THE SAYYID AND AFGHAN DYNASTIES 75
while for purposes of control the parganas were grouped
in districts, now named sarkdr. The general attitude of
the administration is shown in the instructions given to the
district officers that ‘if the people, from any lawlessness or
rebellious spirit, created a disturbance regarding the col-
lection of the revenue, they were so to eradicate and destroy
them with punishment and chastisement that their wicked-
ness and rebellion should not spread to others,”’—an obvious
restatement of the principle on which Sher Shah had acted
when he was managing his father’s Assignment. In regard
to assessment, however, the King's views had changed.
As manager, he had allowed the peasants to choose the
method they preferred; as King, he imposed the method of
Measurement on practically the whole of his dominions,
and various passages show that its successful operation was
the test by which his officers were judged. Thus in the
Punjab hills, the Governor held such firm possession “that
no man dared to breathe in opposition to him, and he col-
lected the revenue by measurement of land from the hill
people”; while the Governor of Sambhal (in Rohilkhand)
“so humbled and overcame by the sword the contumacious
zamindars [Chiefs] of those parts that they did not rebel
even when he ordered them to cut down their jungles .. .
and they reformed and repented them of their thieving
and highway robberies, and they paid in at the city their
revenue according to the measurements.”!
Measurement then was enforced even in notoriously
rebellious tracts, and the only recorded exception to its
application is in the distant country round Multan, which
had suffered greatly from disorder, and the acquisition of
which gave peculiar pleasure to the King. Here the
Governor was ordered to repeople the country, to observe
the local customs, and to take only a fourth share of the
produce as revenue.! The conditions obviously justified
exceptional treatment in this tract, and there may also
have been exceptions elsewhere, though none are recorded;
but there can be no doubt that Measurement was the general
rule in practice, and not merely in theory.
! Elliot, iv. 415, 416.
t Elliot, iv. 399: Makhzan-i Afghani, 1.0. (Ethé) 60, f. 121.
