Note 32 — INTRODUCTION.

The men to whom this 2½ per cent was granted are referred to in the Mirăt-i-Áhmedi as desáis. Whatever doubt may attach to the precise meaning of the term desái it seems clear that it was as village headmen that the desáis petitioned for and received this grant. These desáis were the heads of villages with whom, as noticed above, the government agent for collecting the revenue dealt, and who, agreeing for the whole village contribution, themselves carried out the details of allotment and collection from the individual cultivators. In the sharehold villages north of the Narbada, the headman who would be entitled to this 2½ per cent was the representative of the body of village shareholders. South of the Narbada, in villages originally colonised by officers of the state, the representatives of these officers would enjoy the 2½ per cent. In south Gujarát the desáis or heads of villages also acted as district hereditary revenue officers; but it was not as district hereditary revenue officers, but as heads of villages, that they received from Akbar this 2½ per cent assignment. In north Gujarát there were desáis who were only district revenue officers. These men would seem to have received no part of Akbar’s grant in 1589–90, for as late as a.d. 1706 the emperor Aurangzíb, having occasion to make inquiries into the position of the desáis, found that hitherto they had been supported by cesses and illegal exactions, and ordered that a stop should be put to all such exactions, and a fixed assignment of 2½ per cent on the revenues of the villages under their charge should be allowed them. It does not appear whether the Surat desáis succeeded in obtaining Aurangzíb’s grant of 2½ per cent as district revenue officers in addition to Akbar’s (a.d. 1589) assignment of 2½ per cent as heads of villages. ↑