Preliminary versions of this article were read at the South Asia Regional Studies Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, March 8, 1973, and the 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, Illinois, March 30-April 1, 1973. Research for this paper was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Danforth Foundation.

¹ In this first group I would include: Ali, M. Athar, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1966)Google Scholar; Bayley, C. A., ‘Local Control in Indian Towns—The Case of Allahabad, 1880–1920’, Modern Asian Studies, V, No. 4 (October 1971), 289–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, Brenda F., ‘The Right-Left Division of South Indian Society’, Journal of Asian Studies XXIX, No. 4 (August 1970), 779–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Calkins, Philip, ‘The Formation of a Regionally Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal, 1700–1740’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXIX, No. 4 (August 1970), 799–806Google Scholar; Frykenberg, Robert E., Guntur District 1788–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Gokhale, R. G., ‘Ahmedabad in the XVIIth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XII (April 1969), 187–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leonard, Karen, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXX, No. 3 (May 1971), 569–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pearson, Michael Naylor, ‘Commerce and Compulsion. Gujarati Merchants and the Portuguese System in Western India, 1500–1600’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1971)Google Scholar, and ‘Political Participation in Mughal India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, IX, No. 2 (1972).Google Scholar

² In the second group, I would include: Broomfield, John H., ‘The Regional Elites: A Theory of Modern Indian History’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, III, No. 3 (1966), 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohn, Bernard S., ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Banaras Region’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, LXXXII, No. 3 (1962), 312–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fox, Richard G., ‘Rajput “Clans” and Rurban Settlements in Northern India’, in Fox, (ed.), Urban India: Society, Space and Image (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, 1970), pp. 167–85Google Scholar and Kin, Clan, Raja, and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Pre-Industrial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Musgrave, P. J., ‘Landlords and Lords of the Land; Estate Management and Social Control in Uttar Pradesh, 1860–1920’, Modern Asian Studies, VI, No. 3 (1972), 257–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shah, A. M., ‘Political System in Eighteenth Century Gujarat’, Enquiry, I, No. 1 (Spring 1964), 83–95Google Scholar; Singh, Kashi Nath, ‘The Territorial Basis of Medieval Town and Village Settlement in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India‘, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LVIII, No. 2 (June 1968), 203–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stein, Burton, ‘Integration of the Agrarian System of South India’, in Frykenberg, Robert E. (ed.), Land Control qnd Social Structure in Indian History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 175–216Google Scholar, and ‘The Segmentary State in Indian History’, Paper delivered at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York City, December 1971; Crane, Robert I. (ed.), Regions and Regionalism in South Asian Studies: An Exploratory Study (Durham, N.D.: Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, 1967).Google Scholar

³ Heesterman, J. C., ‘India and the Inner Conflict of Tradition’, Daedalus, CII, No. 1 (Winter 1973), 97–114.Google Scholar Heesterman couches his thesis in the form of hierarchy vs. independence, in an effort to revise the perspective of Louis Dumont in Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); his argument is easily transposed to the landed-nonlanded argument I put forward in this paper.Google Scholar

⁴ Professor Holden Furber recently informed me that Hove's real, but secret, mission was to determine whether Indian varieties of cotton could be grown in the West Indies. The secret orders as well as the public ones, Furber noted, are preserved in the Public Record Office.

⁵ DrHove, ., Tours for Scientific and Economical Research Made in Guzerat, Kattiawar, and the Conkuns in 1787–88: Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, Vol. XVI, New Series (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1855), p. 77.Google Scholar

⁶ Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, XXXIX (New Series, 1856), 339. This volume was reprinted by the Government of Bombay in 1894, but renumbered as XXVII. This is confusing because in the same reprint series that volume XXXVII was renumbered as XXXIX. Thus two volumes were interchanged. Unless otherwise noted, the 1856 volumes and page numbering are used.Google Scholar

⁷ S. C. Misra points out that the continuing fragmentation of Rajput states in Saurashtra during the seventeenth century suggest that the Mughal authority was ‘superficial’. Gujarat State Gazetteers, Rajkot District (Ahmedabad), 1965, p. 37.Google Scholar

⁸ For a regional approach to Indian geo-politics, see Cohn, Bernard S., ‘Regions Subjective and Objective: Their Relation to the Study of Modern Indian History and Society’, in Crane, Robert I. (ed.), Regions and Regionalism in South Asian Studies: An Exploratory Study, pp. 5–37.Google Scholar

Histories of Saurashtra are few. Wilberforce-Bell, H., The History of Kathiawar (London: William Heinemann, 1916)Google Scholar is the only one in English. The standard gazetteer, Kathiawar: Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. VIII (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884)Google Scholar provides much useful information. Another useful set of books are the mini-gazetteers of five of the major states of the peninsula prepared by Watson, J. W. as background for the overall gazetteer of Kathiawar. They are entitled Statistical Account of Bhavnagar, S.A. ofJunagadh, S.A. of Porbandar, S.A. of Nawanagar; and S.A. of Dhrangadhra. All the volumes were published in Bombay between 1883 and 1885.Google Scholar An especially useful historical perspective is Amarji, Randhodji, Tarikh-i-Sorath (Bombay: Education Society‘s Press, [1882]), an English perioditranslation from the Persian. Ranchodji's father was one of the greatest diwans of Saurashtra's largest state, Junagadh, from the 1760s until his assassination in 1784. The most recent and comprehensive history in Gujarati is Shambhuprasad Harprasad Desai, Saurashtrano Itihaas (Junagadh: Sorath Shikshan Ane Sanskruti Sangh, 1968). It lacks, however, an integrated approach, tending rather to be a catalogue of events state-by-state.Google Scholar

