Indian History Quiz: Mughal Administration: Mansabdari and Revenue

The correct answer is D, the army department. The Mir Bakhshi was the head of the military establishment: he kept the muster rolls of the mansabdars, verified the horses and men at inspection, recommended candidates for rank and countersigned their pay orders, and the news writers and intelligence reporters of the provinces also sent their reports through his office. A, the karkhanas or royal workshops, came under the Mir Saman, who looked after the imperial household. B, revenue and finance, was the charge of the Wazir or Diwan-i-Ala, and that is the option most often chosen by mistake. C was headed by the chief qazi, while religious grants and charity were with the Sadr-us-Sudur. Hold the pair in memory as bakhshi for the sword and diwan for the purse, and the option can never confuse you.

The correct answer is A, statements (A) and (B) are true. The Ain-i-Akbari was written by Abul Fazl, the courtier and friend of Akbar, and it forms the third volume of the Akbarnama; it is an administrative gazetteer, listing departments and officers, the subas with their sarkars and parganas, measured areas, revenue rates, prices and wages, which is why historians use it for economic history. Statement (C) is false for this volume: the ancestry and early life of Akbar are dealt with in the first volume of the Akbarnama, not in the Ain. Hence B, C and D, each of which treats statement (C) as true, are wrong. The Akbarnama in three volumes, with the Ain as the third, is itself a fact worth carrying into the exam hall.

The correct answer is A, personal pay and rank, and the number of horsemen to be maintained. The zat number fixed the salary of the holder and his place in the order of precedence at court, while the sawar number fixed the contingent of cavalry he had to keep ready for the emperor. If the sawar rank equalled the zat the holder was of the first class, if it was half or more of the zat he was of the second, and below that of the third. B describes the jagir records kept by the revenue department, not the mansab. C invents a measure that never existed in the system. D confuses the mansab with the revenue schedule of the dahsala settlement. The mansab was also neither hereditary nor permanent, and it lapsed to the state on the death of the holder.

The correct answer is A, Raja Todar Mal, who had learnt revenue work under Sher Shah and rose to be the revenue minister of Akbar. Under his settlement the average produce and the average price of the previous ten years were calculated for every crop in every locality, the demand was fixed at about one-third of that average produce and stated in cash per bigha, and land was measured with the bamboo jarib and the ilahi gaz. B was a leading Rajput noble and commander of Akbar, not a revenue officer. C wrote the Ain-i-Akbari in which the settlement is described, which makes him a plausible but wrong choice. D was an earlier finance officer of the reign who held office before the dahsala was framed.

The correct answer is B, the branding of horses and the descriptive roll of soldiers. Mansabdars were paid for the troopers they maintained, and the standing temptation was to hire horses and men for the day of inspection and send them away afterwards. Akbar therefore ordered that every horse accepted at muster be branded with the imperial mark, the dagh, and that a written description of each soldier, the chehra, be kept in the office of the Mir Bakhshi, so that the same animals and men could not be shown twice. A is wrong because jagirs were tankha, mashrut, in-am and watan. C and D name no such terms in the records of the period. The two measures together made the Mughal muster the most closely checked military roll of its age in India.

The correct answer is B, Jahangir. Raising the sawar rank of a favoured noble meant raising his zat as well, which disturbed the order of precedence and cost the treasury more in personal pay. Jahangir therefore allowed a noble to be asked to maintain double or triple the troopers of his sawar rank, paid for the additional men but left at the same zat, and the arrangement was called du-aspa sih-aspa, meaning of two horses and three horses. A created the mansab system itself with its zat and sawar ranks. C is remembered in this chapter for the month ratio by which the pay of a mansabdar was scaled down. D expanded the empire into the Deccan and faced the resulting shortage of land for assignment.

The correct answer is A, polaj, the best land, under the plough every season and assessed at the full rate of about one-third of the average produce. B, parauti, was land left fallow for a season or two to recover its strength, and it paid the full rate once it was cultivated again. C, chachar, had lain fallow for three or four years, and D, banjar, for five years or more, and both were assessed at concessional and rising rates over a few years so that a cultivator had a reason to break them up again. Learning the four in order, polaj, parauti, chachar and banjar, from the most to the least cultivated, answers every form of this question. The classification is described in the Ain-i-Akbari, which also gives the rates charged on each class of land.

The correct answer is B, suba, sarkar, pargana, mauza. The suba was the province, headed by a subedar with his own diwan, bakhshi, sadr and qazi; the sarkar was the district, where the faujdar held charge of law and order and the amalguzar of revenue; the pargana was a group of villages with its shiqdar, amil and qanungo; and the mauza was the village itself, with the muqaddam as headman and the patwari keeping the accounts. Akbar fixed twelve subas in 1580, and they rose to fifteen by the end of his reign. A, C and D disturb that order, and such sequence questions are set precisely because the middle two units are easily interchanged. Remember that the faujdar and the amalguzar both worked at the level of the sarkar, one with troops and one with the revenue papers.

The correct answer is A, land whose revenue was reserved for the imperial treasury. The territory of the empire was divided between khalisa and jagir: the revenue of khalisa land was collected by imperial officers and credited to the central treasury, while the revenue of jagir land was assigned to mansabdars in place of a cash salary. The proportion of khalisa was watched carefully, since too little of it left the treasury short. B describes grants called madad-i-maash given to scholars and religious men. C describes a watan jagir, held hereditarily by chiefs such as the Rajput rulers. D describes banjar land, which was assessed at concessional rates rather than exempted. The share of khalisa in the empire rose and fell with each reign, and its shrinking is one measure of the later crisis.

The correct answer is B, batai or ghalla-bakhshi, in which the harvested crop itself was divided in an agreed proportion between the state and the cultivator, either on the threshing floor or in the standing field. It suited areas where measurement was costly and prices unsteady, and the peasant could sometimes choose it. A, zabti, is the dahsala method in which a cash rate per bigha was fixed from ten-year averages. C, kankut, was an estimate of the yield of a standing crop made by appraisal, with kan meaning grain and kut an estimate. D, nasaq, was a rough demand based on previous collections for the whole village, without either measurement or division of the crop. Of the four methods, zabti covered the greatest area under Akbar, and the other three survived at the edges of the empire.