Peasants, Zamindars And The State

Agrarian Society & the Mughal Empire

A register says that a village owes revenue. Has that money been paid? Does the entry tell us who grew the crop, who did unpaid work, or whether the demand was disputed? The history of the Mughal countryside begins when we ask what a record measures—and whose experience it leaves out.

These notes cover Class 12 History, NCERT Theme 8, Peasants, Zamindars and the State: Agrarian Society and the Mughal Empire, c. sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, using the actual 2026–27 reprint and current CBSE syllabus. The English Domesday comparison and invented revenue workshop are enrichment. Questions and activities are original, with no claim to be past examination questions.

Why the countryside mattered

Agrarian society includes the people, work and relationships organised around agriculture: cultivators, labourers, artisans, landholders, local institutions, traders and state officials. Rural life involved cooperation as well as inequality and conflict. The Mughal state depended heavily on land revenue, while crops grown for sale connected villages to towns and wider trade.

NCERT estimates that roughly 85 per cent of India's population lived in villages during this period. Treat that as a historical estimate, not a contemporary census result. Nor was every rural person a settled farmer: forests, pastures, drylands and mobile communities were part of the same wider world.

The main chronological setting runs from the empire founded by Babur in 1526 through Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. Akbar's reign, 1556–1605, is especially important for the Ain-i Akbari. Later regional and eighteenth-century records sometimes help historians compare practices, but should not silently become evidence from the same year or place.

Sources: seeing society from above and below

Abu'l Fazl's Ain-i Akbari describes imperial organisation, revenue and regions from the viewpoint of Akbar's court. Its detailed information is valuable; its ambition to present orderly, harmonious government also shapes what it emphasises. A regulation shows what an authority wanted done, not automatically what happened everywhere.

Revenue records from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, petitions and later East India Company records widen the evidence. Conflicts can reveal cultivators' expectations about fairness and subsistence. However, a petition preserved by an official or a council is still a mediated record. The scarcity of personal accounts by cultivators does not mean they lacked opinions or agency.

Different terms used to describe Peasants

• Raiyat, with the plural riaya, and muzarian appear in Indo-Persian sources; kisan and asami are other terms encountered.
• Khud-kashta: cultivators resident in the village where they held their land.
• Pahi-kashta: cultivators from another village working land on a contractual basis.

Movement could be a choice, attracted by more favourable revenue terms, or a response to distress after famine. These labels describe a relationship to place and cultivation; they do not by themselves tell us a person's caste, wealth or freedom from coercion.

Property & Land

Peasants could hold individual rights in land and buy or sell holdings. That does not mean all households possessed equal resources or that every land right resembled modern unrestricted ownership. Local claims existed alongside revenue obligations, village authority and the privileges of stronger groups.

NCERT describes the ordinary north Indian peasant as seldom possessing more than a pair of bullocks and two ploughs, with many possessing less. Its regional examples treat about six acres as an affluent holding in Gujarat, while in Bengal five acres marks an upper level for an average farm and ten acres a rich asami's holding. These examples cannot be converted into one national definition of wealth.

A cultivator moves after a famine. Is pahi-kashta a complete explanation?

No. The term identifies non-resident contractual cultivation. The famine helps explain this fictional person's movement, while another person might move voluntarily for better terms. Ask about resources, the agreement and alternatives before describing either as a freely chosen move or compulsory displacement.

Irrigation and technology

Available land, labour and cultivator mobility helped agricultural expansion. Rainfall supported many crops, but wells, water-lifting devices and canals supplemented it. State initiatives included canal construction and the repair of the shahnahr in Punjab under Shah Jahan.

In NCERT's extract from the Babur Nama, a wheel near Lahore and Dipalpur raises water in pitchers. Animal power turns a wheel-and-gear arrangement; the pitchers empty into a trough that carries water onward. The bucket-and-rope arrangement described around Agra also needs animal and human labour. Neither is a system without energy or maintenance costs.

