Mughal Agrarian Society and Economy

1. Sources for agrarian history

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In the 16th–17th centuries about 85 per cent of India's population lived in villages and the Mughal state drew the bulk of its income from agriculture; rural society was the sum of relationships of cooperation, competition and conflict among peasants, landed elites and the state's agents.

• Peasants did not write about themselves — the major source is the Ain-i Akbari of Akbar's court historian Abu'l Fazl: it recorded state arrangements for cultivation, revenue and zamindars, but its purpose was a vision of empire where social harmony flowed from a strong ruling class (revolt "predestined to fail"). Everything it says about peasants is a view from the top (the chapter's critical framing of its own master source).
• Correctives: 17th–18th-century revenue records from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan and East India Company records for eastern India — documenting actual peasant–zamindar–state conflicts.
• The Babur Nama: villages depopulated and re-founded "in a moment" thanks to rain-grown crops and unlimited labour; detailed accounts of irrigation devices.

2. Peasants and their lands

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• Indo-Persian terms for peasant: raiyat (pl. riaya), muzarian; also kisan, asami.
• Khud-kashta = residents cultivating their own village's lands; pahi-kashta = non-residents farming elsewhere on contract — by choice (better revenue terms) or compulsion (famine distress).
• Smallholding norm: rarely more than a pair of bullocks and two ploughs. Gujarat: ~6 acres = affluent; Bengal: 5 acres = average ceiling, 10 acres = rich asami.
• Individual ownership: peasant lands bought and sold like other property; fields demarcated with raised earth/brick/thorn borders — "thousands of such fields" per village.
• Three drivers of constant agricultural expansion: abundant land, available labour, peasant mobility.

3. Irrigation, technology and the crop regime

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• Monsoons were the backbone; 40+ inches of rain = rice zones, then wheat, then millets. Water-hungry crops needed irrigation: the Persian wheel (Lahore/Dipalpur) vs the bucket-lift (Agra–Chandwar–Bayana), both in the Babur Nama; state canal-digging (nahr, nala) and repair — the shahnahr in Punjab under Shah Jahan.
• Cattle-powered kit: light wooden plough with iron tip — shallow furrows preserved moisture; oxen-drawn seed drill (broadcasting still the main method); narrow iron hoe for hoeing-cum-weeding.
• Kharif (autumn) + rabi (spring): at least two crops a year (do-fasla) almost everywhere, three with assured water. Ain: Agra 39 crop varieties, Delhi 43, Bengal 50 rices alone.
• Jins-i kamil ("perfect" crops) — cash crops the state pushed for revenue: cotton (central India/Deccan) and sugarcane (Bengal) par excellence, plus oilseeds and lentils. Subsistence and commerce were intertwined in the same holding.
• 17th-century arrivals: maize via Africa and Spain (a major western-India crop by the 17th century); New World tomato, potato, chilli; pineapple, papaya. Tobacco: Deccan first, north by the early 1600s; absent from the Ain's northern crop lists; Akbar's court first saw it 1604; Jahangir's ban on smoking failed — by 1700 a major article of consumption, cultivation and trade.
• Outcome: population grew ~50 million between 1600 and 1800 (~33 per cent) despite famines — slow demographic growth.

4. Village community I: caste, panchayats and headmen

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Three constituents: cultivators, the panchayat, the headman (muqaddam or mandal).

Caste. Cultivators were heterogeneous; menial-labourer castes (majur) stayed poor despite abundant land — "much like the Dalits of modern India" (chapter's phrase). Parallels: halalkhoran (scavengers) housed outside village bounds in Muslim communities; Bihar's mallahzadas comparable to slaves. At intermediate levels mobility worked: a 17th-century Marwar manual lists Rajputs as peasants beside Jats; the Gauravas (Vrindavan) claimed Rajput status; Ahirs, Gujars, Malis rose through cattle and horticulture; eastern Sadgops and Kaivartas became peasants.

Panchayat and headman:

• Assembly of elders with hereditary property rights — heterogeneous in mixed villages but an oligarchy (menials unrepresented); decisions binding.
• Headman: chosen by elders' consensus, ratified by the zamindar, dismissible; supervised accounts with the patwari. Corrupt mandals defrauded accounts and under-assessed their own revenue, shifting the burden onto smaller cultivators.
• Common financial pool: entertaining touring revenue officials, calamity relief, and works peasants could not fund alone — bunds, canals.
• Caste enforcement was a core duty; in eastern India marriages required the mandal's presence. Sanctions: fines; expulsion (usually temporary — but it made one an outcaste, losing the right to one's profession).
• Jati panchayats: in Rajasthan they arbitrated inter-caste civil disputes, land claims, marriage norms, ritual precedence; the state respected their decisions except in criminal justice.
• Court of appeal: collective petitions from the lowest rungs against excessive taxation and forced labour (begar) by "superior" castes or officials (Rajasthan, Maharashtra archives); the right to a subsistence minimum was seen as sanctioned by custom. The panchayat brokered compromise; failing that, peasants deserted the village — effective, given plentiful land and competition for labour.

