Alam, Muzaffar; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (eds);
The Mughal State, 1526-1750
Oxford University Press (Themes in Indian History), 1986, 548 pages
ISBN 0195652253
topics: | india | history | medieval | mughal | anthology |
Once in a very long while something happens to stir the shallow, turbid and yet extensive waters of Indian historiography. The publication of Irfan Habib's The Agrarian System of Mughal India is generally recognised – even in the most unlikely quarters – as one of these rare occasions. The detailed knowledge on which the volume is based would satisfy the most rigorous demands of India's traditional scholarship: the not-so-whispered accusation of glib generalisation, based on ill-understood and inadequate data, often levelled against the Indian protagonists of the analytical approach to history, would be quite pointless in this particular case ... Habib's Agrarian System is the first major product of [the] new Aligarh 'school' and marks a fresh point of departure in Indian historiography. (1965) p. 259 [ch.8]
Our knowledge and understanding of Indian agrarian society in the pre-colonial era, as derived from Moreland, Baden-Powell, Maine, etc. on the one hand and Marx and the Marxists on the other, are essentially simplistic, which fact perhaps explains the striking and unexpected similarity of views as between the British officials and the radical thinkers mentioned above. The image generally projected is of an undifferentiated mass of small peasants, held together in fraternal village communities exercising by virtue of immemorial custom the communal right of hereditary occupation over arable land and pasture, subject only to revenue exploitation by the superior political-military authorities who expropriated the surplus directly or through power delegated to intermediate levels of authority. In this pre-class society, private ownership of land had not emerged: the concept was, in fact, irrelevant. For the situation, in Moreland's words, was 'antecedent to the process of disentangling the concept of private right from political allegiance'. [India at the death of Akbar, p. 96-98] In Marxist terms, the basic fact of communal property -- which was really no property in the bourgeois sense -- was masked by oriental despotism with 'the despotic government suspended over the small communities'. To repeat, property in land was irrelevant in these circumstances wherein cultivation was not a right but an enforceable duty. The 'self-sustaining unity of manufacture and agriculture' containing 'all the conditions for reproduction and surplus production' within the village community explains the economic viability and self-perpetuating character of this elementary form of social organization which could resist disintegration as much as evolution. Within this essentially changeless system, superficial mutations occurred through the aggregation of small states into empires, entailing changes in assessment and collection and in the composition of the exploiting class. These did not however affect either the organization or the relations of production. The sharers in the expropriated surplus might be of diverse origin, but they were identical in their economic functions and foundations. [see Marx, pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, esp Hobsbawm's introduction] In so far as the only mentionable changes in agrarian society concerned this class, unconnected with production, the basic thesis of changelessness is not affected. At most, the variation in the degree and manner of revenue extraction permitted a limited range of fluctuations in output and the producers' share of it. But strictly limited; because most of the time in most places the expropriation of the surplus was as near total as was practicable.
This simple abstract model has been repeatedly put forward as the standard pattern of agrarian organization in Asia, and not by Marxists alone. Of course, one knew there were local differences; but these differences were considered to be either deviations from the norm or subsumed by the fundamental uniformity of socio-economic organization throughout this vast continent. In other words, the view that the local and regional variations were not significant enough was established pretty firmly. This image of the Oriental Society, with capital letters in appropriate places, is reborn, Phoenix-like, from time to time, of course with a seasonal change of feathers. Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism is perhaps the latest -- but not the last, one apprehends -- formidable avatars of this immortal bird. 261 Fortunately, over the last three decades or so, at a safe distance from the grand theory, specialists on different regions of Asia have produced a number of monographs which, when compared, bring out the striking individuality of socio-economic organisations in different parts of Asia, often within the same country. The abstract model of pre-class ante-property village communities, based on self-sufficiency, with the state in the role of an incubus, hardly fits any of these regional patterns. Even as a tool of analysis it has lost much of its value, unless one treats it as a starting hypothesis to be abandoned for the most part by the time one has finished investigation. The works of Van Leur, Schrieke and Meilink~Roelofsz on the Indonesian archipelago, of Doreen Warriner on the Middle East, of Lambton on Persia have all done their bit to demolish the image of a universal Oriental Society. To this growing library of studies on Asian societies, Habib's work is a very important addition. This detailed empirical study, though not free from the natural limitations of a general survey covering the whole of Mughal India and a wide time span, brings into focus the distinctive traits of India's agrarian economy during a significant phase of the pre-colonial era.
