APPENDIX B 
221 
insists (pp. 556, 574) on the contrast furnished by the wise and 
lenient administration of Firtiz, under whom ‘no Wali or 
Muqti” came to ruin from this cause. The processes of audit 
and recovery thus varied in point of severity, but they were 
throughout a normal feature of the administration. 
This statement of the Muqti’s position indicates on the face 
of it a purely bureaucratic organisation. We have officers 
posted to their charges by the King, and transferred, removed, 
or punished, at his pleasure, administering their charges under 
his orders, and subjected to the strict financial control of the 
Revenue Ministry. None of these features has any counterpart 
in the feudal system of Europe; and, as a student of European 
history to whom I showed the foregoing summary observed, 
the analogy is not with the feudal organisation, but with the 
bureaucracies which rulers like Henry II of England attempted 
to set up as an alternative to feudalism. The use of feudal 
terminology was presumably inspired by the fact that some of 
the nobles of the Delhi kingdom occasionally behaved like feudal 
barons, that is to say, they rebelled, or took sides in disputed 
successions to the throne; but, in Asia at least, bureaucrats can 
rebel as well as barons, and the analogy is much too slight and 
superficial to justify the importation of feudal terms and all 
the misleading ideas which they connote. The kingdom was not 
a mixture of bureaucracy with feudalism: its administration 
was bureaucratic throughout. 
The question remains whether there were differences in status 
or functions between the Wali and the Muqti. The chronicles 
mention a Wali so rarely that it is impossible to prepare from 
them a statement similar to what has been offered for the Mugqti. 
The constantly recurring double phrases, walis and mugqtis, or 
iqtas and wildyats, show that the two institutions were, at any 
rate, of the same general nature, but they cannot be pressed so 
far as to exclude the possibility of differences in‘detail. A recent 
writer has stated that the difference was one of distance from the 
capital! the nearer provinces being iqtis and the remote ones 
* Qanungo’s Sher Shah, p. 349, 350. Barni, however, applies the term 
wildyat to provinces near Delhi such as Baran (p..58), Amroha (p. 58), or 
Samana (p. 483); while Multan (p. 584) and Marhat, or the Maratha 
country (p. 390) are described as iqti. Some of the distant provinces had 
apparently a different status in parts of the fourteenth century, being 
under a Minister (Vazir) instead of a Governor (Barni, 379, 397, 454, &c.), 
but they cannot be distinguished either as wilavats or as igtis.