226 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA

the sixteenth century kingdom of Bijapur, and a possible explanation of
it is that the Arabic khit passed into the Deccan at the time of Alauddin’s
conquest, and became naturalised there as khot. That there were khots
in Gujarit also, before the Mogul conquest, appears from a document
published by Professor Hodivala (Studies in Parsi History, p. 204), but
their position is not explained; it is possible that the Arabic word, which
quickly became obsolete in the North, survived in Gujarat, as in the
Konkin, in an Indianised form, but more documentary evidence is necessary
 on this point.
(3) This clause is ungrammatical as it stands. It would be easy to
read awardand for aGwardan, putting a full stop at the end of clause 5. The
translation would then be: ‘“ And two regulations were made in pursuance
of the aforesaid object,” which makes grammar and sense. Barni’s
grammar, however, is not immaculate, and the text may show what he
actually wrote.

(4) “The rule of Measurement and the biswa-yield,”” hukm-i masahat wa
wafa-i biswa.
Barni mentiones two ‘“hukms’’ or rules for assessment, Masdhat and
Hasil, i.e. “measurement” and ‘produce’; he does not describe the
methods, but the passage which follows will make it clear that Masahat
involved allowances for crop-failure, which were not required in Hasil.
Unless we take these two terms to denote methods which have become
entirely forgotten, we must identify them with the two which I have called
Measurement and Sharing, which, as we have seen, were equally familiar
to Hindus and Moslems at this period, which reappear, though with
different names, in the sixteenth century, and which persisted into the
nineteenth. The word Masahat gives place to jarib or paimaish in the
official records of the Mogul period, but it seems to have survived in local
use, for as late as 1832 the “native measuring staff’ was known as the
"“masahut establishment’ (Rev. Sel., ii. 378). Hasil can be read quite
naturally as denoting the process of Sharing the produce. and, so far as
I can see, it can carry no other suggestion.
The phrase ‘‘ wafi-i biswda"’ does not occur except in Barni, and can be
read here merely as a repetition or duplication of what precedes it, ‘‘reliance
 on the unit of area,” “biswa’ denoting the smaller unit, 1/20th
of the bigha. Passages in the next two chronicles, however, indicate
that the word wafa had acquired the technical meaning of “yield of crops,”
and this is probably the meaning here; ‘‘biswa-yield”’ would then indicate
 the standard outturn per unit of area, which was a necessary datum
for the method of Measurement. The decisive passage is in T. Mubarakshihi
 (Or. 5318, f. 347.), where, in a description of the oppression in the
River Country under Muhammad Tughlaq, we read kisht-ha mipaimGdand
 wa wafd-ha farmani mi-bastand; ‘they used to measure the
fields and fix the yields by ordinance.” Here it does not seem possible to
take wafiba in any other sense. The same sense is required in Afif, 180,
where the word occurs twice; and taking these examples into account, it
is permissible to infer that Barni also was familiar with this technical use
of the word. I have not found this use in the Mogul period, and presumably
 it became obsolete.