Chapter VII. 
The Outlying Regions. 
1. THE DECCAN 
I HAD hoped to conclude this essay by an account of the 
agrarian developments in the different States into which 
the first Moslem kingdom of Delhi broke up, but the materials 
within my reach have proved to be too scanty for such an 
undertaking. In the case of Malwa, I have found nothing 
beyond a passage! showing that Assignments were common 
in the early part of the sixteenth century; while the available 
chronicles of Gujarat allow us to see only that, during the 
period of independence, the great bulk of the country was 
shared between assignees and tributary Chiefs. In neither 
case have I been able to discover any contemporary account 
of the position of the peasants under the local dynasties; 
while it will be recalled that the descriptions of these two 
provinces given in the Ain are obscure, so that it would be 
dangerous to base any argument on them regarding the 
conditions which prevailed at the time of the Mogul conquest. 
These two kingdoms must therefore be passed over, and 
this chapter confined to two regions—the Deccan and 
Bengal. 
The term Deccan denotes a geographical region rather 
than a precise unit of administration, and has to be inter- 
preted by the facts of any particular period; but, in the 
language of the Moslem chroniclers, it usually meant what- 
ever area, bcyond the line of the Narbada, was under 
Moslem rule, its southern, and fluctuating, boundary being 
the Hindu territory subject to Vijayanagar. We have seen 
in Chapter II that Alauddin Khalji carried the Moslem 
i Bayley, 353, for Malwa; 5-16, and passim, for Gujarat. 
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