Taksaris of Sikkim
sikkim landed class
Taksaris of Sikkim (also known as Taksari Newars) were owners of minting houses, traders, landed class and their families in the former Kingdom of Sikkim. There were six families – mostly Newars – minting coins for the erstwhile Himalayan kingdom. In the period of British influence, Chogyal of Sikkim gave these families large land estates as Thikadars, a system of hereditary leesee landlords with judicial and administrative power over their respective estates.
History
After contact with the British, the agrarian Sikkimese society witnessed a drastic change in land use and settlement pattern. The British encouraged migration of Nepalese to Sikkim mainly for agriculture and labour. The two Newar trade families of Lachhimidas Pradhan and Chandrabir Maskey from princely estates of Kathmandu were given land as a contract or ‘’thika’’. These new landlords hence came to be known as Newar Thikadars. They could mint coins as ‘’Taksaris’’, engage labourers to clear forests for agriculture and encourage human settlements in their estates.
In 1867, Newar trader Lachhimidas Pradhan was the first Nepalese to be given territories in East and South Sikkim by Khangsa Dewan and Phudong Lama under British influence by issuing a “Sanad”(ordinance) establishing a hereditary feudal estates. Lachhimidas and his brother Chandrabir Pradhan divided the areas into number of estates to be distributed within the members of the family.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q110933428. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1867.
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This entry incorporates text from “Taksaris of Sikkim” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.