The Iqta System: From Sultanate to Mughal India
The iqta was the basic instrument of revenue assignment in the medieval Islamic empires, and the system, in its various forms, was the principal fiscal mechanism of the Delhi Sultanate and of the early Mughal empire. The term iqta derives from the Arabic root q-t-’, meaning to cut, and refers to a portion of the public revenue assigned by the sovereign to a particular officer in lieu of a cash salary. The system had a long pre-Mughal history in the caliphate, in the Iranian and Central Asian successor states, and in the Sultanate of Delhi, and its evolution under the Mughals is essential to an understanding of both the mansabdari system and the land revenue administration. The present page treats the Arabic and Islamic origins, the Sultanate-era practice, the difference between the iqta and the later jagir, the evolution under the Mughals, the regional variations, and the decline of the system.
The Arabic and Islamic Origins
The iqta originated in the early Islamic caliphate as a device for the payment of the standing army and the provincial administration. Under the Umayyads and the early Abbasids, the standard practice was to assign to a military officer or a provincial governor the right to collect the land tax and other revenues of a specified district, in return for a stipulated payment to the central treasury and the maintenance of a stipulated number of troops. The assignment was, in principle, revocable, and the recipient held it as an officer of the sovereign rather than as a proprietor. The conceptual framework of the iqta as a public revenue assignment, distinct from private property, was thus established at the very beginning of the Islamic fiscal tradition.
The practice of iqta was developed and systematized in the Iranian and Turanian successor states of the caliphate, the Samanids, the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, and the Khwarezm-shahs. The Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, in the late eleventh century, produced the classic treatise on the system, the Siyasat-nama, and the Seljuk practice of assigning military iqtas to Turkish officers, generally in regions distant from the officer’s tribal homeland, became the model for the later Indo-Persian state.
The Delhi Sultanate
The iqta was introduced into India with the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the early thirteenth century, and the system was the principal fiscal mechanism of the sultans from the time of Iltutmish to the time of Muhammad bin Tughluq. The sultans, drawing on the Turko-Afghan practice, assigned to military commanders and provincial governors large iqtas, sometimes covering entire provinces, in return for the maintenance of specified contingents and the payment of a stipulated surplus to the central treasury. The most important innovation of the Sultanate was the regularization of the iqta through a system of measurement and assessment, the predecessor of the later zabti system treated in connection with Akbar’s revenue reforms.
The Sultanate iqta was, in its classical form, a conditional and revocable assignment. The recipient, the iqtadar or muqti, did not own the land; he collected the revenue on behalf of the sovereign and transmitted a stipulated portion to the treasury. The assignment was generally renewed every three to four years, and the muqti could be transferred from one iqta to another at the sultan’s pleasure. The system had the great administrative virtue of paying the army and the provincial administration without requiring a large cash treasury.
The Sultanate iqta was not, however, immune to the chronic problem of hereditary entrenchment. By the fourteenth century, the muqtis of many regions had begun to treat their iqtas as hereditary property, and the sultanate was repeatedly weakened by the defection of provincial governors. By the time of Babur’s invasion, the iqta system had lost much of its original flexibility, and the successor states of the sultanate had all developed hereditary or semi-hereditary forms of the assignment.
The Iqta and the Jagir
The difference between the iqta of the Sultanate and the jagir of the Mughal empire is a matter of definition as well as of substance. The Mughal jagir, in its classical form, was a revenue assignment granted to a mansabdar in lieu of cash salary and was held for as long as the mansabdar held the rank. The jagir was conditional, revocable, and non-hereditary, and the mansabdar was expected to maintain from the proceeds of the jagir the sawar or cavalry contingent required by his rank.
The principal differences were three. First, the Mughal jagir was integrated into a comprehensive ranking system, the mansabdari, that did not exist under the sultanate. The mansabdar was a graded officer of the imperial service, and the jagir was the instrument by which the rank was paid. Second, the Mughal state developed a more elaborate and standardized system of revenue assessment, the zabti system, that fixed the value of the jagir more precisely than the sultanate had fixed the value of the iqta. Third, the Mughal state maintained a more active and more centralized supervision of the jagir assignments, with a dedicated office, the diwan’s office, and a continuous process of inspection, transfer, and reassignment.
The two systems thus shared a common conceptual core but differed in the degree of standardization, the rigor of assessment, and the strength of central supervision. The Mughal jagir is in many ways the culmination of the iqta tradition, and the British later described the jagir as the Mughal form of the iqta in their early studies of Indian administration.
The Evolution under the Mughals
The evolution of the iqta into the jagir under the Mughals was a gradual process that occupied the first century of Mughal rule. Under Babur and Humayun, the older iqta practice of the Sultanate continued in substantially its late-medieval form, with the Timurid and early Mughal officers holding large, often hereditary, iqtas in the regions they had conquered. Akbar’s great administrative reforms, including the consolidation of the mansabdari system and the introduction of the zabti revenue system, transformed the older iqta into the new jagir.
The transformation involved several distinct elements. The first was the abolition of hereditary or semi-hereditary iqtas in the core provinces, in favour of conditional and transferable jagirs held by mansabdars. The second was the standardization of the assessment of the revenue of the jagir through the zabti survey. The third was the regularization of the transfer cycle, the practice of moving mansabdars from one jagir to another at intervals of three to four years. The fourth was the development of the watan and tankha distinction, by which jagirs of different kinds were distinguished according to whether they were held in the holder’s home region or in a distant province.
Regional Variations and the Iqta in the Periphery
The iqta in its older Sultanate form survived in several peripheral regions. The Rajput states of Mewar, Marwar, Amber, and other principalities preserved the older iqta tradition, often under the title of bhum, and the Rajput chieftains treated their bhum as a hereditary domain substantially independent of the Mughal centre. The successor states of the sultanate in the east, including the rulers of Bengal, Jaunpur, and Bihar, retained the iqta in various forms until their absorption into the Mughal empire. The frontier regions of the northwest, including Kabul, Kandahar, and Baluchistan, used a more military version of the assignment, often tied to the presence of a Mughal army.
The British, when they took over the administration of India in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, distinguished carefully between the iqta of the older Sultanate type, with its connotations of hereditary regional power, and the jagir of the Mughal type, with its connotations of conditional service. The distinction was preserved in the legal and administrative categories of British India, and the term iqta was generally reserved for the older hereditary assignments, while the term jagir was used for the service assignments of the mansabdari.
The Decline
The decline of the iqta in its older Sultanate sense coincided with the consolidation of the Mughal empire. By the reign of Akbar, the hereditary iqtas of the great noble families had been replaced by the conditional jagirs of the mansabdari, and the iqta in its strict sense had effectively disappeared from the core provinces. The iqta continued in modified form in the peripheral regions and in the successor states of the eighteenth century, and the jagir itself underwent a long crisis in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, treated in connection with the mansabdari system. The British study of the iqta tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an important element in the reconstruction of the history of Indian revenue administration.
Sources
- Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963; rev. 1999), ch. 3.
- Noman Ahmad, The Decline of the Mughal Empire: A Study of the Mughal Iqta System (K.B. Publications, 1997).