The Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli c11.171

c11.171

In connection with assignments, it was necessary to know how much a certain area was likely to yield. This has been technically termed valuation.³ When the government did not know the value of various parts of the newly or only half conquered territories, the nobles must have been given large areas to be brought under control without any precise knowledge of their yield; but even then some regard must have been been paid to the dignity of the noble in proportion to the size of the area entrusted to him. When there was room for expansion and there was a great deal of land to be brought under control, a noble's domains must have depended on his own resources. But gradually as administration grew sounder and more settled, there must have grown up some method of suiting the assignment to the office. Thus valuation must have come into existence quite early. The mention of valuation in the *Masālik-u'l-abṣār* throws further light on assignments.⁴ This authority says that the assignments yielded much more than their estimated produce, which shows that the assignment was granted on the basis of the expected produce; the net produce was a matter of the assignee's luck. Hence, the state must have left a margin in favour of the assignee. We know definitely that the surplus was not claimed by Muḥammad bin Tughluq or Sikandar Lodī, but the position with regard to other monarchs is not quite certain.⁵ We know about Fīrūz Shāh that he claimed any surplus that accrued, but he also compensated the assignee whenever there was a deficit.¹ It is obvious that this valuation had to be revised periodically on the basis of figures collected by the *dīwān-i-wizārat*, but there is no record of the method used nor of the time that lapsed between one valuation and another. One valuation sufficed for the whole of Fīrūz Shāh’s reign, but this seems to be an exception; however, this valuation had taken six years to prepare.² Probably the breakdown of the administration under Muḥammad bin Tughluq was responsible for this length of time.