During the Delhi Sultanate, the designation 'Muqaddam or Chaudhuri' was used for

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q62 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q62 — History PYQ with Answer