The new light thrown on the nature of land rights perhaps marks the most significant point of departure from the traditional views sketched above. [...] [earlier ideas : * land ownership was an unknown idea * the king was the owner of all lands contradictory ideas - but often held simultaneously] Milkiyat (ownership, < mAlik) in agricultural land under the Mughals was not, according to Habib, the same as 'ownership' as understood today. The raiyat had no right to alienate his land freely. Cultivation as a right was vested hereditarily in the peasant, but it was also an obligation from which no peasant was exempt. He was thus not a free agent: if the land belonged to him, he also belonged to the land and hence was not very different in his rights and obligations from the European serfs. Besides, his right of hereditary occupation was at times interfered with in practice, if the land was lucrative enough to attract new peasants whenever the old occupants were forced out. The most striking proof of the peasants' subject status was the large-scale abandonment of cultivation by raiyats who had no other means of escaping an intolerable revenue burden. [contrasts Habib's conclusions with instances of land sale cited by B.R. Grover and Nurul Hasan, though Grover states that they were very rare.]
Our knowledge regarding the lowest strata of agrarian society -- the people without any proprietary or tenancy rights in land -- is still very inadequate. Habib has added some useful details to Moreland's statements on agricultural labourers and 'village serfs' in India. He mentions cultivators who tilled other people's land, chamars who 'worked for wages in the fields of cultivators and Zamindars', dhanuks who husked rice and other groups who worked as guides and porters. The assumption that the 'landless' were not numerous is not consistent with another possibility, viz. that the bulk of the untouchables, a significant proportion of Hindu society, were excluded from occupancy rights. The phenomenon, somewhat puzzling in the context of a very favourable land-man ratio, is explained in terms of the rigid caste system, the rigidity in its turn being ascribed to hereditary division of labour necessitated by rural isolation and self-sufficiency.12 But isolation and self-sufficiency of villages have not generated such immobility in other societies, to wit, in those of medieval Europe. Inadequacy of capital supply-Habib mentions how large sections of the peasantry depended 'wholly upon credit for their ability (to cultivate)' -- partly explain the origin of this c1ass.[Habib p.120] One may however, have to fa11 back on social anthropology for a more satisfactory explanation.
the size of one's holding and one's status in the rural hierarchy were not evenly correlated. There must have been other sources of inequality besides the perquisite of village officials. A minority of well-to-do peasants has been a characteristic feature of many agrarian societies in the pre-capitalist era. We have inter alia the notable example of the Russian serfs who were allowed to trade and became millionaires.24 Growth of the market for agricultural products may have favoured the enterprising and the fortunate and colonizing efforts further aggravated the inequalities. And during the unsettled years the progress from wealth to ownership and hence the suppression of communal rights were perhaps a natural process. Yet these are but surmises and we are still nowhere near the history of the Indian village communities and do not even know where, when or in what forms the institution actually existed. [also discusses deviations in the view of communal resources] Habib: there is not 'the slightest suggestion anywhere in our sources' that the occupancy or proprietary right was ever held in common or land distributed periodically; the village community developed only in 'some spheres outside that of production.' 264 But in the 19th c., British officials do describe communal ownership and periodic redistribution. [So is this a later growth in the anarchic periods of 18th c.? Or did it exist but are hard to find in the sources consulted so far?] [TR is impressive in his comparison of practices on communal land across many other cultures in Asia].
Without any long-term interest in the territory assigned to him for a short period, the jagirdar unhesitatingly fleeced the peasant. Complaints to the higher authorities, permitted in theory, were nearly impossible in practice and were at best ineffective. The system of fanning out jagirs, discouraged by the government, apparently to little purpose, further aggravated the situation. The financial crisis of the Mughal empire, in the later years of Aurangzeb and afterwards, with too many mansabdars and not enough jagirs to go around led to a steady deterioration all round: N.A. Siddiqi in his thesis has described the gradual impoverishment and exit of the big jagirdar, replaced by a class of men who bought from the jagirdar or otherwise secured the right to collect revenue over parts of the erstwhile big jagirs, a right which eventually became hereditary in many instances. [habib p.270; Noman Ahmad Siddiqi phd]
The erstwhile political authority undertook to pay peshkash (tribute), or became a mansabdar of the empire holding his territory as watan jagir, not necessarily coterminous with his ancestral lands. The zamindari status of the 'intermediary zamindar', however hoary its antiquity, was derived, under the Mughals, from imperial sanads formally conferring the 'office'. Under the sanad, the zamindar became a malguzar, an official responsible for the collection of revenue from the land under his control, almost invariably more extensive than his ancestral holding. From this point there are movements in two different directions. The zamindar might become a sadr zamindar with jurisdiction over numerous parganas or (outside Bengal) a taluqdaar with superior rights over smaller zamindars who paid their revenue through him. Still a cog, however big, in the wheel of the revenue administration, the taaluqdar before long consolidated his rights in the nature of perquisites and eventually laid claim to proprietorship over the territories under his control. Secondly, the zamindari rights might suffer a dilution or diminution as well generating in the process other forms of control over land. The Bengal taaluqdars -- both independent (i.e. huzuri, paying revenue directly to the state) and dependent (i.e. muskuri, paying revenue through some zamindar) -- secured rights essentially similar to that of the zamindars through colonization, purchase or gift and thus emerged as a distinct level of intermediaries. The frequent sales and partitions of the zamindari and taaluqdari lands often reduced the individual holding to a size which forced the individual zamindars to become, once more, a khudkashta ryot, paying revenue through the real or putative head of the family, now a chief zamindar.
