MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 10 of 100

Correct — option (3), 'Khiraj and Zakat'. The Delhi Sultanate's revenue system rested on four taxes sanctioned by the shariat — kharaj, zakat, jizya and khams — and the question asks which two of them fell respectively on Hindu and on Muslim landholders. Kharaj was the land tax, a share of the produce taken from the land held by the Sultanate's non-Muslim, overwhelmingly Hindu, landholding and cultivating population; it was the largest single source of state income and the tax around which the whole administration of the iqta was organised. Zakat was the obligatory religious levy on the wealth of Muslims, assessed on accumulated property above a threshold and traditionally collected at a fortieth part, and it was the levy the Muslim propertied classes paid. The pairing 'kharaj from the Hindu, zakat from the Muslim' is therefore the one combination among the four printed options in which each name is a real tax and each falls on the community the question assigns it to, in the printed order. It is worth adding, without disturbing that answer, that the tax the books pair most exactly with kharaj is ushr, the tithe of a tenth taken from land held by Muslims — but ushr is not among the options offered here, and among the four that are printed, zakat is the levy borne by Muslims. The other two canonical taxes complete the picture and explain the distractors: jizya was a poll tax on non-Muslim subjects, levied on persons in return for protection and exemption from military service rather than on land, and khams was the state's share of the spoils of war and of treasure and mines. Recognising which of the four was levied on land, which on persons, which on wealth and which on plunder is the whole of what this question tests.

• (1)Jizya and Shar — Half of this option is not a tax at all. 'Shar' is not the name of any Sultanate levy — the word belongs to the vocabulary of shara or shariat, the religious law itself, and a candidate who accepts it has been persuaded by a term that merely sounds administrative. Jizya, the other half, is a genuine tax but the wrong one for this question: it was a poll tax levied on non-Muslim subjects as individuals in exchange for protection and exemption from military service, not a charge on landholding, and it had no Muslim counterpart because Muslims were not liable to it.
• (2)Jizya and Khams — Both names here are real, and both are wrong for this pairing. Jizya was a poll tax on non-Muslims rather than a land tax on Hindu landholders. Khams was the state's one-fifth share of the spoils of war, and by extension of treasure trove and mines — a windfall levy, not a recurring charge on anybody's land or wealth, and certainly not something collected from Muslim landlords as a class. The option is designed for the candidate who remembers that jizya fell on Hindus and then reaches for any second Arabic term to fill the Muslim side of the pair.
• (4)Khams and Zakat — This option gets the second half right and the first half wrong, which makes it the most dangerous of the three. Zakat was indeed the levy on Muslim wealth, so a candidate who works from the Muslim side of the pair will find this option satisfying. But khams was the fifth part of war booty claimed by the state, not the land tax paid by Hindu landholders — that was kharaj. In a 'respectively' question both halves must match in the printed order, and one correct half is worth nothing.

Sultanate taxation was organised by the religious status of the taxpayer as well as by the source of the income, and the four canonical taxes divide neatly on that principle. Kharaj was the land revenue taken from non-Muslim landholders and was the fiscal backbone of the state; ushr was the lighter tithe on land held by Muslims; zakat was the religious levy on Muslim wealth; jizya was the poll tax on non-Muslim subjects, from which women, children, the disabled and the indigent were exempt and from which Brahmins were long exempt in practice until Firoz Shah Tughlaq extended it to them; khams was the state's share of war spoils, which Alauddin Khalji notoriously reversed by claiming four-fifths for the treasury instead of the customary one-fifth. Collection ran through the iqta system, in which assignments of revenue rather than salaries paid the nobility and the army, which is why control over kharaj assessment was the perennial political question of the period.

MPSC's medieval-history questions favour terminology, because a term either is or is not the right name for a thing and no interpretation is possible. This item is a compact test of four Arabic-Persian revenue terms, and the option list is built so that every wrong choice contains at least one real term used in the wrong place — the standard way of punishing recognition without understanding. The safeguard is to hold each term with its base: kharaj on land, ushr on Muslim-held land, zakat on wealth, jizya on persons, khams on plunder. A second habit this question rewards is reading the word 'respectively', which requires both halves of the answer to line up with both halves of the stem in the order printed. The vocabulary carries beyond this chapter as well: the same distinction between a levy on land, a levy on persons and a levy on wealth reappears under different names in the Mughal and Maratha revenue questions, so the effort spent on these five terms is not confined to the Sultanate.

• The four taxes sanctioned by the shariat under the Delhi Sultanate were kharaj, zakat, jizya and khams.
• Kharaj was the land tax taken as a share of produce from non-Muslim landholders and was the principal source of the Sultanate's revenue.
• Zakat was the obligatory religious levy on the accumulated wealth of Muslims above a minimum threshold, traditionally at a fortieth part.
• Jizya was a poll tax on non-Muslim subjects in return for protection and exemption from military service; ushr was the tithe on land held by Muslims.
• Khams was the state's share of the spoils of war and of treasure and mines; Alauddin Khalji claimed four-fifths for the state instead of the customary one-fifth.

• Treating jizya as a land tax; it was a levy on persons, not on holdings, and had no Muslim counterpart
• Accepting an invented or garbled term such as 'Shar' because it looks like the other Arabic revenue words in the list
• Ignoring the word 'respectively', which requires both halves of the chosen pair to match the two communities in the printed order

Medieval revenue terminology appears in MPSC papers as single-term recall, as 'respectively' pairings like this one, and as match-the-columns items linking a term to its base or to the ruler who introduced or abolished it. Because the vocabulary is small, the commission manufactures difficulty by mixing real terms into wrong slots and occasionally by printing a word that is not a tax at all. Learning the five or six terms with one line each — what it was levied on, who paid it, and which ruler is associated with a change to it — covers the whole family, and the same vocabulary carries forward into the Mughal questions on jizya and the zabti system.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the Delhi Sultanate, the tax known as khams referred to which of the following ?

  • (a)The land tax taken from non-Muslim landholders
  • (b)The state's share of the spoils of war, treasure and mines
  • (c)The poll tax levied on non-Muslim subjects
  • (d)The tithe on land held by Muslims

  Answer(b) The state's share of the spoils of war, treasure and mines — customarily one-fifth, though Alauddin Khalji claimed four-fifths for the treasury and left a fifth to the soldiers. The land tax on non-Muslim landholders was kharaj, the poll tax on non-Muslims was jizya, and the tithe on Muslim-held land was ushr.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The jizya was abolished in the Mughal empire in 1564 and reimposed in 1679 by which pair of rulers respectively ?

  • (a)Akbar and Aurangzeb
  • (b)Humayun and Shah Jahan
  • (c)Jahangir and Aurangzeb
  • (d)Akbar and Jahangir

  Answer(a) Akbar and Aurangzeb — Akbar abolished the jizya on non-Muslim subjects in 1564, early in his reign and as part of the same policy that ended the pilgrim tax, and Aurangzeb reimposed it in 1679. The tax had earlier been extended to Brahmins by Firoz Shah Tughlaq during the Sultanate period.