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and as a judge in civil cases.
Revenue work , it should be explained, has no counterpart in the
British Isles. In India the British had taken over the Mogul
system intact, and this was based on the proposition that all
land belongs to the Government and that individuals hold it and
cultivate it on a basis of "share-cropping." The moguls demanded
50% of the crop, but this was very inefficiently assessed and
collected ; we aimed to take 25 - 30% but, as it was more
rigorously enforced, this was not such a boon to the cultivators
as it sounds. At intervals of 20 years or so a "Settlement" of
each district would be made, and an officer of the I.C.S. (or in
the North-West Frontier Region of British India bordering Afghanistan. Province the Political) would have to
assess the yield of each holding and its value and decide what
"land revenue" was due from each and every cultivator in cash.
This was a formidable and thankless task which, I am glad to say,
I was never called upon to perform.
Land Revenue accounted for the bulk of the income of the
Government, as other taxation was rudimentary; and was collected
by a hierachy of officials of which the chief in each district
was the Deputy Commissioner (or Collector in the older
provinces) , and the lowest - but the lynch-pin of the system - was
the village patwari with his cloth map showing every field of his
village.
As a magistrate, third class, one had to try minor criminal cases
and one's powers of sentencing were limited, but the experience
it provided of human nature and human deviation was unlimited.
The lawyers on either side, and a capable Hindu Clerk of the
Court, helped one not to stray too far from the correct
interpretation of the law; but the main problem was, naturally,
the correct assessment of the evidence. Mostly this was false,*
and delivered in the local dialect of Punjabi which, of course!
one had to learn from scratch. As one had to transcribe it, in
longhand, in English, it was an extremely effective way* of
learning the language and the main reason why, on taking the
examination in Panjabi a few months later, I was able to achieve
a mark of 93%.
Frustrations were frequent. I remember a case in which one of
the parties persistently found excuses for not appearing, thus
compelling his opponent (a poor man), to go to the expense of
bringing his witnesses to court only to be sent away. On one
occasion he produced a medical certificate that he was unfit to
appear, signed by an Indian doctor who was known to provide such
certificates for a trifling sum. The police sergeant told me
that he was sitting outside the court in perfect health, and
accordingly I went to my mentor, the Deputy Commissioner, to ask
what I could do to enforce his appearance in the interests of
justice. The answer was "Nothing. No other doctor would sign a