Chapter 8 — Peasants, Zamindars and the State

About 85 per cent of India's population lived in villages during this period. Both peasants and landed elites were involved in agricultural production and claimed rights to a share of the produce.

The Ain-i Akbari was authored by Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's court historian. It was completed in 1598, the forty-second regnal year of Emperor Akbar, after going through five revisions. It formed the third book of the larger Akbar Nama project commissioned by Akbar.

Khud-kashta peasants were residents of the village in which they held their lands. Pahi-kashta were non-resident cultivators who belonged to some other village but cultivated lands elsewhere on a contractual basis — either because revenue terms were more favourable elsewhere or out of compulsion, such as economic distress after a famine.

Jins-i kamil literally means 'perfect crops' — cash crops that the Mughal state encouraged peasants to cultivate because they brought in more revenue. Cotton and sugarcane were jins-i kamil par excellence. Cotton was grown across central India and the Deccan plateau, while Bengal was famous for its sugar. Various oilseeds such as mustard and lentils also fell into this category.

Agriculture was organised around the kharif (autumn) and rabi (spring) seasonal cycles. Most regions produced a minimum of two crops a year (do-fasla). Areas with assured rainfall or irrigation could even yield three crops a year.

The three constituents of the village community were: the cultivators, the panchayat (an assembly of elders with hereditary rights over their property), and the village headman known as the muqaddam or mandal.

The muqaddam or mandal was the headman of the village panchayat. The chief function of the headman was to supervise the preparation of village accounts, assisted by the accountant or patwari of the panchayat. The headman was chosen through the consensus of village elders and held office as long as he enjoyed their confidence.

Jama was the amount assessed — the revenue fixed by the state — while hasil was the amount actually collected. Akbar decreed that the amil-guzar (revenue collector) should strive to make cultivators pay in cash, but also keep the option of payment in kind open.

The Ain lists four categories: polaj (annually cultivated, never left fallow), parauti (left fallow temporarily to recover), chachar (fallow for three or four years), and banjar (uncultivated for five years or more). For polaj and parauti, there were three quality grades — good, middling, and bad — and one-third of the average produce of all three grades was taken as the royal due.

Milkiyat referred to the extensive personal lands held by zamindars, meaning 'property'. These lands were cultivated for the private use of zamindars, often with hired or servile labour. Zamindars could sell, bequeath, or mortgage milkiyat lands at will.

In contemporary texts, forest dwellers were termed jangli. The term described those whose livelihood came from gathering forest produce, hunting, and shifting agriculture — not an absence of civilisation as the word implies today. Among the Bhils, for example, spring was for collecting forest produce, summer for fishing, the monsoon months for cultivation, and autumn and winter for hunting.

Men tilled and ploughed, while women sowed, weeded, threshed, and winnowed the harvest. Women also performed artisanal tasks such as spinning yarn, sifting and kneading clay for pottery, and embroidery. Peasant and artisan women worked not only in the fields but also went to employers' houses or markets when necessary. Amongst the landed gentry, women including widows had the right to inherit and sell zamindaris; the Rajshahi zamindari in eighteenth-century Bengal had a woman at its helm.

Trade between India and Europe — as well as with Turkey, Persia, and South-East Asia — brought large amounts of silver bullion into India to pay for goods. Italian traveller Giovanni Careri, who passed through India c. 1690, described how silver from America, Japan, and other regions ultimately gravitated towards India. This ensured a remarkable stability in the availability of the silver rupya between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, facilitating coin minting and enabling the Mughal state to collect taxes in cash.

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