The Evolution of the Land Tenure System in Coorg: A Historical Perspective

Land is rarely just land. In Coorg – the lush, highland district now known as Kodagu in Karnataka – who owned the land, how it was held, and what obligations came with it shaped the entire social order of the region. From a warrior-based system rooted in military loyalty to a colonial economy driven by coffee, the story of Coorg’s land tenure is really a story about how power, identity, and social relations are transformed when the rules of landholding change. M. N. Srinivas, in his landmark 1952 work Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, gave sociologists a compelling lens to study these changes – and they remain as instructive today as ever.

Land as the foundation of Coorg society 🔗

Long before the British arrived, land in Coorg was far more than an agricultural resource. It was the basis of social standing, political authority, and military obligation. The Kodavas – the dominant community of Coorg – were traditionally land-owning agriculturists with deep martial customs. Their identity was built around two twin occupations: farming and soldiering. The two were, in fact, inseparable.

The land tenure system that governed this society was known as the Jamma system. The word “jamma” derives from the Sanskrit janma, meaning “birth,” and it referred to hereditary land rights passed from father to son within family clans called okka. According to a detailed historical study on land administration in colonial Coorg, Jamma tenure originated from pre-colonial grants made by local rulers to Kodava warriors in exchange for military service. These landholders were known as Jamma ryots – essentially militia farmers whose right to the land was tied to their duty to bear arms for the state.

Land revenue was the principal source of income for the ruling Lingayat Rajas of Coorg, and the assessment of land was made based on careful survey and classification of cultivated plots. Under this arrangement, Jamma holdings were assessed at roughly half the standard revenue rate, a privilege that acknowledged the military obligations of those who held the land. This kept landholding affordable for warrior families and ensured a loyal, armed constituency for the Rajas.

Alongside Jamma tenure, other forms of land holding existed – including Sagu, Umbali, and Jodi tenures – each carrying its own identity, purpose, and set of obligations. Land was also granted to those who rendered services to the state, for religious and charitable purposes, or to attract artisan and trading communities to settle in the region. The system was, in short, a complex web of land rights that mirrored the social hierarchy of Coorg.

The Jamma system in practice: identity, family, and military duty 🔗

The Jamma land system reinforced Kodava social organization in very direct ways. Land was held collectively by the okka – the joint patrilineal family – and was passed on within the clan as an hereditary right. In 1812, during the reign of Linga Raja II, a comprehensive land settlement called the Hukum Nama was drawn up, categorizing all cultivated land in Coorg into farms called vargar, each recorded according to the tenure under which it was held. This document formalized an already ancient practice.

Jamma tenure was not exclusive to Kodavas. It was also held by Kannada Okkaligas, Tulu Gowdas, smiths, potters, and even some Mapilla immigrants from Malabar. The Rajas sometimes extended Jamma tenure to attract artisans and traders to the region or to encourage the reclamation of forest and waste land. However, the system had important social exclusions: a woman could not hold Jamma lands. She could hold land under a family settlement, but the formal military-linked tenure remained a male prerogative.

The 1878 Indian Arms Act explicitly exempted Kodava Jamma tenure-holders from weapons restrictions, recognizing that their land rights were legally tied to police and military duties. This legal recognition underscored how deeply the military tradition and land system were fused in Coorg society. Even under early British rule, this arrangement was preserved as a deliberate policy to maintain Kodava loyalty.

British annexation and the reshaping of land tenure 🔗

In 1834, the British East India Company annexed Coorg following the Coorg War, deposing the last Lingayat Raja. This marked a decisive turning point. The British introduced centralized administration, conducting new land surveys, creating six taluks and subdividing them into villages, and establishing a revenue system that treated land revenue not as rent to local rulers but as tax payable to the colonial state.

The British initially preserved the Jamma tenure system, confirming its hereditary privileges through proclamations in the 1830s as a way of securing Kodava loyalty. However, the new administration gradually imposed different priorities. Under colonial rule, land revenue occupied a pivotal position in general administration, and the colonial state used taxation to extract surplus from the province and finance its own military and administrative machinery – a very different purpose from the earlier system, where land obligations had been reciprocal.

One of the earliest and most consequential British reforms was the abolition of slavery. In 1843, the Imperial Government abolished slavery in all British colonies in India, a reform that had a sweeping effect on Coorg’s landholder class. Slavery had been deeply rooted in Coorg’s agrarian structure: high-caste landholders had slaves, primarily of the Poleya caste, who worked on their wet land estates. The immediate shock to Jamma landholders was limited – in the early years of abolition, cultivated land continued to function as before. But the situation would soon change dramatically.

The rise of coffee plantations and the transformation of the labor market 🔗

In 1853, European capitalists began to cultivate coffee in Coorg, and the region came into direct contact with world commodity markets for the first time. Coffee was ideally suited to Coorg’s elevation and climate, and it rapidly transformed the economic landscape. The first commercial estate was established in 1854 near Mercara (now Madikeri), signaling the shift from subsistence-oriented paddy farming to cash-crop production at a commercial scale.

