Lathiyals were armed servants who were part of a system called lathiyali which surrounded peasantry and land ownership. The word lathiyal emerged from the term lathi meaning bamboo rod, the classic weapon of the peasant class in Bangladesh and India. The servants traditionally served as the private armies of zamindars (landowners) who were the “agents of colonial rulers.” Zamindars had social and political power because of their status as land owners. Despite the dissolution of the official system that gave them power with the East Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Act in 1950, former zamindars and their successors maintain an economic stronghold in the countryside. It is perhaps because of this that the modern usage of the word lathiyal refers to a thug hired to physically fight for (often agricultural) land.
Haimabati Sen describes her landowning family’s relationship with lathayals in the years of their household’s economic decline. She says “we still had 500 lathiyals, stick-wielding armed men, all Muslims, attached to us. They had nothing to do and seldom received their wages on time, but there was no way we could dismiss them, for they would have joined our enemies. That would have spelt disaster.” The Muslim men employed by them in this way have some power over Sen’s family. They have a militaristic type of power even as they are, during a wedding later in the narrative, proven to be financially desperate enough to steal jewelry.
Sources
Because I am a Woman by Haimabati Sen, pages 11 and 14, 27.
https://www-jstor-org.proxy.uchicago.edu/stable/2803775?origin=crossref&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents (See especially the first two footnotes)
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/retainer