18 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA
Arabic or Persian names to the institutions which they
found in existence; and even this process was not carried
out consistently, for in some cases the Indian names were
adopted at once, while in others they eventually ousted the
imported designations. Some details of this development
must be given, because the fluctuating terminology is one
of the chief difficulties in understanding the early chronicles.
To take tho most important person first, there was at the
outset no established term for the individual peasant, but
peasants in the mass were regularly denoted by the Arabic
word ra‘7yat, now naturalised in English as ryot. This
word meant a herd of whatever animals furnished sub-
sistence, and consequently deserved protection,—camels in
the desert, cattle in grazing-country, peasants on arable
land: its transfer in Indian use from the herd to the indi-
vidual did not occur, so far as I can find, until the eighteenth
century at the earliest; and throughout the Moslem period
it must ordinarily be read as a noun of multitude, the plural
forms being interpreted as “herds” rather than “peasants.”
As regards the Chief, usage seems to have developed
gradually. Writing in the middle of the thirteenth century,
Minhaj-ul Sirdj! used only specific Indian terms such as
Rai or Rana: a century later, Ziya Barni? denoted the Chief
usually by &Adt, a word which I have found nowhere else in
the northern literature, and employed zamindar in only a
few passages; but Shams Afif, the next chronicler, used
zaminddr frequently, and thenceforward it is the regular
designation.
For the village, we find the Persian word dekh from the
outset, supplemented later on by the Arabic mauza; but
the aggregate of villages known in Hindi as pargana was
given different names. The earliest writers generally used
the Arabic gasba (not yet specialised in the modern Indian
sense of ‘“town”), but the Hindi designation? appears in
!'T. Nasiri: Rai occurs as early as p. 9, and frequently thereafter, as
does Rana.
‘ Barni uses kk#l in too many passages for citation: zamindar appears
on p. 326 referring to Chiefs outside the kingdom, and on p. 539 it denotes
for the first time Chiefs subject to the King of Delhi. The word khit
is discussed in Appendix C.
3 Afif: the first use is on p. 99.
