Which of the following taxes was collected from Hindu and Muslim landlords respectively during the Sultanate rule ?

Question

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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.

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

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2024 Q10 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q10 — History PYQ with Answer