Few traces of any such organisation as has been indicated now prevail, great changes having been made when the Vijayanagar Government introduced, more than five hundred years ago, a system of administration under which the local Jain chiefs, though owing allegiance to an overlord, became more independent in their relations with the people of the country. Under the Bednur kings, and still more under the Mysore rule, the power of the chiefs was also swept away, but the old organisation was not reverted to.
The Bants are now the chief land-owning and cultivating class in South Canara, and are, with the exception of the Billavas or toddy-drawers, the most numerous caste in the district. "At the present day, the Bants of Canara are largely the independent and influential landed gentry, some would say, perhaps, the substantial yeomanry. They still retain their manly independence of character, their strong and well developed physique, and they still carry their heads with the same haughty toss as their forefathers did in the stirring fighting days when, as an old proverb had it, 'The slain rested in the yard of the slayer,' and when every warrior constantly carried his sword and shield. Both men and women of the Bant community are among the comeliest of Asiatic races, the men having high foreheads and well-turned aquiline noses."
In a note on the agricultural economy of South Canara, Rao Sahib T. Raghaviah writes [99] that "the ryot (cultivator) of South Canara loves to make his land look attractive, and every field is lined with the lovely areca, and the stately palm. The slopes adjoining the rich fields are studded with plantations of jack, mango, cashew, plantain and other fruit and shade trees, and the ryot would not even omit to daub his trees with the alternate white and red bands, with which the east coast women love to adorn a marriage house or temple wall. These, with the regularly laid out and carefully embanked water-courses and streams, lend an air of enchantment to the whole scene. The ignorance prevailing among the women of the richer section of the landed classes (on the east coast) is so great that it is not uncommon to ridicule a woman by saying that what she knows about paddy (rice) is that it grows on a tree. But, in a district like South Canara, the woman that does not know agriculture is the exception. I have often come across respectable women of the landed classes like the Bants, Shivallis, and Nairs, managing large landed estates as efficiently as men. The South Canara woman is born on the land, and lives on it. She knows when to sow, and when to reap; how much seed to sow, and how much labour to employ to plough, to weed, or to reap. She knows how to prepare her seed, and to cure her tobacco, to garner her grain, and to preserve her cucumbers through the coming monsoon. She knows further how to feed her cow, and to milk it, to treat it when sick, and to graze it when hale. She also knows how to make her manure, and how to use it without wasting a bit of it. She knows how to collect green leaves for her manure, and to help the fuel reserve on the hill slope above her house grow by a system of lopping the branches and leaving the standards. She knows also how to collect her areca nuts, and to prepare them for the market, and to collect her cocoanuts, and haggle for a high price for them with her customers. There is, in fact, not a single thing about agriculture which the South Canara man knows, and which the South Canara woman does not know. It is a common sight, as one passes through a paddy flat or along the adjoining slope, to see housewives bringing out handfuls of ashes collected in the oven over night, and depositing them at the root of the nearest fruit tree on their land."