Peasants, Zamindars and the State (Agrarian Society and Mughal Empire)

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XII (Themes in Indian History Part II), Chapter 8.

The people who fed an empire but left no diary

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about 85 per cent of India's people lived in villages. Peasants grew the food, and the Mughal state drew most of its income from what they grew. Yet the peasants wrote nothing about themselves. What we know of the countryside comes from the court, from men who measured, taxed and recorded. This chapter (c. sixteenth to seventeenth century) is therefore a lesson in reading sources as well as a study of rural life: every fact about a peasant comes through someone else's eyes.

Peasants and the landed elite both took part in producing crops and both claimed a share of the produce. This created cooperation, competition and conflict. The sum of these relationships made up rural society. The Mughal state added a third force: revenue assessors, collectors and record keepers tried to make sure cultivation took place and taxes arrived. Since many crops were grown for sale, trade, money and markets linked villages to towns.

The Ain-i Akbari: a source that sees from the top

The most important source for the sixteenth and early seventeenth century is the Ain-i Akbari ("the Ain"), written by Akbar's court historian Abu'l Fazl. It was completed in 1598, the forty-second regnal year of Akbar, after five revisions. It is the third book of the larger history project known as the Akbar Nama, whose first two books are a historical narrative. The Ain is a compendium of imperial regulations and a gazetteer of the empire.

For each suba the Ain gives tables with eight columns: parganat/mahal, qila (forts), measured area, revenue assessed in cash (naqdi), revenue grants in charity (suyurghal), zamindars, and, in the last two columns, the zamindars' castes and their troops (horsemen, foot soldiers, elephants). It was a major break with earlier chroniclers, who wrote mainly about wars, conquests and dynastic politics. The Ain records information about the country, its people and its products, and is a benchmark for studying India at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Two views. For the exam: the Ain's central purpose was to present a vision of Akbar's empire in which a strong ruling class provided social harmony, and any revolt against the Mughal state was predestined to fail. So what it tells us about peasants is a view from the top. Another reading: the Ain is also treated as an extraordinary and careful document. Abu'l Fazl revised it five times, cross-checked oral testimony, and wrote numbers out in words to avoid copying errors, and its quantitative evidence on agrarian relations is uncontested. Historians therefore use it, but supplement it with other sources.

To balance the view from the top, historians use revenue records from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and the extensive records of the East India Company for eastern India. These record conflicts between peasants, zamindars and the state, and show what peasants expected in fairness from the state.

Peasants and their land

Indo-Persian sources most often call a peasant raiyat (plural riaya) or muzarian, and also kisan or asami. Seventeenth century sources describe two kinds of peasants.

Seldom did the average peasant of north India have more than a pair of bullocks and two ploughs, and most had less. In Gujarat, peasants with about six acres were considered affluent. In Bengal five acres was the upper limit of an average farm, and ten acres made one a rich asami. Cultivation rested on individual ownership, and peasant lands were bought and sold like other property.

Babur noticed how mobile people were. In his memoirs, the Babur Nama, he wrote that in Hindustan villages and towns are emptied and settled in a moment, since the crops are rain-grown, water can be had by digging a tank or well, grass and wood are plentiful, and the population is endless.

Land, water and crops

Three things kept agriculture expanding: abundant land, available labour and the mobility of peasants. The most commonly grown crops were staples such as rice, wheat and millets. Areas with 40 inches or more of rainfall were usually rice zones, followed by wheat and millets in places with less rain. Monsoons were the backbone of agriculture, but some crops needed extra water.

Babur described devices he saw: in Lahore and Dipalpur, a wheel with pitchers on ropes turned by a bullock, and in Agra, Chandwar and Bayana, a bucket drawn up by a bullock on a roller over the well-edge. The state also helped irrigation by digging new canals (nahr, nala) and repairing old ones, such as the shahnahr in Punjab under Shah Jahan.

