Reforms in Mughal Taxation: Abul Fazal’s Contributions to Agricultural Policy

When we think of the Mughal Empire, grand forts and elegant gardens usually come to mind. But the empire’s real strength rested on something far less glamorous: land revenue. Agriculture fed the treasury, and how taxes were assessed on farmers decided whether the countryside thrived or suffered. At the heart of this system stood Abul Fazl, the scholar-statesman in Akbar’s court who documented and rationalised these reforms in his monumental work, the Ain-i-Akbari. His writings reveal a vision of taxation rooted in economic justice, predictability, and the well-being of the cultivator.

Why the old tax system needed reform 🔗

Before Akbar’s reign, revenue collection was often arbitrary. Under the first two Mughal rulers, Babur and Humayun, the administration largely continued the practices inherited from the Delhi Sultanate. Taxes fluctuated, local officials had wide discretion, and corruption was common.

A major step forward came from Sher Shah Suri, who ruled briefly between Humayun and Akbar. He was the first to order a systematic land survey and establish clear principles of revenue assessment. Akbar inherited this foundation and, with the help of his finance minister Raja Todar Mal, expanded and refined it into one of the most sophisticated fiscal systems of the pre-modern world. Abul Fazl became the chronicler and intellectual defender of this achievement.

How Abul Fazl justified taxation 🔗

Abul Fazl did not treat taxation as simple extraction. In the Ain-i-Akbari, he framed land revenue as the remuneration of sovereignty: a payment made by subjects in return for the protection and justice the state provided. This was a significant idea. It positioned the ruler not as the absolute owner of all land, but as a provider of services who was owed a fair share in exchange. Land revenue, in this view, was a tax on the crop rather than rent on the soil, a distinction that later confused early British administrators.

From crop-sharing to fixed assessment 🔗

To understand the reform, we first need to understand the older methods. The earliest form of revenue collection was Ghalla-Bakhshi (also called batai or crop-sharing). Here, the actual harvest was divided between the peasant and the state. The Ain-i-Akbari records three variations of this method: dividing grain at the threshing floor, dividing the standing crop in the field, or dividing the cut and stacked heaps.

Crop-sharing had one clear advantage: the peasant and the state shared the risk of a bad season equally. If the harvest failed, both bore the loss. But Abul Fazl noted a serious drawback. The method was expensive for the state, because it had to employ large numbers of watchmen to guard the crop and prevent misappropriation before the division was made.

The estimation and lump-sum methods 🔗

Two other methods reduced these costs. In Kankut, land was measured or paced out and the standing crop was estimated by inspection, with revenue fixed according to productivity. As Abul Fazl explained, kan meant grain and kut meant estimate. This resembled crop-sharing but was far cheaper, since it required no constant watch over reaping and threshing.

The third method, Nasaq, was widely used in Akbar’s time. It involved a rough calculation of the amount payable by a peasant based on past experience and customary rates. It was simple to administer and common in regions like Bengal, though it risked drifting away from actual agricultural conditions over time.

The Zabt system and the Dahsala settlement 🔗

The centrepiece of Akbar’s reform was the Zabt system, finalised in the Dahsala settlement of 1580. The Persian word zabt literally means “regulation” or “fixed assessment.” Under this system, revenue demand on cultivated land was fixed in cash, based on systematic measurement and regionally adjusted rates, rather than on the annual share of an unpredictable harvest.

The Dahsala, often called the “ten-year system,” did not mean a settlement signed for ten years. Instead, it used the average produce and average prices of crops over the previous ten years to calculate a standard revenue demand. This produced schedules of rates known as dastur-ul-amals for each locality. The corrections Akbar made to the system fell under three heads: measurement of land, classification of land by fertility, and fixation of rates.

Why fixed assessment helped farmers 🔗

The shift towards a fixed, measurement-based demand had real benefits for the cultivator. Because the state’s share was settled in advance and recorded, there was far less scope for officials to extract more than was actually due. Measurement could always be rechecked, and fixed rates removed the discretion that revenue collectors had previously abused.

