The agrarian system of Moslem India

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1804119261

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-188010

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Moreland, William Harrison http://d-nb.info/gnd/172263670

Title:: The agrarian system of Moslem India

Edition:: 2. ed. Reissue (d. Ausg. Cambridge) 1929; [Reprint]

Place of publication:: Delhi

Publisher:: Oriental Books, Munshiram Manoharlal

Year of publication:: 1968

Scope:: XVII, 296 S.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter III. The Sayyid and Afghan dynasties

Collection:: Economics Books

94 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA promotion, or granted a reward, and the order went to the Ministry to be carried out.! This business was certainly heavy. The chronicles show the frequency of appoint- ments and promotions, and each order would have to be followed by the allocation of an appropriate Assignment; while -each transfer might involve a series of adjustments, because an officer who was moved from, say, Lahore to Patna, would often prefer, or might on occasion be required, to exchange his Assignment in the Punjab for one in Bihar. I have not found precise details of the internal organisa- tion of the Ministry in Akbar’s time, but some incidental references show that then, as in the next century, it con- sisted of two main branches, one of which managed the Reserved districts, while the other, known as the Salary Office, handled all questions regarding Assignments. The work in the latter branch can be readily visualised. An order comes to provide for a particular officer an Assign- ment yielding, say, a kror of dams, the unit in terms of which salaries and rewards were defined; the records must be searched to find vacant districts or parganas estimated to yield just this Income and no more; existing arrange- ments may have to be disturbed in order to provide it; and everyone concerned, not merely the new assignee, but existing assignees who either want a change or want to be let alone, will be busy making interest, and, as we shall see, sometimes offering bribes, in order to secure their objects.? In dealing with such cases, the essential record was an estimate of the Income which an assignee could reasonably expect to obtain from a district or pargana, and the story to be told in this section relates mainly to the vicissitudes of this record, for which, as has been explained in Chapter 11, I have selected the term Valuation. 1 The procedure is detailed in Ain, 1. 193; but this chapter relates wholly to procedure in the military department, where the orders were drawn up, and does not go into the manner in which the Revenue Ministry handled them, a matter which has to be deduced from scattered passages. 2 Biyazid, an old collector, tells us (f. 1 54) how, when Akbar granted him a pargana by way of pension, he went to the Ministry to settle details, and quarrelled over them with Raja Todar Mal, who was then in charge of the work. Hawkins (Early Travels, p. 114) describes the constant changes in assignments in his time, so that everything depended on how a man was ‘' befriended of the Vizir,” i.e. the head of the Revenue Ministry; probably things were worse in his time than under Akbar, but in essentials 1t was the same svstem.

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