THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 127 
on in the Revenue Ministry. A few passages, however, 
from this work require notice. One is the seventh clause 
of the regulations which he issued (Tuzuk, 4) on his accession 
to the throne, to the effect that officials and assignees 
should not take peasants’ land into their own cultivation 
by force. We may infer from this that cases of the kind 
had occurred, and had given rise to scandal; in most parts 
of the Empire there was productive land to spare, but there 
would often be choice plots coveted for their productivity 
or situation, as Ahab coveted Naboth’s vineyard, and it is 
in accordance with what we know of Jahangir’s character 
that he should have condemned such conduct, though we 
cannot be confident that his orders were vigorously enforced. 
[n another passage! the Emperor, whose taste for choice 
fruit is notorious, states that fruit-trees were, and had 
always been, free of any demand ior revenue, and that a 
garden planted on cultivated land was forthwith exempted 
from assessment; but the language indicates, what is 
known from other sources, that a cess on fruit-trees was 
among the items of miscellaneous revenue which survived 
repeated prohibitions. 
The only definite innovation which Jahangir records? is 
the institution of the Grant-under-seal (dltamgha), which is 
of interest as constituting the nearest approach to land- 
ownership, in the modern sense, which appears during the 
Mogul period. The scope of such Grants was limited to 
the case where a deserving officer applied for a grant of his 
“home,” that is to say, of the village or pargana in which 
he was born: in this case the grant was to be made under 
a particular form of seal, and was not to be altered or 
resumed, so that, by contrast with the other tenures of the 
period, it may be regarded as permanent, though naturally 
an absolute Emperor could not be prevented from annulling 
it. This Grant-under-seal, it may be noted, was not an 
t Tuzuk, 252. The cess on fruit-trees is called sar-darakhsi; Akbar had 
remitted this impost (Ain, i. 3o1). 
' Tuzuk, 10; Badshahnama, II. 409. At the opening of the British 
period claims to dltamgha-grants were not uncommon, but the designation 
had come to be used loosely during the disorders of the eighteenth century; 
thus the grant of the Diwini of Bengal to the East India Company was 
described as idltamgha (Aitchison’s Treaties (1892), i. 56), but it cannot 
possibly be brought within the original definition.