THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 129

We get somewhat nearer to the peasant in an account!
written shortly before 1630, of agrarian practice in Gujarat.
Anyone, we are told, “who wants to cultivate any land.
goes to the headmen of the village, who are called mugaddam,
and asks for as much land as he wants, at the place which
suits him. This is rarely refused, but almost always granted,
because here not one-tenth part of the land is cultivated,
and so anyone can easily obtain his choice, and the area he
needs; and he may sow as much as he can till, on condition
of paying the dues to the lord.” This account brings out
the fundamental difference from the present time, when the
productive land is fully occupied, holdings are ordinarily
permanent, and a successful peasant often has difficulty
in finding room for extension; so long as there was land to
spare, the peasant could pick and choose, and, while it is
reasonable to suppose that the ordinary man retained certain
fields as a fixed holding, it was possible for him to extend
or contract his operations according to his resources and
other conditions; while there was room for administrative
efforts such as were prescribed in Akbar’s rules for collectors,
directed towards bringing waste land into cultivation, and
preventing cultivated land from falling vacant. The
account also fits in with the provision made in the same
rules for rewarding the headmen for their exertions in
developing a village.
According to this authority, an assignee in Gujarat
usually received three-quarters of the produce from the
peasants, so that poverty was general, and few of the peasants
were possessed of any means. The figure given is probably
an exaggeration, because a somewhat later writer,® who
almost certainly had this report before him, wrote that onehalf,
 or sometimes three-quarters, was paid; and, assuming
that this includes cesses or miscellaneous exactions, it points
to the practice of assessing at half the produce which we
find well-established under Aurangzeb.

! Gujarat Report, f. 21. The expression ‘‘not one-tenth part’ should
not be taken in a strict arithmetical sense; the writer of the report frequently
 used figures rhetorically, and I do not think he meant to say
more than that there was plenty of land for everybody. He uses the word
“lord” (heer) in several other passages to denote the assignee.
* J. van Twist, Beschrijvinge van Indien. c. xli. This book was first
published in 1638.