The Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli c14.72

c14.72

The entire system lived on the efforts of the *mazārī* or peasant. Writers like Jayaswal and Ghoshal hold that in pre-Muslim India the cultivator was the owner; F. W. Thomas thinks that ‘the ultimate property in the land appertained, in the sense which has since prevailed, to the king; that is to say, the king was entitled to revenue therefrom, and in default could replace the cultivator in his holding.’⁵ Whatever may have been the peasant's position in Hindu states, he was certainly recognized to be the owner under Muslim law.¹ Land paying kharāj or 'ushr is the property of the tax-payer and he is allowed to sell it. The right of sale and purchase was recognized in the Sultanate; for there are references in Fiqh-i-Fīrūzshāhī and other law books of the period to the transfer of land by sale from one tax-payer to another.² It has been suggested that the relations between the state and the peasantry were governed by the conception that the cultivator had only duties and no rights. Such an idea is foreign to Muslim law. It seems to have arisen from the fact that if a peasant does not cultivate his holding without any excuse, the state may demand the kharāj from him. This has been taken to mean that a peasant is forced to cultivate his land. The shar' gives no such authority to the state: it has been permitted only to demand the kharāj if the peasant leaves his land untilled without any excuse.³ When the owner of the land had sufficiently valid reasons for not cultivating his holding, the state very often had it cultivated through its agents and paid any surplus to the owner after deducting the cost of cultivation and the kharāj. There could be no greater proof of the fact that the peasant was recognized to be the owner of his land.⁴ Even if it be conceded that the state could force the peasant to cultivate the land, the peasant did not lose his proprietary rights; he was only saddled with the public obligation of keeping up the produce.⁵ Some authors are led away by certain incidents involving confiscation of land by the state; such confiscations, however, fall into an entirely different legal category. Confiscation of property was a well-known punishment for high treason and rebellion; so if a man rebelled, his land, like his other property, was confiscated. A peasant was seldom, if ever, accused of rebellion; the whole agrarian policy of the Sultanate was directed towards increasing the cultivation; peasants were a precious possession who could, if oppressed, find new homes in neighbouring territories or tributary states where they would be welcome. There was a genuine competition for peasants who would bring more land under cultivation; since, as a Muslim writer puts it, "treasure comes from the abundance of peasants and the cultivation of the soil."¹ The peasants were, therefore, treated with consideration, and the sultans were anxious to protect them from the oppression of petty officials and Hindu middlemen.² It was also a well established tradition to advance money called *sondhār*, in times of drought or scarcity. So large were the amounts advanced by Muḥammad bin Tughluq that they could not be recovered; Fīrūz, on the advice of his ministers, wrote off these loans.³