6 Agrarian structure on the Eve of the British Rule I

Manish Thakur

Introduction

The nature of Indian economy before the British conquest has been a matter of intense debate among the historians. The latter has been interested in knowing if the economy had such elements that would have led to subsequent development of capitalism in India. Alternatively, the question has been if capitalism had to enter the economy in India, it had necessarily to depend on the colonial intervention. Based on such historiographical literature, we present in this module an overview of agrarian structure on the eve of the British Rule. This module heavily reproduces the work of IrfanHabib, the eminent historian of Mughal India. The assumption here is that an understanding of the agrarian structure in Mughal India implies an understanding of the agrarian structure on the eve of the British Rule. Though, it is true that at the time of the arrival of the British, the Mughal Empire was in a state of decline, and the inevitable disarray and collapse. It is also true that regional rules and potentates had taken over increasingly large swathes of territory and snatched them away from the control of the Mughals. Yet, Mughals’ impact on the agrarian structure has been long-lasting, and even today, there are technical terms in vogue in the field of land revenue administration that had their origins during the Mughal rule.

Revenue System in Mughal India

Habib (1969) begins his discussion of Indian agriculture during the seventeenth century by noting a great abundance of land. According to him, the extent of cultivation then was about half of what it was about the beginning of the 20thcentury, in the middle Gangetic basin and Central India, and from two-thirds to one-fifth in other regions. Generally, cultivation would be done on more fertile lands in 1600. Also, owing to larger wastes and pastures more cattle could be kept indicating not only a larger output of pastoral products per capita, but also a greater use of cattle-power in agriculture. It is probable that each household farm should have approximated more closely to the optimum size; and, speculates that a greater amount of double-cropping could have been undertaken by the peasants. Habib does not see much difference in terms of agricultural technology available in 1600 and that in 1900 except the large-scale canal irrigation network laid out by the British in the Indus basin and the upper Gangetic region, the impact of the railways facilitating the raising of crops for which particular lands or localities were most suited; and substantial expansion of new crops namely, maize and the plantation crops, tea, and coffee in the nineteenth century.

The point being made by Habib is that per capita agricultural productivity in Mughal India was not in any way backward when compared with other contemporary societies, including those of Western Europe. The “low yields” of traditional Indian agriculture is a myth. He writes (1969) ‘there is little doubt, then, that the absence of capitalistic development in India cannot be attributed very simply to a low level of agricultural production. Given the minimum size of the agricultural surplus, it is really the mode of its appropriation, and ultimate distribution, which can (but may not) contain the seeds of capitalism. The agricultural surplus may be appropriated and shared in various ways that are reducible, theoretically speaking, to two basic forms: (A), a demand from outside imposed on the producer (e.g., rent) and (B), a gain accruing as a result of the appropriator’s undertaking or organizing the productive process himself (e.g., peasant’s savings; profits of the capitalist-farmer).’

In Mughal India, quaHabib, the dominant form of surplus-appropriation was of the type A listed above. Its two distinct elements were peasant agriculture (as the mode of production) and the land revenue (representing the bulk of surplus appropriated). He adds, but for rare possible exceptions, Indian peasant farming was organized on individualistic lines. Each peasant had his own separate holding. Owing to land abundance, land in most areas had little or no price, but seed and cattle were important forms of peasant property. In other words, individual ownership and the attendant stratification were present within the peasantry. At the same time, the Indian village presented the appearance of a closed, custom-based social and economic unit. The close settlement of peasant households and the needs for peasant migrants to move in a body, for better protection, furnished the basis for a collective organization of peasants within the framework of clan and caste and the Indian Village Community.

With this community were associated hereditary artisans and village servants, who provided the peasants with goods and services needed by them. They were paid by the peasants, as a body (for the community had a financial pool), and as individuals, according to customary rates, usually in kind, or through allotments of land. Habib asserts, ‘to a certain degree an Indian village was a stable economic unit, essentially self-sufficient in respect to its own consumption needs. This is not to belie the individualistic organization of production and the economic stratification that must have existed among the peasantry or various forms of customary economic transactions.