Technology used cattle power. The wooden plough was light and easily assembled with an iron tip or coulter. It did not make deep furrows, which kept moisture better in the intense heat. A seed drill pulled by a pair of oxen was used, but broadcasting seed was most common. Hoeing and weeding were done with a narrow iron blade with a small wooden handle.

Agriculture followed two seasons, kharif (autumn) and rabi (spring). Most regions grew at least two crops a year (do-fasla) and some grew three where rainfall or irrigation was dependable. The Ain says that the Agra province grew 39 crop varieties and Delhi 43 over the two seasons, and Bengal grew 50 varieties of rice alone.

Subsistence and commerce together. The stress on staples did not mean farming was only for subsistence. Sources speak of jins-i kamil (literally, perfect crops), which the Mughal state encouraged peasants to grow because they brought in more revenue. Cotton and sugarcane were the classic examples. Cotton was grown over central India and the Deccan plateau, while Bengal was famous for sugar. Oilseeds such as mustard and lentils were also cash crops. A peasant's holding mixed subsistence and commercial production.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the Ain does not mention tobacco in its lists of north Indian crops, because the plant reached north India in the early seventeenth century. In reality: Akbar and his nobles saw tobacco for the first time in 1604, and smoking in hookahs or chillums caught on quickly. Jahangir, concerned by the addiction, banned it, but the ban was totally ineffective. By the end of the seventeenth century tobacco was a major article of consumption, cultivation and trade across India. This is a neat example of how crops and habits crossed the world faster than rulers could control them.

Agricultural prosperity went with slow population growth. Despite famines and epidemics, India's population grew, by calculations of economic historians, by about 50 million between 1600 and 1800, an increase of about 33 per cent over 200 years.

The village community

Peasants held land individually, yet belonged to a village community in many aspects of life. It had three constituents: the cultivators, the panchayat and the village headman (muqaddam or mandal).

Caste and the village. Cultivators were not one group. Many worked as menials or agricultural labourers (majur). Certain caste groups were assigned menial tasks and pushed into poverty, forming a large section of the village population with the fewest resources. Similar distinctions entered other communities. Among Muslims, menials like the halalkhoran (scavengers) were housed outside the village, and the mallahzadas (sons of boatmen) in Bihar were comparable to slaves. At the lower levels, caste, poverty and social status were strongly linked, but at intermediate levels less so.

The panchayat and the headman. The village panchayat was an assembly of elders, usually important people with hereditary property rights. In mixed-caste villages it represented various castes, though the menial-cum-agricultural worker was unlikely to be represented. Its decisions were binding. The headman, muqaddam or mandal, was chosen by consensus of the elders, with the zamindar ratifying the choice, and held office as long as he kept their confidence. His chief task was to supervise village accounts with the help of the patwari, the accountant. Headmen sometimes misused their position, defrauding accounts with the patwari and under-assessing the revenue on their own lands to pass the burden to smaller cultivators.

Each caste or jati had its own jati panchayat. In Rajasthan these decided civil disputes between castes, claims on land, marriage rules and ritual precedence, and the state respected their decisions except in criminal justice. In disputes between "lower caste" peasants and officials or the zamindar, the panchayat often suggested compromise. If that failed, peasants took more drastic action such as deserting the village, a powerful weapon because uncultivated land was easy to get and there was competition for labour.

Village artisans. Marathi documents and surveys from the early years of British rule show artisans made up as much as 25 per cent of households in villages. The line between artisan and peasant was fluid, since cultivators also did craft work in slack periods. Potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers and even goldsmiths were paid with a share of the harvest or an allotment of land, which in Maharashtra became their hereditary holding (miras or watan). In Bengal, eighteenth century records show zamindars paying smiths, carpenters and goldsmiths a small daily allowance and diet money. This was later called the jajmani system, though the term was not used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Two views. For the exam: some British officials in the nineteenth century saw the village as a "little republic", fraternal partners sharing resources and labour. Another reading: this was not rural equality. There was individual ownership of assets and deep inequalities of caste and gender, a group of powerful individuals ran village affairs and exploited the weak, and a cash nexus already linked villages and towns. The Mughal heartland collected revenue in cash, and weavers who worked for export got advances or wages in cash. Tavernier found it remarkable that a village had to be very small indeed if it had no money-changer, or shroff.