5. Village community II: artisans, exchange and the "little republic" question

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• Artisans: up to 25 per cent of village households (Marathi documents; early British surveys); the peasant–artisan line was fluid — cultivators did dyeing, textile printing, pottery firing and implement repair in agricultural lulls.
• Remuneration of potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers, goldsmiths: a harvest share or land allotment (often panchayat-decided) — in Maharashtra the hereditary miras or watan; or negotiated goods-for-services (Bengal zamindars paid smiths "a small daily allowance and diet money") — later labelled the jajmani system, a term not in vogue in the 16th–17th centuries (flagged anachronism). Cash payment was not unknown.
• "Little republic"? Some 19th-century British officials imagined a fraternal collective. The chapter rejects this: individual ownership, deep caste and gender inequities, a powerful oligarchy dispensing justice — and an established cash nexus: heartland revenue assessed and collected in cash; export weavers and cotton/silk/indigo producers on cash advances and wages; Tavernier: even a tiny village had a shroff (moneychanger-banker).

6. Women in agrarian society

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• Gendered but joint production: men tilled and ploughed; women sowed, weeded, threshed, winnowed; production rested on the whole household's labour — home/world segregation impossible. Biases persisted: menstruating women barred from plough and potter's wheel (western India) and paan groves (Bengal).
• Female-dependent craft stages: spinning, sifting/kneading clay, embroidery — the more commercialised the product, the greater the demand on women's labour; women also worked at employers' houses and markets.
• Reproducers in a labour-scarce society: high female mortality (malnutrition, frequent pregnancies, childbirth) → shortage of wives → peasant/artisan customs distinct from elite norms: bride-price, not dowry; legitimate remarriage of divorced and widowed women.
• The corollary was control: male-headed households, draconian punishments for suspected infidelity. Women petitioned panchayats (Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra) against husbands' infidelity or neglect of the grihasthi; provisioning was enforced even where male infidelity went unpunished; petitioners' names were effaced (recorded only as wife/mother/sister of the male head).
• Propertied exceptions: landed-gentry women inherited property; Punjab women, including widows, sold inherited land; Hindu and Muslim women inherited zamindaris (free to sell/mortgage); the great 18th-century Rajshahi zamindari was headed by a woman.

7. Forests and tribes

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• Beyond settled agriculture: jangal (dense forest) and kharbandi (scrubland) across eastern, central and northern India, the Terai, Jharkhand, the Western Ghats and Deccan — average cover ~40 per cent (informed conjecture).
• Jangli meant not "uncivilised" but a livelihood of gathering, hunting and shifting agriculture, season-specific — the Bhils: spring forest produce, summer fishing, monsoon cultivation, autumn–winter hunting. Mobility was the tribes' hallmark.
• The state's view: the forest was a refuge (mawas) for "troublemakers" — Babur: jungles let pargana folk grow "stubbornly rebellious and pay no taxes". The peshkash (tribute) from forest people often included elephants; the royal hunt symbolised the emperor's care for all subjects (court trope).
• Forces of change: commercial agriculture; demand for honey, beeswax and gum lac (gum lac a major overseas export by the 17th century); elephant capture and sale; the Lohanis of Punjab in overland India–Afghanistan trade; the 16th-century Bengali Chandimangala (Mukundaram Chakrabarti) shows Kalaketu clearing forest to found a kingdom — agrarian colonisation in literature.
• Tribal state-formation: chiefs became zamindars, some kings, raising lineage armies — Sind tribes: 6,000 cavalry, 7,000 infantry; the Ahom kings' paiks owed military service for land (class 8: every able-bodied man owed labour or military duty — a large force without a standing army), and wild-elephant capture was an Ahom royal monopoly; the Koch kings subjugated neighbouring tribes through the 16th–17th centuries. The transition looks fully developed by the 16th century (the Ain on north-eastern tribal kingdoms).
• Cultural change: some historians suggest sufi pirs drove the slow acceptance of Islam in newly colonised agricultural zones (a suggestion, not settled fact).

