Abu'l Fazl Put Akbar's Assessed Revenue at 3.6 Billion Dams and Wrote Down the Ranks, Rates and Rules That Raised and Spent It

In the 40th year of Akbar’s reign (1595 to 1596), Abu’l Fazl counted 105 districts (sarkars) and 2,737 townships in the emperor’s dominions. H. S. Jarrett’s translation of the Ain-i-Akbari gives the yearly revenue assessed under the ten-year settlement as 3,62,97,55,246 dams. The dam was a copper coin, counted at 40 to the rupee in the Ain’s own salary tables, so the total comes to about 9 crore rupees, or 90.7 million.

Placed beside the chroniclers who watched the state at work, the book shows how Akbar paid his officers, measured his fields and collected from his farmers, and where the system leaked.

A chronicle with a manual attached

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s catalogue describes the Akbarnama as commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of his reign, written by Abu’l Fazl between 1590 and 1596, and calls the Ain-i-Akbari its third volume. Its first book covers the emperor’s household, the second the army and the officers, and the third the courts, the land survey and the revenue, according to H. Blochmann, who made the first English translation and dated the Ain’s completion to the 42nd year of the reign, about 1598.

Its author sat inside the system he described. At the new-year feast of March 1585 the Akbarnama records that he was raised to Hazari, a commander of 1,000, “without his having given any proof of service.” Charges of flattery drew a defence from Blochmann, but Vincent Smith, writing in 1917, was cooler, calling him “not a practical revenue expert.”

Ranks from ten to ten thousand

Mansab is Persian for an office or place, and a mansabdar is the holder of one. The third Ain of the second book says Akbar set the ranks from the commander of ten (dahbashi) to the commander of ten thousand, with every command above 5,000 reserved for his sons. Sixty-six grades are listed, tied by Abu’l Fazl to the numerical value of the letters in God’s name. Half of them existed only on paper, Blochmann noted, and Smith counted 33 grades in use. From the Ain’s lists Blochmann reckoned about 1,600 mansabdars in all.

Persia supplied the model, according to Smith, with grades running from a commander of 12,000 down to a commander of 10. Baz Bahadur, the ex-ruler of Malwa, given a mansab of 1,000 in 1570 to 1571, is the earliest ranked appointment under Akbar that Smith found. Systematic grading came in the 18th regnal year (1573 to 1574), after Gujarat fell, in his account.

At first a rank was a headcount, the number of horsemen an officer was meant to bring to the field. A commander of 1,000 was not required to keep 1,000 cavalry out of his salary, only some smaller number, W. H. Moreland pointed out. Shireen Moosvi writes, in a 1981 paper in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, that by Akbar’s death in 1605 a mansab had two numbers. Zat was a personal rank that fixed pay and status, and sawar was the number of horsemen to be maintained.

Akbar’s government as a whole was military, Smith wrote, with the only considerable officials outside the army ranks holding religious and legal posts. For Mughal government generally, Jadunath Sarkar adds that clerks and accountants of the higher grades were entered in the army list too, paid by the army paymasters and promoted by an increase in their nominal command.

Hindus were not shut out of the list. The March 1585 promotions in the Akbarnama include Raja Bhagwant Das as a commander of 5,000 and Raja Todar Mal as a commander of 4,000. For the wider Rajput story see who the Rajputs were.

What a rank paid, and what it cost

For most ranks the Ain sets three pay classes, depending on how complete the officer’s contingent was. Commanders of 100 had eleven: 700 rupees a month with every man and horse present, 500 with no troops of his own. Rupees of Akbar’s time fill Moreland’s table of the scale. A commander of 5,000 in the first class was entitled to 30,000 a month, a commander of 500 to 2,500, and a commander of 10 to 100. The top salary was 300 times the bottom one.

Out of that money the officer paid for horses, elephants, camels and carts. The force proper to each rank cost 10,600 rupees a month for a 5,000, 1,170 for a 500 and 44 for a 10, by Moreland’s calculation. What an officer actually netted is hard to say, he added, since Abu’l Fazl states the salaries as fixed sums.

