INTRODUCTION

Accordingly, in two earlier books, India at the death of
Akbar, and From Akbar to Aurangzeb, 1 included condensed
accounts of the relations which at that period subsisted
between the administration and the peasants. These
accounts were based mainly on the original authorities, but,
in interpreting the obscure and crabbed texts, I followed
the work of previous students, who I assumed had mastered
the technical terminology of the subject; and, usually
accepting their renderings, I offered a description of the
main lines of the agrarian administration, reserving for
subsequent study some difficulties which appeared to be
matters of detail.
On returning to the subject, I found that these apparent
details increased in importance when scrutinised more
closely; and I was driven gradually to the conclusion that
the guides I had accepted, Blochmann, Jarrett, Dawson,
and other writers of the last century, busied, as they were, in
exploring an entirely unknown field, had not fully mastered
the terminology employed in the literature of the period,
but had borrowed from modern practice in India, or sometimes
 from medieval practice in Europe, terms of art, or
picturesque phrases, which did not always give the precise
meaning of the originals, and occasionally involved serious
misrepresentation. It was necessary, therefore, to study the
terminology afresh; and for this purpose I worked through
the printed literature of the period, together with such
relevant manuscripts as I found in this country, extracting
every passage in’ which an apparently technical term
occurred, and then bringing the passages together, and
inferring from them the meaning, or meanings, borne by
each term at different periods, or in different parts of India.
The results obtained in the course of this study form the
basis of the present essay, and sufficient illustrations of
my methods will be found in the notes and appendices;
but at the outset it may be well to insist on the fact that
the terminology employed in the literature is fluid, so that
both time and place may condition the interpretation of a
particular passage. The Persian language, as -it was used
in Moslem India, possessed a wealth of synonyms; and
most of the authorities observed what may be described as