INTRODUCTION 
Accordingly, in two earlier books, India at the death of 
Akbar, and From Akbar to Aurangzeb, 1 included condensed 
accounts of the relations which at that period subsisted 
between the administration and the peasants. These 
accounts were based mainly on the original authorities, but, 
in interpreting the obscure and crabbed texts, I followed 
the work of previous students, who I assumed had mastered 
the technical terminology of the subject; and, usually 
accepting their renderings, I offered a description of the 
main lines of the agrarian administration, reserving for 
subsequent study some difficulties which appeared to be 
matters of detail. 
On returning to the subject, I found that these apparent 
details increased in importance when scrutinised more 
closely; and I was driven gradually to the conclusion that 
the guides I had accepted, Blochmann, Jarrett, Dawson, 
and other writers of the last century, busied, as they were, in 
exploring an entirely unknown field, had not fully mastered 
the terminology employed in the literature of the period, 
but had borrowed from modern practice in India, or some- 
times from medieval practice in Europe, terms of art, or 
picturesque phrases, which did not always give the precise 
meaning of the originals, and occasionally involved serious 
misrepresentation. It was necessary, therefore, to study the 
terminology afresh; and for this purpose I worked through 
the printed literature of the period, together with such 
relevant manuscripts as I found in this country, extracting 
every passage in’ which an apparently technical term 
occurred, and then bringing the passages together, and 
inferring from them the meaning, or meanings, borne by 
each term at different periods, or in different parts of India. 
The results obtained in the course of this study form the 
basis of the present essay, and sufficient illustrations of 
my methods will be found in the notes and appendices; 
but at the outset it may be well to insist on the fact that 
the terminology employed in the literature is fluid, so that 
both time and place may condition the interpretation of a 
particular passage. The Persian language, as -it was used 
in Moslem India, possessed a wealth of synonyms; and 
most of the authorities observed what may be described as