7 Agrarian Structure on the Eve of the British Rule II

Manish Thakur

Introduction

As mentioned in Module 2.1 A, 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 H. Fukazawa in its presentation of the agrarian structure of Maharashtra and the Deccan. It does the same for South India in relation to the work of Burton Stein. And, of course, IrfanHabib, the eminent historian of Mughal India, is present in each and every sentence concerning Mughal India. The assumption here is that an understanding of the agrarian structure in Mughal India, South India and Maharashtra and the Deccan implies an approximate understanding of the Indian agrarian structure on the eve of the British Rule.

Aspects of Agricultural Production in North India

Economic historians generally agree that Indian agriculture wascharacterisedby the large number of food and non-food crops. In terms of sheer range of crops produced, the Indian peasants were distinguished from their counterparts in other parts of the world. The peasants elsewhere were confined to a very few crops. For instance, the Ain-i Akbari gives revenue rates for sixteen crops of the rabi (spring) harvest cultivated in all the revenue circles of the Agra province with three others not cultivated in some; and twenty-five crops of the kharif(autumn) cultivated in all, or all but one, circles,. In n each locality as many as forty-one crops were being cultivated within the year. A similar multiplicity of assessed crops appears in the Ain-i Akbar rates for other provinces. Not only did the Indian peasant grow a multiplicity of crops, but he was also prepared to accept new crops. The seventeenth century saw the introduction and expansion of two major crops, tobacco and maize. Both were immigrants from the New World. The rapid extension of tobacco was spectacular: its cultivation had begun on the western coast soon after 1600; but by 1650, it was being cultivated in almost all parts of the Mughal empire (Habib 1982).

Historians like IrfanHabib underline the mobility of the peasantry as an interesting feature of agriculture during Mughal times. Habib quotes Babur who says, “In Hindustan hamlets and villages — even towns — are depopulated and set up in a moment! If a people of a large town, who have lived there for years, flee from it, they do it in such a way that not a sign or trace of them remains in a day or a day and a half. On the other hand, if they fix their eyes on a place in which to settle, they need not dig watercourses or construct dams, because all their crops are rain-grown…. A group collects together, they make a tankor dig a well; they need not build houses or set up walls – khas grass abounds, trees (are) innumerable, and straight way there is a village or town.”

Abundance of land was another characteristic of the prevailing system of agricultural production. The large areas of virgin land were available in most regions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The desertion of old lands and settlements of new appear to be common practices undertaken by peasants organized in communities. In some cases, perhaps, individual peasants, too, shifted their cultivation. Habib mentions a category of peasants designated pdikdsht or pdbikdsht, who cultivated lands in villages other than their own. This may not have been the common practice though. Also, there was little change in the average productivity of the land during the three centuries – 17th through 19th. According to Habib, it is possible that productivity per head (as distinct from per acre) was higher in 1595 than around 1870 or 1900. Given greater availability of land, with means of cultivation remaining the same, the average peasant holding of 1595 was more likely to approach the optimum size than that of 1900.

Also, as discussed in the earlier module, the Indian peasantry was economically highly stratified, and considerable differences existed in the size of holdings, produce obtained and resources of the peasants within the same villages. On the one hand, there were the big peasants, or headmen (muquddams), who organize khwudkdsht (cultivation under their own management). They employ labourers as their servants and put them to the tasks of agriculture; and making them plough, sow, reap and draw water out of the well, they pay them their fixed wages, whether in cash or grain, while appropriating to them the gross produce of cultivation. At the opposite end, were the small peasants engaged in cultivation but depended wholly upon borrowing for their subsistence and for seed and cattle. If the absolute size of the agricultural product, or even the per capita product, in Mughal India was impressive, it does not necessarily follow that agricultural production was carried on at a smooth or even pace. On the contrary, there were two factors, one natural and the other human, which created serious interruptions or violent setbacks for agricultural life.

The first factor was climatic, essentially, the untimeliness, scarcity or superfluity of rain. The dependence of Indian agriculture on the monsoons is proverbial. In the absence of adequate means for transporting grain in bulk, the mortality in each major famine, which was often accompanied by pestilence, was frightful. During the 1630-2famine in Gujarat, 3 million people are said to have died. In the years1702—3 and 1703—4, 2 million people are said to have died of starvation in the Deccan. These figures in themselves are guesses only, but are still important as showing the immensity of the mortality as it appeared to contemporaries. The Gujarat famine of 1630-2, caused a lasting dislocation to the economy of the region. The villages were utterly depopulated; and when they began to ‘fill but slowly’ late in 1634, the peasants who had survived abandoned cotton cultivation for food. The marks of the famine were visible in 1638and even by 1647 agriculture in Gujarat had not fully recovered, since the revenues of the province had not yet reached the level attained before the famine.

