THE LAST PHASE IN NORTHERN INDIA 171 
village would .at once be raised; and concealment was 
flected, or at least facilitated, by the employment of a 
special unit of area for the land cultivated by the Brother- 
hood. To take a case! reported from part of what is now 
the Ghazipur district, the net sum payable by the members 
of the Brotherhood being Rs. 150, and the area cultivated 
by them being 300 ordinary bighas, they had to pay only 
8 annas per bigha; but, if this fact had become known, 
there would have been prompt enhancement, so they kept 
a special measuring-rope for their own cultivation, giving 
a bigha four times the usual size, and thus only 75 bighas, 
instead of 300, were recorded in the village papers, and the 
payment on this area worked out at Rs. 2 per bigha, a 
figure sufficiently high to avoid suspicion. 
Where then the organisation of the Brotherhood func- 
tioned effectively, the profit of the village was shared 
equitably among the members, and competent Headmen 
might be able to show a profit of reasonable amount; but 
where a usurping Headman was found, he took much of the 
profit for himself in the way indicated in the quotation given 
in the last section, charging the members at rates somewhat 
less than were paid by other peasants, and remaining “in 
his own person the master of profit and loss.” On the other 
hand, there are cases on record where members of the 
Brotherhood paid the same rates as other peasants, because 
the assessment left nothing in the way of profit, and there 
may have been cases, though I have not come across any, 
where the Brotherhood actually paid rather more. The 
economic effect of the system was thus to take out of the 
1 Mehendy Ally Khan's report to Jonathan Duncan, Rev. Sel, i. 170. 
The statement that the use of the special unit of area was intended to 
~onceal the facts was controverted on conjectural grounds by Baden- 
Powell (The Land-Systems of British India, ii. 138). His argument was 
that the officials “would not in the least care for areas. They probably 
had no measurement, but a traditional assessment of the village. . . . 
They cared nothing for how much land each sharer held, as long as the 
whole demand was paid.” Aurangzeb’s farmans, however, show that the 
lata of area were regularly taken into account in making the annual 
assessments, so that this conjectural argument falls to the ground. They 
show also that the officials were ordered to make use of the village-accounts, 
so that it is reasonable to infer that Mehendy Ally -knew what he was 
writing about when he wrote that the special unit was used “to the end 
that, should their putwarree’s accounts be ever called for by Government 
or the Amil, the profits in their villages mav not be known to amount to 
so much.’”’