecture. The Tagore family produced India's first Nobel laureate in literature in 1913, Rabindranath Tagore, who was often based at his estate. The zamindars were also patrons of the arts. One of the most notable examples is the 16th-century confederation formed by twelve zamindars in the Bhati region ( Baro-Bhuyans), which, according to the Jesuits and Ralph Fitch, earned a reputation for successively repelling Mughal invasions through naval battles. The zamindars often played an important role in the regional histories of the subcontinent. The system was abolished during land reforms in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1950, India in 1951 and West Pakistan in 1959. The British also reduced the land holdings of many pre-colonial princely states and chieftaincy, demoting their status to a zamindar from previously higher ranks of nobility. Many of the region's princely states were pre-colonial zamindar holdings elevated to a greater protocol. The British rewarded supportive zamindars by recognising them as princes. During the colonial era, the Permanent Settlement consolidated what became known as the zamindari system.
Some zamindars were Hindu by religion and Brahmin or Kayastha or Kshatriya by caste. Emperor Akbar granted them mansabs and their ancestral domains were treated as jagirs. They were typically hereditary, and held the right to collect tax on behalf of imperial courts or for military purposes.ĭuring the period of British colonial rule in India many wealthy and influential zamindars were bestowed with princely and royal titles such as Maharaja, Raja/ Rai, Chaudhary, Nawab and Sardar.ĭuring the Mughal Empire, zamindars belonged to the nobility and formed the ruling class. The term itself came into use during the reign of Mughals and later the British had begun using it as a native synonym for “estate”. His family's landholdings in Bengal were one of the largest in British India.Ī Zamindar ( Hindustani: Devanagari: ज़मींदार, zamīndār Persian: زمیندار, zamīndār) in the Indian subcontinent was an autonomous or semi-autonomous ruler of a province. Sir Nawab Khwaja Salimullah was a zamindar with the title of nawab.
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