of the land into full proprietors was intended to give greater stability and security to the peasant ownership of land, but the result was to improve the position of the moneylender, who, owing to the thriftlessness of the Indian rayat and the extravagant expenditure to which he is from time to time driven by traditional custom in regard to marriages, funerals, and other family ceremonies, has always played a disastrously important part in village life.  As M. Chailley remarks in his admirable study of these problems, “the agricultural debtor had now two securities to offer.”  He had always been able to pledge his harvest, and now he could pledge also his land.  On the other hand, “a strict system of law and procedure afforded the moneylender the means of rapidly realizing his dues,” and the pleader, who is himself a creation of that system, was ever at the elbow of both parties to encourage ruinous litigation to his own professional advantage.  Special laws were successively enacted by Government to check these new evils, but they failed to arrest altogether a process which was bringing about a veritable revolution in the tenure of land, and mainly to the detriment of an essentially peaceful and law-abiding class that furnished a large and excellent contingent to the Native Army.  The wretched landowner who found himself deprived of his land by legal process held our methods rather than his own extravagance responsible for his ruin, and on the other hand, the pleaders and their clients, the moneylenders, who were generally Hindus, resented equally our legislative attempts to hamper a process so beneficial to themselves.

But all these were only contributory causes.  There were still deeper influences at work which have operated in the Punjab in the same direction as the forces of unrest in the Deccan and in Bengal, but differ from them nevertheless in their origin and in some of their manifestations.  In the Punjab too the keynote of unrest is a spirit of revolt not merely against British administrative control, but, in theory at least, against Western influence generally, though in some respects it bears very strongly the impress of the Western influence which it repudiates.  The motive force is not conservative Brahmanism as in the Deccan, nor does it betray the impetuous emotionalism of Bengal.  It is less rigid and purely reactionary than the former, and better disciplined than the latter.

Orthodox Hinduism ceased to be a dominant factor in the Punjab when the flood of Mahomedan conquest swept over the land of the Five Rivers.  Even Islam did not break the power of caste, and very distinct traces of caste still survive amongst the Mahomedan community itself.  But nowhere has caste been so much shaken as in the Punjab, for the infinity of sub-castes into which each caste has resolved itself gives the measure of its disintegration.  Sikhism still represents the most successful revolt against its tyranny in the later history of Hinduism.