Sources for agrarian history

Detail

Why sources are a problem here

• In the 16th–17th centuries about 85 per cent of India's population lived in villages. So most people of that time are the people we know least about.
• The Mughal state took the bulk of its income from agriculture. This is why the state bothered to write anything at all about farming.
• Village society was not one block. It was a web of cooperation, competition and conflict between three groups:
• peasants — the people who actually ploughed.
• zamindars — landed elites with rights over land and a share of the produce.

• the state's agents — revenue officials who measured, assessed and collected.

• Peasants did not write about themselves. They left no diaries, no letters. Everything we know comes from people writing about them, usually from above.

The master source: Ain-i Akbari

• Written by Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's court historian and close friend, who was also a minister and army commander; he was killed in 1602. [2]
• The Ain-i Akbari is the third and final volume of the Akbar Nama, Abu'l Fazl's three-volume history of Akbar's reign. [2][3]
• The Ain is arranged in five sections (daftars): [3]
• 1 — Akbar's household, court and treasury.
• 2 — military and civil servants, and courtiers famous for writing or music.
• 3 — judicial and executive branches, methods of land survey, tribal divisions, and the duties of the finance minister Todar Mal. This is the section that matters most for agrarian history.
• 4 — the social world and learning of the time, especially philosophy and law.

• 5 — Akbar's short sayings.

• The Ain carries statistics on crops, yields, prices, wages and revenues, plus the geography of the empire. [3]

• What it records for our section: state arrangements for cultivation, revenue collection, and the place of zamindars.
• But the purpose was not neutral record-keeping. Abu'l Fazl wrote to present a vision of empire in which:
• social harmony flows down from a strong ruling class;

• revolt against that order is "predestined to fail".

• So every line about peasants in the Ain is a view from the top — the state describing what it wanted to see and collect, not what villagers felt or said. Anything about peasant anger or resistance is either missing or dismissed.

Correctives — sources that talk back

Historians do not stop at the Ain. Two bodies of record are used to cross-check it:

• Revenue records of the 17th and 18th centuries from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.
• These are regional, working documents — not court literature meant to praise a king.

• They record actual disputes between peasants, zamindars and the state.

• East India Company records for eastern India.

• Same value: they document conflict on the ground.

• Together these show the village as a place of bargaining and fighting over the crop share, which the Ain's picture of harmony hides.

The Babur Nama

• The memoirs of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal dynasty. [4]
• Written as a diary, it is counted as the first true autobiography in Islamic literature and in medieval India. [4]
• Written first in Chagatai Turkic (a Central Asian language, now dead), in a heavily Persianised style; later translated into Persian and illustrated during the reign of Babur's grandson Akbar. [4]
• The two-volume English translation, Memoirs of Babur, was first published in 1921–22. [4]
• It is prized for its close observation of India's plants, animals and natural world. [4]
• What it gives our section:
• villages were emptied and re-founded "in a moment" — because crops grew on rain (no costly canal needed) and labour was unlimited;

• detailed accounts of irrigation devices used in north India.

• Value for a historian: it is written by a newcomer noticing what locals took for granted. That is why the technical detail is so good.

Note: The Met holds an illustrated folio, "Three Trees of India", from a Baburnama manuscript — an example of the Akbar-period illustrated copies. [5]

Prelims Hooks

• Ain-i Akbari was written by Abu'l Fazl, court historian of Akbar. [2]
• The Ain-i Akbari is the third volume of the Akbar Nama. [2][3]
• The Ain-i Akbari has five sections (daftars). [3]
• The Ain names Todar Mal as finance minister and describes land survey methods. [3]
• Abu'l Fazl died in 1602. [2]
• Roughly 85 per cent of India's population in the 16th–17th centuries lived in villages. [1]
• The Babur Nama was written in Chagatai Turkic, later translated into Persian under Akbar. [4]
• Babur's dates: 1483–1530; the English Memoirs of Babur appeared in 1921–22. [4]
• Correctives to the Ain come from revenue records of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and from East India Company records for eastern India. [1]

Mains Points

• The main source is also the main problem. The Ain-i Akbari is rich in numbers on crops, yields, prices, wages and revenue [3], but it was written to justify a strong ruling class and to say revolt was "predestined to fail". A GS-I answer should use its data while stating that it gives the state's view, not the peasant's.
• Method matters: read the state record against the local record. Regional revenue papers from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, and Company papers for the east, show peasant–zamindar–state conflict that the court chronicle smooths over. This is a good example of how historians correct a biased source rather than discard it.
• Different genres give different facts. The Ain gives administrative structure; the Babur Nama, a personal diary, gives technology and land use — irrigation devices, rain-fed crops, villages abandoned and rebuilt fast. Neither alone is enough.
• Silence of the peasant is itself a historical fact. That 85 per cent of the population left no written record of its own shows how record-making followed power, and explains why agrarian history leans on archaeology of documents — revenue papers, court accounts, company files — rather than on peasant voices.