The close intermeshing of revenue-collection structures with land tenures in the pre-colonial agrarian order brought the British face to face with the question of the basic tenure of land during their efforts to set up effective land revenue systems in India. The answer to this question, they reckoned, would help determine the point on the tenurial scale at which a private property right should be lodged: This ‘modern’ form of proprietary right was to be attached not to the land itself but to its revenues; the existence of a distinct customary right of physical dominion over the soil was never denied. An implicit, though not perfectly clear intention of British revenue law was, if possible, ‘to weld the novel property attaching to the revenue-collecting right to this primary right of dominion’. The Permanent Settlement of the land revenue in 1793 with the zamindars of Bengal accorded the property right to a class of people whose role in rural society as territorial magnates and tax-farmers had been to collect revenue and remit it to government, not to hold or exploit land as such. The discrepancy between colonial revenue law infused with its particular concept of property and the manner in which land was actually held and operated in Bengal ensured from the very outset that the legal classification of agrarian society was far removed from its working structure.