The second factor to consider is the impact of the system of agrarian exploitation. It has been argued that since the land revenue covered practically the entire surplus produce raised by the peasant, and that since, representing a fixed share of the produce or a fixed cash-rate on the crop per unit of area, it was a retrogressive tax, it fell excessively heavily on the smaller peasantry. In addition, the system of jdgir transfers encouraged an unchecked spoliation of the peasantry by the potentates. This resulted in the large-scale abandonment of land by peasants. With famines as recurring setbacks to agricultural production and Mughal agrarian exploitation as a factor of constant pressure upon the peasantry, it would perhaps be reasonable to rule out any spectacular increase in the extent of cultivation during the Mughal period. There were areas that were reclaimed from waste or forest as in the Terai or eastern Bengal; but such reclamation did not exclude the simultaneous process of depopulation in other areas.

Agricultural Production and Relations in South India

Some of the most important features of agricultural production in South India were: (i) the tropical climate allowing agricultural operations throughout the year; (2) more even distribution of rains than in northern India (combination of south-western and south-eastern monsoons), which to an extent made it really possible to vary dates of sowing and harvesting of some crops; (3) large quantity of unoccupied lands, absence of land-starvation, and, on the contrary, a shortage of labour;(4)  the great expenditure of labour for bringing into cultivation the new lands. The construction of an irrigation system usually was beyond the labour resources of a single household and hence undertaken by avillage or a group of villages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the representatives of central power and the local officials are more often seen as the organizers of the construction of reservoirs, canals, sluices etc. than before. Irrigation was considered a work of religious merit, with the result that during all the known history of southern India we find inscriptions, detailing the construction of tanks, dams, etc. Yet, In most parts of southern India in the beginning of the nineteenth century only 3 to 7 per cent of cultivated territory was irrigated. Only in Tanjore, where the conditions for irrigation were especially good, was this ratio nearer to 50 per cent. Irrigation management in the medieval period was often uneconomical. Tanks and canals were neglected and abandoned, perhaps as oftenas they were constructed. The main crop on the wet lands was paddy, the most important food -grain of southern India. Each householder, even the marginal peasant, had to use additional labour. This additional labour was sometimes provided in the form of peasant cooperation but also in the form of labourers from depressed untouchable castes. There was the considerable group of landless labourers who was forced by their social and economic dependence to work in the others’ households. The historian Dharma Kumar has estimated that at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the Madras Presidency agrestic labourers, mainly from the untouchable castes, numbered up to 10-15 Per c e n t of the population and 17-2 5 per cent of the agricultural population. They were comparatively less numerous in Rayalasima, Baramahal and Mysore, but in eastern Tamilnadu and in Kerala the untouchables’ labour had relatively more importance.

The small-peasant household based on personal labour of the householder was but one type of production unit in agriculture. Widespread to some extent were also two other types, i.e. the large peasant house hold with the householder taking some part in the work but mainly dependent on the regular inflow of additional labour; and the type in which the householder directed the work of labourers dependent on him and attached to the land. The Indian social system reversed the influence of economic factors. The deficiency of labour force was to an extent connected with the fact that an appreciable part of the population from high castes considered physical labour as degrading and some agricultural operations as forbidden and constantly sought to avoid personal participation in the production processes.

The main food-grain was rice, but the millets {cholam, ragi, varagu, etc.)occupied a comparable area. Rice was at the same time the most important commodity. The poorer strata of the population sold the rice they produced (except the part taken in kind as a tax) in order to buy Ragi and cholam for their own consumption. Other commodities were pepper, produced mainly on the Malabar Coast, chilli, oil-producing crops (sesame, flax, groundnut), cotton. In the inscriptions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and earlier, village bazaars and fairs are mentioned where the retail trade in rice, betel-leaves, pulses, ragi, oil, pepper, milk, jaggery and artisans’ goods took place. But the connections of the rural population with the market did not yet create a commodity-production system. The agriculture continued to be essentially natural, as the reproduction of its labour implements was going on inside the village community on the basis of natural exchange between the artisans (the blacksmith, the carpenter, etc.) and the cultivator. Thus, the system of agriculture developed and traditionally consolidated in southern India was extensive in principle, oriented to labour-saving and not to land-saving. It assured a definite and rather high level of agricultural productivity, but the further increase on the basis of the same system was impossible. With the growth of population and cultivation of the worse lands this system was sure to suffer a sharp decline in its productivity as happened later on. The system of traditional services by artisans who produced the agricultural implements, as well as widespread use of dependent labourers not interested in the results of their labour, were the greatest obstacles preventing an intensification of the methods of production.

