The Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli c14.64

c14.64

The next smaller unit after the shiqq or the sarkār was the parganah which has rightly been identified by Moreland with the qaṣbah in its older meaning of an aggregate of villages.⁶ The next division was the ultimate unit, the village.⁷ Ibn Baṭṭūṭah mentions a ṣadī, which he defines in these words, "These people give the name of ṣadī to the collection of a hundred villages." He names the ṣadī of Hindpat, which can easily be recognized as the parganah of Indrapat in the suburbs of Dehlī.⁸ The grouping of villages into hundreds even in the directly administered province of Dehlī involves too theoretical an outlook on administration to fit in the practical nature of the Sultanate administration. Nor is the ṣadī mentioned by any other contemporary authority. Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, however, finds strange confirmation in the *Shukranīti* which mentions units of a hundred villages and defines a village as an area covering just a little over two square miles.¹ The decimal aggregation of villages is also mentioned in the *Viṣṇu-smṛti* as well as in *Manū*, in both of which the unit of a hundred villages is explicitly included.² Even the practical-minded Kautilya has groups of ten, two hundred and eight hundred villages.³ The Rājpūt dynasties, in this area as well as in Rājpūtānah, had their *chaurāsīs*, or groups of eighty-four villages.⁴ These names are obviously too precise and covered, in all probability, an area only approximately corresponding to the description; and, of course, with the growth of the population this area would be sub-divided into smaller divisions bearing the same name. Probably what was officially termed a *chaurāsī* under the Rājpūts was, in popular parlance, known by the old name for a group of a hundred villages. In Ibn Baṭṭūṭah’s time, the appellation seems to have stuck to the *parganah*. The term *ṣadī* does not seem to have been officially adopted which would explain its absence from contemporary chronicles.