________________
NOVEMBER, 1911.)
EARLY SOUTH INDIAN FINANCE
283
is that the sale of the entire produce does not suffice to pay the entire contribution. The cultivators then remain under the weight of a heavy debt; and often they are obliged to prove their inability to pay by submitting to the most barbarous tortures. It would be difficult for you to conceive such an oppression, and yet I must add that this tyranny is more frightful and revolting in the kingdom of Gingee. For the rest this is all I can say, for I cannot find words to express all that is horrible in it." This letter shows that Venkäji took fall 80 per cent. of the gross produce as revenue, leaving only 20 per cent to the cultivators. On the accession of Raja Pratápsing in 1741, the cultivators enjoyed 29 per cent. of the pisanam (staple crop), which required additional labour in watering. The rate for the former was raised by him and his successors till it amounted to 40 per cent, in the time of Amirsing.71 These rates applied solely to cultivation under river irrigation. In regard to wet cultivation under rain-fed tanks, the vdram varied from 50 to CO per cent of the gross produce.72 Besides the regular land assessment, there were several cesses, the names, nature, and extent of as many as twenty-seven of them being known.73
V.-Nawabs of Arcot. The conquest of Bijapur and Golkonda by Aurangazib by 1687" opened the way for Marathi raids into the sonth of India. But that puritanical Mogul would not desist from making the south an integral portion of his empire. Mogul thus followed in the wake of the Maratha and the state of the country, towards the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries, was truly distressing. Zulifikâr Khan, the Mogul general in the sontb, was employed in a course of incessant and destructive warfare. The express statement," says Wilks,ne " of nineteen actions fought and three thousand cose (6,000 miles) marched by this officer in the course of six months only, may afford some faint idea of the wretchedness in shich the unfortunate inhabitants were involved during that period, and these miseries of var, in the ordinary course of human calamity, were necessarily followed by a long and Iestructive famine and pestilence.” Within this period, Zulifikar Khan made three different xpeditions to the south of the Cauvery, levying heavy contributions on Tanjore and Trichinopoly. Both the Maratha and the Mogul fleeced the cultivators, who often had no Iternative but to give up their occupation and turn freebooters themselves. Shortly after, allowed the war in the Coromandel (174-1761) between the rival Nawabs of Arcot, aided by the rival subadars of the Deccan and the French and the English on opposite sides. This eaded in the Treaty of Paris of 1763 which recognised Muhammad Ali as the Nawab of the Carnatic, though to the close of the century the country knew no rest through the devastating vasiong of Haider Ali, the usurper of the Mysore throne. The territories, over which
ohammad Ali's rule, nominal or actual, extended, were divided into the four Subhds of Arcot, Icluding the present districts of North Arcot, South Arcot, Chingleput, which was in 1763 Lanted as a jághir to the East India Company: Trichinopoly, to which in 1774 was added by +Dquest the Maratha kingdom of Tanjore; Madura, including the present Tinnevelly district; id lastly Nellore. The system of administration introduced by the Nawabs of the Carpatic * atterly destructive of the ancient village institations of Southern India.77 To each of the
bhás was appointed a Fauzdâr,78 or Military Governor, who exercised the supreme authority of the State in it as the chief officer and representative of the Nawab. During early times ho
.
T Tanjore Dt. Manual, 478, quoting Report of the Tanjore Commissioners of 1708. 11 Ibid. 477.
12 Ibid. 479.
13 lbid, 482, 493, and 487. ** See Lane Polo's Aurangazfb in the Rulers of India Series, 183.
To Ibid. 190. T6 Histor al Sketches, eto., I., 135, 11 See Nellore Dt. Manual, 481, and North Arcot Dt. Manual, I, 117-8, 18 Caldwell's History of Tinnevelly, 125; Nellore Dt Manual, 482.