Farmers used cattle-powered implements as well as manual labour. The light wooden plough had an iron tip; a drill could place seed, though scattering seed by hand was common. Hoeing and weeding used simple iron tools. “Labour intensive” therefore does not mean “without technology”.

Crops, seasons and markets

Kharif and rabi were the major seasonal cycles, associated in the chapter with autumn and spring harvests. Water and local conditions allowed two crops in many regions and sometimes three. This was not a guarantee that every field everywhere produced multiple harvests each year.

Rice, wheat and millets supplied staple food. Commercial crops also mattered. The sources call valued revenue-producing crops jins-i kamil; cotton and sugarcane are prominent examples. Oilseeds and other produce entered markets too. A household could grow food for its own use and a crop for sale, so subsistence and commercial production were connected.

The Ain lists 39 crop varieties for Agra and 43 for Delhi across the two seasons, and 50 rice varieties for Bengal. These are source-specific lists, not modern crop surveys. New World crops such as maize and chillies also became part of the subcontinent's changing agricultural world. Their introduction and later spread were processes, not a single transformation in every village.

A family grows millet to eat and cotton to sell. Which label fits?

Both subsistence and commercial production describe parts of its activity. Selling cotton does not prove that all its food comes from a market, and growing millet does not make the household isolated from money or trade. Draw arrows between its field, home, buyer and revenue collector to reveal the connections.

The Village Community

Caste and the Rural Milieu

Cultivators were not one equal group. Agricultural labourers and people assigned low-status work often had few resources and limited access to power. Caste-related disadvantage affected livelihood and social standing, even where cultivable land was available.

Such exclusions also appeared within Muslim communities. NCERT's historical example of halalkhoran concerns people assigned scavenging work and housed outside village boundaries; it is not a term for meat cutters. These labels describe discrimination in the sources, not a natural hierarchy or a judgement on people's worth.

At intermediate levels, occupation, wealth and status could change. The chapter describes Rajputs and Jats as cultivators in Marwar, groups seeking Rajput status around Vrindavan, and gains associated with profitable cattle rearing or horticulture. In eastern India, some pastoral and fishing groups became established cultivators. Mobility for some does not cancel exclusion for others.

Powers and Functioning of Panchayats and Headman

The village panchayat was commonly an assembly of influential elders. Oligarchy means power concentrated in a small group; it does not mean rule is democratic merely because several castes are present. Poor agricultural workers were unlikely to be represented. These institutions should not be equated with today's constitutionally regulated elected gram panchayats.

A headman, often called muqaddam or mandal, supervised village accounts with the patwari. Some sources describe selection by elders, ratification by the zamindar and continued dependence on the elders' confidence. This is evidence of particular arrangements, not a uniform electoral procedure throughout the empire.

Contributions to a common fund supported hospitality for visiting revenue officials, help during calamities and collective work such as a bund or canal. Collective resources could make projects possible that a household could not fund alone. Yet headmen could also manipulate accounts, reduce their own burden and shift demands onto weaker cultivators.

Panchayats enforced social boundaries, levied fines and could temporarily expel people from the community. Rules about marriage and caste could protect dominant groups rather than everyone equally. Expulsion threatened livelihood and belonging, which made it a powerful sanction.

Jati Panchayat and petitions

A jati could also have its own council. Records from Rajasthan describe mediation over land, marriage rules and precedence at ceremonies. The state generally respected such decisions outside criminal justice. Village and jati panchayats were related forms of authority, not interchangeable labels for one institution.

Petitions complained about excessive demands and begar, unpaid labour. Petitioners could appeal to customary expectations that revenue should leave enough for survival. Outcomes varied: compromise was possible, but failure could lead cultivators to leave. Availability of uncultivated land and competition for labour sometimes gave the threat of departure force.

Design a village hearing: who is missing from the circle?

In an invented hearing, a headman, two substantial cultivators and a revenue official discuss a canal levy. Before choosing a policy, add the people affected but unheard: landless workers, women doing household and field labour, artisans or families using the water downstream. Ask each for one piece of evidence. This is a modern reasoning exercise, not a claim that historical councils guaranteed equal participation.

