96 SOCIAL SCIENTIST 10. See Sanjay Subramanyam, 'Aspects of State Formation', p. 366. 11. For the North Indian Mughal historians, revenue farming is an after-effect of the decline of the Mughal empire. But in South India, according to Sanjay Subramanyam, 'revenue farming represents an attempt by the state or revenue assignment holders to stabilise income—a response to crisis'. Ibid., p. 371. 12. It is here that one can question the notion of the system of 'checks and balances' of the Mughals. The Mughals are supposed to have checked the autonomy firstly by shifting the burden of collection of land revenue to their servants. As their salaries were tied with the state revenue, as it is shown in some of the studies, over a period of time they tended to appropriate more as their salaries, often cutting into the state share of the social surplus. And secondly, even the method of checking the officials through regular transfers was not effective. Recently a study of the seventeenth century Punjab subah questions the legitimacy of the working of these transfers. It is found that often officials at provincial levels stayed longer in the same place than the stipulated duration of time. See Chetan Singh, 'Centre and Periphery in the Mughal State: The Case of the Seventeenth Century Panjab', in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 12,1988, p. 306.