194 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
Bengal zamindaris had, however, come into existence after 
Akbar’s reign. At first the position was definitely official, 
that of a revenue collector with certain stated remuneration; 
but the collector developed into a Farmer, paying a fixed 
sum, and making what he could; and then the Farmer be- 
came assimilated by degrees to the Chief, acquiring heredi- 
tary claims, and obtaining the same designation, which thus 
came to cover Chiefs, Farmers, and collectors alike. Ac- 
cording to this account, the Bengal zamindar of the eighteenth 
century was precisely the counterpart of the talugdar of 
Northern India at the same period, a person in possession, 
whatever his title might be. 
This view appears to me to be, at the least, probable; 
but it is not so easy to accept the account of the revenue 
assessments during the same period which became current 
in Calcutta through the labours of James Grant, and which 
is the starting point of most of what has recently been 
published on the subject! Grant’s studies were carried on, 
as he tells us, in Hyderabad, the capital of the State founded 
by Asaf Jah. Here he obtained access to records relating 
to Murshid Quli Khan's reorganisation of the revenue 
system of the Deccan, a portion of which was included 
in Asaf Jah’s territory. In his ‘Political Survey of the 
Northern Circars,” which was written in 1784. he described 
Murshid Quli’s methods with substantial accuracy; but he 
added the erroneous statement that they were a servile 
copy of those which had been introduced in Northern India 
in the time of Akbar by Raja Todar Mal. Shortly after- 
wards, he applied the conclusions reached in the “Political 
Survey” to the affairs of Bengal in his better-known 
“Historical and Comparative Analysis of the Finances of 
Bengal,” the whole argument of which is based on the view 
that Todar Mal made a detailed assessment on the peasants 
throughout Bengal on the lines which Murshid Quli followed 
in the Deccan. 
i Grant's two works were reprinted as Appendices to the Fifth Report 
of the Select Committee on the Affairs of the E. I. Co., 1812, the ‘‘ Survey” 
as Appendix 13, the ‘‘ Analysis’ as Appendix 4. Portions of them have 
been discussed by Archdeacon Firminger in his recent edition of the Fifth 
Report, and by Mr. Ascoli in the Early Revenue History of Bengal, 1917. 
I have examined some of Grant’s work in J.R.A.S,, Jan. 1926, p. 43; but 
when that paper was written, I had not fully realised the ambiguity 
nnderlying the term ‘‘ aggregate.’