Note 19 — INDEX (continued 2)

According to the European travellers in India during the seventeenth century, provincial governors, and probably to some extent all large holders of service lands, employed various methods for adding to the profits which the assigned lands were meant to yield them. Of these devices two seem to have been specially common, the practice of supporting a body of horse smaller than the number agreed for, and the practice of purveyance that is of levying supplies without payment. Sir Thomas Roe, from a.d. 1615 to 1618 English ambassador at the court of the emperor Jehángír, gives the following details of these irregular practices: ‘The Pátan (that is Patna in Bengal) viceroy’s government was estimated at 5000 horse, the yearly pay of each trooper being £20 (Rs. 200), of which he kept only 1500, being allowed the surplus as dead pay. On one occasion this governor wished to present me with 100 loaves of the finest sugar, as white as snow, each loaf weighing fifty pounds. On my declining, he said, ‘You refuse these loaves, thinking I am poor; but being made in my government the sugar costs me nothing, as it comes to me gratis.’ Sir Thomas Roe in Kerr’s Voyages, IX. 282–284. The same writer, the best qualified of the English travellers of that time to form a correct opinion, thus describes the administration of the Musalmán governors of the seventeenth century: ‘They practise every kind of tyranny against the natives under their jurisdiction, oppressing them with continual exactions, and are exceedingly averse from any way being opened by which the king may be informed of their infamous proceedings. They grind the people under their government to extract money from them, often hanging men up by the heels to make them confess that they are rich, or to ransom themselves from faults merely imputed with a view to fleece them.’ Sir Thomas Roe in Kerr’s Voyages, IX. 338. ↑