The Medieval Deccan and Maharashtra

The village of the Medieval western Deccan was called gdnva (from Sanskrit grama), mauje (from Arabic mauza), or Persian deh. These terms were used interchangeably, but formally mauje was prefixed to theproper name of the village. A bigger village containing a market-place (bdjdr, Persian bddr) was called kasbe (from Arabic qasba).The villages as a rule took the collective form of habitation. There,the ‘village-site’ was called pdndhari (literally ‘white’) and usually surrounded by earthen walls. Outside the village site there were agricultural lands called kali (literally ‘black’). It is said that people originally inhabited the white soil unfit for cultivation and turned the black soil widely found in the Deccan into their agricultural fields. Beyond them there was village common or grassland called kuranorgdyerdn (literally ‘waste land for cows’). The grassland meant for common use of villagers was termed ‘people’s grassland’ (lokdcdkuran)and that for fodder used by government was called ‘government’ sgrassland’ (sarkdrcdkuran).Agricultural land (kali) was divided into perhaps twenty to forty blocks called thai (from Sanskrit sthala = land), and each block had of tena name that was probably the surname of the original proprietor or colonizer. Each block was composed of fields variously called set or set (from Sanskrit ksetra= field), or jamin. Occasionally Sanskrit bhumi (land) was also used to mean the fields.

To put the matter in another way, kali would be divided into (1)ordinary owned land (mirasjamin), (2) gifted or exempted land (indmjamin), (3) state land variously called ‘demesne of the government’(sarkarcisert), ‘demesne fields’ (sericen set), ‘demesne’ (seri) or ‘treasuryland’ (khdlsdjamin), and (4) land of extinct families (gatkuljamin) or wasteland (padjamin).On the other hand, villages would consist of (1) hereditary village officers such as headman (pdtilor mokadam), accountant (kulkarnt), and assistant headman (chaugula), (2) proprietary peasants called mirdsdars in Persian, or thalkarior thalvdik in indigenous terms, (3) temporary peasants or tenants called upari (literally ‘ strangers’), and (4) village servants and artisans collectively called baluteddrs(literally ‘twelve holders of balute). While the headman was usually of Kunbi (peasant) caste (which was later to become assimilated into Maratha caste), the accountant was generally a Brahman because of his literacy. Village officers used to own more or less large mirds land and be allowed by the government to have some inam land as well. Moreover, they were entitled to enjoy certain rights and privileges to receive some amount of produce from peasants and village artisans. Their office and accompanying inam landas well as privileges were called watan which was not only heritable but saleable and transferable with acknowledgement of state authorities and village assembly. On the other hand, mirasdar peasants, mostly Kunbls by caste, were permanent residents of the village and bore the regular revenue and miscellaneous cesses for the state on their mirasland in which they held a fairly complete proprietory right. Though it was not a frequent practice, they could sell their own land from the late sixteenth century. Village servants and artisans called baluteddrs included the carpenter, blacksmith, potter, shoemaker, rope maker, barber, washer man, astrologer, temple-keeper, mosque-keeper, (being butcher as well), Mahar(an untouchable caste engaged in sweeping, watching and other menial works), and so on. Their composition was fairly uniform though their number varied according to the size of the village. They were expected to serve villagers whenever required in their respective capacities fixed by their castes, and were paid the remunerations at two harvests of the year usually in kind, but occasionally in cash, such remunerations being called balute. Besides these they were entitled to certain shares of offerings dedicated to village temples, and to some other perquisites on special occasions. Moreover, many of them were given by the villagea small plot of indmland, which was as a rule cultivated by themselves.

