In the Mansabdari system, 'zat' and 'sawar' refer respectively to:

Personal status/pay grade, and the cavalry a mansabdar maintained

Watan, as distinguished from an ordinary jagir, refers to land held as:

A hereditary, personal assignment (chiefly among Rajput chieftains)

A temporary, revocable service grant

A grant to a Buddhist monastery

Vijayanagara's Nayankara system assigned land (amaram) to nayakas chiefly in exchange for:

Military service and a share of revenue (raya-rekho)

Which of the following are correctly paired as a state and its administrative system?

Mughals — Mansabdari/Jagirdari

Bahmanis — Turkan-i-Chahalgani

Jaziya and Zakat together form a fiscal structure best described as:

Religiously differentiated — one on non-Muslims, one on Muslims

Both abolished by Sher Shah Suri

Medieval Administration: Sultanate, Mughal, Deccan and Maratha Systems

Unit V takes the political history of Unit IV and asks the administrative question directly: how were these states actually governed, day to day? NET explicitly wants the Sultanate, Mughal, Vijayanagara/Bahmani and Maratha systems held side by side for comparison, not studied as four unconnected topics.

1. Administration under the Sultanate

The Sultanate's administration is organised in three tiers — central (the Sultan, assisted by key ministers: the Wazir for revenue/finance, the Ariz-i-Mumalik for the army, and the qazi-led judicial establishment applying Shariyat, alongside a separate customary law for non-Muslim subjects), provincial (governors, often military commanders, holding considerable autonomy in practice), and local (the pargana as the basic revenue-administrative unit, run through hereditary local functionaries) — and the law of succession, notably, was never formally settled: no fixed rule of primogeviture existed, and succession was repeatedly decided by military strength and court factionalism rather than by an agreed principle, a recurring source of instability across all five dynasties.

ℹ️ Sher Shah's Administrative Reforms

Sher Shah Suri's brief interregnum (1540-1545, already met in Unit IV) is treated here for its own administrative content: a rationalised, surveyed land-revenue system based on measured crop yields rather than arbitrary assessment, the Rupiya as a stable silver coin standard that outlasted his own dynasty, an efficient postal/intelligence relay system, and the Grand Trunk Road with sarais (rest-houses) at regular intervals for travellers and trade — reforms so effective that Akbar's own later administration built directly on them rather than starting afresh.

2. Mughal Administration: Mansabdari and Jagirdari

Akbar's Mansabdari system assigned every noble a numerical rank (mansab), expressed as two numbers — zat (personal status/pay grade) and sawar (the number of cavalry a mansabdar was obligated to maintain) — a system deliberately designed to prevent the buildup of independent, hereditary regional power bases by keeping ranks non-hereditary and revocable at the Emperor's discretion; jagirdari was the linked mechanism through which a mansabdar was actually paid, an assignment (jagir) of the right to collect land revenue from a specified territory in lieu of a cash salary, with Akbar's finance minister Todar Mal's careful land measurement and revenue settlement (the Zabti/Dahsala system, based on ten-year average yields — the concepts list's own Ain-i-Dashsalah) providing the assessment base the whole edifice depended on.

Mughal fiscal and administrative vocabulary
Term	Meaning
Dastur	The schedule of standard crop-wise revenue rates fixed for each locality under the Zabti system, updated periodically to reflect actual yields and prices.
Watan	Land held as a hereditary, personal (rather than transferable, service-linked) assignment — chiefly relevant to autonomous or semi-autonomous chieftains like the Rajputs, contrasted with the ordinary, non-hereditary jagir a serving mansabdar held.
Jaziya and Zakat	Jaziya, a tax on non-Muslim subjects (abolished by Akbar, reimposed by Aurangzeb); Zakat, an Islamic obligatory almsgiving/wealth-tax collected from Muslim subjects — the two form a paired, religiously-differentiated fiscal structure the concepts list names separately.