Life of Village Artisans

Potters, smiths, carpenters, barbers and other specialists supplied goods and services. Households could combine cultivation with craft production, using quieter agricultural periods to spin, dye, make pottery or repair tools. “Peasant” and “artisan” did not always identify completely separate people.

Payment could take the form of produce, a land allotment, goods or cash. Maharashtra records describe hereditary artisan holdings called miras or watan. Other arrangements involved agreements with individual households. The later label jajmani should not be mistaken for the standard term used everywhere in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The chapter's figure of artisans forming as much as 25 per cent of households comes from particular documents and village surveys. It is not an empire-wide occupational census. Export production and cash advances also linked rural artisans with markets beyond the village.

Why question “Little republics”?

Some nineteenth-century British officials pictured villages as self-contained communities of cooperating partners. Shared work did exist, but the image hides private assets, caste and gender inequalities, dominant families and external authority. Trade, credit and revenue collection also crossed village boundaries. Cooperation did not make a village equal or independent of a wider economy.

Women in Agrarian society under Mughals

Agriculture depended on the labour of entire households. The chapter describes men ploughing and women sowing, weeding, threshing and winnowing. Women also spun yarn, prepared clay, embroidered, sold goods and worked beyond their homes. Working alongside men is not evidence that the numbers of male and female workers were exactly equal.

Economic participation did not remove discrimination. NCERT records restrictions connected with menstruation in particular regional settings, such as touching the plough or potter's wheel in western India and entering betel groves in Bengal. These were discriminatory social practices, not scientific facts or one universal ban on all farm work.

Frequent pregnancies, childbirth risks and malnutrition contributed to high female mortality. In many peasant and artisan communities, bride-price and the acceptance of widow or divorcee remarriage differed from elite norms. Practices varied; recognising women's productive and reproductive roles did not automatically give them authority over their lives.

Petitions from western India show women seeking maintenance or complaining about neglect and a husband's infidelity. Their names were often omitted in favour of a relationship to a male household head. That omission makes them less visible in a register without making their action unimportant.

Some women among landed groups inherited and transacted property. The chapter records Hindu and Muslim women's inherited zamindaris and eighteenth-century women landholders in Bengal. These examples demonstrate possible property rights for particular groups; they do not establish equal inheritance or control for every rural woman.

A petition has no personal name. Does it contain no woman's voice?

Look at the request, circumstances and relationship recorded. A demand for support can show action and an expectation of redress even when an official substitutes “wife of” for a name. Also ask who wrote the petition and how its wording was mediated. Neither complete silence nor an unfiltered personal account is a safe assumption.

Forests, mobility and changing livelihoods

Forests and scrublands supported hunting, gathering, pastoralism and shifting cultivation. The historical term jangli referred to a relationship with forest livelihoods; it should not be read as evidence of an absence of civilisation. The chapter's suggestion of about 40 per cent forest cover is an informed conjecture, not an exact survey of the Mughal Empire.

Seasonal activity required movement. NCERT's Bhil example links collecting forest produce with spring, fishing with summer, cultivation with the monsoon, and hunting with autumn and winter. It is an example of a particular sequence, not the calendar of every forest community.

State officials often viewed forests as refuges for resistance to revenue demands. Forest dwellers could see the same terrain as home and livelihood. The Mughal demand for peshkash, tribute, sometimes included elephants. Commercial demand for honey, beeswax and lac, and exchanges between hills and plains, drew forest regions into wider markets.

Chiefs could become zamindars or kings, recruit forces through lineage ties and compete with neighbouring communities. Ahom rulers in Assam organised service obligations through paiks and claimed a monopoly over capturing wild elephants. Political change was not a single uniform movement from one supposedly inferior society to a superior one.