IrfanHabibargues that the zamindar’s share of the “rent” in Mughal India was of a subordinate order. It amounted, nominally, to 10 percent of the land revenue in Northern India and 25 percent in Gujarat. In other words, it was the land revenue that represented the bulk of the rent,’ Mal, that is land revenue, was not, formally speaking rent from the land, but a tax on the crop. It was basically a share of the crop; and it was generally collected through an actual division of the harvest (Batai). There were variations though in actual practice rendering the process more complex and, administratively, less strenuous. The revenue, for example, was imposed in kind, but the demand was fixed by means of surveys of the cropland, and the application of an estimated crop rate upon the area so determined, so as to give the estimate of the total crop (Kankut). The revenue being a given share of the produce, the total revenue demand could now be stated in kind, but might subsequently be commuted into cash at market (or arbitrary) prices. In the most developed farm, and in some provinces the most prevalent, a standard cash rate was levied per unit of area, varying according to the crop (Zabt). Here too, for purposes of drawing up the schedules, the revenue had to be assumed as a fixed portion of the crop. By and large, it seems that the share of the produce taken as revenue ranged from one-third to half in most parts of Northern India and the Deccan; but was less in certain arid areas, and substantially more in certain fertile tracts.

The revenue demand was, theoretically, assessed separately on each individual peasant, according to his holding and the crops. Terms such as “demand” and “revenue demand,” are frequently used in British-Indian land-revenue administration. This term represents the Persian term jamer, and means the amount at which the revenue was assessed or fixed. In fact, the whole village body was usually made into a single assessed, and collectively called upon to pay the revenue levied. Habib also notes that despite the fact that revenue demand was basically a share of the produce, land revenue was realized most often in cash, not only under zabt, but also under other systems through commutation of the demand into demand in cash. Often when fixed on a village it appeared as an amount of money, quite arbitrarily determined. Cash nexus appears as an established institution in the Delhi region as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century. In Mughal India, collection of revenue in cash was far more prevalent than collection in kind save local exceptions, and during periods in certain regions where there might have been a shift from the one mode of revenue assessment to the other. Even when the revenue was collected in kind, the authorities often did so not for purposes of consumption directly, or for storage, but for sale.

Agrarian Surplus and the Ruling Class

These characteristics of land revenue were historically interwoven with the emergence of a ruling class among whose members it was distributed. The revenue was collected from the peasant directly in the name of the king, either by his own officials for the royal treasury, or by his assignees for themselves. The areas from which the revenue went to the treasury were known as Khalisa. The Khalisa consisted of areas scattered throughout the Empire, and its total size varied. In 1647, for instance, the estimated revenue of the Khalisa amounted to about 13.6 percent of the total. The remaining portion consisted of jagirs, or territories whose revenues were assigned by the king to his mansabdars (officers or nobles) in lieu of their personal pay, and allowances for the maintenance of their military contingents. Such assignment holders were known as jagirdars. But some mansabdars also drew their pay (wholly or in part) in cash from the royal treasury. For all practical purposes these mansabdars, especially those holding higher ranks, might be considered as forming the ruling class of the Mughal Empire. This class was largely urbanized and contained a considerable foreign element. It was largely without local roots, and was prevented from forming such roots by a system of transfers of posts as well as jagirs. On an average, the period for which an area was held in jagir by any assignee was less than three years. Neither the rank in service, nor the jagir (except in the case of certain chiefs) was hereditary.

According to Habib, this ruling class was completely subordinate to a centralized royal despotism. With the help of this ruling class only, the realization of the massive claim on the entire rural surplus of the country that the land revenue represented was realized. Owing to the system of transfers, the noble’s household and contingents could not naturally be established permanently on a jagir so as directly to live off the land. In general, the larger the jagir, the greater the distance of the headquarters of the jagirdar’s establishment from the villages; and this was apart from the fact that, being highly urbanized, the Mughal nobles in any case disdained rural life. It is, therefore, no wonder that jagirdars preferred to collect revenue in cash, or to commute collections in kind immediately into cash. Since the royal treasury too had to pay out salaries (to the mansabdars and others) in cash, the tendency in the Khalisa too must have been overwhelmingly toward collections in cash.

