Ryot

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A peasant farmer or tenant who cultivates land in India, especially under the colonial revenue system
2. An Indian agricultural tenant who works a plot of land and pays rent or tax to the landowner or state
3. A cultivator of the soil in India, historically a small tenant holding land under British revenue arrangements

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "ryot" is how far it travelled before reaching English. Its ultimate source is the Arabic "raʕiyya", meaning "flock" or "herd", built on the idea of a shepherd's charge. The image of a people as livestock under a ruler's care passed into Classical Persian as "ra'iyyat", a word for the population or peasantry, and from there into Urdu and Hindi, where it became a term for a peasant cultivator. English took it in the 17th century, when British traders and administrators in the Indian subcontinent needed a word for the farmers who worked the land. Its sense was narrow and administrative: a cultivator who held land directly from the state or an estate, rather than a landlord. The word therefore carried the colonial land-revenue system into English, where it stayed a specialist term for that farming class.

Synonyms: peasant, farmer, tenant, sharecropper, serf