46 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
inconsistencies, and the final position of the chronicler is 
not one of uncritical eulogy, nor yet of prejudiced detrac- 
tion, but of astonishment and perplexity. He tells us that 
he had never heard or read of such a character, he could not 
place it in any known category, and, more than once, he 
takes refuge in the view that the King was one of the 
wonders of creation, in fact, a freak of nature. In such a 
position, it is safe tc assume that the chronicler’s language 
is exaggerated in both directions: he was striving to em- 
phasise the contrasts presented by the reign—the King’s 
brilliant gifts and his practical incompetence, or his sub- 
servience to the Khalifa and his disregard of Islamic law, 
and both sides of the case are inevitably overstated. It is 
advisable then to discount the chronicler’s superlatives, but 
there is, so far as I can see, no reason to distrust his state- 
ments of fact regarding the King’s agrarian measures, the 
only topic with which I am at present concerned. 
For this reign we have no formal statement of agrarian 
policy, and no direct indication of the King’s ideals; but we 
have a series of episodes which fall into two groups, the 
treatment of the provinces generally, and the special mea- 
sures taken in the River Country. One of the King’s 
earliest measures was an attempt to assimilate the ad- 
ministration of the outlying provinces to that of Delhi and 
the River Country, which were, it will be recalled, directly 
ander the Revenue Ministry The chronicler gives a 
caustic description of this attempt at centralisation, which 
is closely in accordance with his picture of the King as a 
brilliant but unpractical man; he tells us of detailed accounts 
being submitted from the most distant provinces, and of 
the uttermost penny in them being wrangled over by the 
audit staff at the capital; and he mentions that the ex- 
periment lasted only for a few years. The sequel is not 
formally recorded, but two episodes show that the specula- 
tive Farmer supervened in the provinces. One episode 
(p. 488) is that of a man who had taken a three-year farm 
of Bidar, in the Deccan, for a payment of a kror of tankas. 
The chronicler describes him as “by occupation a corn- 
merchant, timorous, incompetent”; he was a stranger to 
the locality; and, when he found that he could not realise