266 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
I5 years, so as to be more or less up to date at the time when the 
record was incorporated in the Ain. I have found only a single 
passage indicating that modification took place, but it suggests 
that the practice was normal; it is Bayazid’s account of the 
dispute over his pension,! which has been referred to in the notes 
to Chapter IV. When Bayazid was getting past work, Akbar 
granted him by way of pension a pargana which was entered at a 
Valuation of 144 lakhs of dams; when he went to the Revenue 
Ministry to settle the matter, Todar Mal objected that another 
claimant had agreed to a figure of 16 lakhs for the pargana in 
question, and urged him to do the same, the result being, I take 
it, that he would have had to pay the difference to the Treasury. 
Bayazid refused, Todar Mal lost his temper, and, when neither 
would give way, Fathulla Shirazi, who was then Imperial Com- 
missioner, intervened, and took the case to Akbar, who ruled 
that Bayazid was to have the pargana at the old Valuation. 
This anecdote suggests, what is in itself probable, that the 
Revenue Ministry, concerned primarily with finance, made a 
practice of raising the existing Valuation in any case where there 
was reason to regard it as below the truth. In the ordinary 
course, we could not expect to find any record of such a practice, 
part of the routine of the Ministry, and for this isolated notice 
we have to thank the garrulity of the old collector, who inserted 
his personal experiences into what was intended to be a chronicle 
of the period. 
The view that the Valuation was modified in detail would help 
to explain a feature of the statistics which has been the subject 
of frequent comment—discrepancies between recorded totals and 
the sum of the items. In some cases such apparent discrepancies 
probably result from copyists’ errors, in others from accidents in 
printing,2 but it is obvious that they might also arise from 
piecemeal modifications. It would be a nuisance to correct the 
successive totals for subdivision, district, province, and Empire, 
on each occasion when the figures for a village were modified, 
and it would be a greater nuisance to distribute the modification 
over subdivisions and villages in cases where an officer accepted 
\ Bavazid, f. 154. 
3 The Arabic digits used in Blochmann’s text are particularly liable 
to break in printing, and traces of such an accident are not always visible. 
I have found that owing to this cause two copies of the printed text may 
differ materially, one having a line of, sav. seven digits, while another has 
six, or eight.