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In “Street Singers of Lucknow and Other Stories,” the table of contents deftly traverses Bombay neighborhoods, grand Lucknow zamindari estates and serene tea gardens in what is now Bangladesh.

Banished in India was zamindari*: 1.

After independence, the new government took over the princely states and abolished the zamindari.

In the state of Uttar Pradesh it was Deliverance Day, the day that marked the end of zamindari, a system of tax collecting which has held most of India's plain people in thrall since the Middle Ages.

For 30 years the Congress Party of Prime Minister Nehru has cried for the abolition of zamindari, but India's constitution leaves land reform to the individual states.