Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire (A.D. 1346 – A.D. 1646) v1.c10.s8.9

v1.c10.s8.9

We now come to the contract or farming system. It may be interesting to know Mr. Moreland's conception of the farming system: "The idea underlying the method of farming the King's share seems to have been that an officer appointed to administer a province, or smaller area, could effect a great administrative simplification by undertaking to pay a fixed sum representing the net revenue of his charge, thus relieving the executive of all detailed financial responsibilities in regard to it".¹ In another connection Mr. Moreland speaks of the "new system". "It is a noteworthy fact that in the seventeenth century the agrarian system of the Vijayanagar territory was practically identical with that of the Moslem kingdom of Golconda, and it is most unlikely that the former should have borrowed a new system from the latter: the more probable inference is that Farming had become established as the mainstay of the Hindu agrarian system in the South by the end of the thirteenth century, and that 'Alā-ud-din Khaljī took it over at the time when he acquired the territories which later became the kingdoms of the Deccan."²