Chapter VIII. 
Conclusion. 
[N the foregoing chapters I have set out the evidence I have 
been able to collect regarding the agrarian system which 
operated in India during six centuries of Moslem rule. 
Readers who have followed thus far will probably share the 
impression with which I leave the subject, a sense of the 
inequality with which the evidence is distributed both in 
time and in space. We know much, if not everything, 
regarding certain periods during which the State entered 
into direct relations with some, or all, of the peasants owning 
its authority; but, measured by time, these periods are 
merely episodes, and we know very much less of the rest 
of the story. A few great names—Alauddin, Sher Shah, 
or Akbar, Todar Mal, or Murshid Quli—stand out like 
mountain-tops rising clear-cut above a sea of mist; but for 
a just appreciation of their significance we need to obtain 
1 view of the much wider country which the mist conceals. 
[ cannot claim to have presented that view as a whole, but 
in places the mist allows occasional glimpses of portions of 
it, and in the paragraphs which follow, I base on these 
glimpses a hypothetical reconstruction, which I offer, not 
as fact established by evidence, but as tentative inference, 
to be confirmed or modified in the light of further knowledge. 
[t seems to me to be a probable view that, just before 
the establishment of Moslem rule, the Hindu Kings or 
Chiefs in Northern India dealt ordinarily, though not ex- 
clusively, with the village, or on occasion with an aggregate 
of villages, as a unit, fixing the revenue-Demand to be paid 
for the season, or the year, either with the headmen or with 
a farmer as circumstances might permit. . The aim would 
be to realise an amount corresponding to whatever share of 
the produce the King or Chief might claim, but there would 
be an element of bargaining in the transaction, and the 
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