The Koch rulers expanded through wars with neighbouring groups. New devotional connections also developed: historians have linked pirs with the adoption of Islam among some agricultural communities in newly settled areas. Military expansion, livelihood changes and religious encounters must be investigated separately, with attention to regional differences.

NCERT juxtaposes a royal hunting image with Mukundaram Chakrabarti's Chandimangala, a Bengali poem describing Kalaketu's forest clearance and settlement. The hunt helped court artists present an ideal of accessible, harmonious kingship. The poem brings axes, newcomers, markets and displaced animals into view. Neither is a neutral environmental survey.

Give one landscape two captions

For an invented forest-edge settlement, write a court official's caption about new fields and revenue, then a forest household's caption about access, movement and resources. Explain which observations would support each. Both captions need evidence; the exercise does not permit inventing what a particular historical person said or treating every newcomer as the same kind of threat.

Role of Zamindari in Rural Society

Zamindars held important rights in rural society and drew income from agriculture without necessarily doing its productive labour themselves. Their position rested on several sources of power: status and lineage, personal property, services to the state and armed followers.

Personal lands called milkiyat could be cultivated through hired or dependent labour and sold, inherited or mortgaged. Revenue-collection rights were another source of income and influence. Forts, often called qilachas, and armed contingents strengthened the position of powerful zamindars. A zamindar's personal property and authority to collect revenue are related but distinct.

Zamindaris could grow through conquest, grants, transfers, purchase or the settlement of new land. An imperial sanad could confirm authority. Brahmana and Rajput groups were influential, but intermediate castes and Muslim zamindars also appear in the evidence. It is inaccurate to reduce the whole category to one caste or religion.

Zamindars helped settle cultivators, sometimes supplying loans or other resources. They marketed produce from their own lands and established haats, markets used by others too. Buying and selling zamindari rights—not buying and selling the people called zamindars—contributed to monetisation.

Extraction coexisted with patronage and reciprocal ties. Some peasant groups supported zamindars in opposition to the state. Such alliances do not prove that zamindars never exploited cultivators; they show that local loyalties and conflicts could cut across a simple two-sided division. The interests of peasants, zamindars and officials could overlap on one issue and clash on another.

Land Revenue System

A claim on paper and a payment in practice

The diwan supervised fiscal administration, while assessors, collectors and record keepers connected imperial government with villages. Officials sought information about cultivated and cultivable land, crops and cultivators before determining demands.

Jama is the assessed revenue demand; hasil is the amount actually collected. They answer different questions. A gap can prompt an investigation into collection, conditions or disputes, but its size alone cannot identify the cause.

For an invented example, a demand of 100 rupees and a recorded collection of 80 leave a difference of 20. That is not automatically proof that 20 rupees were stolen, nor that the harvest fell by 20 per cent. It is also not a calculation of the cultivator's remaining food or income. The native workshop makes these distinctions visible.

How land and produce were classified

• Polaj: regularly cultivated land, not left fallow between successive crops in the source's classification.
• Parauti: land temporarily rested to recover productive strength.
• Chachar: land left fallow for three or four years.
• Banjar: land uncultivated for five years or more.

For the first two categories, the Ain extract distinguishes good, middling and bad produce. It describes taking their average and assessing one-third of that average as royal dues. Averaging three figures and then taking a third are two separate operations. This particular prescription is not proof that every cultivator throughout the empire paid exactly one-third of the same measure of output.

Average first, then take a third

Suppose three invented representative yields for the same area and crop are 12, 9 and 6 units. Their average is (12 + 9 + 6) ÷ 3 = 9 units. One-third of that average is 3 units. Taking one-third of the total instead would give 9 and skip the averaging step. These numbers illustrate the source's procedure; they are not historical yields or a universal tax rate.

Collection could take more than one form

Akbar's instructions preferred cash where practicable but retained payment in kind. NCERT's Ain extract describes several arrangements:

• Kankut: estimating the crop, with sampling or appraisal to address doubts.
• Batai or bhaoli: dividing reaped, stacked produce by agreement in the parties' presence.
• Khet-batai: dividing fields after they had been sown.
• Lang batai: dividing heaps after the crop had been cut.

