About 85% of Indians lived in villages under the Mughals. Yet our best source on their lives was written by a court chronicler who never worked the land.
This article covers Mughal-era peasants, village society, forest tribes, zamindars, the land revenue system, the silver that fuelled it all, and the Ain-i-Akbari as a historical source.
🏛️ Must Know
Peasants and Their Lands
- Raiyat, the Common Term Mughal-era Persian sources most often called a peasant a raiyat, or muzarian. Regional terms like kisan and asami also appear.
- Two Kinds of Cultivators A khud-kashta peasant farmed land in his own village. A pahi-kashta peasant farmed land in a different village, sometimes by choice for better terms, sometimes forced there by famine.
- Small Holdings Most north Indian peasants owned barely a pair of bullocks and two ploughs. In Gujarat, six acres counted as an affluent holding; in Bengal, ten acres made a peasant genuinely rich.
- Individual Ownership Peasant land was privately owned property. It could be bought and sold, just like the land of any other proprietor.
- Babur on Mobility Emperor Babur, in his memoirs, marvelled that Indian villages could vanish and reappear within days, since crops depended on rain, not fixed infrastructure.
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Crops and Irrigation
- Two Harvests a Year Farming followed two cycles, kharif and rabi. Most regions grew at least two crops annually, and some, with good water, grew three.
- Jins-i-Kamil, “Perfect Crops” The state pushed peasants toward high-value cash crops like cotton and sugarcane, since these brought in more revenue than plain food staples.
- The Persian Wheel Babur described a well-irrigation device using a rope-and-pot wheel turned by a bullock, precisely the mechanism later known as the Persian wheel.
- New World Crops Arrive Maize reached India via Africa and Spain. Tomatoes, potatoes, chillies, pineapple, and papaya arrived from the New World during the seventeenth century.
- Tobacco and a Failed Ban Tobacco reached the Deccan, then north India, by 1604. Jahangir banned it over addiction fears, but by the century’s end it was a major crop nationwide.
Village Community: Panchayats and Caste
- Three Constituents The village community rested on three parts: the cultivators, the panchayat of elders, and the headman, called muqaddam or mandal.
- Not an Equal “Republic” Some British officials later romanticised the village as a “little republic.” In fact, caste hierarchy and unequal landholding shaped it deeply, with menial castes doing the poorest-paid work.
- The Headman’s Real Job The muqaddam supervised village accounts with an accountant called the patwari, but mandals were often accused of underpaying their own revenue and shifting the burden onto smaller peasants.
- Jati Panchayats Beyond the general village panchayat, each caste ran its own jati panchayat, arbitrating land disputes and marriage norms within that caste.
- Petitioning for Fairness Villagers, especially from lower castes, petitioned panchayats against excessive taxes or forced unpaid labour (begar), appealing to a customary right to basic subsistence.
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Women in Agrarian Society
- Shared Field Labour Men tilled and ploughed. Women sowed, weeded, threshed, and winnowed. Both worked the fields as one household economic unit.
- Craft Depended on Women Spinning yarn, kneading clay for pottery, and embroidery relied heavily on female labour. The more commercial the product, the more it depended on women’s work.
- Bride-Price, Not Dowry Many rural communities practised bride-price rather than dowry, and treated remarriage of widows and divorced women as legitimate, unlike elite social norms.
- Women as Zamindars Women, including widows, could inherit and sell zamindaris. One of Bengal’s largest eighteenth-century zamindaris, Rajshahi, was headed by a woman.
Forests and Tribes
- Roughly 40% Forest Cover Historians estimate dense forest and scrubland covered about 40% of the land, stretching from eastern and central India to the Western Ghats.
- Jangli Did Not Mean “Uncivilised” Forest dwellers, called jangli, lived by gathering produce, hunting, and shifting cultivation. Among the Bhils, each season had its own dedicated forest activity.
- Elephants as Tribute The state extracted peshkash, tribute, from forest peoples, often demanding elephants for the army, since forests were the main source of war elephants.
- A Place of Refuge Babur described forests as a mawas, or refuge, where rebellious groups could hide from the state and escape paying taxes.
- Chiefs Became Zamindars Powerful tribal chieftains built armies from their own kin groups. Many became zamindars, and some rose all the way to become kings, as happened among Assam’s Ahoms.
The Zamindars
- Not Cultivators Themselves Zamindars were landed proprietors who lived off agriculture without directly farming. Their status came from caste and from services (khidmat) rendered to the state.
- Milkiyat, Personal Land Zamindars held private milkiyat lands, worked by hired or servile labour, which they could freely sell, mortgage, or bequeath.
- A Private Army Most zamindars kept fortresses (qilachas) and armed retinues. The Ain records the combined zamindar forces of the empire at over 384,000 cavalry and 4.2 million infantry.
- Reciprocity, Not Pure Exploitation Bhakti saints who condemned caste oppression rarely blamed zamindars directly, usually targeting state revenue officials instead. In many peasant revolts, zamindars actually sided with the peasantry against the state.
The Land Revenue System
- Jama vs. Hasil The jama was the amount of revenue assessed; the hasil was the amount actually collected. The two frequently did not match.
- Akbar’s Four Land Categories The Ain classifies land as polaj (cultivated every year), parauti (rested to recover fertility), chachar (fallow three to four years), and banjar (fallow five years or more).
- Cash or Kind Akbar’s amil-guzar was told to accept cash where possible but to allow payment in kind too, through methods like kankut, estimating standing crops, or batai, physically dividing the harvest.
- Aurangzeb’s 1665 Survey Order Aurangzeb ordered detailed, village-by-village, peasant-by-peasant surveys of cultivation, balancing state revenue needs against peasant welfare.
Exam Point of View
The Flow of Silver
- India Had No Silver Mines India lacked natural silver deposits, yet the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw remarkable stability in silver rupya currency.
- Silver Followed Trade New World silver reached Europe, then flowed onward through Ottoman and Persian trade networks, and finally into India to pay for Indian goods.
- Careri’s Global Circuit Italian traveller Giovanni Careri, drawing on Bernier’s account, described gold and silver from the Americas eventually converging on India via Mocha and Basra.
- Why It Mattered This steady silver inflow let the Mughal state mint coins on an unprecedented scale and collect land revenue reliably in cash.
The Ain-i-Akbari as a Source
- The Third Book of the Akbar Nama Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari was the third of three books in the Akbar Nama, completed in 1598 after five revisions.
- Five Daftars The Ain has five books: the imperial household, military and civil administration, revenue and fiscal data, and two on religious and cultural traditions plus Akbar’s sayings.
- A View From the Top The Ain aimed to show social harmony under a strong ruling class, treating any revolt against Mughal authority as destined to fail. Its picture of peasants is therefore always from the state’s own perspective.
- Real Data Gaps Coverage was uneven: detailed zamindar caste data exists for many provinces but not Bengal or Orissa, and price-and-wage data mostly reflects the area around Agra alone.
- Still a Breakthrough Unlike earlier chronicles focused only on wars and kings, the Ain systematically recorded the empire’s people, products, and revenue, making it a genuine benchmark source.
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D4364 — Who authored the Ain-i-Akbari, the third book of the Akbar Nama, completed in 1598?D4363 — According to the flow-of-silver argument connected to Mughal India, where did the New World silver that eventually reached India originate, and through which regions did it mainly flow before arriving?D4362 — In Akbar's four-tier land classification recorded in the Ain-i-Akbari, which category referred to land left fallow for five years or more?D4361 — Which irrigation device did Babur describe in his memoirs, using a rope-and-pot mechanism turned by a bullock?🎲 Take a Medieval Indian History Quiz
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