THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 151
is the recognition that it might be better to be on the cash-
list than to have an Assignment. No such preference is
suggested by the records of the earlier period, during which
all high and favoured officers received Assignments as a
matter of course, while the only changes in conditions re-
corded in the chronicles during the interval were on the
whole in favour of the assignees.
One of these changes related to a practice by which the
assignees were required to pay for the keep of the animals
in the Imperial stables! This practice became a serious
burden during the reign of Aurangzeb, when the income
from Assignments was declining, so that the demand made
by the stables on an individual might even exceed the total
he was able to collect; but under Shah Alam these charges
were so adjusted that no grievance remained. The other,
and more important, change in practice was the dis-
appearance of the audit. During the seventeenth century,
it was the duty of the provincial Diwan to see that assignees
id not retain more than the sums to which they were en-
titled, and to recover any excess for the treasury. On the
other hand, an assignee could claim to be reimbursed for
deficiency in his actual Income arising from certain causes,
though it was difficult to establish such claims in the face
of the determined opposition of the accountants. An
Assignment thus involved a periodical contest of wits, in
which the assignee needed to employ competent agents,
and probably to spend money freely on bribery, if he was to
retain what he had succeeded .in collecting; but during
Aurangzeb’s reign the practice gradually decayed, and the
audit-procedure had become obsolete when Khwafi Khan
wrote.?
The reasons for the unpopularity of Assignments must
then be sought, not in changes in administrative practice,
but in the conditions of the time, the decline in agricultural
production, and the weakening of the central authority.
1 Khwafi, ii. 602.
! For this complicated subject see Tuzuk, 22, 89, 190, 399; Salih, 319;
Saqi, 234; Khwafi, i. 753, il. 87, 397. That a recovery might be sub-
stantial in amount appears from the record in Saqi, 170, that Shiyista
Khan was surcharged 132 lakhs of rupees for what he had collected ip
sxcess of his authorised Income while Viceroy of Bengal.