The expansion of coffee cultivation created a massive demand for labor – and this is where the abolition of slavery and the plantation economy collided. When coffee plantations were opened, many slaves deserted their former masters to work for cash wages on the estates. This left Jamma landholders, who were still obligated to pay assessment on all wet land whether it was cultivated or not, without the unpaid labor force they had relied upon for generations. The wet rice fields – the traditional basis of Kodava subsistence – began to suffer from neglect.

As noted in Srinivas’s analysis, coffee plantations increased the demand for labor, slaves deserted their masters, and Coorg became a place for a labor market. This was a structural rupture. For the first time, labor was being openly bought and sold in a competitive market rather than coerced through hereditary servitude or the obligations of caste and tenure. The plantation economy had introduced wage labor as a new organizing principle of economic life in Coorg.

Migrant labor and shifting social boundaries 🔗

The British began coffee cultivation in the plantations of Coorg, and the region became a hub for mass coffee production. The workforce that sustained this boom increasingly came from outside Coorg. Migrant Tamil laborers from neighboring regions arrived in large numbers to work on the estates, creating an entirely new demographic layer in Coorg society. These workers were not Kodavas; they were not tied to the land by Jamma tenure or by hereditary obligation. Their relationship to the land was purely economic – they came for wages, and they could leave.

This fundamentally altered the social geography of Coorg. The slaves from the lower caste who had once been bound to higher-caste masters now had better economic prospects on the coffee estates. Once annual remuneration was established for lower-caste laborers, the economic structure partially re-stabilized – but it was no longer the same structure. The caste-based hierarchy of obligation that had governed labor relations was giving way to a more transactional, market-based arrangement.

The joint family, individual land rights, and social fragmentation 🔗

The coffee economy also exerted pressure on Coorg’s internal social organization, particularly the joint family system. Traditionally, the joint family owned land collectively, but by 1870, some individual Coorgs had begun acquiring farms and coffee plantations in their own names. The Jamma tenure system, which had cemented collective family ownership and military identity, was being quietly individualized as younger Kodavas took advantage of the new economy to break away from joint households and establish independent farms.

The British responded to the changed conditions with administrative adjustments. The requirement that Jamma landholders not sublet their land was relaxed, allowing them to sublet up to a quarter of their estate. In 1863, the government considered imposing a tax on coffee plantations, and the Chief Commissioner decided that Jamma ryots could cultivate coffee on their bane (forest) lands but not beyond ten acres. By 1878, colonial officials were reporting that Coorg ryots were routinely selling their bane lands – a sign of how deeply market logic had penetrated even the most traditionally held corners of Coorg’s land system.

Socio-economic implications: what the land tenure shift really meant 🔗

Viewed together, these changes amount to a comprehensive restructuring of Coorg society driven by shifts in land tenure. The pre-British system had been characterized by hereditary rights, military obligation, collective family ownership, and coerced labor. The post-1834 order introduced market wages, individual ownership, commercial agriculture, and a plural labor force drawn from across South India.

The new economic forces ensured that the traditional stronghold of Coorg’s social unity cracked, and compromises were made across the social hierarchy. The Kodavas who had once been self-sufficient warrior-farmers were now navigating a plantation economy alongside British estate owners and Tamil migrant workers. Originally small landholders, they gained relative prosperity with the advent of coffee cultivation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – but that prosperity came at the cost of the older social order.

What Srinivas helps us see is that these were not merely economic changes. The land tenure system had been the scaffolding upon which Coorg’s caste hierarchy, gender norms, military identity, and family structure all rested. When the scaffolding shifted – through abolition, commercialization, and migrant labor – so did every social institution it supported. Coorg did not remain a static, idyllic society. It adapted, negotiated, and was in many ways irreversibly transformed by forces set in motion from 1834 onward.

The coffee economy that disrupted Coorg’s old order also connected it to the global market. The Jamma system that had organized social life for centuries was not erased – it persisted in modified form – but it no longer carried the same meaning. Land was now as much about profit as it was about identity, loyalty, or military duty.

What do you think? Does the transformation of Coorg’s land tenure system suggest that economic reforms under colonialism were more about restructuring labor than about improving the lives of local communities? And when a society’s relationship to land changes as fundamentally as it did in Coorg, is it ever possible to fully preserve the social and cultural structures that were built around the older system?

References

1. https://www.sociologyguide.com/indian-thinkers/m-n-srinivas.php
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodava_people
3. https://rbanmsfgc.ac.in/Doc/land-administration-n-social-change-colional-coorg-19-sentury.pdf
4. https://grokipedia.com/page/Coorg_Province
5. https://thebooknotes.in/introduction-to-religion-and-society-among-the-coorgs-of-south-india/
6. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/27545/1/Unit-8.pdf
7. https://www.escape2explore.com/blog/tours/unveiling-coorgs-history-a-journey-through-time/135
8. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/83676/1/Unit-8.pdf