3. Administrative Systems in the Deccan and Among the Marathas

Vijayanagara administered its vast territory through the Nayankara system — provincial military governors (nayakas) holding land assignments (Amaram, the concepts list's own named term) in exchange for military service and a share of revenue remitted to the centre (Raya-Rekho, the syllabus's own named crown-revenue share) — a structure with real functional parallels to Mughal Mansabdari/Jagirdari despite its independent Hindu-polity origin, which is exactly why NET asks candidates to compare rather than treat the two systems as unrelated.

Bahmani administrative system — territory was divided into provinces (tarafs) under governors, with the recurring Deccani-Afaqi factionalism (already met in Unit IV) directly shaping appointments and provincial loyalty, a political fact with real administrative consequences rather than a purely court-intrigue matter.
Maratha administration — Asta Pradhan — Shivaji's eight-minister council (already met in Unit IV) divided functions cleanly: the Peshwa (chief minister, later the dynasty's own effective ruling office), Amatya (finance/accounts), Sachiv (correspondence), Mantri (intelligence/household), Senapati (military command), Sumant (foreign affairs), Nyayadhish (justice) and Panditrao (religious/charitable affairs) — a functional division comparable in spirit, though independently derived, to the specialised central ministries of the Sultanate and Mughal systems.

4. Frontier Policy and Inter-State Relations

Both the Sultanate and the Mughals faced the same structural frontier problem — the north-west passes as the historic invasion route into the subcontinent — and responded with broadly similar policies: forward military posts and negotiated or coerced tribute/alliance relationships with the Afghan tribes controlling the passes, punctuated by repeated large-scale invasions from Central Asia (the Mongols under Chinggis Khan's successors repeatedly threatened the Sultanate; Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali later devastated the weakened Mughals from the same direction, as Unit IV's Mughal chapter already recorded), showing that the frontier problem long outlasted any single dynasty's solution to it.

🎯 Inter-state relations meant treaty AND war, both

Sultanate-era inter-state relations with regional Hindu kingdoms, and Mughal-era relations with Rajput states, the Deccan Sultanates and later the Marathas, moved fluidly between marriage alliance, tributary subordination and open war depending on relative strength at a given moment — Akbar's Rajput policy (marriage and high mansabs for allied Rajput houses alongside continued military pressure on resistant ones like Mewar) is the syllabus's own best-documented example of this flexible, calculated mixture rather than a single fixed doctrine.

Key takeaways

Sultanate administration ran through central (Wazir, Ariz-i-Mumalik, qazi), provincial and local (pargana) tiers with no fixed succession rule; Sher Shah Suri's revenue survey, Rupiya coinage and Grand Trunk Road with sarais underlay Mughal reforms that followed.
Mansabdari (zat/sawar ranks, non-hereditary) and jagirdari (revenue assignment in lieu of salary) worked together, resting on Todar Mal's Zabti/Dahsala (Ain-i-Dashsalah) revenue settlement and its dastur schedules; watan named hereditary chieftain land distinct from ordinary jagir.
Vijayanagara's Nayankara system (amaram grants, raya-rekho revenue share) parallels Mughal Mansabdari functionally despite independent origin; the Bahmanis divided territory into tarafs shaped by Deccani-Afaqi factionalism.
Shivaji's Asta Pradhan cleanly divides eight functions (Peshwa, Amatya, Sachiv, Mantri, Senapati, Sumant, Nyayadhish, Panditrao), functionally comparable to Sultanate/Mughal specialised ministries though independently derived.
The north-west frontier problem outlasted any single dynasty's solution; inter-state relations (especially Akbar's Rajput policy) mixed marriage alliance, tributary subordination and war flexibly rather than following one fixed doctrine.

