12 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
by the Sacred Law itself, for it is laid down in Manu! that 
the officer appointed to be in charge of 100 villages should 
enjoy the revenues of one village, and this provision seems 
to carry the jdgir, the great agrarian institution of Moslem 
times, back to quite an early period of Hindu culture: but 
in any case service-assignments were the rule in Kanauj 
under Harsha, if we may accept the Chinese pilgrim’s 
statement that ‘Ministers of State and common officials 
all have their portion of land, and are maintained by the 
cities assigned to them.” According to Professor Aiyangar, 
the same system existed in the Chola administration in 
the South, ““the higher officers as well as the lower ones 
being remunerated by gifts of land or assignments of 
revenue.’”’ 
The practice of appointing provincial Governors . on 
farming terms prevailed in the Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar, 
and it is probable that the farming-system extended down 
from the province to the village? under the Empire, as it 
certainly did in this region after the Empire had collapsed. 
It is a noteworthy fact that in the seventeenth century 
the agrarian system of the Vijayanagar territory was 
practically identical with that of the Moslem kingdom of 
Golconda, and it is most unlikely that the former should 
have borrowed a new system from the latter: the more 
probable inference is that’ Farming had become established 
as the mainstay of the Hindu agrarian system in the South 
by the end of the thirteenth century, and that Aliuddin 
Khalji took it over at the time when he acquired the terri- 
tories which later became the kingdoms of the Deccan. 
We may- say then that grantees, assignees, and probably 
also farmers, belonged to the developed Hindu system. 
I do not know of direct evidence showing the existence of 
L Sacred Books of the East, XXV. 234; Watters (op. cit.) i. 176; 
Aiyangar, p. 184. The author of the ‘Arthasastra apparently objected to 
the system (p. 299), but he knew of its existence (p. 67). 
* The position in Vijayanagar early in the sixteenth century is explained 
by Nuniz, a Portuguese visitor who recorded his observations in detail, 
(Sewell, A Forgotten Empire, 373). He does not carry us below the province, 
but in the next century the Hindu Chiefs who were then in possession of 
what had been Vijayanagar territory obtained their revenue mainly, if 
not exclusively, by farming, and I think it probable that this was a con- 
tinuation of the system practised under the Empire. The facts are discussed 
in Chapter VIII of mv book From Akbar to Aurangzeb.