In historical Indian land systems, a landowner who held proprietary rights to land and paid taxes to the government, a position between free farmers and landlords.
From Sanskrit/Hindi भूमि (bhūmi) meaning 'land' or 'earth' plus the Arabic/Persian suffix -dar meaning 'holder' or 'keeper'. The term refers to land-holding status in pre-colonial and colonial India.
The complexity of Indian land-holding systems—with terms like bhumidar, zamindar, and ryot—shows how colonial administrators encountered a totally different way of organizing land rights and struggled to fit it into Western categories.
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