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the people and their interaction with the powers that governed
them But the fault was not mine : Riza Shah had strictly
forbidden his subjects from contact with foreigners, presumably
out of fear of intrigue, though none of the British officers in
East Persia whom I knew would have been capable of it, not having
received any instruction in the art.
However I did manage to discover that the Persian system of
division of the produce of the land (the main source of wealth)
was guite different from the Indian one, where the Government
took a fixed percentage of the harvest as of right. In Persia,
virtually no cultivation was possible without irrigation, and the
provision of it by the digging and maintenance of ganTts often
involved a very considerable capital investment. TKe Harvest
was therefore divided into five shares, one each for the owner of
the land, the provider of the water, the power (in the form of
plough cattle), the seed-corn, and the labour. To what extent
this traditional rule-of-thumb was still followed I cannot say
but the obvious lacuna was that it left nothing for the State’
The gap was f i 1 1 ed by 'presents'. No action by the authorities
could take place without an appropriate donation to the man in
authority, whose superiors made certain that a suitable
proportion of it was passed on to them, so that the Governor of
the province achieved a considerable income. However his day of
reckoning came with the visit of the Inspector from Teheran who
had to be sent away satisfied if the Governor was to be continued
in his office. When the Inspector returned to Teheran, of
course, it was his turn. "It is no more possible" wrote the sage
"to tell whether an official is taking bribes than to tell
whether a fish is drinking water". So the sensible thing was not
to try.
Although this system sounds iniguitous, it could, in fact, work
guite well. If a provincial governor was unjust or
over-rapacious the peasants simply removed themselves to another
part of the country where the adm-i ni s tration was fairer, the land
was left uncultivated and became derelict, and the income of the
governor vanished. Thus it was in the interests of the ruler to
keep the peasants prosperous and contented, and this the
Shaukat-al-mulk, hereditary ruler of the Qainat, did.
It is easy to sneer at the system I have described as venal and
corrupt, and compare it with western systems where a highly-paid
and impartial judiciary dispenses justice without fear or favour
or thought of corrupt reward. But the idol may have feet of
clay. The apocryphal story springs to mind of the British judge
retiring after a life-time of devoted service in India, who was
invited to a farewell dinner by his court clerk and entertained
in circumstances of such dazzling splendour that it was clear,
even to him, that such opulence could never have been achieved
honestly. In response to his pressing enguiries the clerk
replied: "Sir, I was never dishonest. I simply accepted an
envelope from each of the contestants in your court and, when