AGRARIAN RELATIONS IN SARAVALI 51 and without a bearing on the present pattern of production relations in this area. What is however more important is that when the first survey rates were introduced in the Dhanu taluka by the British., the average holding measured 22 j acres. The average holding was reduced to 11 acres in 1879-80. By 1882 the small holdings began to disappear, and the peasantry became indebted to the moneylender.1 Grain crop occupied 83.5 per cent of the total cultivable land. Double cropping was not unknown., practised on 3 per cent of the cultivable area. Garden tillage was not adopted although the soil was found most suitable.2 In shorty when the British took control of the district it made the tiller of the soil the propertyowner. The peasant proprietary feature was very transitory. Private property, money economy and the market it introduced did not necessarily bring about a capitalist mode of production. There were no attempts to establish bourgeois democratic rights. On the contrary., certain institutions, like the legal system it grafted on to the existing system, led to the decay of society.8 Anatomy of Dhanu The majority of the local population at the time of the British takeover were Varlis who practised slash-and-burn techniques of agriculture.4 Every acre of riceland needed three acres of upland for rab (wood ash). The latter type of land was entered as varkas in the survey records. Expropriation of varkas land by non-agriculturists is an important landmark in the changing agrarian relations. Dhanu taluka abounds in rich timber which, as the British learnt from the Portuguese, is superior to oak for shipbuilding.0 In Bassein not far away was the shipbuilding yard. The British government therefore passed an ordinance that all teak trees belonged solely to the government. It however permitted the peasants to cut down all trees except teak from varkas land for the rab. Timber trade was profitable. Memons, the shrewd businessmen from Bombay, and trading communities from Marwar, Gujaratand Cutch as well as Brahmins from other parts of Maharashtra realizing the wealth lying in timber appropriated ^through fraud, with the help of village accountants, large tracts of vark as and other lands. '"6 Apart from stripping the area of valuable timber forest they reduced a section of the local peasantry to the status of woodcutters. The new settlers did not take to tilling. British administration's reports on the type of investment of each group sc which is related to one's caste and calling" gives a clue to the present pattern of agrarian relations as well as the reasons for decay of the society. The Brahmin or the Prabhu ^lends money, takes government contract, buys lodging houses and chawls, adds to his land and surrounds himself with house and field workers whose services he has secured/or a term of years by paying marriage expenses". That was the beginning of bonded labour. The Parsee lends money, especially to Varlis in Dhanu,