ABSTRACT
Until the middle of the eighteenth century, South India had been under the rule of the Mughal Empire. There were administrative units called magans, which were almost equivalent to the counties of today. In the late eighteenth century, a colonial policy was introduced by the British and the Mughal Empire gradually lost its power in South India. To govern the area and to collect taxes, the British appointed officers called zamindaris and sent them to some of the villages. Each zamindari governed 25 villages on average, and this formed a new administrative system, which we call the zamindari system.
