THE LAST PHASE IN NORTHERN INDIA 159 
The peasants, on the other hand, were slow to come for- 
ward, deterred partly by ignorance, partly by the require- 
ment that they should engage for a term of years to pay a 
~ash-revenue based on the existing standards, which left 
no margin for unfavourable seasons. At first, many dubious 
claims were recognised, but the new ‘‘owners” frequently 
failed to pay the revenue for which they had engaged, and 
were summarily displaced; and for a short time the whole 
position was unstable. The details of this period, and of the 
gradual approach to stability lie beyond the scope of this 
essay; my only reason for referring to these topics is that 
they explain why it is impossible to present anything like a 
quantitative account of the position at the end of the 
Moslem period, to say with precision what districts or 
parganas were held in what tenure, or what portions of 
agricultural land were liable to what burdens. 
Leaving quantity aside, it is possible to describe the 
position at the beginning of the period of British rule; but 
the records available for this purpose are, as 1 have said, 
treacherous, and make it very easy for the student to go 
seriously wrong. As usual, the main difficulty is the ter- 
minology. The earliest administrators brought with them 
the technical vocabulary of Bengal, so far as they had 
succeeded in acquiring it, and applied the terms to things 
which looked like the originals; but appearances were some- 
times misleading, things were found for which Bengal 
supplied no names, words had acquired different meanings 
in different places, and, as time went on, in the mouths of 
different officers; and the confusion became so great that 
Holt Mackenzie, the Secretary to the Government of India, 
writing in the year 1819, suggested that in issuing Regula- 
tions it would be advisable “to adopt the use of artificial 
words, barbarous as they may seem, and altogether to avoid 
the use of terms already in use until the uniformity of their 
t Rev. Sel. i. 131. As examples of the pitfalls in these records it may 
be noted that the familiar term khudkasht is often applied in the sense 
now accepted to land cultivated by a landholder, but more frequently it 
means land held by a resident peasant who is not a landholder. Asami 
is applied to two different classes of peasants, as Mackenzie points out. 
What he does not mention is that he himself uses zamindar in at least 
three senses, to denote (a) what I call Chiefs, (b) a particular class of 
peasants, (¢) persons of whatever class allowed to engage for the revenue 
of a village.