RESEARCH ARTICLE Land Tenures in Cooch Behar District, West Bengal: A Study of Kalmandasguri Village Ranjini Basu* Abstract: This paper describes and analyses changes in land tenure in Cooch Behar district, West Bengal. It does so by focussing on land holdings and tenures in one village, Kalmandasguri. The paper traces these changes from secondary historical material, oral accounts, and from village-level data gathered in Kalmandasguri in 2005 and 2010. Specifically, the paper studies the following four interrelated issues: (i) land tenure in the princely state of Cooch Behar; (ii) land tenure in pre-land-reform Kalmandasguri; (iii) the implementation and impact of land reform in Kalmandasguri; and (iv) the challenges ahead with respect to the land system in Kalmandasguri. The paper shows that an immediate, and dramatic, consequence of land reform was to establish a vastly more equitable landholding structure in Kalmandasguri. Keywords: Kalmandasguri, Cooch Behar, West Bengal, sharecropping, princely states, history of land tenure, land reform, village studies, land rights, panel study. Introduction This paper describes and analyses changes in land tenure in Cooch Behar district, West Bengal.1 It does so by focussing on land holdings and tenures in one village, Kalmandasguri.2 The paper traces these changes by drawing from secondary historical material, oral accounts, and from village-level data gathered in Kalmandasguri in 2005 and 2010. Peasant struggle against oppressive tenures has, of course, a long history in the areas that constitute the present state of West Bengal (Dasgupta 1984, Bakshi 2015). * Research Scholar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
[email protected] 1 Cooch Behar is spelt in various ways.