THE SAYYID AND AFGHAN DYNASTIES 75 
while for purposes of control the parganas were grouped 
in districts, now named sarkdr. The general attitude of 
the administration is shown in the instructions given to the 
district officers that ‘if the people, from any lawlessness or 
rebellious spirit, created a disturbance regarding the col- 
lection of the revenue, they were so to eradicate and destroy 
them with punishment and chastisement that their wicked- 
ness and rebellion should not spread to others,”’—an obvious 
restatement of the principle on which Sher Shah had acted 
when he was managing his father’s Assignment. In regard 
to assessment, however, the King's views had changed. 
As manager, he had allowed the peasants to choose the 
method they preferred; as King, he imposed the method of 
Measurement on practically the whole of his dominions, 
and various passages show that its successful operation was 
the test by which his officers were judged. Thus in the 
Punjab hills, the Governor held such firm possession “that 
no man dared to breathe in opposition to him, and he col- 
lected the revenue by measurement of land from the hill 
people”; while the Governor of Sambhal (in Rohilkhand) 
“so humbled and overcame by the sword the contumacious 
zamindars [Chiefs] of those parts that they did not rebel 
even when he ordered them to cut down their jungles .. . 
and they reformed and repented them of their thieving 
and highway robberies, and they paid in at the city their 
revenue according to the measurements.”! 
Measurement then was enforced even in notoriously 
rebellious tracts, and the only recorded exception to its 
application is in the distant country round Multan, which 
had suffered greatly from disorder, and the acquisition of 
which gave peculiar pleasure to the King. Here the 
Governor was ordered to repeople the country, to observe 
the local customs, and to take only a fourth share of the 
produce as revenue.! The conditions obviously justified 
exceptional treatment in this tract, and there may also 
have been exceptions elsewhere, though none are recorded; 
but there can be no doubt that Measurement was the general 
rule in practice, and not merely in theory. 
! Elliot, iv. 415, 416. 
t Elliot, iv. 399: Makhzan-i Afghani, 1.0. (Ethé) 60, f. 121.