Mughal Land Revenue and Fiscal Administration

For Mughal rulers in South Asia, land revenue turned harvests into funds for the treasury and the officers who governed and served the empire. Officials assessed cultivated land and crops, while village accountants, headmen and local powerholders helped record and collect what was due. During Akbar’s reign (1556–1605), measurement and long-term crop and price records supported a more regular cash assessment in parts of the empire; other regions continued to collect a share of the harvested crop.

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Measuring land and setting a demand

Abu’l-Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari, compiled at Akbar’s court in the late sixteenth century, describes how the administration classified fields and assessed their output. It calls land cultivated every season polaj; parauti was left fallow to recover, chachar had lain fallow for three or four years, and banjar for five or more. The categories mattered because a recently rested or long-abandoned field could not be assessed like land cropped each year.

Akbar’s measurement-based zabt system set a cash rate for each crop and unit of land in regions where it was applied. The reforms of 1579–80 used a ten-year settlement developed under the finance officials Muzaffar Khan and Raja Todar Mal: qanungos gathered provincial revenue accounts, and the administration used crop yields and prices to form rates over a decade. Abul-Fazl says the ten-year aggregate drew on annual records, with more recent collections more accurately known than earlier years. This gave officials and cultivators a fixed schedule to work from instead of requiring a fresh estimate of every harvest at once.

Crop-sharing offered a different way to calculate the state’s claim. At Tatta in Sindh, now in Pakistan, Abul-Fazl records division of the harvested crop, with a third assigned as revenue. In rain-dependent Ajmer in present-day Rajasthan, he reports a share of one-seventh or one-eighth, paid very little in money. These examples show how assessment reflected local cultivation and collection practices: a cash schedule based on measured fields worked differently from separating a portion of the crop after harvest.

Records and officials

The Ain describes the bitikchi, a record officer, listing agreements with cultivators, village boundaries, arable and waste land, the names of cultivators and headmen, and the crops grown. The revenue collector, or amil-guzar, worked with local revenue record keepers called qanungos, who preserved accounts and rules. Provincial officials used this information to prepare figures for the imperial treasury. Written records linked a field and crop to a named payer and a scheduled obligation.

Assessment figures and money actually collected were different parts of the account. The imperial record called the assessed demand jama; the sum realized was hasil. A discrepancy between the two could leave the treasury short or prevent a revenue assignee from meeting his service expenses. Abul-Fazl notes that estimates and receipts had diverged under earlier arrangements, one reason Akbar’s officials revised assessments and collected updated reports from local qanungos.

Local rights and revenue assignments

The term zamindar covered a range of rural powerholders, from village headmen and landholding cultivators to chiefs who negotiated with the imperial court. In 1574, an imperial order granted Jayanti Das, Narhar Das and three associates 200 bighas, a measure of land, in the pargana or revenue district of Dhar in Malwa, central India. The fallow land was tax-free on condition that they bring it under cultivation, a grant that rewarded settlement while extending cultivation into the region’s frontier.

Other Malwa records show the bargaining that connected village authorities to jagirdars. A jagir assigned the right to collect revenue from named jurisdictions to an imperial officer, often in place of a cash salary and to support his service establishment. It did not transfer the cultivated plots to him. A bilingual tax contract from 1626 records a negotiated revenue arrangement between a village headman and a jagirdar. Its Persian and Hindi sections set out largely the same agreement in both languages.

A Malwa record from the early eighteenth century shows how these rights also supported borrowing. The chaudhri, a local revenue and community official, Hamir Chand received a loan of 2,240 rupees secured against collection rights in two villages, with repayment promised after a future harvest. The contract tied moneylending to income from village revenue.

From harvest to treasury or service

Revenue reserved for direct payment into the imperial treasury was called khalisa. Other revenue was assigned through jagirs to officers holding a mansab, an imperial service rank. These mansabdars used the income toward their pay and the service establishment, including troops, required by their rank. A jagirdar depended on collectors and local intermediaries to secure payment from the villages named in the assignment.

For cultivators, the mode of payment shaped the route from crop to obligation. A cash assessment could require a household to sell part of its grain or another crop to obtain money. Under crop-sharing, officials or their agents separated the state’s portion from the harvested produce. In either case, the assessment records and collection arrangements linked cultivation to imperial finances, while the working details differed between the measured lands of Akbar’s settlement and regions such as Ajmer and Tatta.