http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2821/stories/20111021282107500.htm As a sequel to this inquiry, Habib came out with a major conclusion that India did not, despite the necessary resources and conditions, have the potentialities of capitalist development as the surplus that was produced and extracted was not invested for the production of further wealth. Although, strictly speaking, this is a counterfactual and there could be alternative routes, the strict adherence to both the methods of scientific inquiry and of historical materialism makes this a seminal essay in Indian historiography. =Contents== General Editor's Preface ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam 1
1. A warlord's fresh attempt at empire D.H.A. Kolff 75 [from Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, 1990, pp. 32-70.] 2. The Turko-Mongol Theory of Kingship Ram Prasad Tripathi 115 [from Some Aspects of Muslim Administration, 1959, pp. 105-21] 3. The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir J.F. Richards 126 [from Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia, 1978. ] 4. Some Notes on Rajput Loyalties during the Mughal period Norman P. Ziegler 168 [from Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority, 1978. ]
5. Rank (mansab) in the Mogul State Service W.H. Moreland 213 [J. Royal Asiatic Society of GB & I, 1936, pp. 641-65] 6. The Faujdar and Faujdari Under the Mughals Noman Ahmad Siddiqi 234 [Medieval India Quarterly, Vol 4, 1961, pp. 22-35] 7. Distribution of the Revenue Resources of the Mughal Empire among the nobility A. Jan Qaisar 252 [Proc. Indian History Congress, 1965, pp. 237-42] 8. The Agrarian System of Mughal India: A Review essay Tapan Raychaudhuri 259 [Enquiry, New Series, Vol II(1), 1965, pp. 92-121] 9. Zamindars under the Mughals S. Nurul Hasan 284 [from Frykenberg (ed.), Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, 1969, pp. 17-31]
10. The Condition of the people in Aurangzib's Reign Jadunath Sarkar 301 [History of Aurangzeb, Vol.4, 1924, pp. 436-72] 11. Lower-class uprisings in the Mughal empire Wilfred Cantwell Smith 323 [from Islamic Culture, Vol XX, 1946, pp. 21-40] 12. Review of the Crisis of the Jagirdari System Satish Chandra 347 [from Medieval India: Society, the Jagirdari Crisis and the Village, Delhi, 1982, pp. 61-75] 13. Trade and Politics in eighteenth century India Ashin Das Gupta 361 [from D.S. Richards (ed.), Islam and the Trade of Asia, 1970, pp. 181-214.] 14. The 'Great Firm' Theory of the Decline of the Mughal empire Karen Leonard 398 [from Comparative Studies in Society and History, v.XXI (2), 1979, pp. 151-67]
15. Conformity and Conflict: Tribes and the 'Agrarian System' of Mughal India Chetan Singh 421 [Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol XXIII, (3), 1988, pp. 319-40] 16. Aspects of Agrarian Uprisings in North India in the Early eighteenth century Muzaffar Alam 449 [Bhattacharya/Thapar (eds.), Situating Indian History, 1986, pp. 146-70.] 17. Two frontier uprisings in Mughal India Gautam Bhadra 474 [from Ranajit Guha, (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol II, 1982, pp. 43-59] 18. Banditry in Mughal India: Historical and Folk perceptions J.F. Richards and V. Narayana Rao 491 [The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol XVII(1), 1980, pp. 95-120] Bibliography 520 This volume would have been richer if Professor M. Athar Ali, lrfan Habib and Iqtidar Alam Khan had granted permission to reproduce their essays. ---from the blurb: I believe that this book would certainly compel the students of Mughal history to reconsider issues, consolidate new research and move beyond the paradigms of W.H. Moreland and Blochmann.' -Meena Bhargava in The Book Review