150 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA
Jandholders, which was to be recognised by British law as
homogeneous; the earlier stages in these developments
form the subject of the next section
5. INTERMEDIARIES UNDER AURANGZEB AND
HIS SUCCESSORS
We have seen in a previous section that, in the middle
of the seventeenth century, the great bulk of the revenue
was assigned, as much as 19 krors out of the total of 22;
and consequently the assignees were at that period much
the most important class of Intermediaries between the
Emperor and the peasants. During the next half century,
a gradual change occurred, and shortly after the end of
Aurangzeb’s reign, Assignments, taken as a whole, had
become unremunerative, and were naturally unpopular;
they continued to be made, but energetic men preferred
a title resting on force to one which was based on paper, and
in the course of the eighteenth century the Taluq, or
“Dependency,” came to take the place of the Assignment
as the most prominent agrarian institution.
The unpopularity of Assignments is a familiar. topic in
the chronicle written by Khwafi Khan shortly after Aurang-
zeb’s death. The most noteworthy passage is a digression!
where, after describing the liberality of Shahjahan in
equipping his officers for active service, the chronicler
proceeds to stress the contrast between past and: present.
Nowadays, he says in effect, perhaps one or two in a hundred
of the wretched assignees may get a morsel of bread from
their Assignments, but the rest are starving mendicants;
while those who are nominally on the cash-roll may possibly
receive their pay for a year or two at most. The passage
is rhetorical, and the writer was obviously a pessimist,
so that his language must be somewhat heavily discounted;
but there is no reason to suppose that it does not represent
in substance the opinion current in the first quarter of the
eighteenth century. Perhaps its most significant feature
1 Khwafi, i. 622. The approximate date of this chronicle is fixed by
such passages as ii. 378. where the vear of writing is given as 1135 H, or
1722-13.
