Which one of the following is NOT the characteristics of 'Iqta System' ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, 'Revenue from Iqta was directly deposited in Sultan's account'. That is exactly what the iqta was designed to avoid. The whole point of the institution was that the Sultan, short of cash and short of an empire-wide collecting bureaucracy, assigned the revenue of a defined territory to an officer instead of paying him a salary from the treasury. The holder — called the muqti or wali — collected the land revenue of his iqta himself, retained his own pay and the cost of the cavalry contingent he was obliged to maintain, and sent only the balance to the centre. That balance had a name of its own, fawazil, and the fact that a separate term existed for the surplus is itself proof that the gross revenue never went straight to the Sultan's treasury. Only the khalisa lands, reserved directly under the crown, were collected for the central exchequer in that way. Later Sultans tightened the accounting: officers of the diwan-i-wizarat estimated what an iqta ought to yield and audited the holder's figures so that the fawazil was actually remitted — but even then the money passed through the muqti's hands first. So (c) states the opposite of how the system worked and is the exception the question asks for.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is a true characteristic. The iqta was an assignment of the land revenue of a tract in lieu of cash salary, and collecting that revenue was the assignee's central duty — so it functioned as the Sultanate's principal machinery for realising and distributing land revenue.  (b) This is true. The Siyasatnama (Siyar al-Muluk), the manual of statecraft written by the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk Tusi in the eleventh century, sets out the theory of the iqta — the assignee's duties, the peasants' protection and the state's ultimate ownership — and remains a standard source historians use to reconstruct the institution the Turks brought to India.  (d) This is true and is the military logic of the whole arrangement. The muqti was bound to maintain and produce a fixed contingent of horsemen, paid for out of the revenue of his iqta; the iqta was in effect a device for keeping an army without a cash payroll.

Concept: The iqta was not a European-style fief and not private property. It was a transferable, in principle non-hereditary assignment of revenue: the state retained ownership, the muqti held the right to collect for as long as the Sultan pleased, and he could be moved from one iqta to another — Balban and Alauddin Khalji used exactly that power to prevent assignees from striking roots. In return the holder discharged administrative and military duties in his tract and remitted the fawazil. The institution came into India with the Turks — Iltutmish is credited with organising it systematically — and its later history is a running contest between central control and local entrenchment: Alauddin Khalji resumed many assignments and expanded the khalisa, while Firoz Shah Tughlaq moved the other way and allowed iqtas to become effectively hereditary.

State PCS 2019 Q130 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q130 — History PYQ with Answer