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 VC. The seventeenth century

Collection:: Economics Books

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 151 is the recognition that it might be better to be on the cash- list than to have an Assignment. No such preference is suggested by the records of the earlier period, during which all high and favoured officers received Assignments as a matter of course, while the only changes in conditions re- corded in the chronicles during the interval were on the whole in favour of the assignees. One of these changes related to a practice by which the assignees were required to pay for the keep of the animals in the Imperial stables! This practice became a serious burden during the reign of Aurangzeb, when the income from Assignments was declining, so that the demand made by the stables on an individual might even exceed the total he was able to collect; but under Shah Alam these charges were so adjusted that no grievance remained. The other, and more important, change in practice was the dis- appearance of the audit. During the seventeenth century, it was the duty of the provincial Diwan to see that assignees id not retain more than the sums to which they were en- titled, and to recover any excess for the treasury. On the other hand, an assignee could claim to be reimbursed for deficiency in his actual Income arising from certain causes, though it was difficult to establish such claims in the face of the determined opposition of the accountants. An Assignment thus involved a periodical contest of wits, in which the assignee needed to employ competent agents, and probably to spend money freely on bribery, if he was to retain what he had succeeded .in collecting; but during Aurangzeb’s reign the practice gradually decayed, and the audit-procedure had become obsolete when Khwafi Khan wrote.? The reasons for the unpopularity of Assignments must then be sought, not in changes in administrative practice, but in the conditions of the time, the decline in agricultural production, and the weakening of the central authority. 1 Khwafi, ii. 602. ! For this complicated subject see Tuzuk, 22, 89, 190, 399; Salih, 319; Saqi, 234; Khwafi, i. 753, il. 87, 397. That a recovery might be sub- stantial in amount appears from the record in Saqi, 170, that Shiyista Khan was surcharged 132 lakhs of rupees for what he had collected ip sxcess of his authorised Income while Viceroy of Bengal.

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