THE 13tH AND 141tH CENTURIES 23 
“Province” I mean a primary division of the kingdom, and 
by “Governor” an officer who received orders directly from 
the King or the Ministers at Court. These provinces varied 
in number with the size of the kingdom, and possibly also 
with its development; but most of them appear in the 
chronicles with sufficient regularity to be regarded as per- 
manent, though two or more might on occasion be held by 
a single Governor. Apart from the ordinary provinces, 
two particular regions require separate notice. 
1. The Delhi Country! (havali-i Dehli). This region 
was bounded on the East by the Jumna, and on the North 
by the Siwaliks, or rather by the line of forest at their foot. 
On the South it marched with Mewat, a fluctuating boun- 
dary, because at times the turbulent Mewatis threatened 
Delhi itself, and at others they were penned up in the 
Rajputana hills, but they were never really subdued. On 
the West, it was bounded by the provinces of Sirhind, 
Samana, and Hansi (known later as Hissar). Its adminis- 
trative position was exceptional in that it had no Governor, 
but was directly under the Revenue Ministry. 
2. The River Country. This region is described in the 
chronicles as “between the two rivers,” and translators 
have usually written of it as ‘the Doab.” That rendering 
is, however, misleading, because in modern usage the Doab 
extends to Allahabad, while the region referred to by the 
chroniclers was much smaller; it lay between the Ganges 
and the Jumna, and on the North it extended to the sub- 
montane forest, but on the South it did not reach much 
further than Aligarh. During the thirteenth century, this 
region was divided into three provinces, Meerut, Baran 
(now Bulandshahr), and Kol (now Aligarh); but Alauddin 
brought it directly under the Revenue Ministry on the same 
footing as the Delhi country. In a later section we shall 
see how it was desolated under Muhammad Tughlaq. 
These two regions formed the heart of the kingdom. The 
provinces which can be identified outside their limits are 
\ The word havali occurs occasionally in the general sense of ‘neigh 
pourhood,” but in many passages it denotes what was obviously a specific 
administrative area. It should not be identified with the subdivision 
known 1n the Mogul period as Haveli-i Dehli. which was much less 
swtangive