On the other hand, like the peasants, baluteddrswere divided into permanent and temporary residents of the village. The right to serve and the right to receive various remunerations of permanent baluteddrs was clearly recognized as their mirdsor watan; hence mirdsddrbaluteddrs (or watanddrbaluteddrs). Their mirds was heritable and transferable. The temporary baluteddrs were naturally entitled to receive rewards so long as they worked in the village, but were called upartbaluteddrs and not recognized as mirdsddrs. In fact, the baluteddrswere not employed by individual peasant families (as under the ‘jajmdnisystem’) but by the village as a territorial whole. There were broadly three methods of paying remuneration to them, probably corresponding to three different systems of payment of land revenue to the government. The first method corresponded to the batdt system; all the peasants brought their respective produce to a certain place in the village and gave customary shares of it to each category of baluteddrs. The second method was in the line of the system where each peasant paid a certain fixed amount of his produce to the state; after inspecting the state of harvest, the village headman got every peasant to pay a certain portion of his produce to each category of baluteddrs. And the third method waswhen the revenue was paid in cash, where each category of baluteddr would receive a certain amount of cash. At any rate, each category of baluteddr was considered to hold one watan per village, and the amount of remunerations was fixed per watan. When a watan was shared by several families of the same occupation or caste, what was divided was not the sphere of work but the remuneration for the watan; the lump amount whether in kind or in cash was to be divided among themselves. The assembly would decide village affairs such as dispute over lands and rights, disposal of waste lands, and so on, and attested the transfer of lands and rights in watan (or mirds).It sometimes intervened in the caste matters of villagers, though there was a separate caste-assembly for the members of each caste residing in the same region. The village was responsible to the state for arresting criminals, compensating for the value of goods stolen or tracing them as far as the next village.

Despite the fairly stable structure of the village community, considerable economic differentiations among the peasants were a reality. This could have been there owing to a variety of reasons: the revenue system, state promotion of cultivation, system of inheritance, individual availability of capital and labour, natural as well as man-made calamities. Peasants were not only divided into mirdsddrs and uparis, but also into the comparatively well-to-do and the poor. From ten to two hundred villages formed a sub-district called apargana and so on, and each sub-district had one or several hereditary chiefs(desmukbor desai) and hereditary accountants (despdnde), the former being usually peasant by caste and the latter, as a rule, Brahman. At any rate the zamindari system of the north Indian type was generally absent in the Deccan. Also, hereditary officers of sub-districts were not the sole holders of land and village in inam. Kings and pesh was of the Marathas as well as preceding Muslim kings of the Deccan used to give waste land as inam to distinguished servants of the state, noted temples, monasteries and mosques, in addition to the hereditary officers of sub-districts and villages. The more important of them were given villages in inam. Inam was as a rule free from revenue, though sometimes lighter revenue called inampatti was levied. The holders of villages and large lands in inam generally exercised feudal authority on the people on the lands.

Government sometimes encouraged the construction and repair of dams and wells, and gave money to those who were willing to do so. Those peasants who actively responded to the state encouragement of the cultivation of waste land seem to have been uparis rather than mirdsddrs. A large portion of revenue was more or less assigned to the officials and aristocrats in the medieval Deccan states. In the Deccan Muslim kingdoms the high-class officials and nobles as well as the middle-class officials were as a rule temporarily assigned the revenue from a certain region, such assignments being called muqasti. The assignees, and especially the large ones, exercising wide administrative power over the assigned areas, were virtually in a position to collect as much as possible through their agents.

Conclusion

Much like in north India, the general structure of the village in the medieval Deccan was fairly uniform and stable. Also, the size of landholdings among the peasants fluctuated considerably because of natural and political situations. As a consequence, there was remarkable economic differentiation among the peasants. In the medieval Deccan, there seems to have been a conceptual distinction between the tax and rent corresponding to the different categories of agricultural land.At any rate, the revenue was assessed and levied usually in cash on different crops and soils. At a more fundamental level, the southern and western parts of the country did not have the type of zamindari rights that was so characteristic of Mughal and north India.

References and Further Readings

• Frykenberg, Robert Eric. 1969. Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History. Madison:University of Wisconsin Press.
• Fukazawa, Hiroshi. 1964. ‘Lands and Peasants in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Kingdom’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, 5 (1): 32-61.
• —–. 1968. ‘State and Caste System (Jati) in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Kingdom’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, 9 (1): 32-44.
• Habib, Irfan. 1963. Agrarian System of Mughal India. Bombay: Asia Publishing House.
• 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.