The Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli c11.110

c11.110

Three factors would count most in the adoption of an agrarian policy by the Muslims: their own background of thought and custom; their desire to meddle as little as possible with the existing system; and the natural difficulty experienced by foreigners in finding out all the intricacies of a complex system. Muslim ideas on agrarian questions are dispersed over a mass of literature, and yet there is a striking similarity of sentiment. The cultivator is the very foundation of the state, it is better to encourage him by reducing the demand than to drive him away from the land by extracting too much out of him, for if he is harshly treated, he will certainly give up cultivation.⁵ In the matter of fixing the proportion in a new country where it would be more necessary than ever to reconcile the cultivator to the state, it would be natural for the conquerors to adopt the lowest scale levied on *dhimmis* in Muslim countries.¹ This is a double *‘ushr* or a fifth of the gross produce which was not too great a departure from the theoretical one-sixth of the Hindus, particularly when the conquerors did not charge the more vexatious cesses.² The question of cesses will be discussed later; as far as land revenue was concerned, the Muslims would rely for their information regarding Hindu custom and usage on the information given by the local officials and by their own interpreters of the Hindu law. Al-Bīrūnī’s writings would exercise great influence on Muslim administrators. The local officials would not be too anxious to tell a foreign conqueror how much he should expect from the land; they would be inclined to hide the possibility of a bigger revenue and to put a part of the amount thus saved into their own pockets. Thus all probabilities were in favour of the earlier sultans demanding a fifth of the produce.³