80 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bt\ al. [N.S., XIII, 



181. The Muradi Tank a. 



"At the present time, namely a.h. 1002, Hindustan con- 

 tains 3200 towns, and upon each town there are dependent 200, 

 500, 1000, or 1500 villages. The whole yields a revenue of 640 

 crores (6,400 ; 000 ,000) Muradi tankas." So writes l Nizarau-d- 



Tdbaqat-i 

 Thomas s 



and well-infc 

 s the Mum 



that 



was 



double dam, and as forty dams went to the Akbari rupee, the 

 Muradi tanka must be taken to be identical in value with the 

 older Sikandari tanka, which was the twentieth part of the 

 rupee. (Chronicles, Ed. 1871, pp. 441-5; Revenue Resource 

 of the Mughal Empire, p. 7). He therefore took Nizamu-d-din 's 

 statement to mean that Akbar's gross annual receipts from 

 all sources amounted to 32 crores of rupees. Mr. Stanley 



W. W 



subject 



question of Mughal Revenues in his Monograph on Aurangzeb, 

 has taken a very different view. •■ I have not mentioned," he 

 says," Thomas's theory that the gross income of Akbar in 1593 

 was (at 2s. 3d. the rupee) £36,000,000, because it is based on the 

 assumption that the 6,400,000,000 Muradi tankas of Nizamu- 

 d-din Ahmad 's return for that year (which I have purposely 

 omitted in the list given above) were equivalent to double dams. 

 The terms dam and tanka are interchangeable, as is proved by 

 the inscriptions on the coins themselves, and though there were 

 undoubtedly double dams as well as double tankas, there is really 

 no valid ground for assuming in this single instance a different 

 fiscal unit from that employed in all the other returns. * * * l 

 therefore take Nizamu-d-din's return to represent C 18, 000 ,000- 

 Whilst disbelieving the Muradi tanka theory, however, as a 

 ground for the higher estimate, I do not doubt that (she gross 

 revenue of Akbar in 1593 may have been quite 36 millions." 

 (Aurangzeb, Rulers of India Series, p. 128 note; Hunter, 

 Indian Empire, 3rd ed., p. 353 ff.). Briefly, Mr. Lane Poole is 

 confident that the Muradi tanka of the • Tabaqat ' is nothing but 

 the single dam of which forty and not twenty went to the rupee, 

 and he does not think it probable that a monetary or fiscal unit 

 altogether different from that employed everywhere else should 

 have been used by Nizamu-d-din in this solitary passage. 

 It is now nearly twenty years since Mr. Lane Poole wrote as 



has 



Muradi 



theory of Thomas. It occurred to me recently that a re-examina 



1 DowBon's Elliot, V, p. 186. 



Chronicles 