Pay came in two forms. A jagir assigned an officer the revenue of a village, a district or a larger tract in place of a salary. The change to crown land and money salaries came in the 19th year of the reign, which began on 11 March 1574, Abu’l Fazl writes. Jagirs gave nobles too much independence, in Smith’s view, which is why Akbar tried to convert them. The conversion was probably never complete, Moreland thought, and jagirs regained ground under Jahangir.

No rank was heritable, Smith adds, and the emperor treated himself as heir to a dead officer’s property.

Horses borrowed for the day

The pay scale invited fraud, and both chroniclers describe it. Early in the reign, writes Abu’l Fazl in the Ain, officers sold their horses and served as foot soldiers, or turned up with a nag that looked more like a donkey. His remedy was the descriptive roll, a written description of every soldier, and the compulsory branding of horses with the imperial mark, which he dates to the 18th year.

Abd al-Qadir Badauni, a court scholar who wrote a sharply critical history of the reign and fought on the Mughal side at Haldighati, tells the same story with less polish. Weavers, carpenters and other tradespeople brought borrowed horses to be branded and got themselves a command, he writes in W. H. Lowe’s translation. At times men were weighed in their clothes with their hands and feet tied, and inquiry showed the men were hired and their clothes and saddles borrowed. Akbar’s reply, as Badauni quotes it, was: “With my eyes thus open I must give these men pay, that they may have something to live on.”

Abu’l Fazl’s more discreet phrases confirm Badauni’s account in substance, Moreland judged. Badauni also records the fix. Shahbaz Khan, the chief paymaster, revived the branding rule of Alauddin Khalji and Sher Shah, and every officer was to start as a commander of twenty and show his troopers’ branded horses before he could rise to a hundred or more.

A bamboo rod, four kinds of land and a third of the crop

The revenue chapters of the Ain begin with measurement. Surveyors had used a hemp rope that shrank when damp and lengthened as it dried, so the farmer lost if it was used damp and the treasury lost if it was used dry. A bamboo rod (jarib) joined by iron rings replaced it in the 19th year. After the 31st year one yard, the Ilahi gaz of 41 finger-widths, replaced the several in use. A bigha, the unit of area, was 60 gaz by 60.

Land was sorted by how often it was farmed: polaj, cropped every year; parauti, rested for a year or two; chachar, fallow three or four years; and banjar, idle for five years or more. For the first two, officials took the produce of a good, a middling and a poor bigha, averaged the three, and fixed the state’s share at one third of that average. Only the area actually under crops was assessed.

The Ain says the rate of Sher Shah, the Afghan ruler who preceded the Mughal restoration, stood as the lowest assessment in every province. It also says that under earlier rulers across Hindustan one-sixth of the produce was taken. Moreland read the one-third rule as an attempt to take for the state the average money value of a third of the gross produce, and concluded that a farmer in the provinces assessed under Akbar’s regulations gave up a much larger share of his income than his successor pays in rent today.

A collector should be “a friend of the agriculturist,” the Ain says, lend the needy farmer money and recover it by degrees, take nothing beyond the area under crops, and deal with each farmer himself instead of leaving the appraisal to the village headman. Even a single dam offered in obeisance by a headman or village accountant was to be refused, and each month he was to report on prices, rents and the state of the poor.

Smith thought the principles sound but doubted practice matched precept, and he judged the assessment “extremely severe.” As evidence he cites remissions. More than a million rupees was remitted in 1586, the 31st year, from crown lands in Delhi, Oudh and Allahabad because prices were too low for the peasantry to pay full cash rates, and a similar remission had been made the year before.

