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.