CONCLUSION 
205 
usually took the same form. Whether or not cash- 
payment existed before the Moslem conquest is a question 
which must be left to students of the Hindu records, but it 
is certainly one of the characteristic features of the Moslem 
administration. 
When we look at the period as a whole, two figures stand 
put as normally masters of the peasants’ fate. They are 
not the King and the Minister, nor the assessor and collector, 
but the farmer and the assignee. The two institutions were 
not mutually exclusive, for, as we have seen, assignees 
sometimes farmed their Income; but, taken together, they 
formed the backbone of the whole agrarian system. Neither 
institution is inherently bad; both must be judged according 
to their conditions, and, most of all, their duration. As a 
matter of history, in Moslem India the tenure of assignees, 
as of farmers, was ordinarily far too short, and always far 
too uncertain, to justify expenditure of capital or effort 
on a constructive policy of development. The only prudent 
course was that which was in fact usually adopted to take 
whatever the peasants could be made to pay, and leave the 
future to look after itself. In his analysis of the conditions 
prevailing in the middle of the seventeenth century, Bernier 
put the following argument into the mouths of the dominant 
classes with whom he was familiar, officials, assignees, and 
farmers alike: 
“Why should the neglected state of this land create uneasiness 
in our minds? and why should we expend our money and time 
to render it fruitful? We may be deprived of it in a single moment, 
and our exertions would benefit neither ourselves nor our children. 
[et us draw from the soil all the money we can, though the 
peasant should starve or abscond, and we should leave it, when 
commanded to quit, a dreary wilderness.” 
In the circumstances which prevailed, the logic of that 
argument is not open to question; and it may stand as the 
epitaph of the agrarian system to which it was applied. 
I have sometimes been asked by students whether the 
agrarian system prevailing at one epoch or another is to be 
classed as ‘“‘zamindari” or ‘‘ryotwari.”” The question 
involves something of an anachronism, for the clear-cut