Jama, Hasil and the Temptation of a 31 Per Cent Decline
A student must pronounce on the agrarian condition of pargana Bhadaur, sarkar Kara-Manikpur, between 1595 and 1700. The file contains: (a) the jama of the pargana as entered in the Ain-i-Akbari of about 1595, expressed in dams and totalling 42 lakh dams; (b) a Persian farman of 1678 confirming a madad-i-maash grant, whose preamble cites the hasil of the same pargana as 29 lakh dams for that year; (c) a Persian chronicle of the 1720s stating that in the late seventeenth century 'the pargana was laid waste and its cultivators scattered'; (d) a note from the teacher that no village-level khasra or dastur-ul-amal for Bhadaur survives. The student's draft opens: 'Bhadaur declined by 31 per cent between 1595 and 1678.' The figures are constructed for this exercise.
1. Why is the 31 per cent figure not yet a finding? Separate the units being compared.
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Because the two figures measure different things.
- Jama is an assessment - the demand the state calculated at a given set of rates, often with suyurghal deductions and tankha assignments already carved out. It is a statement of expectation.
- Hasil is realisation - what was actually collected, after remission, default, or the failure of an intermediary to pay.
The 1595 figure is an assessment computed under Akbar's schedule; the 1678 figure is a collection figure in a grant preamble, where the drafting clerk had an interest in a plausible, not a precise, figure. A gap between jama and hasil is normal even in a good year, so a 31 per cent gap between an assessment and a realisation is consistent with no agrarian change at all.
What the draft actually shows is a comparison of a demand with a receipt. Before it becomes a finding it must be restated in one unit - jama against jama, or hasil against hasil - and the currency and the assessment rates must be shown to be comparable.
2. The chronicle says the pargana was ruined. How would you weigh it, and what further records would you seek?
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Weighing the chronicle. Persian chronicles routinely deploy a topos of ruin to praise a later ruler's restoration or to censure a predecessor's officers; the statement is unsourced, retrospective by fifty years, and undated. It cannot carry the argument alone, but it does raise a hypothesis worth testing - a genuine crisis in a particular decade rather than a century-long slide.
Records to seek, and what each would do:
- Dastur-ul-amal and amal-dastur registers - would let you recompute demand at a single schedule.
- Farmans of appointment citing the jama of the pargana at a given date - gives a jama series.
- Arzdasht and petitions from zamindars and muqaddams - reveals whether shortfall was agrarian or a dispute over assignment.
- Dutch or English factory records with grain prices and cloth purchases - an independent proxy for output and distress.
- Maratha or successor-state records after 1720 - traces recovery or collapse past the Mughal archive's edge.
- A control pargana in the same sarkar - without it, you cannot tell a general trend from a local event.
Each shifts the claim from 'decline' to a dated, located, and where necessary retracted, finding.