The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.18

c15.s1.18

Even though the Mughals clearly strove to keep commercial interests and official administration apart, they badly needed the cooperation of these experts and they could hardly avoid recruiting them to the financial departments of their bureaucracy. Thus the repeated injunctions against the farming out of revenue rights seem to indicate that this was more of a practice than the sources want us to believe. Moreover, it is difficult to see how, for instance, the holders of land assignments (*jāgīrdār*), often posted at a great distance from their assigned lands, could manage them without leaving a great measure of freedom to their ‘āmils. The question whether the actual arrangement was technically one of farming or not seems largely an academic one. In fact, the practice of farming out the collection of estate rents to groups of local financiers who provided for the management of the estate while being equally involved with the district administration through family connections seems to have remained a common practice in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.²⁸ We know the difficulties that the incipient English administration experienced on a far larger scale in the second half of the eighteenth century over the problem of divorcing commerce from administration.