THE OUTLYING REGIONS 193 
make them [the Towns] flourish,” a phrase which points to 
the development of vacant land. It would be rash to use 
the word “permanent” of any transaction entered into by 
a government of the period; but it is clear that the fixed 
payment had already become established when the Company 
acquired its rights, and the question of possible future en- 
hancement does not appear to have been raised in the course 
of the negotiations. Whatever the tenure really was, the 
fact remains that the origin of the early English use of the 
word zamindar is to be found in connection with this tran- 
saction; whether the Company’s tenure was technically 
1jara or something else, the English in Calcutta were led to 
call it zamindari, and they became habituated to the word 
in the sense of collecting rents from tenants and paying 
revenue to government—the sense which later on they 
carried into Northern India. 
Whether this sense of the term prevailed generally in 
Bengal, or was confined to the neighbourhood of the Higli, 
is a question to which I cannot give a definite answer based 
on contemporary sources. I have not had opportunities 
of studying any records of the local history during the 
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and I cannot 
offer a confident account of what happened in the province 
at large during the interval between the preparation of the 
Ain and the appointment of the East India Company as 
Diwan in the year 1765. If, however, we may accept 
Sir John Shore's later account! as correctly representing the 
facts of that period, the word zamindar carried throughout 
Bengal the wider meaning which, we have seen, was current 
in Calcutta. Shore recognised that the zamindars of 
Akbar’s time were what I have called Chiefs, that is to say, 
men with claims antecedent to the establishment of the 
Mogul government, and enjoying hereditary positions subject 
to recognition by the Emperor. The great majority of the 
The translation of the former speaks of ‘‘renting,’” but in the latter the 
term used is ‘farming’; and, since the translations were made at the same 
time, and presumably by the same staff, the difference may well indicate 
a difference of language in the originals. I have failed to trace a Persian 
version of this order, and the question cannot therefore be settled definitely, 
but it is possible that ‘‘farming’’ in the translation may represent ijéra 
In the missing original. 
1 Shore’s Minute of 2nd April, 1788, reprinted in Firminger, ii. 737.