Pause and predict: if a village's panchayat could not settle a dispute over a heavy tax demand, what could peasants do, and why was it effective?

Check your answer: they could desert the village. Uncultivated land was easy to find and labour was in demand, so a zamindar or official who lost cultivators lost revenue and workers. It was a powerful weapon in peasants' hands.

Women in agrarian society

Women and men worked shoulder to shoulder in the fields. Men tilled and ploughed, while women sowed, weeded, threshed and winnowed. Because production rested on the labour of the whole household in individual peasant farming, a strict separation of home (for women) from world (for men) was not possible. Biases tied to women's biological functions still continued: in western India menstruating women could not touch the plough or the potter's wheel, and in Bengal they could not enter the betel groves. Spinning, kneading clay and embroidery depended on women's labour, and the more commercial the product, the more it depended on them.

High mortality among women, from malnutrition, frequent pregnancies and childbirth, often meant a shortage of wives. So peasant and artisan communities developed customs unlike those of the elite: bride-price rather than dowry, and legitimate remarriage for divorced and widowed women. At the same time the fear of losing control over women, as reproducers of labour, meant they were kept under strict control by men.

Women petitioned the panchayat in western India (Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra), protesting a husband's infidelity or neglect of wife and children, but their names were left out of the record and they were described as mother, sister or wife of the male head. Among the landed gentry, women had the right to inherit property. In Punjab, widows and other women sold inherited property in the land market. Hindu and Muslim women inherited zamindaris, and in eighteenth century Bengal women zamindars were known. One of the biggest, the Rajshahi zamindari, had a woman at its head.

Forests and tribes

Rural India was not only settled farming. Huge stretches of forest (jangal) or scrubland (kharbandi) covered eastern, central and northern India (including the Terai), Jharkhand, and peninsular India down the Western Ghats and the Deccan plateau. Informed estimates suggest an average of about 40 per cent forest cover. Forest dwellers were called jangli, which meant people whose livelihood came from gathering forest produce, hunting and shifting agriculture, not an absence of civilisation. Their work was seasonal. Among the Bhils, spring was for collecting forest produce, summer for fishing, the monsoon for cultivation, and autumn and winter for hunting, a cycle that kept them mobile.

For the state, the forest was a subversive place, a refuge (mawas) for troublemakers. Babur said jungles gave the people of a pargana a defence behind which they became stubbornly rebellious and paid no taxes.

The Ain notes tribal kingdoms in the north-east, and the Koch kings fought and subjugated neighbouring tribes in a long series of wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The shift from tribal to monarchical systems had begun earlier but seems fully developed by the sixteenth century. A sixteenth-century Bengali poem, the Chandimangala, describes the hero Kalaketu clearing forest with settlers brought from different lands, with markets founded afterwards.

The zamindars

Zamindars were landed proprietors who lived off agriculture but did not take part in cultivation. They enjoyed superior social and economic status. Caste was one reason for their high status, and another was that they performed services (khidmat) for the state.

In the pyramid of rural society, zamindars formed the narrow apex. Abu'l Fazl's account indicates that an upper-caste Brahmana-Rajput combine had firm control, with many from intermediate castes and a sprinkling of Muslim zamindaris. By the Ain's count, the combined military strength of the zamindars was 384,558 cavalry, 4,277,057 infantry, 1,863 elephants, 4,260 cannons and 4,500 boats, a kind of parallel army.

