Page:Mughal Land Revenue System.djvu/21

 Mughal land revenue policy, since a government though alien to a soil with deep-rooted custom and hoary principles of administration has turned out to evolve a unique type of revenue administration which was borrowed wholesale by the contemporary and later-day Hindu kingdoms in India which were outside the pale of Mughal control, and was groped back to by the early British administrators of India. Mughal administrative system was imported readymade from outside India. As Prof. Sarkar puts it, "it was the Perso-Arabic system in Indian setting". It is but natural that a succession of sovereigns alive to a sort of settled government in their own native land which lay shrouded in abstract Arabic theory, had had the necessity of giving # sort of orderly government to a country newly conquered, while the conception of chalking out a government of a rough and ready kind to govern the heterogeneous mass of the Hindu community of the age with innate disruptive forces is but a dream. Not to prove derogatory to the Mughal sovereigns, we have to recognize this much, that they were, to some extent, sagacious enough in giving their system a local colouring, in striking a compromise between Hindu traditional customs and prevalent notions of Muhammadan administration.

It may be curious for us to note the chronic antagonism between the tax-payer and the tax-gatherer of the day. But such a condition was warranted by the then prevailing circumstances. It is undoubtedly the fact that the Hindu peasant at the time derived no benefit from