Person · Mughal revenue administrator · India
Raja Todar Mal
The administrator who carried out Akbar's zabt revenue settlement: measure the land with a standard bigha and a jarib chain, classify it by fertility and continuity of cultivation, average yields and prices over ten years, and fix a cash demand per unit. Every Indian land-revenue system down to 1947 descends from it.
- Date
- 1560–1589
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Mughal
- Condition
- historical person
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.180, 78.020
Worth knowing
He had served in the Sur administration before Akbar's, so the system credited to the Mughals is Sher Shah's method run at imperial scale. He also made Persian compulsory for revenue accounts throughout the empire, which is how Persian became the language of Indian administration for three centuries and of Indian legal vocabulary after that.
About the place
Placed at Agra, the court from which he ran the revenue survey and the zabt assessment that reorganised Mughal land taxation across north India.
Connections (2)
- PatronageAkbar
Todar Mal's zabt settlement measured the cultivated land with a standard bigha, classified soils by fertility, averaged a decade of yields and prices and fixed the demand in cash rather than grain — which meant the peasant had to sell in a market and the state had to keep one working. The British kept the system and independent India's northern land records still descend from those surveys, which makes a Khatri accountant of the 1580s the longest-lasting administrator in Indian history.
- Institutional successionSasaram
Todar Mal had served in the Sur administration before he served Akbar's, and the zabt settlement is Sher Shah's surveyed cash revenue carried out at imperial scale with ten-year price averages added. The system that the Mughals are credited with, and that the Company then inherited in Bengal, is traceable through one official's career back to a five-year Afghan reign.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Todar Mal”. Abu'l-Fazl, Āʾīn-i Akbarī, book II, on the revenue settlement; Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556–1707 (1963).
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