Akbar’s Revenue Reforms: Todar Mal and the Zabti System
The land revenue reforms associated with the reign of Akbar the Great and his finance minister Raja Todar Mal represent the most important single reorganization of agrarian assessment in pre-colonial India. Carried out between the late 1560s and the 1590s, the reforms replaced a patchwork of regional and local practices with a standardized, survey-based, and largely cash-based system of demand, and the resulting framework remained the working basis of Mughal fiscal administration for the next century and a half. This page treats the pre-Akbari inheritance, the failure of the early kankut experiment, the introduction of the zabti system, the parallel shahbaz khani method, the measurement of land, the classification of soils, the schedule of revenue demand, and the role of the qanungo. The broader institutional setting is surveyed in the Mughal administration overview, and the fiscal counterpart of the system is treated in connection with the mansabdari and jagir assignment.
The Pre-Akbari Inheritance
The agrarian assessment inherited by Akbar from the Delhi Sultanate, the early Mughal governors, and the regional sultanates of Malwa, Gujarat, Bengal, and the Deccan was highly variable. The dominant medieval practice in the Indo-Gangetic plain had been a flexible sharing of the standing crop, the batai or ghalla-bakshi system, in which state officials either watched the crop in the field or accepted a stipulated share of the harvest from the cultivator, and the share fluctuated between one-third and one-half of the produce. A second practice was the nasaq or rough estimate, in which the assessment was fixed in cash on the basis of an estimate of the village area and the customary produce.
The pre-Akbari system was not, in its own terms, defective. The batai system had the great merit of adjusting the demand to the actual harvest and was less vulnerable than fixed-cash assessment to the recurrent Indian problem of fluctuating yields. Its defects, however, were substantial. The system required a large body of honest and well-trained harvest supervisors; it gave the cultivator strong incentives to conceal the size of his harvest; it made the state dependent on the personal probity of countless local officials; and it left the central government uncertain, year by year, of the size of its income.
The Failure of the Kankut System
The first systematic attempt at reform is associated with the early years of Akbar’s personal rule, after the dismissal of the regent Bairam Khan in 1560. The method adopted is known as the kankut system. Under kankut, a state official, generally the qanungo or a specially appointed assessor, was expected to walk the fields of the village, to estimate the area sown to each crop, to forecast the yield, and to arrive at a lump sum of revenue in cash after a process of consultation with the cultivators.
The kankut system had the advantage of speed. It did not require the elaborate and expensive survey that the later zabti system would entail, and it could be introduced rapidly across a wide territory. Its disadvantage, in the eyes of Akbar’s centralizing advisers, was that it was local in its standards and unverifiable from the centre. By the early 1570s the kankut system had been judged a failure, and Akbar authorized a comprehensive review of the basis of assessment. The review was entrusted to a series of finance ministers, of whom the most important was Raja Todar Mal, a Khatri nobleman of long administrative experience.
The Zabti System
The method that emerged from this review is known as the zabti system, the term deriving from the Arabic and Persian word for a written, fixed assessment. The zabti system rested on three procedural elements: a measurement of the cultivated area, a classification of the land by soil type, and the application of a schedule of rates per unit area to the measured area. The work of measurement, classification, and rate-setting was carried out in a continuous process of surveying, beginning in the 1570s and reaching a first culmination in the great survey of the 1580s whose results were incorporated in the Ain-i-Akbari by Abu’l Fazl in the 1590s.
The survey was carried out by a team of imperial officers, the most important of whom were the amil or revenue collector, the qanungo or hereditary keeper of the land records, the bitikchi or writer, and a body of measurers equipped with the bamboo jarib and the rope tanab. The measurement was carried out village by village, and the resulting area, broken down by soil class, was recorded in a village register, the wajib-ul-arz or customary roll, a copy of which was deposited with the village authorities, a copy with the qanungo, and a copy with the central revenue office.
The Classification of Soils
The classification of soils was a central feature of the zabti system. The principal category was polaj, land cultivated regularly and never allowed to lie fallow. The polaj land was the most valuable, and the assessment per bigha was highest. The second category was parauti, land left fallow for one to two years between cultivations. The third was chachar, land left fallow for three or four years. The fourth was banjar, land left uncultivated for five years or more, divided into banjar-i-qilq (occasionally cultivated) and banjar-i-muwat (effectively uncultivated). The schedule of rates per bigha was calibrated to the soil class.
The schedule of rates is recorded in the Ain-i-Akbari in considerable detail. The rates varied from crop to crop as well as from soil to soil, and the basic idea was to translate the customary produce of each soil class, in normal years, into a cash assessment. The schedule was not a uniform national rate but a regional one.
The Revenue Demand
The revenue demand under the zabti system was fixed, in the standard formulation attributed to Todar Mal, at one-third of the average produce. The figure of one-third was not original to Akbar; it derived from the customary practice of the Delhi Sultanate and had the support of the sharia, which treated one-third as the maximum just demand of an Islamic ruler over non-Muslim subjects. The Mughal practice, however, was to demand a fixed cash sum per bigha rather than a one-third share of the actual harvest, and the cash sum was computed on the basis of the average yield over a number of years and the average price over a similar period. The cultivator thus retained any surplus arising from an unusually good harvest or an unusually favourable price, and the state bore the loss of an unusually bad harvest.
The cash demand could be paid in cash or, where the cultivator lacked the necessary coin, in kind at a stipulated conversion ratio. The state preferred cash, but the conversion in kind was permitted in practice, and the batai or crop-sharing method continued in use in many regions where the zabti system was impractical.
The Shahbaz Khani Method
In addition to the zabti system, Akbar’s government experimented with a parallel method known as the shahbaz khani or, less commonly, the karori method. The method is associated with Shahbaz Khan, a Mughal officer who served as the faujdar of parts of the Punjab and the upper Doab in the 1570s, and is sometimes said to have been the model from which the zabti system was derived. Like the zabti, the shahbaz khani rested on a measurement of the land, but the schedule of rates was calibrated more closely to the actual produce of each field. The method was eventually merged into the broader zabti framework.
The Role of the Qanungo
The administrative pivot of the zabti system was the qanungo, the hereditary keeper of the village-level land records. The office existed in parts of north India under the Delhi Sultanate, and Akbar’s reform was to standardize it, to extend it to all the surveyed provinces, and to insert the qanungo into a regular chain of accountability reaching from the village to the imperial diwan in Agra. The qanungo of a pargana was responsible for the records of all the villages in the pargana, the qanungo of a sarkar for those of the parganas in his charge, and the qanungo of a subah for those of the sarkars of the province. The periodic re-survey, generally every five to ten years, was conducted under his supervision.
The reforms of Akbar transformed the basis of agrarian assessment in north India, and the legacy of the zabti framework survived, in modified form, in the revenue settlements of the early British East India Company. The local administrative officers who implemented the assessment are surveyed in the local administration page.
Sources
- Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963; rev. 1999), ch. 5.
- S.A. Khan, The Khalisa Land and the Crown Servants under Akbar (1980).
- Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, trans. Blochmann/Jarrett (1873–1927), vol. II.