Rural revolt in 1857 was essentially elitist in character. Things may have been otherwise in the cities and towns, where as at Aligarh (Koil) ‘the low Muhammedan rabble’ could become a potent revolutionary force. But in the countryside the mass of the population appears to have played little part in the fighting or at most tamely followed the behests of its caste superiors. The dominant castes and communities that took the lead in rebellion were a minority of the population, and, of these, the owners of land were a still smaller group. Figures for the classification and enumeration of population have to be treated with reserve, but it is interesting to note, for example, that in Aligarh district in 1872 landowners numbered some 26,551 or 2½% of the total population. In Mathura district where cultivating proprietary brotherhoods of Jats were thick on the ground the proportion was higher, some 6½%. Roughly 47,000 owners (including non-agriculturalists) controlled an adult male agricultural population of 129,000 cultivators; in other words one in three male agriculturalists wned land. It was one in six in the Ganges Canal Tract of the Muzaffarnagar district where the landowning castes – Tagas, Jats, Rajputs, Sayyids, Sheikhs, Gujars, Borahs, Marhals and Mahajans – comprised one-third of the population. In Mainpuri district the Rajputs formed just over 8% of the population and held about one-half of the land. Even, therefore, where ‘village republics’ owned the land, as in the Jat bhaiachara settlements in northern Mathura or in the western portions of Meerut and Muzaffarnagar districts, the proprietary body was very much a rural elite.