THE OUTLYING REGIONS 197 
elaborate detailed assessment attributed to him by 
Grant. 
On this view we should regard the revisions made by 
Shah Shuja and Jafar Khan as corrections of this original 
Valuation, incorporating the territory which had been 
acquired in the interval, and those increments of the figures 
for particular areas which had been made trom time to time. 
This reading is in accordance with the fact that all three 
records were known to Grant under the name of “aggre- 
gates” (jama), the word which is appropriate to Valuations, 
and which would necessarily appear in the titles of such 
records. The idea of Valuation had, however, become 
obsolete before Grant took up his duties in Bengal, and it 
would be natural for a man in his position to understand 
“aggregate” in the alternative sense of Demand, which 
has survived in India into the present century. 
It does not, however, follow from this view that Grant's 
elaborate discussion was entirely irrelevant, because it is 
quite possible that, in the case of Bengal, the Valuation may 
in fact have come to set the standard of the Demand made 
by the State, not indeed on the peasants, as he supposed, 
but on the Intermediaries whom it recognised. In Bengal, 
the position of the provincial Diwan at the beginning of 
the seventeenth century must have been particularly diffi- 
cult. His duty was to raise the maximum revenue from 
the Reserved area, which, on Grant’s figures,! considerably 
exceeded the area given in Assignment; but he had, so far 
as we can see, absolutely nothing in the way of standards 
by which to check the work of the local assessors, beyond 
the Valuation made when Bengal was brought into the 
Empire. To have allowed the assessors a free hand would 
have been utterly at variance with Mogul administrative 
practice, and it would be the obvious course to check their 
assessments by the Valuation, the only record available in 
the Diwan’s office, and to call for explanations in cases 
where the annual assessments fell below that standard. 
For the next half century, the assessments, taken as a 
! Analysis, p. 255 ff. I am doubtful as to the significance of Grant's 
figures for Assignments, which do not explain themselves, and can be 
interpreted in more ways than one; but in any case the Reserved areas 
rere important.