106 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA
would lead naturally to the sale of wives and children,
which was a recognised process for realising arrears; and,
speaking generally, Badaiini’s account is confirmed in
essentials by the official record.
Turning to his description of Todar Mal’s severity, it
is to my mind impossible to read the appointment of the
Imperial Commissioner in any other sense than as showing
that Akbar thought the Raja had gone too far. Todar
Mal’s proceedings, as described by Badaiini, were obviously
a revival of the old, ferocious, process of audit called
muhdsaba, which we have seen in operation in the fourteenth
century. The process was not yet obsolete, for the same
writer tells us (ii. 280) that in Bengal Muzaffar Khin
“practised muhdsaba according to the ancient custom’:
and it is perhaps significant that some of the cases which
the Commissioner was appointed to settle dated from the
time when that officer was working in the Revenue Ministry.
These proceedings had clearly been dragging on for years,
collectors being brought to account with repeated floggings
and tortures in the old style, till Akbar decided to bring
the matter to a close.
This view is entirely borne out by the nature of the Commissioner’s
 proposals. The document is exceedingly obscure,
 dealing, as it does, with minute details of the relations
between the Ministry and the local staff; but its general
purport 1s correctly represented in the statement that it
was designed to make the position of a collector tolerable.
We may infer from its terms that, in the practice of the
period, each individual collector was held personally responsible
 for the revenue assessed on his charge; but that
the “check on receipts,” to use the modern administrative
phrase, was occasional rather than continuous. That is
to say, a collector was left for some time with an open
account, which was audited, at the Ministry and not locally,
on the occasion of his removal or transfer, or else when he
was called to headquarters for the purpose; he had then to
satisfy the auditors that he had collected and paid to the
treasury all that was due, or, failing that, to make good the
sum for which he could not account satisfactorily.
Reading the Commissioner’s report in the light of this