The method affected when the division happened, what needed measurement and where disagreement or deception could occur. A written instruction to supervise fairly does not establish that every collection was fair. Local conditions could frustrate imperial claims.

Aurangzeb's order of 1665 called for close investigation of cultivation, village by village and cultivator by cultivator, considering government finances and peasant welfare. This expresses an administrative aim. Large forest areas and other obstacles meant that measurement never became complete everywhere.

Distinguish the mansabdar, an officer with civil or military responsibilities, from the zamindar, a holder of local landed and revenue rights. Many mansabdars received jagir assignments of revenue rather than a cash salary and could be transferred. Such an assignment should not automatically be treated as the officer's privately owned milkiyat land.

The Flow of Silver Coin

Trade linked the Mughal realm with Safavid Iran, Ottoman territories, China and maritime networks reaching Europe and beyond. Bullion arriving in exchange for goods increased the silver available for coinage. Circulating rupees, credit and money-changing helped connect revenue collection with commodity markets; they did not eliminate barter or payment in kind.

Tavernier's description of shroffs, money-changers who also helped transfer funds, supplies one view of these connections. Careri's account, drawing on Bernier in the extract used by NCERT, follows precious metals through several trading regions towards India. Its sweeping language about all the world's silver ending there is rhetoric, not a complete balance sheet of global metal flows.

A cash tax could require a household to sell produce, obtain coins or use credit. The amount of silver circulating cannot by itself establish equal prosperity or stable purchasing power for everyone. Follow the goods, payments and obligations separately.

The Ain-i Akbari of Abu’l Fazl Allami

The Ain formed the third part of the larger Akbar Nama project, after two historical narratives. NCERT dates its completed form to 1598 after five revisions. It combined regulations, descriptions and quantitative information about Akbar's empire; it was more than a list of battles.

Do not confuse three different counts: the three-part Akbar Nama, the Ain's own five daftars, and later English translations published in multiple physical volumes. A book on a modern shelf need not reproduce the original internal divisions one volume at a time.

What the five daftars contain

1. Manzil-abadi: the imperial household and its maintenance.
2. Sipah-abadi: military and civil administration, service and notices of officials and other notable people.
3. Mulk-abadi: fiscal arrangements and detailed accounts of the provinces, measured areas and assessed revenue.
4. The fourth daftar: religious, intellectual and cultural traditions.
5. The fifth daftar: a collection including Akbar's sayings.

The fiscal material moves through subas, provinces, and their smaller administrative units, including sarkars, parganas and mahals. Tables record names of units, forts, measured area, revenue assessed in cash, charitable revenue grants and information about zamindars and their forces. The categories reveal what government sought to know and control.

Abu'l Fazl drew on records, orders, reports, memories and testimony, checking accounts and revising drafts. The manuscript's numbers were written as words to reduce later copying errors. These procedures matter, but care in compilation does not remove the influence of court patronage or make a dataset complete.

Archive surprise: can an eighteenth-century copy preserve a sixteenth-century text?

Yes. The British Library catalogues Add MS 16872 as a Persian copy of the Ain-i Akbari dated 1783. That is the catalogue's date for this manuscript, not a new date for Abu'l Fazl's composition. Distinguish when a text was composed, when a surviving copy was made, and when a translation was published. The catalogue record is available in the sources below; the manuscript itself was not used for a new translation here.

Limitation on Ain-i-Akbari

The Ain remains valuable precisely because historians can ask specific questions of its evidence while checking its limits:

• Perspective: it presents society from the imperial centre and social elite, with an interest in orderly kingship.
• Arithmetic and copying: researchers have identified errors in totals. Individual figures require checking even when a dataset remains broadly useful.
• Uneven coverage: information about zamindar caste composition is missing for Bengal and Orissa, although supplied for several other provinces.
• Geographical concentration: detailed prices and wages largely concern Agra and nearby areas. They cannot automatically represent the entire empire.
• Administrative categories: assessment, collection, property and people are different things; a fiscal table is not a complete description of lived experience.