8. The zamindars

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• Landed proprietors who lived off the land without working it — the narrow apex of the rural pyramid; status rested on caste and services (khidmat) to the state.
• Milkiyat: extensive personal lands worked by hired or servile labour, freely sold, bequeathed, mortgaged. Further power: collecting state revenue (for compensation) and military resources — fortresses (qilachas) with cavalry, artillery and infantry. The Ain's "parallel army" of all zamindars: 384,558 cavalry, 4,277,057 infantry, 1,863 elephants, 4,260 cannons, 4,500 boats.
• Composition (Abu'l Fazl): an entrenched Brahmana–Rajput combine, a large intermediate-caste presence, and a "liberal sprinkling" of Muslim zamindaris.
• Origins: some by conquest/dispossession — viable only with an imperial sanad; more important were slow consolidations — colonising new land, transfer of rights, state order, purchase (brisk sales even let "lower" castes in). Lineage zamindaris: Rajputs and Jats in the north; peasant-pastoralist Sadgops in central/south-west Bengal.
• Developmental role: zamindars spearheaded colonisation, settled cultivators with means including cash loans, sold milkiyat produce, and founded haats — accelerating rural monetisation.
• Exploiter or patron? Undoubtedly exploitative, yet with reciprocity, paternalism and patronage: the bhakti saints did not portray zamindars (or moneylenders) as oppressors — their ire fell on the state revenue official; and in the 17th-century agrarian uprisings of north India, peasants often backed zamindars against the state.

9. The land revenue system

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Land revenue was the empire's economic mainstay, run from the daftar (office) of the diwan; revenue officials became decisive agents in agrarian relations. Procedure: gather information on lands and produce, then assess, then collect.

Term	Meaning
jama	revenue assessed
hasil	revenue collected
amil-guzar	revenue collector — to prefer cash but keep kind open (Akbar's decree)
amin	ensured imperial regulations were carried out in the provinces
kankut	estimate (kut) of grain (kan); in doubt, crops cut and estimated in three lots — good, middling, inferior
batai / bhaoli	crops reaped, stacked, divided by agreement before the parties
khet-batai	fields divided after sowing
lang batai	grain cut, heaped, then divided

Akbar's land classes (Ain): polaj — cultivated annually, never fallow; parauti — briefly fallow to recover; chachar — fallow 3–4 years; banjar — uncultivated 5+ years. Polaj and parauti had good/middling/bad grades; one-third of the medium produce = the royal dues.

• Cultivated and cultivable land was measured province by province (aggregates in the Ain); Aurangzeb's 1665 order required cultivation records village by village, peasant-wise (asamiwar), balancing state finance (kifayat) and peasant welfare. Forests stayed unmeasured; the state maximised claims but local conditions limited realisation.
• Wider frame (class 8): the Sultanate's iqta was the precursor — territories assigned to iqtadars for tax collection (posts non-hereditary), the burden falling hardest on the peasantry. Akbar's machinery: diwan (finance), mir bakhshi (military), khan-i-saman (works/trade/agriculture/household), sadr (justice/religion/education) across twelve subahs; mansabdari ranked officers maintaining fixed troops and animals, mostly paid by jagirs (jagirdars) with periodic transfers, a minority in cash (naqdi); Todar Mal made detailed crop-yield and price surveys and a systematic land survey. Revenue typically ran at one-fifth of produce but reached one-half under some sultans; recurrent famines cut the peasants' shrinking share.

10. Silver, trade and the Ain-i Akbari as source

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The flow of silver. The Mughals stood with Asia's other stable empires — Ming, Safavid, Ottoman — sustaining trade from China to the Mediterranean, while the New World voyages massively expanded India's trade with Europe. Silver bullion poured into Asia and gravitated to India, which had no natural silver resources: hence a remarkably stable silver rupya (16th–18th centuries), an unprecedented expansion of minting and circulation, and a state able to tax in cash. Giovanni Careri (Italian, c. 1690, after Bernier): all the world's circulating gold and silver "at last Centres" in Hindustan. Class 8 adds: silver rupaya + copper dam; the hundi — a written payment instruction moving funds across borders without carrying coin (a banking precursor; Marwari networks); ports (Surat, Calicut, Masulipatnam, Hooghly) and an export surplus; temples as economic hubs (endowments, irrigation and pilgrim infrastructure, credit to merchants); and late-1600s stress — over-taxed peasants sliding into bonded labour.

