Introduction. 
THIS book may be described as an essay in institutional 
history. During the main period of Moslem rule in India, 
lasting from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, a 
kingdom had three essential constituents, the Sovereign 
who ruled it, the Army which supported the throne, and 
the Peasantry which paid for both; and the relation sub- 
sisting between these entities was aptly presented in an 
aphorism current in the early days, that “troops and 
peasants are the two arms of the kingdom.” The dynastic 
and military history of the period is now tolerably accessible 
to students, but it is impossible to obtain from the existing 
literature a general or connected view of the position of 
the peasants in their relations with the State, and it is this 
gap which I now attempt to fill. 
The contents of my essay will possibly come as something 
of a surprise to readers who are interested primarily in the 
agrarian questions of the present day, and who may expect 
to find it occupied mainly by discussions of the rights 
enjoyed or claimed by landholders and their tenants. The 
prominence of questions of right is, however, a recent 
development in Indian agrarian history, and belongs almost 
entirely to the British period: in Moslem India, as in the 
India of the Hindus, the agrarian system was a matter of 
duties rather than rights. At its root lay the conception 
that it was the duty of the peasants to till the soil, and pay 
a share of their produce to the State; so far as private rights 
or claims were recognised, they were subordinate to this 
fundamental obligation. The main subject-matter of my 
essay is consequently an examination of the methods by 
which the State’s share of the peasant’s produce was 
assessed and collected, and of the arrangements under 
which portions of it were alienated in favour of the classes 
whom I describe collectively as Intermediaries. 
It is not part of my present purpose to trace in detail 
the transition from the Moslem system to that which now