In Habib’s description of the agrarian system in Mughal India, we find the centrality of the ruling class. Habib relates the major aspects of the land revenue system to the power, organization, and composition of the ruling class. This understanding reveals the historical tendency toward a steadily intensified pressure upon the peasants and other revenue payers. The source of this tendencywas the system of transferring jagirs. This meant that individual revenue assignees could have no interest in the long-term maintenance or growth in the revenue-paying capacity of any particular area.In a way, the excessive pressure for greater revenue was ultimately self-defeating, since for immediate gain it sacrificed future possibilities. In fact, the Mughal system did not contain any effective mechanism whereby restraints could have been put on the ruling class.

Habib underlines two main consequences of the collection of land revenue that was prevalent in pre-British India. First, the rural economy was subjected to an enormous drain of wealth that would go into the maintenance and consumption of the ruling class. There was a general flow of wealth away from the rural sector. Of course, part of the land revenue undoubtedly stuck to the hands of certain rural elements, through shortfalls in collection, remissions, concessions, and commissions to certain local magnates (chaudhuris, ganungos) and the village headmen (muqaddams), salaries and perquisites of local revenue staff, etc. Some of the jagirdars sub-assigned their jagirs to their soldiers who lived in the villages. Besides, there was a whole class of revenue grantees (comprising the intelligentsia and the idlers), the imperial revenue grants (madad-i maash) alone accounting for 4 to 6 percent of the total estimated revenue. Even then, after making allowances for all these leakages, Habib asserts, that the total net amount of produce annually lost by the country-side, without any return, must have amounted to a very large portion of the total-at least a fourth of it, if not a third or a half.

Secondly, the mechanism by which the bulk of the rural surplus was removed created the conditions for the establishment of the rural market. When the land revenue was collected in cash, the revenue payer was compelled to sell his produce in order to get money to pay for it, but when it was collected in kind, then too, as we have noted, the revenue authorities preferred to sell it. In either case, most of the surplus was put on the market, and, therefore, a very large portion of agricultural production would not be directly ‘for use’ but would be commodity production, properly speaking. The market mechanism once established must have reacted on the mode of agricultural production. The consequence of the creation of the agricultural market was that it not only introduced money relations into a system of ‘natural economy’, but also engendered a shift to high-grade crops and cash crops (e.g., from coarser grains to wheat; and to cotton, sugarcane, indigo, poppy, tobacco, etc.).

IrfanHabibavers that the two-fold impact of the Mughal revenue systems led to a considerable subversion of the ‘pure’ peasant economy, and an alteration in the nature of exploitation. In effect, the land revenue represented an enormous drain on the countryside. Moreover, the built-in tendency in the Mughal system was toward an increase in pressure upon the revenue payers. Habib is emphatic that unlike the lord’s ‘rents’, the land-revenue rate was firmly based on the conception of its being a set proportion of the produce, and was accordingly variable when stated in cash. As a result, though agricultural prices appear to have risen during the seventeenth century, the revenue demand did not fall in real terms. Also, among the peasantry, the land revenue, being in essence a regressive tax, fell more heavily upon the poorer than upon the richer strata. When it represented a set proportion of the produce, it is obvious that the peasant who produced less would have a smaller amount left to him than the one who produced more. It is also possible to argue that when each individual peasant was assessed separately, the village community was naturally bypassed, and the individual was alone made to face all the risks as a revenue payer. This too should have led to economic differentiation. In practice, however, the village was the usual unit of assessment, and that the village community had a distinct role to play in the payment of revenue by means of a financial pool into which all the peasants paid, and out of which the revenue demand, the other fiscal burdens, and the expenses of the village establishment were met.

