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Peasants and their lands
- The term which Indo-Persian sources of the Mughal period most frequently used to denote a peasant was raiyat (plural, riaya) or muzarian. In addition, we also encounter the terms kisan or asami.
- Sources of the seventeenth century refer to two kinds of peasants - khud-kashta and pahi-kashta. The former were residents of the village in which they held their lands.
- Cultivation was based on the principle of individual ownership. Peasant lands were bought and sold in the same way as the lands of other property owners.
Irrigation and technology
- Though agriculture was labour intensive, peasants did use technologies that often harnessed cattle energy. One example was the wooden plough, which was light and easily assembled with an iron tip or coulter.
- It therefore did not make deep furrows, which preserved the moisture better during the intensely hot months. A drill, pulled by a pair of giant oxen, was used to plant seeds, but broadcasting of seed was the most prevalent method.
The spread of tobacco
- Tobaco arrived first in the Deccan and then spread to northern India in the early years of the seventeenth century.
- The Ain does not mention tobacco in the lists of crops in northern India.
- Akbar and his nobles came across tobacco for the first time in 1604.
- At this time smoking tobacco (in hookahs or chillums) seems to have caught on in a big way.
- Jahangir was so concerned about its addiction that he banned it.
- This was totally ineffective because by the end of the seventeenth century, tobacco had become a major article of consumption, cultivation and trade all over India.
Caste and the rural milieu
- In a manual of seventeenth century in Marwar, Rajputs are mentioned as peasants, sharing the same space with Jats, who were accorded a lower status in the caste hierarchy.
- The Gauravas, who cultivated land around Vrindavan (Uttar Pradesh), sought Rajput status in the seventeenth century.
- Castes such as the Ahirs, Gujars and Malis rose in the hierarchy because of the profitability of cattle rearing and horticulture.
- In the eastern regions, intermediate pastoral and fishing castes like the Sadgops and kaivartas acquired the status of peasants.
Village artisans
- Marathi documents and village surveys made in the early years of British rule have revealed the existence of substantial numbers of artisans, sometimes as high as 25 per cent of the total households in the village.
- The most common way of doing so was by giving them a share of the harvest or an allotment of land, perhaps cultivable wastes, which was likely to be decided by the panchayat.
- In Maharastra such lands became the artisans’ miras or watan – their hereditary holding.
- Another variant of this was a system where artisans and individual peasant households, entered into a mutually negotiated system of remuneration, most of the time goods for services.
- For example,eighteenth-century records tell us of jamindars in Bengal who remunerated blacksmiths, carpenters, even goldsmiths for their work by paying them “a small daily allowance and diet money”.
- This latter came to be described as the jajmani system thought the term was not in vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centures.
A "little republic"?
- Some British officials in the nineteenth century saw the village as a “little republic” made up of fraternal partners sharing resources and labour in a
Money in the village
- The seventeenth-century French traveller jean-Baptiste Tavernier found it remarkable that in “India a village must be very small indeed if it has not a moneychanger called a Shroff.(they) act as bankers to make remittances of money (and who) enhance the rupee as they please for paisa for these (cowrie) shells”.
Woman in Agrarian Society
- In the contexts that we are exploring. Women and men had to work shoulder to shoulder in the fields. Men tilled and ploughed, while women sowed, weeded threshed and winnowed the harvest.
- In fact, peasant and artisan women worked not only in the fields, but even went to the houses of their employers or to the markets if necessary.
- Women were considered an important resource in agrarian society also because they were child bearers in a society dependent on labour.
- Hindu and muslim women inherited zamindaris which they were free to sell or mortgage. Womem zamindars were known in eighteenth-century Bengal.
- In fact, on the biggest and most famous of the eighteenth-century zamindaris, that of Rajshahi, had a women at the helm.
The Zamindars
- Zamindars were landed proprietors who also enjoyed certain social and economic privileges by virtue of their superior status in rural society. Caste was one factor that accounted for the elevated status of zamindars; another factor was that they performed certain services (khidmat) for the state.
- The zamindars held extensive personal lands termed milkiyat, meaning property. Milkiyat lands were cultivated for the private use of zamindars.
- Zamindars spearheaded the colonisation of agricultural land, and helped in settling cultivators by providing them with the means of cultivation, including cash loans.
- There is evidence to show that zamindars often established markets (haats) to which peasants also came to sell their produce.
- Two aspects reinforce this view. First, the bhakti saints, who eloquently condemned caste-based and other forms of oppression, did not portray the zamindars (or, interestingly, the moneylender) as exploiters or oppressors of the peasantry. Usually it was the revenue official of the state who was the object of their ire.
- Second, in a large number of agrarian uprisings which erupted in north India in the seventeenth century, zamindars often received the support of the peasantry in their struggle against the state.
- The testimony of an Italian traveller, Giovanni Careri, who passed through India c. 1690, provides a graphic account about the way silver travelled across the globe to reach India.
The Ain-i Akbari of Abu'l Fazi Allami
- The Ain- i Akbari was the culmination of a large historical, administrative project of classification undertaken by Abu'l Fazi at the order of Emperor Akbar.
- It was completed in 1598, the forty-second regnal year of the emperor, after having gone through five revisions.
- The Ain was part of a larger project of history writing commissioned by Akbar.
- This history, known as the Akbar Nama, comprised three books.
- The first two provided a historical narrative.The Ain-i Akbari, the third book, was organized as a compendium of imperial regulations and a gazetteer of the empire.
- The Ain gives detailed accounts of the organisation of the court, administration and army, the sources of revenue and the physical layout of the provinces of Akbar's empire and the literary, cultural and religious traditions of the people.
- The Ain is made up of five books (daftars), of which the first three books describe the administration.
- The first book, called manzil-abadi, concerns the imperial household and its maintenance.
- The second book, sipah-abadi, covers the military and civil administration and the establishment of servants. This book includes notices and short biographical sketches of imperial officials (mansabdars), learned men, poets and artists.
- The third book, mulk-abadi, is the one which deals with the fiscal side of the empire and provides rich quantitative information on revenue rates, followed by the "Account of the Twelve Provinces".
- Historians who have carefully studied the Ain point out that it is not without its problems. Numerous errors in totalling have been detected.
- Another limitation of the Ain is the somewhat skewed nature of the quantitative data.
- Data were not collected uniformly from all provinces. For instance, while for many subas detailed information was compiled about the caste composition of the zamindars, such information is not available for Bengal and Orissa.
Translating the Ain
- Given the importance of the Ain, it has been translated for use by a number of scholars.
- Henry Blochmann edited it and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), published it in its Bibliotheca Indica series.