The collectors who were meant to fix it

Abu’l Fazl describes a further reform in the 19th year. Crown lands were divided into tracts each expected to yield a crore (ten million) of tankas, and a collector called a karori was put over each. The number was 182, and the scheme, he says, provided for the army and guarded against embezzlement. His translator H. Beveridge calls him “unduly concise” on the subject in a footnote. Smith, who dated the scheme to 1575 to 1576, reckoned a karori’s tract at 250,000 rupees.

Badauni’s version is harsher. The karoris were chosen for trustworthiness and had to give security, he writes, but did not follow the rules, and a great part of the country was laid waste “through the rapacity” of the karoris. Badauni adds that “the wives and children of the raiyats were sold and scattered abroad.” Todar Mal then called the karoris to account, and many men died under beatings and in jail.

Smith thought Badauni embittered and fanatical, but accepted that his statements of fact are usually correct where they can be checked. A grievous failure was his verdict on the scheme, and no details survive, he added, that would let anyone verify either Abu’l Fazl’s praise or Badauni’s denunciation. That 1917 judgment rests on the same two chronicles.

Twelve provinces and a ten-year average

In 1579 to 1580, the 24th and 25th years of the reign, the empire was divided into twelve subahs, or provinces, according to Smith. The Ain lists them as Allahabad, Agra, Oudh, Ajmer, Ahmadabad (Gujarat), Bihar, Bengal, Delhi, Kabul, Lahore, Multan and Malwa, and adds that the number rose to fifteen once Berar, Khandesh and Ahmadnagar were conquered. The Akbarnama says each province received a governor, a diwan (revenue officer), a bakhshi (army paymaster), a judge, a sadr (head of religious grants), a kotwal (city police chief), an admiral and a recorder.

Sarkar read the pairing of governor and diwan as deliberate, borrowed from older Islamic practice, with each meant to watch the other closely. The Ain’s instructions to a governor say he “should not interfere with any man’s creed.” Akbar’s wider policy is covered in the piece on shared saints.

The ten-year settlement came in those years. Yearly resets of prices and rates had stopped working once the empire grew, Abu’l Fazl explains, with farmers complaining of excess demands and assignment holders of unpaid balances. The 15th to 24th years were pooled and a tenth of the total fixed as the annual assessment. If the best harvest year was the standard, Smith noted, the demand must have been heavy.

Blochmann credited Todar Mal with the new rent-roll in the Ain’s third book. The Akbarnama is more careful. It says the work was entrusted to Todar Mal and Khwaja Shah Mansur, but that Todar Mal was sent to the eastern provinces and it was the Khwaja who grasped the instructions and drew up the plan. Smith dates Todar Mal’s departure to the Bengal rebellion of January 1580 and calls Shah Mansur a highly skilled accountant who carried the burden. Todar Mal had already tried the main features in Gujarat in 1573 to 1575, Smith found, measuring the land and fixing a ten-year demand.

Todar Mal, and the audit that followed

Blochmann describes Todar Mal as a Khatri who began as a clerk. Muzaffar Khan Turbati had his help redoing the assessment in the 15th year. Todar Mal then assessed Gujarat, fought in Bengal and Bihar, and became diwan, or rather vakil, in the 27th year, by Blochmann’s dating. Government accounts were to be kept in Persian rather than Hindi by his order, Blochmann adds, which pushed Hindu clerks to learn the court language.

The system was audited within a few years. In 1585 Akbar made Mir Fath Ullah Shirazi the Amin-ul-Mulk and told Todar Mal to run the financial officers on his advice. Abu’l Fazl reproduces Fath Ullah’s complaints “textually.” The accountants, Fath Ullah said, had worked from guesses and approximations in the year the empire became crown land, and the rule that collectors give farmers a receipt had been dropped. The official history of the reign printed the criticism of its own revenue machinery.

Todar Mal died in 1589. The Akbarnama says Raja Bhagwant Das, who had attended his cremation, died in the middle of November that year. Badauni’s entry for the Hijri year 998 consigns both men to hell, asks God to scorch them, and quotes a verse saying that Todar Mal’s tyranny had oppressed the world.