The land revenue system

Detail

Why land revenue mattered

• Land revenue was the economic mainstay of the Mughal Empire. The state ran on what it took from farming.
• The whole business was run from the daftar — the office of the diwan, the finance minister.
• Because so much money flowed through them, revenue officials became decisive agents in agrarian relations. They were not just clerks. They shaped how peasants, zamindars and the state dealt with each other.
• The Ain-i-Akbari, written by Abul Fazl, is the third volume of the Akbarnama. Its third section records the judicial and executive wings of the empire, the methods of land survey, tribal divisions, and the duties of finance minister Todar Mal [2][4].

The two-step procedure

• Step 1 — gather information. Officials first collected details of lands and of what those lands produced.
• Step 2 — assess, then collect. Assessment came first; collection followed.
• Two words you must not mix up:
• jama = revenue assessed (the amount fixed on paper).

• hasil = revenue actually collected (what really came in).

• The gap between jama and hasil shows the difference between the state's claim and the state's reach.

The officials

• amil-guzar — the revenue collector. Akbar's decree told him to prefer cash, but to keep payment in kind open as a choice for the peasant.
• amin — made sure imperial regulations were actually carried out in the provinces.
• Under the Sultanate, the earlier officer was the iqtadar (see the iqta point below).

Methods of assessment

• kankut — from kan (grain) + kut (estimate). A guess at the grain yield without cutting everything.

• If there was doubt, the crops were cut and estimated in three lots — good, middling and inferior.

• batai / bhaoli — the crops were reaped and stacked, then divided by agreement in front of the parties. Everyone watched the sharing.

• khet-batai — the fields themselves were divided after sowing.
• lang batai — the grain was cut, heaped, and then divided.
• zabt — the cash-assessment system linked to Todar Mal, who surveyed crop yields, prices and area cultivated over ten years. A fixed cash rate was then set on productivity, worked out at about one-third of the average produce turned into a cash value [3].
• It worked best in north India, where officials could measure land and keep careful accounts.
• It was not workable in provinces such as Gujarat and Bengal [3].
• Measurement used the bigha as the land unit, with crops classified and priced [3].

Note: the scaffold's methods (kankut, batai, khet-batai, lang batai) are share-of-crop methods; zabt is the cash-rate method. They coexisted — the state used whichever the local conditions allowed.

Akbar's classes of land (from the Ain)

Class	Meaning
polaj	cultivated every year, never left fallow
parauti	left fallow for a short time so the soil recovers
chachar	fallow for 3–4 years
banjar	uncultivated for 5 years or more

• polaj and parauti were further graded good, middling and bad.
• The rule for the state's share: one-third of the medium (average) produce was the royal dues.

Measurement and records

• Cultivated and cultivable land was measured province by province. The totals are given in the Ain.
• Forests were left unmeasured. The state's survey stopped at the field edge.
• Aurangzeb's order of 1665 demanded cultivation records village by village and peasant-wise (asamiwar).

• The stated aim balanced two things: kifayat — good state finance — and the welfare of the peasant.

• Key limit to remember: the state maximised its claim on paper, but local conditions limited what it could actually realise. That is the jama–hasil gap again.

The wider frame — from iqta to jagir

• Precursor: the Sultanate iqta. Territories were assigned to iqtadars, who collected taxes from them.
• These posts were non-hereditary — they could not be passed to sons.

• The burden fell hardest on the peasantry.

• Akbar's central machinery, spread over twelve subahs (provinces):

• diwan — finance.
• mir bakhshi — military.
• khan-i-saman — public works, trade, agriculture, royal household.

• sadr — justice, religion and education.

• mansabdari — officers were given a rank, and each rank fixed how many troops and animals they had to keep.

• Most mansabdars were paid by jagirs (so they were jagirdars) — an assignment of revenue, not of land ownership.
• Jagirs were transferred periodically, so no officer could sink roots in one area.

• A minority were paid in cash — these were naqdi.

• Todar Mal carried out detailed crop-yield and price surveys plus a systematic land survey [3].

• Revenue level: typically about one-fifth of produce, but it reached one-half under some sultans.
• Recurrent famines cut further into the peasants' already shrinking share.

Prelims Hooks

• jama = revenue assessed; hasil = revenue collected. Do not swap them.
• amil-guzar = revenue collector, told by Akbar to prefer cash but allow kind.
• amin = officer who ensured imperial regulations were carried out in the provinces.
• kankut = kan (grain) + kut (estimate); doubtful cases cut into three lots — good, middling, inferior.
• Akbar's four land classes: polaj (never fallow), parauti (short fallow), chachar (3–4 years fallow), banjar (5+ years uncultivated).
• Royal dues = one-third of the medium produce; polaj and parauti alone had good/middling/bad grades.
• Aurangzeb's 1665 order = cultivation records village by village, peasant-wise (asamiwar); kifayat = state's financial prudence.
• Forests were not measured in the Mughal land survey; aggregates of measured land appear in the Ain.
• zabt rested on a ten-year survey of yields, prices and area by Todar Mal; it failed in Gujarat and Bengal [3].
• Ain-i-Akbari is the third volume of the Akbarnama by Abul Fazl, and records land survey methods and Todar Mal's duties [2][4].
• iqta under the Sultanate: assigned to iqtadars, posts non-hereditary.
• Akbar's four departments — diwan, mir bakhshi, khan-i-saman, sadr — across twelve subahs; cash-paid mansabdars were called naqdi.

Mains Points

• The jama–hasil gap is the core argument about Mughal state power. The empire wrote down a maximum claim (one-third of medium produce, province-wide measurement, asamiwar records in 1665) but could only collect what local conditions and local intermediaries allowed. Use this to argue that Mughal centralisation was strong on paper and negotiated on the ground.
• Assessment method followed administrative capacity, not ideology. zabt needed survey and accounts, so it took hold in north India and failed in Gujarat and Bengal [3]; share-of-crop methods (batai, kankut) survived where measurement was impossible. Uniform empire, uneven practice.
• The push to cash (Akbar's decree to the amil-guzar to prefer cash) tied the village to the market. Peasants had to sell grain to pay in coin. Link this to monetisation, rural markets and the later commercialisation of agriculture.
• Continuity from iqta to jagir shows the state avoided creating a landed nobility. Both iqtadars and jagirdars held non-hereditary, transferable rights to revenue, not to the soil. But in both systems the burden landed on the peasantry, made worse by famines and by rates that ran from one-fifth up to one-half of produce.