How zamindaris grew. Conquest may have started some, with a powerful chieftain dispossessing weaker people, but the state would hardly have allowed this unless the zamindar was confirmed by an imperial order (sanad). More important were the slow processes of consolidation: colonising new land, transfer of rights, state orders and purchase. Zamindaris were bought and sold briskly, which let some people from relatively "lower" castes become zamindars. Clan or lineage based zamindaris grew among Rajputs and Jats in the north, and peasant-pastoralists like the Sadgops carved out powerful ones in Bengal.

Zamindars helped colonise land and settle cultivators by giving them the means of cultivation, including cash loans. The trade in zamindaris speeded monetisation. They sold produce from their milkiyat lands, and often set up markets (haats) to which peasants came to sell.

Two views. For the exam: zamindars were an exploitative class. Another reading: their relationship with peasants also had an element of reciprocity, paternalism and patronage. Bhakti saints, who strongly condemned caste and other oppression, did not portray zamindars (or moneylenders) as oppressors; their anger fell mostly on the state's revenue official. And in many peasant uprisings in seventeenth century north India, zamindars received the support of the peasantry in their struggle against the state.

The land revenue system

Land revenue was the economic mainstay of the empire, so the state needed an apparatus to fix and collect it. This included the office (daftar) of the diwan, who supervised the fiscal system. The Mughal state first collected information on the extent of agricultural land and what it produced before fixing the tax burden. Revenue arrangements had two stages: assessment and collection.

The state tried to maximise its claims when fixing revenue, but local conditions sometimes stopped it from collecting that much. Both cultivated and cultivable land were measured in each province. The Ain recorded totals under Akbar, and measurement continued under later emperors. In 1665 Aurangzeb told revenue officials to prepare yearly records of the number of cultivators in each village. Forests, covering huge areas, were not measured.

Classification of land under Akbar (from the Ain):

For polaj and parauti land there were three grades, good, middling and bad. The produce of each was added, and the average gave the medium produce, of which one third was taken as the royal dues.

Methods of collection (from the Ain): kankut (estimating the crop, from kan, grain, and kut, estimate), batai or bhaoli (reaping and stacking the crops and dividing them by agreement in the presence of the parties), khet-batai (dividing the fields after sowing) and lang batai (dividing the cut grain into heaps and taking shares home).

Pause and predict: why would a ruler insist on a record of cultivators village by village, peasant by peasant?

Check your answer: Aurangzeb's order of 1665 asked officials to find out the actual conditions of cultivation and assess the jama keeping in view both the government's finances and the peasantry's welfare. Detailed records let the state base its assessment on what each village and peasant actually cultivated.

The flow of silver

The Mughal empire was one of the large territorial empires of the time, with the Ming (China), Safavid (Iran) and Ottoman (Turkey). Their political stability supported overland trade from China to the Mediterranean. Voyages of discovery and the opening of the New World brought a massive expansion of Asia's, especially India's, trade with Europe. Huge amounts of silver bullion came to Asia to pay for Indian goods, and much of it reached India, which had no silver of its own. As a result, the period from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw a remarkable stability in the supply of metal currency, especially the silver rupya. This allowed unprecedented minting of coins, circulation of money, and the state's ability to collect taxes in cash. The Italian traveller Giovanni Careri, who passed through India around 1690, gave a graphic account (based on Bernier's) of how the world's gold and silver ended up in Hindustan.

Timeline: landmarks in the Mughal world

Cause and effect: how land, labour and revenue linked up

Key terms

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: An Imperial Capital is the contemporary south Indian empire; Through the Eyes of Travellers lets you test Bernier's claim that the emperor owned all land against what the Ain and revenue records show.
• Next: Colonialism and the Countryside picks up the rural story after the East India Company took the diwani of Bengal in 1765.
• Earlier link: Bhakti-Sufi Traditions explains why bhakti saints directed their criticism at revenue officials, and Kings, Farmers and Towns is the early agrarian background.