200 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM OF MOSLEM INDIA 
from time to time, and which in fact operated to maintain 
the claim of the State to a share in the produce of the 
country, though the developments which had occurred 
necessarily tended to obscure the fundamental nature of 
that claim. It was through this obscurity that the earliest 
British administrators had to grope their way to a workable 
agrarian system.