The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c20.446

v3.c20.446

A department to deal with all questions relating to agriculture was created and placed under the charge of a minister called, for no apparent reason, *Amīr-i-Kūhī*, or 'Mountain Lord,' and it was ordained that the kingdom should be divided into districts thirty by thirty leagues, or about 1800 square miles, in area, in which not one span of land was to be left uncultivated, and crops were to be sown in rotation. This ordinance was the conception of a mere theorist. No allowance was made for forest, pasture, or unculturable land, and though the order relating to rotation appears to indicate some knowledge of the principle of scientific agriculture it is clear, from the examples given, that these principles were not understood. Barley, for instance, was to follow wheat; sugarcane, a most exhausting crop, after which the land should have been allowed to lie fallow for at least a year, was to follow barley; and grapes and dates were to follow sugarcane. To these districts were appointed superintendents who, to borrow a term from Anglo-Irish history which literally translates their designation, were styled 'undertakers,' who undertook to see not only that the regulations were carried out to the letter, but also to re-people the land and make every square mile maintain a fixed number of horse soldiers. None but irresponsible adventurers would have entered into such an agreement, and even these would have held aloof but for the immediate inducements offered. The king, who was as bad a judge of men as he was of affairs, would not see a favourite scheme baulked at the outset, and undertakers were induced to come forward by gifts of caparisoned horses, rich robes of honour, and estates to reward them for their promises and large sums of money to enable them to inaugurate the scheme. These gifts were, as the historian says, their own blood-money, for when they perceived the impossibility of meeting their engagements they appropriated to their own use all that they had received and trusted to events to enable them to escape an almost inevitable fate. More than seventy millions of *tangas* were thus disbursed in gifts to the undertakers and at the end of the stipulated term of three years so little of what had been promised had been performed that Baranī speaks of the performance as not one-hundredth, nay, not one-thousandth part of the promise, and adds that unless Muhammad had died when he did, in his expedition to Sind, not one of the undertakers would have survived his resentment.