30 SOCIAL SCIENTIST In 1918, there were 97.9 percent insecure tenants in Oudh.8 The number of ejectment notices rose from 27,580 in 1905-06 to 43,490 in 1919-20.° The sword of eviction was wielded every year to pressurize the tenants into paying higher nayana and abwabs1^ One of the worst forms of forced labour and exploitation existed in the form of begar, fiari and rasad. The condition of the agricultural labourers was most pathetic. Between 1873 and 1903 their wages had gone down by 2 percent in Oudh whereas rents had been increasing.11 The taluqdars, like an octopus, spread their tentacles into the body-social of the cultivators of Oudh. They sat over them like an incubus oblivious of their sufferings. The taluqdars and their minions, in utter disregard of law, imposed fines on the tenantry according to their whims and hunted the tenantry to fill their coffers. The colonial courts were hardly the instruments of justice as the success there depended on longer arms and fatter purses, which the poor peasantry always lacked.12 The mounting evictions and increasing rents13 drove the peasantry into the lap of the only borrowing agencies at hand—the traditional village mahajans (elite) and the landlord himself. The vast mass of the poor cultivators in varying degrees were in debt to their landlords or the village moneylenders all over Oudh.14 The operation of the usurious merchant capital aggravated the economic plight of the tenantry. Socio-economic Changes The last years of the nineteenth century and the early }ears of the twentieth century witnessed some important changes in the social situation which started influencing agrarian relations. The proprietory mutations; growing impoverishment of small ^amin-dars'^ intrusion of outsiders or thekedars;16 introduction of usurious merchant capital; material conditions such as growing population unaccompanied by the growth of industrial or other avenues of employment; mounting social tensions; soaring prices;17 fragmentation of cultivated land affecting the man-land ratio18 were bound to influence the rural scene. The political process of Indian nationalism with colonial constraints also helped to highlight socio-economic contradictions. The outbreak of the first world war added to the miseries of the Oudh peasantry. The loyal supporters of the Empire—the taluqdars—squeezed the peasantry dry by forcibly raising war loans (larai chandas) and recruits. The demobilization and retrenchment of the imperial troops at the end of the war brought to the countryside a large number of soldiers—the victims of false promises—now ready to