Administering India and people's lives

Two systems in this chapter answer the same question: how do you keep an army without paying it all year?

The Sultanate's answer was the iqta system. Areas of land were given to nobles called iqtadars, who collected taxes there and, after their expenses, sent the rest to the Sultan's treasury, mainly to keep the army.

One detail stopped this from becoming lots of little kingdoms: the posts were not hereditary. An iqtadar's son did not inherit the land (just as a District Magistrate's son does not become DM automatically), so loyalty had to be earned again.

Akbar's answer was the mansabdari system, recorded by Abul Fazl in the Ain-i-Akbari. Each mansabdar, according to his mansab (rank), had to keep an exact number of elephants, horses, camels and troops for the state, checked by regular inspections. They were usually paid in land, called jagirs, so they were also called jagirdars.

Akbar also set up departments:

• the Diwan for finance;
• the Mir Bakhshi for military matters;
• the Khan-i-Saman for public works, trade, industry and farming;
• the Sadr for justice and religious and educational matters.

These were repeated in each of twelve provinces (subas), a bit like today's states, with officials checking one another. In villages, traditional self-government carried on much as before. The chapter is honest about the limit: non-Muslim officials rarely exceeded one-third of the higher ranks, and were often far fewer.

Todar Mal, Akbar's finance minister, surveyed crop yields and prices, set a price for each crop from that information, and surveyed the land of the whole empire, turning tax from guesswork into measurement.

Under all this politics, the economy held. India stayed one of the wealthiest regions in the world, resting on farming, craft industries, and old local systems: śhreṇis (guilds), jātis (communities defined by their work), and systems of credit.

Two of these deserve attention.

• The hundi was a written instruction to pay someone. Money could cross borders without any coin travelling, so there was nothing on the road to steal. The book calls it an early form of modern banking.
• Temples were much more than places of worship. They held donated land and wealth in trust, built irrigation works and places for pilgrims to stay, ran markets, and lent money to merchants.

Yet by the late 1600s peasants were often left with a small share after taxes and middlemen; many lost their land and became bonded labourers. Wealth was held at the top, even while people of different faiths lived side by side and depended on one another.