THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 153 
the Administration was gradually losing its hold on the 
-ountry, officials were getting out of hand, and strong men 
were beginning to assume an attitude of independence. 
Khwafi Khan tells a story (ii. 861), which is perhaps typical 
of what was going on. For some years before 1719, an 
Afghan named Husain Khan had gone into rebellion, and 
taken possession of some parganas in the neighbourhood of 
Lahore: the officials employed by the State, and by the 
assignees, were driven out of their charges, the Viceroy’s 
troops were more than once defeated, and Husain Khan 
was for a time practically independent, but ultimately he 
was killed in a skirmish with the Viceroy. Further South 
we get glimpses of the revolt of the Jats near Agra, which 
resulted eventually in the establishment of the State of 
Bharatpur! The local traditions of Oudh show that, by 
the end of the seventeenth century, Chiefs and officials 
alike were engaging in the struggle for territory ;? and these 
incidents cannot be regarded as exceptional. An assignee 
could no longer rely on the authority of the Emperor; he 
had to expect that other claimants to the revenue would 
appear, and he must either repel them by force, or submit 
to the loss of his expected Income. 
The eighteenth century was thus a period when de facto 
possession came to count for much more than title, and it 
was characterised by an apparent assimilation among the 
different classes of Intermediaries, of the kind which, as 
we have seen, occurred in the disorganisation of the Delhi 
kingdom after the death of Firiiz. This assimilation is 
ceflected in the history of the word Taluq,® which may be 
rendered as Dependency. The word and its derivatives 
appear occasionally in the earlier chronicles as denoting 
the relationship between a person and his position, whether 
official or territorial, but there is no sign of .any specialised 
t Khwafi, ii. In 1683, Khin Jahan was sent from the Deccan to punish 
the Jats (316). He failed, and there was more trouble in 1690 (394). 
The chronicler does not pursue the subject, but the story of the rise of the 
State can be read in the Imperial Gazetteer, viii. 74. 
* See, e.g., W. C. Benett, The Chief Clans of the Roy Bareilly District 
(revised edition, 1895), p. 36 ff. 
' More precisely ta‘allug. The derivative word taluqdar, ‘holder of a 
talug,” though familiar, is best avoided in a general discussion. because 
ts meaning now varies in different provinces.