Crucially, Abul Fazl recorded a degree of flexibility built into the system. He wrote that if a peasant did not have the strength to bear the Zabt assessment, the older practice of taking a third of the crop as revenue could be followed instead. In times of drought or excessive rain, revenue was often remitted, and needy peasants were given loans, known as taccavi, by the government to help them recover and continue farming.

Towards individual responsibility and economic justice 🔗

One of the most important shifts in this period was the move towards assessing the demand more directly on the cultivator rather than treating the village as a single collective unit. Under older arrangements, entire villages were sometimes assessed together, with the community internally distributing the burden, an approach that could unfairly load costs onto weaker members.

Detailed measurement and classification under Zabt made it possible to record the productivity of individual plots, document soil quality, and tie the demand more closely to what a particular piece of land could actually yield. This record-keeping reflected Abul Fazl’s broader emphasis on rational governance: decisions grounded in surveys and data rather than in custom or the whims of local power-holders.

The link to agricultural productivity 🔗

A predictable tax demand created incentives. When farmers knew the state’s claim in advance and trusted that it would not arbitrarily rise, they had reason to invest in improving their land and expanding cultivation. The state encouraged this further. Revenue collectors, the amils, were instructed to support peasants by advancing loans and allowing repayment in manageable instalments.

The results were visible in the treasury. Land revenue rose dramatically across the Mughal period, climbing from roughly Rs. 2.6 crore under Babur to about Rs. 17.5 crore in Akbar’s time, and continuing to grow under his successors. While part of this reflects territorial expansion, it also points to a productive and reasonably stable agrarian economy underpinning the empire.

A balanced view of the reforms 🔗

It would be misleading to present the system as perfect. Modern scholarship reminds us that the actual revenue demand was heavy, often ranging between one-third and one-half of the produce, and reaching even higher in some regions. Under the Zabt system, the peasant also bore the risk of a poor harvest more directly than under crop-sharing, because the cash demand was fixed regardless of how the season turned out.

The reforms were also not applied uniformly. Zabt and Dahsala were enforced comprehensively only across the Hindustani core, in provinces like Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and Allahabad. Other regions retained different systems: Bengal relied on nasaq, the Deccan kept its pre-existing structures, and newly conquered tracts often continued with crop-sharing variants. Over time, as enforcement weakened, intermediaries and officials found ways to extract more from cultivators than the rules allowed.

Even so, the principles Abul Fazl documented were genuinely influential. The emphasis on measurement, classification, and direct assessment of the cultivator shaped revenue thinking for centuries. The later Ryotwari system introduced by the British, which assessed taxes directly on the individual ryot based on landholdings and expected yields, drew heavily on these Mughal measurement techniques, even as colonial rule hardened what had once been flexible arrangements.

Abul Fazl’s lasting legacy 🔗

Abul Fazl’s contribution was not merely administrative but intellectual. By recording the revenue system in meticulous detail in the Ain-i-Akbari, he gave it a coherent philosophy: taxation as a fair exchange between ruler and subject, governance grounded in evidence, and an administration responsive to the cultivator’s capacity to pay. His framing of revenue as the price of protection and justice, rather than as the arbitrary right of a conqueror, marked a thoughtful approach to monarchical authority and the well-being of ordinary people.

For students of political thought, the significance lies here. Abul Fazl connected the practical machinery of tax collection to larger ideas about what a just and rational state should be. The reforms of his era show how careful policy design, built on measurement and predictability, can ease the burden on the most vulnerable while strengthening the foundations of the state.

What do you think? Did the shift to a fixed cash demand genuinely protect farmers, or did it simply transfer the risk of a bad harvest from the state onto the peasant? And how much of Abul Fazl’s vision of taxation as a “fair exchange” do you see reflected in the way modern states justify the taxes they collect today?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi_Sultanate
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todar_Mal
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain-i-Akbari
4. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/20250/1/Unit-16.pdf
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_fiscal_system
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahsala_system
7. https://www.historydiscussion.net/history-of-india/mughal-empire/revenue-administration-under-the-mughals/6235
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryotwari