Todar Mal

Todar Mal built the revenue system that paid for the Mughal empire and let it govern rather than merely conquer. He was born into a Khatri family in what is now Uttar Pradesh, was orphaned young, and began as a writer in the service of Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan ruler who briefly displaced Humayun and whose administrative reforms Todar Mal learned and later surpassed. Under Akbar he became finance minister. His settlement, the zabt system, replaced guesswork and annual haggling with measurement: land surveyed with a standard bigha using a jointed bamboo rod rather than a rope that stretched when wet, classified by how continuously it could be cropped, assessed on the average yield and price of the previous ten years, and taxed at a fixed share payable in cash. Because the demand was known in advance, a cultivator could plan and an official could not invent it. He also ordered the accounts kept in Persian rather than Hindi, which centralised the service and made a career in it depend on a particular education. Remissions were built in for crop failure, though whether they were honoured depended on the local officer. He was one of Akbar's navaratna, the nine jewels of the court, campaigned in Bengal and Gujarat, and was a devout Hindu in a Muslim administration at a moment when that was policy. The system outlasted the empire; the British inherited its vocabulary and much of its machinery. He is supposed to have started as a clerk and died as the second man in the empire, which is the kind of career the Mughal service occasionally allowed and the Mughal chroniclers enjoyed recording. Akbar is said to have refused to let him retire. His name survives in north India as a byword for a land measurement done honestly.

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