Conclusion

The picture that emerges from IrfanHabib’s exemplary work on the agrarian system in Mughal India is thus complex. It reveals the degree of monetization and the degree of flexibility of the village community as an economic organization. It is also possible that the stronger (and richer) peasants would dominate the community and distribute the revenue demand at will among their brethren to the great detriment of the poorer peasantry. Individual assessment was indeed often seen by the officials as a device to prevent such unjust distribution. Sometimes, the whole village itself could be so heavily assessed that the peasant population was threatened with slaughter and enslavement in case the revenue demand was not met. In Habib’s reading, in its initial impact the tendency generated by land revenue was toward increasing stratification and pauperization of the poorer strata. In the long run though, it pressed upon the whole peasantry as a class. Monetization could also directly or indirectly lead to pauperization. Prices could fluctuate to the great detriment of peasants as commodity producers. Moreover, most of the cash crops involved larger investments in cattle (owing to the necessity of more frequent ploughing and watering) and in installations (such as the sugarcane press and boilers, indigo vats, etc.), and heavier risks, in respect of harvest and prices. It was unlikely that poorer peasants could compete with the riche ones in the raising of such crops. Rural indebtedness is another aspect of the agrarian structure that was prevalent in pre-British India. Very often, the peasants would go for debts in order to pay the land revenue or to obtain his ‘subsistence food’ and cattle. Once the rural market had developed to a certain degree, moneylending could have extended rapidly. Habib speculates that it is, indeed, likely that peasant indebtedness in Mughal India was more widespread than has hitherto been supposed. The ultimate effect of usury, particularly since the interest rates were extremely high must have burdened the peasantry to a large extent. The beneficiaries of usury were not only zamindars (especially chaudhuris) and headmen (who thus added to their customary exactions), not only professional usurers, who thereby augmented their usurious capital, but also merchants (who often gave advances to the peasants to establish claims on their produce) and, quite generally, merchant-moneylenders.

As Habib perceptively notes, while the land revenue and monetization added, or at any rate, increased another means of exploitation of the peasantry in the shape of usury, they also created the conditions for increased pressure upon the peasantry from the zamindar class. The pressure came, first, through an alteration in the substance of the zamindar’s economic right, and secondly, through an expansion of the area under that right. The zamindar’sfiscal claims appeared as claims on the land revenue collected (as a share thereof, whether as malikana or nankar, or both), and the zamindar was transformed into an intermediary (e.g., taalluqdar) responsible for the collection of the revenue and its payment to the authorities. As a result, the zamindars found themselves obliged, when the revenue demand increased, either to lose their share or to recompense them at the expense of the peasantry. Owing to monetization, the zamindari right became a fully salable commodity, at least from the sixteenth century onward. This meant that persons who obtained their wealth initially out of the distribution of land revenue purchased zamindaris. Such people included the nobles and officials, and cavalry troopers and revenue grantees. Urban merchants did not yet seem to have found in zamindari purchase a suitable avenue for investment of their superfluous capital. However, rural usurers sometimes converted their capital into zamindari right. Such a marketin land rights not only contributed to the increasing heterogeneity of the zamindar class but also placed larger capital at the disposal of that class as a whole.

Moreover, the increasing economic differentiation and social stratification within the peasantry could lend to the emergence of a dominant section (muqaddams, headmen, etc.) whose claims might in time grow into zamindari rights. There was also the presence of a very large class of landless laborers who worked in return for the provision of their barest needs of subsistence. Importantly, as Habib writes, ‘the existence of this large class in conditions of land abundance did not derive initially or in the main from any failure of peasant cultivation but from a social structure maintained by custom and force’. The landless belonged to the menial castes, compelled to serve the interests alike of peasants and of superior cultivators, and forming therefore a vast rural semi-proletariat, maintained entirely through non-economic compulsions.

References

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• Habib, Irfan. 1969. “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 32-78.
• Hobsbawm,  Eric.  1964.  “Introduction”  in  Eric  Hobsbawm  (ed.).  Karl  Marx:  Pre-capitalist
• Economic Formations. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
• Moosvi, Shireen. 2003. ‘Celebrating a Study of India’s Agrarian History’, Review of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 106-12.
• Mukerjee, Radhakamal. 1934. The Economic History of India: 1600-1800. Allahabad: U.P.Historical Society.
• Raychaudhuri, Tapan and IrfanHabib (eds.). 1982. The Cambridge Economic History of India Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.