Note 32 — INTRODUCTION.

Another important effect of this survey was to extend to cultivators in simple villages the proprietary interest in the soil formerly enjoyed only by the shareholders of joint villages. By this change the power of the military nobles to make undue exactions from the cultivators in their assigned lands was to some extent checked. It was, perhaps, also an indirect effect of this more definite settlement of the crown demand that the revenue agents of government and of the holders of assigned lands, finding that the revenues could be realised without their help, refused to allow to the heads of villages certain revenue dues which, in return for their services, they had hitherto enjoyed. Accordingly, in a.d. 1589–90, these heads of villages appealed to government and Akbar decided that in assigned districts as well as in the crown domains from the collections of government lands two-and-a-half per cent should be set apart as a perquisite for men of this class.32