The agrarian system of Moslem India

Bibliographic data

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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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.

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