The scholars of ancient and medieval India like H.D. Sankhalia, D.D. Kosambi, Romila Thapar, D. N. Jha, R.S. Sharma, Irfan Habib and others have observed that the South Asian society had always been shaped and reshaped by a close interaction between pastoral nomads, agriculturists, and forest dwellers.i Sumit Guha in his recent book has further elaborated this observation by stating that the boundary between the three environmental regions, i.e., forests, grazing grounds, and cultivated fields had always been fluid before the advent of British rule. And this fluidity also extended to occupational flexibility whereby people acquired skills in accordance with the political economy and social culture of the times.ii However, this fluidity and flexibility threatened the colonial state’s greed for revenues and desire for territorial expansion. The fluid boundaries had to be frozen and occupational flexibility had to be put into the straightjacket category of caste for better control and management of the empire and its subjects.iii
So the first order of business for the colonial state was to conduct extensive land survey and settlement operations while the process of empire building was in progress during the nineteenth century.iv The following table shows the movement of cultivated and wasteland acreages as a result of British survey and settlement operations in six selected districts of Central India collectively called Berar.
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