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

Detail

How many artisans lived in a village?

• Up to 25 per cent of village households were artisan households. This figure comes from Marathi documents and from early British survey records of villages.
• So a village was never only farmers. One in four homes could be a craft home.
• But the count is hard to fix, because the line between peasant and artisan was fluid (it kept shifting).

The fluid peasant–artisan line

• Cultivators also did craft work. They did it in the agricultural lulls — the gaps between sowing and harvest when fields need little work.
• Craft jobs peasants did themselves:
• dyeing cloth,
• textile printing (stamping patterns on cloth),
• firing pottery (baking clay pots in a kiln),

• repair of farm implements (mending ploughs, sickles).

• Point for the exam: in Mughal villages, "peasant" and "artisan" were not two sealed castes of work. Same household, different season.

Who were the full-time village artisans?

• The named village service groups: potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers, even goldsmiths.
• Blacksmiths and carpenters mattered most to farming — they made and mended the plough and other iron tools.

How artisans were paid — three ways

• Way 1 — a share of the harvest.
• The artisan got a fixed part of the crop at harvest time.

• The village panchayat often decided the share or the allotment.

• Way 2 — land given for service.

• The village gave the artisan a plot of land instead of, or along with, grain.

• In Maharashtra these service lands were hereditary (passed from father to son) and were called miras or watan.

• Way 3 — negotiated goods-for-services.

• Not a fixed rule, but a bargain between the two sides.
• Example from eighteenth-century Bengal: zamindars paid blacksmiths, carpenters and goldsmiths a small daily allowance plus diet money (food money) for their work.

The jajmani anachronism — a flagged trap

• Historians later called this whole arrangement the jajmani system.
• The term was not in use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using it for the Mughal village is an anachronism (putting a later word into an earlier time).
• What the later term describes: castes tied to each other, one family doing set services for another family across generations, paid by a fixed share in the harvest rather than in cash [2].
• Scholars also argue about how far such a system ever really worked across the Indian countryside; in practice it sat next to many money-based exchanges [2].

Note: [2] describes jajmani as a caste-to-caste, hereditary, non-cash arrangement. NCERT's position stands: the word itself is later, and cash payment in Mughal villages was not unknown. Keep the NCERT framing.

Cash payment existed too

• Cash payment was not unknown. Artisans could be paid in coin.
• This single line breaks the old picture of a village with no money in it.

The "little republic" idea — and why it fails

• Who said it: some nineteenth-century British officials. They imagined the Indian village as a little republic — a brotherly group that shared everything equally and needed nothing from outside.
• The chapter rejects this. Four reasons:

1. Ownership was individual, not collective - Land was owned by individuals, not held in common by all.

2. Deep inequality inside the village - Sharp divides of caste. - Sharp divides of gender. - Village society was stratified, not fraternal.

3. A powerful oligarchy ran it - A small group of powerful men (an oligarchy) controlled village affairs. - They also dispensed justice — judged disputes and punished people. - So power sat with a few, not with all.

4. A working cash nexus (money link) with the wider world - In the heartland of the empire, revenue was assessed and collected in cash. Peasants had to sell produce to get coin. - Export weavers worked on cash advances — money paid up front before the cloth was made. - Growers of cotton, silk and indigo likewise got cash advances and wages. - Tavernier, the French traveller, said even a very small village had a shroff — a moneychanger who also acted as a banker.

Who was Tavernier?

• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–89), a French jewel merchant, made six voyages to the East between 1632 and 1668 [3].
• He published Les six voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier in 1676; the English version is known as Travels in India [3].
• His book's own title page promises notes on "the figures, weight, and value of the currencies in use" in each country — money was a subject he tracked closely [3].
• He wrote down prices, quality of goods and business practices, which is why later economic historians used him as a source [3].
• A second edition of Travels in India, Vol. I by "Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne" is held as a rare book in the national digital collection [4].

Why the cash nexus matters

• Money reached the village floor.
• A shroff in a tiny village means coins were changed, weighed and lent there.

• A weaver taking an advance means a village loom was linked to a sea port.

• So the village was open, not closed. It fed revenue to the state and goods to world trade.

Prelims Hooks

• Artisans formed up to 25 per cent of village households — evidence from Marathi documents and early British survey records.
• Hereditary service land for artisans in Maharashtra was called miras or watan.
• The term jajmani was not in use in the 16th–17th centuries — it is a later label.
• In jajmani as later described, payment was normally a fixed share in the harvest, not cash [2].
• In Bengal, zamindars paid blacksmiths, carpenters and goldsmiths a daily allowance plus diet money.
• The village panchayat often fixed the artisan's harvest share or land allotment.
• Tavernier reported that even a small village had a shroff (moneychanger-cum-banker).
• Tavernier (1605–89) was a French jewel merchant; six voyages East between 1632 and 1668; book published 1676 [3].
• The "little republic" image of the Indian village was created by 19th-century British officials.
• Revenue in the Mughal heartland was assessed and collected in cash.

Mains Points

• The "little republic" thesis is false — use four counters. Individual land ownership; caste and gender inequality; a small oligarchy holding judicial power; and a live cash nexus (cash revenue, cash advances to weavers and indigo growers, village shroffs). Each counter attacks a different part of the claim: self-sufficiency, equality, democracy, isolation.
• Beware the jajmani anachronism in answers. The payment practices (harvest share, service land, watan) were real, but the name is a 20th-century sociological label; scholars even dispute how widely such a system worked [2]. Write "service relations" and mention jajmani only as a later term.
• The 25 per cent artisan figure plus the fluid peasant–artisan line shows craft was embedded in agriculture, not separate from it. Seasonal slack in farming supplied the labour for dyeing, printing and pottery. This links to the wider question of why India could supply huge export textile volumes without factory towns.
• Cash advances to export weavers and cotton/silk/indigo growers connect the village to global trade. Use this to link Mughal agrarian society with the Indian Ocean commerce and the bullion inflow theme — the village was a node in a world market, not a sealed unit.