This essay employs the land register of a late nineteenth-century Hindi census conducted in the princely state of Marwar (Rajasthan) to examine the durability of the tax-free (sasan) land grant regime over the course of three centuries. It evaluates the privilege sasan grants inured on their holders until the mid-twentieth century, when a series of a structural land reforms all but overnight changed the ways in which grant holders and their kin interacted with land and state authorities. The essay reads processes of land grant donation and maintenance across a wide social, economic, and ecological spectrum. In so doing, it challenges historiographical assumptions of religion as a fundamental grant donation motive in the region, as well as the idea that land relations were primarily defined by revenue extraction in early modern and colonial north India.

本文采用 19 世纪晚期在马尔瓦尔邦（拉贾斯坦邦）进行的印地语人口普查的土地登记册，以检验三个世纪以来免税 (sasan) 土地授予制度的持久性。它评估特权sasan直到 20 世纪中叶，赠款对持有人有效，当时一系列结构性土地改革几乎在一夜之间改变了赠款持有人及其亲属与土地和国家当局互动的方式。这篇文章阅读了广泛的社会、经济和生态领域的赠地捐赠和维护过程。通过这样做，它挑战了将宗教作为该地区基本赠款动机的史学假设，以及土地关系主要由近代早期和殖民地北部印度的收入榨取定义的观点。