Practice questions (9)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

In the Sultanate's central administration, revenue and finance were overseen by the:
1. Wazir
2. Ariz-i-Mumalik
3. Qazi
4. Nayaka
Show answer
Answer: A — Wazir
The Wazir headed revenue/finance; the Ariz-i-Mumalik oversaw the army, the qazi-led establishment handled justice, and nayaka is a Vijayanagara provincial-governor term, not a Sultanate one.
The Zabti/Dahsala revenue settlement, based on ten-year average yields, is associated with:
1. Akbar's finance minister Todar Mal
2. Sher Shah Suri
3. Shivaji's Amatya
4. Alauddin Khalji
Show answer
Answer: A — Akbar's finance minister Todar Mal
Todar Mal implemented the Zabti/Dahsala system (Ain-i-Dashsalah) under Akbar; Sher Shah's own earlier reform was a different, non-decadal measured-yield system that influenced but preceded it.
In the Mansabdari system, 'zat' and 'sawar' refer respectively to:
1. Personal status/pay grade, and the cavalry a mansabdar maintained
2. Two separate land grants
3. A religious tax and a land tax
4. Two Maratha ministerial posts
Show answer
Answer: A — Personal status/pay grade, and the cavalry a mansabdar maintained
Zat marked personal rank/pay, sawar the cavalry obligation — the two numbers together constituted a mansabdar's rank, a system deliberately kept non-hereditary.
Watan, as distinguished from an ordinary jagir, refers to land held as:
1. A hereditary, personal assignment (chiefly among Rajput chieftains)
2. A temporary, revocable service grant
3. A grant to a Buddhist monastery
4. A trade guild's charter
Show answer
Answer: A — A hereditary, personal assignment (chiefly among Rajput chieftains)
Watan named hereditary, personal land held by chieftains such as Rajputs, contrasted with the ordinary, non-hereditary and transferable jagir a serving mansabdar held.
Vijayanagara's Nayankara system assigned land (amaram) to nayakas chiefly in exchange for:
1. Military service and a share of revenue (raya-rekho)
2. Religious pilgrimage duties
3. Trade guild membership
4. Poetry composition at court
Show answer
Answer: A — Military service and a share of revenue (raya-rekho)
Amaram grants required military service and remittance of a revenue share (raya-rekho) to the Vijayanagara centre, functionally paralleling Mughal Mansabdari/Jagirdari.
In Shivaji's Asta Pradhan, the minister responsible for foreign affairs was the:
1. Sumant
2. Amatya
3. Nyayadhish
4. Panditrao
Show answer
Answer: A — Sumant
Sumant handled foreign affairs; Amatya was finance/accounts, Nyayadhish justice, and Panditrao religious/charitable affairs — the eight posts each had a distinct portfolio.
Which of the following are correctly paired as a state and its administrative system?
1. Mughals — Mansabdari/Jagirdari
2. Vijayanagara — Nayankara
3. Marathas — Asta Pradhan
4. Bahmanis — Turkan-i-Chahalgani
Show answer
Answer: A — Mughals — Mansabdari/Jagirdari; B — Vijayanagara — Nayankara; C — Marathas — Asta Pradhan
Turkan-i-Chahalgani was Iltutmish's Sultanate-era institution, not a Bahmani one — the Bahmanis divided territory into tarafs under governors instead.
Jaziya and Zakat together form a fiscal structure best described as:
1. Religiously differentiated — one on non-Muslims, one on Muslims
2. Both levied only on merchants
3. Both abolished by Sher Shah Suri
4. Both a form of forced labour
Show answer
Answer: A — Religiously differentiated — one on non-Muslims, one on Muslims
Jaziya (on non-Muslims) and Zakat (on Muslims, an obligatory almsgiving) form a paired, religiously-differentiated fiscal structure distinct from labour obligations like vishti.
Name the schedule of standard crop-wise revenue rates fixed for each locality under Akbar's Zabti system.
Numerical answer — type the value.
Show answer
Answer: Dastur
Dastur named the locality-specific schedule of crop-wise revenue rates, periodically updated to reflect actual yields and prices under the Zabti system.