1820.—"An acquaintance with the customs of the inhabitants, but particularly of the rayets, the various tenures ... the agreements usual among them regarding cultivation, and between them and soucars (see [SOWCAR]) respecting loans and advances ... is essential to a judge."—Sir T. Munro, in Life, ii. 17.

1870.—"Ryot is a word which is much ... misused. It is Arabic, but no doubt comes through the Persian. It means 'protected one,' 'subject,' 'a commoner,' as distinguished from 'Raees' or 'noble.' In a native mouth, to the present day, it is used in this sense, and not in that of tenant."—Systems of Land Tenure (Cobden Club), 166.

The title of a newspaper, in English but of native editing, published for some years back in Calcutta, corresponds to what is here said; it is Raees and Raiyat.

1877.—"The great financial distinction between the followers of Islam ... and the rayahs or infidel subjects of the Sultan, was the payment of haratch or capitation tax."—Finlay, H. of Greece, v. 22 (ed. 1877).

1884.—"Using the rights of conquest after the fashion of the Normans in England, the Turks had everywhere, except in the Cyclades, ... seized on the greater part of the most fertile lands. Hence they formed the landlord class of Greece; whilst the Rayahs, as the Turks style their non-Mussulman subjects, usually farmed the territories of their masters on the metayer system."—Murray's Handbook for Greece (by A. F. Yule), p. 54.

RYOTWARRY, adj. A technicality of modern coinage. Hind. from Pers. ra'iyatwār, formed from the preceding. The ryotwarry system is that under which the settlement for land revenue is made directly by the Government agency with each individual cultivator holding land, not with the village community, nor with any middleman or landlord, payment being also received directly from every such individual. It is the system which chiefly prevails in the Madras Presidency; and was elaborated there in its present form mainly by Sir T. Munro.

1824.—"It has been objected to the ryotwári system that it produces unequal assessment and destroys ancient rights and privileges: but these opinions seem to originate in some misapprehension of its nature."—Minutes, &c., of Sir T. Munro, i. 265. We may observe that the spelling here is not Munro's. The Editor, Sir A. Arbuthnot, has followed a system (see Preface, p. x.); and we see in Gleig's Life (iii. 355) that Munro wrote 'Rayetwar.'

S

SABAIO, ÇABAIO, &c., n.p. The name generally given by the Portuguese writers to the Mahommedan prince who was in possession of Goa when they arrived in India, and who had lived much there. He was in fact that one of the captains of the Bāhmanī kingdom of the Deccan who, in the division that took place on the decay of the dynasty towards the end of the 15th century, became the founder of the 'Adil Shāhī family which reigned in Bijapur from 1489 to the end of the following century (see [IDALCAN]). His real name was Abdul Muẓaffar Yūsuf, with the surname Sabāī or Savāī. There does not seem any ground for rejecting the intelligent statement of De Barros (II. v. 2) that he had this name from being a native of Sāvā in Persia [see Bombay Gazetteer, xxiii. 404]. Garcia de Orta does not seem to have been aware of this history, and he derives the name from Sāḥib (see below), apparently a mere guess, though not an unnatural one. Mr. Birch's surmise (Alboquerque, ii. 82), with these two old and obvious sources of suggestion before him, that "the word may possibly be connected with sipāhī, Arabic, a soldier," is quite inadmissible (nor is sipāhī Arabic). [On this word Mr. Whiteway writes: "In his explanation of this word Sir H. Yule has been misled by Barros. Couto (Dec. iv. Bk. 10 ch. 4) is conclusive, where he says: 'This Çufo extended the limits of his rule as far as he could till he went in person to conquer the island of Goa, which was a valuable possession for its income, and was in possession of a lord of Canara, called Savay, a vassal of the King of Canara, who then had his headquarters at what we call Old Goa.... As there was much jungle here, Savay, the lord of Goa, had certain houses where he stayed for hunting.... These houses still preserve the memory of the Hindu Savay, as they are called the Savayo's house, where for many years the Governors of India lived. As our João de Barros could not get true information of these things, he confounded the name of the Hindu Savay with that of Çufo (? Yūsuf) Adil Shāh, saying in the 5th Book of his 2nd Decade that when we went to India a Moor called Soay was lord of Goa, that we ordinarily called him Sabayo, and that he was a vassal of the King of the Deccan, a Persian, and native of the city of Sawa. At this his sons laughed heartily when we read it to them, saying that their father was anything but a Turk, and his name anything but Çufo.' This passage makes it clear that the origin of the word is the Hindu title Siwāī, Hind. Sawāī, 'having the excess of a fourth,' 'a quarter better than other people,' which is one of the titles of the Mahārājā of Jaypur. To show that it was more or less well known, I may point to the little State of Sunda, which lay close to Goa on the S.E., of which the Rāja was of the Vijayanagar family. This little State became independent after the destruction of Vijayanagar, and remained in existence till absorbed by Tippoo Sultan. In this State Siwāī was a common honorific of the ruling family. At the same time Barros was not alone in calling Adil Shāh the Sabaio (see Alboquerque, Cartas, p. 24), where the name occurs. The mistake having been made, everyone accepted it.">[

There is a story, related as unquestionable by Firishta, that the Sabaio was in reality a son of the Turkish Sultan Agā Murād (or 'Amurath') II., who was saved from murder at his father's death, and placed in the hands of 'Imād-ud-dīn, a Persian merchant of Sāvā, by whom he was brought up. In his youth he sought his fortune in India, and being sold as a slave, and going through a succession of adventures, reached his high position in the Deccan (Briggs, Firishta, iii. 7-8).