Historians compare it with regional accounts, petitions, other descriptions and material evidence. Neither accepting every number nor discarding the whole document is a sound response. Identify the particular claim, its location and date, and the corroboration needed.

A global comparison: what land records leave out

England's Domesday survey of 1086 also recorded landholding, resources and valuations for royal government. The National Archives explains that it was not a census of every inhabitant and that entries do not all contain identical information. Its institutions and dates differ from Mughal India; the useful comparison is how official questions shape the surviving record.

An actual Yorkshire extract records Ryther's value as 40 shillings before 1066 and 30 at the time of the survey. The recorded valuation fell by 10 shillings, or 25 per cent. Does that mean its crop output or population fell by 25 per cent? No: those are different quantities, and the entry does not establish that explanation. Read the named measure before calculating or interpreting a change.

The same discipline helps with the Ain: ask what was counted, whose information entered the record and which experiences were omitted. This is a comparison of historical method, not a claim that an English manor and a Mughal village had identical relations of power.

Discover it: open the revenue register

The native workshop provides two invented village assessments, then lets you uncover their recorded collections. Work out the difference and decide what further evidence would explain it. The amounts, villages and testimony prompts are fictional; no historical rate, receipt or peasant quotation is fabricated.

For an open challenge, design a six-column record that a collector, a cultivator and a village artisan could each question. Include date, unit, source and uncertainty as well as the amount. Let a friend remove one column and see which confident conclusion becomes unsafe. Restore or redesign the missing context.

Keep these distinctions: subsistence and isolation; shared resources and equality; women's labour and equal power; forest livelihoods and a lack of civilisation; zamindari rights and jagir assignments; jama and hasil; recorded value and actual crop output; careful compilation and complete evidence.

Sources

Core: NCERT Theme 8, Peasants, Zamindars and the State, Reprint 2026–27; CBSE History curriculum, 2026–27. Historical regulations, traveller accounts, petitions and the Bengali poem are discussed through the chapter's selected extracts and descriptions, with original paraphrases and questions.

Additional evidence: British Library, Ain-i Akbari manuscript Add MS 16872; The National Archives, guide to Domesday Book; Yorkshire extract, E 31/2/2 f315v. The manuscript catalogue is evidence about a particular copy; the Domesday material is comparative enrichment.

Compare urban water, labour and power in Vijayanagara, examine regional accounts in Through the Eyes of Travellers, or return to the study library.

Key takeaways

• Mughal revenue records measure state demands but often omit the experiences of cultivators, labourers, and local conflicts.
• Agrarian society in the Mughal Empire included cultivators, labourers, artisans, landholders, and state officials, with both cooperation and inequality.
• The Mughal state relied heavily on land revenue, and crops grown for sale linked villages to broader trade networks.
• Ain-i Akbari provides an imperial perspective on Mughal administration and revenue but may not reflect ground realities.
• Peasants could hold individual land rights, but resource distribution was unequal, and local claims often competed with state revenue demands.

Test yourself

What does a Mughal revenue record typically measure, and whose experiences does it often leave out?

A Mughal revenue record measures state revenue demands but often leaves out the experiences of cultivators, labourers, and local conflicts.

Name two types of cultivators mentioned in the note and describe their relationship to land.

Khud-kashta cultivators reside in the village where they hold land, while pahi-kashta cultivators work land in another village on a contractual basis.

How did the Mughal state connect villages to wider trade networks?

Crops grown for sale in villages connected them to towns and broader trade networks.

What is the limitation of using Ain-i Akbari as a historical source?

Ain-i Akbari provides an imperial perspective and may present an idealized, orderly view of Mughal governance rather than ground realities.

Why does the note caution against assuming that all peasants held equal resources?

The note highlights that local claims, revenue obligations, and privileges of stronger groups created unequal resource distribution among peasants.