⁹ Selections, XXXIX, 21.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Hove, , Tours, p. ix.Google Scholar

¹² Kincaid, C. A., The Outlaws of Kathiawar and Other Studies (Bombay: Times Press, 1905).Google Scholar

¹³ Meghani, Jhaverchand, Sorathi Bahaarvatiyaa (4 vols.; Ahmedabad: Gurjar Grantharatna Kaaryaalaya, 1929).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Shri Yaduvansh Prakaash, p. 41.Google Scholar No publication data found. The bahaarvatiyos of Saurashtra correspond to the ‘Social Bandits’ studied in Europe by Hobsbawm, E. J. in Primitive Rebels (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1965), pp. 13–29.Google Scholar Cf. Hobsbawm's, description of the conditions which give rise to social banditry: ‘It is rural, not urban. The peasant societies in which it occurs know rich and poor, powerful and weak, rulers and ruled, but remain profoundly and tenaciously traditional, and pre-capitalist in structure…. Moreover, even in backward and traditional bandit societies, the social brigand appears only before the poor have reached political consciousness or acquired more effective methods of social agitation. The bandit is a pre-political phenomenon and his strength is in inverse proportion to that of organized agrarian revolutionism and Socialism or Communism…. In such societies banditry is endemic. But it seems that Robin-Hoodism is most likely to become a major phenomenon when their traditional equilibrium is upset; during and after periods of abnormal hardship, such as famines and wars, or at the moments when the jaws of the dynamic modern world seize the static communities in order to destroy and transform them’ (pp. 23–4).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Selections, XXXIX, 21.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Nightingale, Pamela, Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 231Google Scholar. Cf. also Gense, J. H. and Banaji, D. (eds.), The Gaikwads of Baroda: English Documents (10 vols.; Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons and Co., n.d.), VII, 530.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Forbes, Alexander Kinloch, Ras Mala (London: Richardson and Company, 1878), pp. 394–5Google Scholar, and cf. also Tod, James, Travels in Western India (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1839), p. 305.Google Scholar

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²⁹ Cf. Sjoberg, Gideon, ‘The Rise and Fall of Cities; A Theoretical Perspective’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, IV, No. 2 (September 1963), 107–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sometimes, however, in the absence of adequate governmental protection, merchants hired their own guards. Tod, James. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. 2 vols. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1914) I, 379Google Scholar, and Hove, , Tours.Google Scholar

³⁰ Habib, Irfan, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1963).Google Scholar

³¹ Moreland, W. H., The Agrarian System of Moslem India (Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1968).Google Scholar

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³⁴ The internal division of cities into separate distinct neighborhoods based on kinship or on occupation has been noted repeatedly in a wide variety of pre-industrial cities. Cf. Cohn, , ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India’; Lapidus, Ira M., Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Lapidus, Ira M., ‘Muslim Cities and Islamic Societies,’ in Lapidus, (ed.), Middle Eastern Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Eberhard, Wolfram, Settlement and Social Change in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967), pp. 43–64Google Scholar; Sjoberg, Gideon, The Preindustrial City (New York: Free Press, 1960), pp. 91–103.Google Scholar

³⁵ Selections, section on Jhalavad. Cf. also Gense and Banaji, VII, 496.Google Scholar

³⁶ Cf. Neale, Walter C., ‘Land is to Rule’, in Robert Frykenberg, Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, pp. 3–16, for a general statement on this attitude of rulers.Google Scholar

³⁷ Weber, Max, The Religion of India (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1958).Google Scholar

³⁸ Ibid., p. 64.

³⁹ Ibid., and cf. p. 146.

⁴⁰ Shah, A. M. and Shroff, R. C., ‘The Vahivanca Barots of Gujarat’, in Singer, Milton (ed.), Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959), p. 42.Google Scholar Cf. also Tod, , Travels, p. 264.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Cf. Forbes, , Ras Mala, pp. 353–5Google Scholar; Mehta, Gordhandaas Nagardaas, Saurashtra Itihaas Darshan (Palitana: B.P. Press, 1936)Google Scholar; and Watson, (ed.), Statistical Account of Bhavnagar on the one hand with Shri Yaduvansh PrakaashGoogle Scholar and Watson, (ed.), Statistical Account of Nawanagar on the other.Google Scholar

⁴² For a fuller account, see Commissariat, M.S., A History of Gujarat (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1957), II, 56.Google Scholar

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⁴⁷ Mehta, Kowshikaram Vighraharam (ed.), Gaurishankar Udayashankar Oza (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1903)Google Scholar. For a comparison with a similar group in South India, see Frykenberg, , Guntur District for his account of the Desastha Brahmins.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Affairs of Kattywar, Part II, p. 47. I have no further publication data on this volume. I found it in the District Library, Rajkot, along with other books deposited from the former archival deposits of the Rajkot Residency. The volume reprints a series of letters and reports on the status of Saurashtra about 1859–1861 as changes in administrative status were considered by the Bombay and central governments.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Sankalia, Hasmukh D., The Archaeology of Gujarat (Bombay: Natvarlal and Co., 1941), pp. 210.Google Scholar The presence of the Saurashtra banias in both trade and statecraft challenges Gadgit's, D. R. assumption that ‘In Hindu Society there was no mobility between the merchanttrader classes and the military, priestly, and ruling administrative classes’. Origins of the Modern Indian Business Class, an Interim Report (New York City: Institute for Pacific Relations, 1959), p. 23.Google Scholar

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¹⁰³ Wilberforce-Bell, , History of Kathiawad, p. 127.Google Scholar For an example from south India of a new state administration building up its capital city by attracting migrant, cf. Leonard, Karen, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants’.Google Scholar

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