Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c51.s6.3

v4.c51.s6.3

The Sindhia and Holkar chiefs were illiterate or almost so, and quite incapable by education and habits, of checking the accounts of their civil servants. Nor would they undergo the drudgery of daily calling their collectors to account. The result was that their entire revenue administration was left to their Brahman diwans and Prabhu clerks; and these men were notorious for their love of peculation and ignorance of the economic law that the revenue cannot be increased simply by squeezing the peasantry. The rapacious and inefficient government of the Maratha agents in Hindustan kept lawlessness always raging in their jāgirs, and the desolated land could yield no produce for feeding the population or paying for the administration. Thomas Twining who travelled through the Upper Doab from Farrukhabad via Firuzabad to Agra, Mathurā and Delhi, and back from Delhi via Bulandshahar, Khurjā, Koil, Kāsganj, Dārāganj and Farrukhabad to Fathgarh, in November and December 1794, has left a sad picture of the ruin of agriculture, destruction of the population and widespread brigandage throughout the region; the only oases in this wilderness of anarchy were some villages peacefully cultivated under the strong protection of De Boigne's agents.