BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 62 of 142

Correct — B, Village headmen. The stem pairs two words on purpose, and the pairing is the clue: khut, muqaddam and chaudhuri are the three names for the hereditary rural notables who stood between the Sultanate and the peasant, and the muqaddam is glossed in every standard account as the headman of a village, the chaudhuri as the corresponding chief over a pargana, a group of villages. They were not appointed by the Sultan and drew no salary from him; they were local men of standing who collected the land revenue from the cultivators on the state's behalf and kept a customary share for doing it. Their prominence in the record comes from what Alauddin Khalji did to them. The Wikipedia account of his reign says the countryside and agricultural production in his time 'was controlled by the village headmen, the traditional Hindu authorities', whose resistance he treated as the main difficulty of his reign, and quotes his own complaint that 'the chiefs and muqaddams led a luxurious life but never paid a jital in taxes'. He answered by imposing kharaj at 50 per cent of produce — the maximum the dominant Hanafi school allowed — assessing tax in proportion to land area so that big villages paid more, forcing the rural chiefs to pay the same rates as everyone else, abolishing the cut they took for collecting, and stripping them of wealth, horses and arms. All of that only makes sense against men who were village heads with a hereditary local base, which is exactly what option (b) says.

• (a)Revenue officials — Close enough to be dangerous, and wrong in the way that matters. A revenue official was a servant of the state — the amil, the mutasarrif, the karkun — posted, paid and transferable. The muqaddam and chaudhuri were the opposite: hereditary local notables with their own standing in the village, who collected revenue on the state's behalf and kept a share, which is why Alauddin had to break them rather than simply dismiss them.
• (c)Village accountant — That post has its own well-known name — the patwari, the man who kept the village's land records and accounts and survived from the Sultanate into the Mughal and British revenue systems and into district administration today. Since the accountant's title is already taken by a different word, it cannot also be the meaning of muqaddam.
• (d)None of the above — The escape is available only if all three named meanings fail, and the second is the standard gloss found in every account of Sultanate rural administration. Note the discipline this requires in reverse: a candidate who rejects (b) because 'headman' feels imprecise still has to show that neither of the other two fits, and both are already occupied by other offices.

Sultanate administration had two layers that are easy to confuse. The upper layer was the iqta system: conquered territory was parcelled out to military commanders, the iqtadars or muqtis, who collected the revenue of their assignment, maintained troops from it and remitted the surplus — the fawazil — to the royal exchequer. That layer was Turkish, official, and transferable at the Sultan's will. The lower layer was the village, and it was not Turkish at all. There the same men who had run rural society before the conquest carried on: the khut, the muqaddam and the chaudhuri as headmen at village and pargana level, the patwari as accountant, the village artisans and the panchayat. The Sultanate reached the peasant only through these intermediaries, which gave them both power and a customary cut of the revenue. The tension between the two layers is the story of Sultanate agrarian policy, and Alauddin Khalji's measures — direct collection of kharaj from cultivators, elimination of iqtas and grants in the Ganga-Yamuna Doab, abolition of the intermediaries' cut — are its sharpest episode. The land tax he systematised, kharaj or mal, is described by the Cambridge Economic History of India as the institution of his reign that lasted longest, surviving into the nineteenth or even the twentieth century.

Two clues inside the question do most of the work. First, the stem offers two words joined by 'or', which signals that both denote the same kind of person rather than two different offices — so the answer must be a category broad enough to cover a village figure and a pargana figure, and 'village headmen' is that category while 'village accountant', a single named post, is not. Second, each of the other options is already spoken for by a different Persian-Arabic term you should know: the salaried revenue official is the amil, the accountant is the patwari. When an option's meaning belongs to a word that is not in the stem, that option is a decoy. The wider habit worth building is to keep the Sultanate vocabulary in families — iqta, muqti, fawazil and khalisa for the assignment system; khut, muqaddam, chaudhuri and patwari for the village; kharaj, ghari and charai for the taxes — because both BPSC and UPSC test these as isolated definitions.

• Khut, muqaddam and chaudhuri were the hereditary rural intermediaries of the Delhi Sultanate — the muqaddam a village headman, the chaudhuri a headman over a pargana; the patwari was the village accountant.
• Alauddin Khalji imposed kharaj at 50 per cent of agricultural produce over much of northern India, the maximum permitted by the Hanafi school then dominant in Delhi.
• He assessed the tax in proportion to land area, so that villages with more land paid more, forced the rural chiefs to pay at the same rates as ordinary cultivators, and abolished the share they had taken for collecting revenue.
• He brought a large tract of the Ganga-Yamuna Doab under directly governed crown land by eliminating iqtas, land grants and vassals there, and deprived the rural chiefs of wealth, horses and arms to forestall rebellion.
• The Cambridge Economic History of India calls his taxation system the institution of his reign that lasted longest, with kharaj or mal becoming the principal form in which the peasant's surplus was taken.

• Choosing 'revenue officials' because muqaddams collected revenue. They collected as hereditary village notables with a customary share, not as posted, salaried servants of the state — the amil was the official.
• Forgetting that the village accountant already has its own name, the patwari, which is what makes option (c) a decoy rather than a rival reading.
• Treating the chaudhuri as identical to the muqaddam. Both are headmen, but the chaudhuri's jurisdiction was the pargana — a group of villages — and the muqaddam's was one village.

BPSC asks Sultanate administration as a bare definition — give the term, pick the meaning — with the distractors drawn from adjacent offices in the same system, so a candidate who knows the vocabulary as a family answers instantly. UPSC does the same but reaches for the rarer word, such as fawazil, or turns the vocabulary into a match-the-pairs across dynasties, pairing iqta with the Delhi Sultans against jagir, amaram and mokasa.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the Delhi Sultanate's revenue system, the village accountant was known as the

  • (a)Muqaddam
  • (b)Chaudhuri
  • (c)Patwari
  • (d)Amil

  Answer(c) Patwari — the keeper of village land records and accounts. The muqaddam and chaudhuri were headmen, and the amil was a salaried revenue official of the state.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Alauddin Khalji fixed the kharaj on agricultural produce at

  • (a)One-sixth of the produce
  • (b)One-fourth of the produce
  • (c)One-third of the produce
  • (d)One-half of the produce

  Answer(d) One-half of the produce — 50 per cent, the maximum permitted by the Hanafi school of law then dominant at Delhi, assessed in proportion to the area of land held.