Land Revenue Administration under the Mughals

Land as the Main Tax Base

The Mughal economy was overwhelmingly agrarian, and the state’s claim on the agricultural surplus was, in most years, the dominant fiscal fact. The official theory, articulated in the Ain-i-Akbari and derived from pre-Islamic Persian and Islamic political thought, located the state as the ultimate owner of the land, the cultivator as a tenant-at-will, and the intermediate landholders, the zamindars, as the agents through whom the state’s share was collected. In practice, this theory was substantially modified by the actual conditions of Indian agrarian society, and the Mughal state accommodated a wide range of tenurial arrangements, from peasant proprietors cultivating their own lands to great zamindari estates and temple endowments. The result was a fiscal system that, in its broad outlines, was recognizably Mughal but in its local details varied enormously from region to region.

The principal sources for the study of the Mughal revenue system are Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri of Jahangir, the Padshahnama of Abdul Hamid Lahori and Muhammad Waris, the chronicles of later Mughal historians, the rich corpus of firmans and parwanahs in provincial archives, and the detailed local studies produced by revenue officers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The modern reconstruction of the system, pioneered by Jadunath Sarkar, Irfan Habib, and other historians, has illuminated the operation of the revenue administration at a level of detail unmatched for most pre-modern states.

The Sher Shah Suri Precedent

The Mughal revenue system was built, in substantial part, on the administrative inheritance of the Suri dynasty, which ruled north India between 1540 and 1555. Sher Shah Suri, the most capable of the Suri sultans, had carried out an ambitious revenue settlement that combined careful measurement of the land, classification of soils, and a uniform schedule of rates. The settlement, applied to the core provinces of the empire and described in part by the historian Abbas Sarwani in the Tarikh-i-Sher Shahi, established the basic framework that Akbar inherited. The Mughals retained the technical vocabulary of the Suri settlement, the procedures for measurement and assessment, and many of the categories of land and revenue official.

Akbar is reported to have studied the Suri system with care, and many of the procedures described in the Ain-i-Akbari can be traced back to Suri practice. The two systems are not identical, however. Akbar’s settlement was, in its mature form, more systematic than the Suri precedent, and the proportion of the produce claimed by the state was generally lower. The Mughal system also incorporated a wider range of regional variations and was applied, over time, to a much larger and more diverse territory.

Akbar’s Reforms under Todar Mal

The most celebrated land revenue settlement of the Mughal period is the rahdari or zabti system associated with the name of Raja Todar Mal, the Hindu revenue expert who served as diwan of the empire under Akbar in the 1570s and 1580s. Todar Mal had earlier served in the administration of Sher Shah Suri, and the experience of the Suri settlement informed the Mughal reforms. The principal features of the settlement are described in the Ain-i-Akbari and are summarized in the history of Akbar page.

The settlement was based on a careful measurement of cultivated land. The jarib, a measuring rod of standardized length, was used to determine the area of each holding, and the results were recorded in the khasra, the village-level register of fields. Soils were classified by productivity into several categories, and a schedule of rates was drawn up for each category. The state’s share was typically one-third of the gross produce for the main cereal crops, with different rates for other crops, and the share could be paid in cash or in kind. The assessment was based on the estimated average yield of a ten-year cycle, and the demand was reviewed periodically, often at intervals of three to five years.

The procedure of assessment was known as the nasaq, and it involved the estimation of the area cultivated, the productivity of the soil, and the average yield over a representative period. The jamabandi was the annual revenue settlement, the process by which the actual demand for the year was fixed, taking into account the current state of the crops, the prices prevailing in the local markets, and the cultivators’ capacity to pay. The qanungo of the pargana supervised the village records, and the amil of the pargana was responsible for the actual collection.

The Todar Mal settlement was applied first to the core provinces of Agra, Delhi, and the surrounding region, and was then extended, with regional modifications, to Lahore, Allahabad, Awadh, Bihar, and eventually Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa, and the Deccan. The settlement was not uniformly successful. In some provinces, especially Bengal and the Deccan, the local conditions required substantial modifications, and the proportion of the produce actually collected was often less than the official demand. The system was, however, the basis of the Mughal revenue administration for nearly two centuries, and it remained, in its broad outlines, the model of systematic land revenue settlement in India.

The Classification of Land

A distinctive feature of the Mughal revenue system was the careful classification of land by productivity. The Ain-i-Akbari distinguishes several categories of land, including polaj (land cultivated regularly), parauti (land left fallow for one or two years), chachar (land left fallow for three or four years), and banjar (waste land). Each category was assessed at a different rate, and the polaj was subdivided by soil type, with balam (sandy), pahar (upland), and kamin (lowland) soils attracting different rates per unit area. The classification was based on local knowledge and was intended to reflect the actual productive capacity of the land over a normal cycle.

The classification of land was closely related to the question of measurement. The Mughal system used two principal methods: the measurement of area (the jarib system) and the estimation of produce (the batai or crop-sharing system). The zabti or nasaq system, associated with Todar Mal, was based on area measurement, while the batai system, common in many regions, involved the actual division of the standing crop between the state and the cultivator. The choice of system depended on local conditions, the availability of trained surveyors, and the political authority of the state.

The state’s share of the produce was a matter of both theory and practice. The classical Islamic revenue theory, derived from the kharaj and ushr traditions, recognized various possible rates, and the Ain-i-Akbari reports that Akbar experimented with rates ranging from one-third to one-half of the gross produce before settling on one-third for the main cereal crops. The actual rate varied by region, by crop, and by the political circumstances of the moment. In Bengal, where the productive capacity of the land was exceptionally high, the official rate was often higher; in the dry uplands of the Deccan, the rate was often lower.

The question of whether the state share should be paid in cash or in kind was a matter of considerable practical importance. The Mughal state, in principle, preferred cash payments, on the grounds that these were easier to administer, less vulnerable to spoilage, and more compatible with the monetization of the imperial economy. The actual practice, however, depended on the local conditions of the market, the state of the roads, the availability of storage, and the relative bargaining power of the cultivators and the revenue officials. In many regions, especially in the Deccan and the remote parganas of the north, the share was paid in kind, and the revenue officials were responsible for the disposal of the collected grain.

The nasaq system, based on a fixed cash demand calculated from the estimated average yield and the prevailing prices, was a partial solution to the cash-versus-kind problem. By fixing the demand in money terms, the state provided a predictable obligation for the cultivator, who was then free to sell the produce in the market and to deliver the cash equivalent of the demand to the revenue officials. The system worked well in regions with active markets, good roads, and a reliable currency, and less well in regions where these conditions were absent.

The Qanungo, the Zamindars, and the Peasantry

The Mughal revenue system was administered by a hierarchy of officials operating in close coordination with the local landholders. The qanungo was the district-level revenue officer responsible for the maintenance of the detailed land records, the supervision of the village patwaris, and the provision of the statistical basis for the nasaq. The qanungo’s office was hereditary in many parts of the empire, and the qanungo families often possessed substantial local knowledge and a long memory of past settlements. The institution of the qanungo was legacies of the Mughal revenue administration, and the office survived, in modified form, into the British period.

The zamindars occupied a central and ambiguous position in the Mughal revenue system. In the official theory, they were the agents of the state, responsible for the collection of the revenue from the cultivators and the delivery of the state’s share to the imperial treasury. In practice, the zamindars were often the de facto rulers of considerable local domains, with their own armed retainers, their own systems of local justice, and their own claims to hereditary status. The Mughal state accommodated a wide range of zamindari arrangements, from the small village headman (muqaddam) to the great zamindar of a substantial region, and the relationship between the zamindar and the state was a matter of continuous negotiation.

The impact of the revenue system on the peasantry was a major preoccupation of modern historiography, and the question Some historians, following Irfan Habib and the so-called “standard view,” have argued that the Mughal revenue demand was heavy, that the system imposed substantial hardship on the cultivators, and that the famines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were in significant part a consequence of the imperial demand. Other historians have emphasized the flexibility of the system, the existence of substantial local variations, and the importance of the cultivator’s bargaining power in determining the actual level of the demand. The economic decline of the empire and the great famines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are examined in detail in the decline of the Mughal Empire pillar, and the regional variations of the revenue system are discussed in connection with the provincial administration page.

Regional Variations

The Mughal revenue system was not uniform across the empire. The core provinces of the north, including Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and Allahabad, were settled on the Todar Mal model with relatively minor modifications, and the proportion of the produce actually collected approached the official demand. Bengal, with its exceptionally high productivity and its long tradition of state control, was assessed at higher rates, and the absolute revenue yield was correspondingly greater. Gujarat and Malwa, with their distinctive tenurial arrangements and their substantial commercial economy, were settled on a partly cash, partly kind basis. The Deccan provinces, annexed in the late seventeenth century, presented particular difficulties: the local tenurial arrangements were unfamiliar, the assessment procedures had to be adapted to the new territory, and the long wars of Aurangzeb’s reign imposed a fiscal burden that the existing system could not easily sustain.

The regional variations of the revenue system were closely connected to the broader history of provincial administration and the gradual autonomy of the provinces in the eighteenth century. The breakdown of the revenue system in the later Mughal period, with the rise of ijaredari (revenue farming), the alienation of jagirs, and the increasing militarization of the revenue officials, was a central feature of the decline of the Mughal Empire.

Sources

Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963; rev. 1999).
Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (1986), ch. 4.
S.A. Khan, The Khalisa Land and the Crown Servants under Akbar (Aligarh, 1980).