56 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
bankers at the capital who specialised in this business, and 
who made a handsome income out of it. The difference 
might be material to the revenue-payers, but it does not 
affect the matter with which we are immediately concerned, 
that in this reign the bulk of the revenue was assigned.! 
The wide extension of the practice of Assignment brings 
us to a technical but important question of procedure, 
which, in the absence of any recognised name, I shall describe 
as Valuation. The salaries of officers, and the pay of 
troopers, were fixed in cash: the revenue-Demand, assessed 
by Sharing, necessarily varied from season to season with 
the area sown and with the yield at harvest: and the duty 
of the Revenue Ministry in allotting Assignments was thus 
to see that each claimant received a fluctuating source of 
income equivalent on the whole to the amount of his fixed 
claim. For this purpose, the actual Demand of any par- 
ticular year would not serve as a standard; if a man was 
entitled to, say, 5000 tankas yearly, it would not suffice 
to assign to him an area which had yielded 5000 tankas in 
the previous year, because this figure might be altogether 
exceptional. Wherever then the Assignment system pre- 
vailed, there must have been some sort of calculation and 
record of the standard, or average, Income which villages 
and parganas could be expected to yield, one year with 
another, to the assignee; the future Income, in fact, had to 
be valued in order that claims upon the State might be 
met; and it is this process, together with the record of it, 
which I denote by the term Valuation. We must think of 
a list of the parganas and villages of the kingdom, maintained 
in the Revenue Ministry, and showing the value of each from 
this .point of view: as each order for an Assignment was 
received, ‘the task of the Ministry would be to find in this 
list an available area with a Valuation equivalent to that 
* Afif uniformly speaks of the troopers’ villages in the same language 
as he uses of ordinary Assignments, and his account (pp. 220, 1) of the way 
in which the army was refitted in Gujarat implies that the troopers were 
dependent on supplies from their villages, and not from financiers. The 
passage (p. 296) regarding the documents (it/dg) was read by Dowson 
(Elliot, iii. 346) as describing three methods of paying the troops (a) As- 
signment, (b) cash, (c) itlag: while Irvine (Imperial Gazetteer, ii. 365) 
identified (c) with (a), but his language indicates some lack of confidence. 
The passage is so obscure that I can form no opinion on the point.