The Ain-i Akbari: completed 1598 (Akbar's 42nd regnal year) after five revisions; the third book of the Akbar Nama (first two = narrative history); a compendium of imperial regulations and gazetteer of the empire in five books (daftars):

Daftar	Contents
manzil-abadi	the imperial household
sipah-abadi	military and civil administration; sketches of mansabdars, learned men, poets, artists
mulk-abadi	the fiscal book: revenue rates + "Account of the Twelve Provinces" — each suba and its sarkars/parganas/mahals in eight-column tables: pargana/mahal · qila (forts) · measured area · naqdi (cash revenue) · suyurghal (charity grants) · zamindars · zamindar castes and troops (sawar/piyada/fil)
books 4–5	religious, literary and cultural traditions; Akbar's "auspicious sayings"

• Strengths: five revisions; oral testimony cross-checked; numbers written in words against copying errors; a break with war-and-dynasty chronicles — it recorded the empire and the people, a benchmark for India c. 1600.
• Limits: minor totalling errors; skewed data — no zamindar-caste information for Bengal and Orissa; prices/wages mainly from Agra; always the view from the apex — corrected by regional and EIC records.
• Translations: Blochmann (ed.; Eng. vol. 1, Calcutta 1873), H.S. Jarrett (vols. 2–3, 1891/1894), Asiatic Society of Bengal.

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Exam angles

Prelims:

• Revenue pairings: jama (assessed) vs hasil (collected) · kankut / batai (bhaoli) / khet-batai / lang batai · polaj–parauti–chachar–banjar (chachar 3–4 yrs, banjar 5+) · officials amil-guzar, amin, patwari, muqaddam/mandal, diwan.
• Social-category pairings: khud-kashta vs pahi-kashta · milkiyat, khidmat, sanad, qilacha · miras/watan · jajmani (later label) · begar · peshkash, mawas, pargana · paik (Ahom) · jangal vs kharbandi · majur, halalkhoran, mallahzadas.
• Ain-i Akbari facts: Abu'l Fazl; 1598, 42nd regnal year, five revisions; third book of the Akbar Nama; five daftars — manzil-abadi / sipah-abadi / mulk-abadi (fiscal, Twelve Provinces) + two cultural; Blochmann and Jarrett — classic statement-MCQ fodder.
• Crop chronology traps: maize, tomato, potato, chilli, pineapple, papaya = 17th-century arrivals (maize via Africa and Spain); tobacco absent from the Ain's northern crop lists, first at court 1604, banned by Jahangir (ineffective); jins-i kamil = cotton and sugarcane, not staples; Agra 39 / Delhi 43 crops; Bengal 50 rices.
• Silver and money: India had no natural silver sources; stable silver rupya; rupaya (silver) + dam (copper); hundi; travellers — Tavernier (village shroff), Careri (silver "centres" in India, c. 1690).
• Administration anchors: mansabdari/jagirdari (naqdi = cash-paid), Todar Mal's surveys, twelve subahs, Sultanate iqta precursor; zamindars' "parallel army" (~4.28 m infantry, ~385,000 cavalry).
• Traps (mark FALSE): "the village was a self-sufficient little republic" · "revenue was collected only in cash" (kind kept open) · "pahi-kashta were landless labourers" (non-resident contract cultivators) · "forests were measured under Akbar" (unmeasured) · "bride-price was an elite custom" (peasant/artisan practice born of wife shortage).

Mains:

• Was the Mughal village a "little republic"? — collective institutions (panchayat pool, bunds, canals) vs individual ownership, caste/gender inequity, oligarchy and the cash nexus.
• Zamindars: exploiters or patrons? — milkiyat, qilachas, the "parallel army" against colonisation, cash loans and haats; bhakti silence and peasant support in 17th-century uprisings; why zamindari became a post-Independence reform target.
• Caste as organiser of agrarian relations: rigidity at the bottom (majur, halalkhoran, mallahzadas) vs intermediate mobility (Ahirs, Gujars, Malis, Sadgops, Kaivartas, Gauravas).
• Women as producers and reproducers: field and craft labour, commercialisation raising demand; bride-price, remarriage, control and effaced names; exceptions up to the Rajshahi zamindari.
• Transformation of forest dwellers: peshkash and elephants, commercial penetration (gum lac), tribal state-formation (Ahom paiks, Koch wars), sufi pirs and cultural change.
• The Ain-i Akbari as a historian's source: project, five-daftar structure, strengths, silences — and how regional/EIC records correct the view from the apex.
• Subsistence vs commercial agriculture (jins-i kamil, do-fasla), rural monetisation, and India's place in early-modern global silver circuits.