44 SOCIAL SCIENTIST "marauders'. In the general collapse of administration, caught in the crossfire of the inter-feudatory wars, the tribals took to the hills and a form of social banditry that was to spill over two decades of early British rule. In Thana district the pre-British situation of the tribals was quite different. The region contained both hilly and plain areas but it was the latter that drew the attention of pre-British powers from the Moghuls to the Portuguese and the Marathas. Travellers in the talukas of Bassein, Salsette and Kalyan at varying points of time remarked on the fluctuating prosperity of the local peasantry—all non-tribals—the flourishing trade and the luxury of the landed gentry.7 But the hilly talukas of Dahanu, Umbergaon parts of Mahim, Wada and almost the whole of Mokhada, densely populated by tribals, drew scant notice—not in the least because of their inaccessibility and their relatively low economic importance. Under such conditions the tribals in these areas constituting between 61.1 percent of total population in Dahanu to 26.8 per cent in Murbad in 1890,8 were isolated to a far greater degree from "mainstream9 society than their Khandesh counterparts. The denseness of hills, forests secured the tribals a near total inaccessibility and discouraged the advance of any trade routes through the areas. Cut off from society the tribals in these regions, the principal ones being the Katkari, the Varii and Dhodia, lived in conditions of natural economy—producing coarse grain through shifting cultivation just enough for family reproduction, and supplementing their diet with fruits gathered from the forests.9 The differences in conditions of tribal existence and the differing of communication with the mainstream economy shaped the tribals' responses to the land settlements that the British introduced in both the areas ; and in turn prejudiced both official response to their productive capacity (as labourers or producers) and the modes of exploitation by the landed gentry. But such responses were -the immediate consequence of the nature of the colonial economy, to which we may now turn pur attention. II THE BRITISH PERIOD On assuming political power in Western India after their defeat of the Marathas in 1818, the British were beset by two principal problems in both districts. One was to account for the nfultifarious taxes and revenues (as well as modes of land assessment) that had been levied by various feudatories at varying points, accumulating like a palimpsest On the peasantry ; the second was to settle the singularly largest element of the local population that fell outside the pole of any regular system of r^v^nu^ a§sessm^nt—the tribal$,