94 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
promotion, or granted a reward, and the order went to the 
Ministry to be carried out.! This business was certainly 
heavy. The chronicles show the frequency of appoint- 
ments and promotions, and each order would have to be 
followed by the allocation of an appropriate Assignment; 
while -each transfer might involve a series of adjustments, 
because an officer who was moved from, say, Lahore to 
Patna, would often prefer, or might on occasion be required, 
to exchange his Assignment in the Punjab for one in Bihar. 
I have not found precise details of the internal organisa- 
tion of the Ministry in Akbar’s time, but some incidental 
references show that then, as in the next century, it con- 
sisted of two main branches, one of which managed the 
Reserved districts, while the other, known as the Salary 
Office, handled all questions regarding Assignments. The 
work in the latter branch can be readily visualised. An 
order comes to provide for a particular officer an Assign- 
ment yielding, say, a kror of dams, the unit in terms of 
which salaries and rewards were defined; the records must 
be searched to find vacant districts or parganas estimated 
to yield just this Income and no more; existing arrange- 
ments may have to be disturbed in order to provide it; 
and everyone concerned, not merely the new assignee, but 
existing assignees who either want a change or want to be 
let alone, will be busy making interest, and, as we shall see, 
sometimes offering bribes, in order to secure their objects.? 
In dealing with such cases, the essential record was an 
estimate of the Income which an assignee could reasonably 
expect to obtain from a district or pargana, and the story 
to be told in this section relates mainly to the vicissitudes 
of this record, for which, as has been explained in Chapter 11, 
I have selected the term Valuation. 
1 The procedure is detailed in Ain, 1. 193; but this chapter relates wholly 
to procedure in the military department, where the orders were drawn up, 
and does not go into the manner in which the Revenue Ministry handled 
them, a matter which has to be deduced from scattered passages. 
2 Biyazid, an old collector, tells us (f. 1 54) how, when Akbar granted 
him a pargana by way of pension, he went to the Ministry to settle details, 
and quarrelled over them with Raja Todar Mal, who was then in charge 
of the work. Hawkins (Early Travels, p. 114) describes the constant 
changes in assignments in his time, so that everything depended on how 
a man was ‘' befriended of the Vizir,” i.e. the head of the Revenue Ministry; 
probably things were worse in his time than under Akbar, but in essentials 
1t was the same svstem.