LAND REVENUE

It is best to begin our survey of agrarian relations in Mughal India, with an examination of the nature and magnitude of ‘land revenue’ (māl, kharāj), since it accounted for the larger part of the agricultural surplus of the country. As understood by the succeeding British administrators, it represented ‘the property (vested in government by immemorial usage) of ten-elevenths of the net rental of the country’. European travellers who visited the country during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commonly described the king as the ‘owner’ of all land in India, for he so obviously appropriated what seemed to be the ‘rent’ of the soil. An Indian lexicographer of the eighteenth century, too, cited a similar view. An eighteenth-century jurist, who explicity rejected such an assumption, still argued that the tax in India was not the kharāj of Islamic law, because it often exceeded half of the produce.

The jurist was so far right that while māl, the Mughal tax occupied as important a position in Indian economy as rent in any feudal economy, it was not, properly speaking, rent or even a land tax. It was a tax on the crop. It was thus also different from its successor, the ‘land revenue’ of British settlements, which was conceived of as a standard burden fixed in cash on a particular area of land, irrespective of what grew on that land.