Theme 8

Indian History, Peasants, Zamindars and the State: Agrarian Society and the Mughal Empire

(c. Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)

Aims and objectives

·       Students will learn about how Mughal history is written, examine available sources and address their gaps. They will learn to critically examine their sources and question the representation of social relationships in the text books.

·       Students will learn about the nature of economic and social relationships in Mughal India and examine the intricate power hierarchies that characterized its polity. They will learn to identify the nature of inequities that such arrangements created.

·       Students will learn about the various marginalized social groups by identifying gaps in the narrative that is being presented to them.

Lesson Plan

Introduction

·       A general overview will involve giving an account of the various social groups that can be identified in Mughal society.

·       What kind of inequities and their resultant conflicts can be identified among these groups?

·       Examine very closely the nature of the information offered by the textbook on marginalized social groups like women, tribal people and lower-caste people. What are the sources of such information? Can you identify them within the text-book?

Peasants and Agricultural Production

·       How do historians gather information about the lives of peasants in Mughal India? Can you think of problems/gaps that such sources might contain? Beyond the sources mentioned in your text-book, can you find one literary source from Mughal India that sheds light on the lives of peasants in India? (Hint: Look in the additional resources folder). Please document the process of searching for this source. Are you searching the internet, consulting books?

·       What do sources on Mughal India say about the internal divisions within the peasant community? What kind of social inequities might such divisions perpetuate? Can you make plausible deductions about it from the information provided in your text book?

·       How global was the agricultural market in Mughal India? Choose any one food crop that arrived in India from the foreign shores and find out the story behind how it got here.

·       Mughal state control agricultural production? How does it compare with the situation in the present situation? Does it feature in vote bank politics for instance? Reflect on how agriculture and crop production is linked to the politics of the state.

Suggested activity

v  Choose one region and its crop that is mentioned in the text book and find out about the nature of agriculture in the region at present.

The Village Community

·       Discuss the nature of caste divisions in the peasant community in Mughal India. The text book mentions that low-caste groups were assigned menial tasks but doesn’t really detail the nature of oppression they might have faced. Can you find out more about the actual nature of oppression. What sort of practices of ostracism and violence characterized the lives of low caste groups?

·       How did the village panchayats reinforce caste hierarchies in the villages? Discuss an instance of lower caste complaint against economic oppression that are found in the archival records of Rajasthan and Maharashtra.

·       Discuss the relationship among zamindars, artisans and peasants in Mughal India. What kind of hierarchies existed among them and what could be the potential causes of conflict?

Women in Agrarian Society

·       How were women in Mughal India involved in everyday agricultural labour? What liberties and constraints did they have?

·       Based on your text books elaborate on the social norms and practices that controlled the lives of women.

·       From what kind of sources do we learn about the lives of women in Mughal India? Read this for a better idea (attach a section from Ira M’s book).

Suggested activities

v  Look at these two Mughal miniatures. If you had to imagine the lives of these women, how would you tell their story? What are they thinking about? What is their backstory?

Figure 1. Anonymous, Drawing from the manuscript of VOC servant Adrianus Canter Visscher with twenty-eight Indian miniatures and two maps of places on the Coromandel Coast in the back, Watercolour on paper, Collection: Rijskmuseum

Figure 2. Lady with a yoyo

v  There is a paucity of sources on the lives of ordinary Mughal women. Based on the information provided in your text-book, can you imagine alternative sources for the lives of ordinary Mughal women. Read this excerpt from Ira Mukhoty’s book to learn about the lives of Mughal women:

“The explanation usually given for the general dearth of information about Indian women is multi-layered: women were usually uneducated, so they did not transmit written histories; India, in general, tended not to emphasize written histories, preferring the oral tradition; moreover, physical evidence is fragile in India, subject to the tempestuous weather, eroded by time and the negligence of historians. But in the case of the Mughals, none of this holds true. The women were all, right from the beginning, some of the most educated of their age. Timurid girls were given the same rigorous education, in mathematics, history, physics, poetry, astronomy etc., as boys because the Timurids placed a very high value on calligraphy, writing and erudition. The Mughals were also memory-keepers par excellence of all Indian kings. They wrote memoirs and appointed court historians in enthusiastic numbers. As for the physical evidence of Mughal ambition and glory, India is fairly studded with examples of their vision, in sandstone and in marble.

The term I use for the space reserved for women is zenana, which is more Indian in its origin than harem, the term the Europeans used to speak of a general ‘oriental’ secluded space, whether they were referring to the Ottomans in Central Asia or the Mughals of India. When the Central Asian semi-nomadic warlord Babur rode into Hindustan, he did not only bring his warriors with him. He brought his ‘haraman’ or household, which included elderly matrons, young wives, children, servants, widowed relatives, divorced sisters and unmarried royal relatives. The women of the haraman lived in tents and spent most of their life on horseback, riding with the men and travelling great distances. These early Mughals, Babur and Humayun, had enormous respect for the matriarchs of the clan, their mothers and grandmothers, whose advice often helped keep warring brothers together and empires intact. One of the earliest women to travel into Hindustan on horseback was Khanzada, Babur’s elder sister. Babur, and then his son Humayun, revered Khanzada because of the sacrifice she was required to make early in her life, when she was left behind with the Uzbek warlord Shaybani Khan, to secure Babur’s safety. “The Mughals were tenacious in their gratitude towards the matriarchs of their clan, who were robust, physically inured to hardship, and willing to suffer their menfolk’s privations alongside them. They were pragmatic about women who ‘fell’ to an enemy, unlike their contemporaries, the Rajputs, who invested so heavily in their women’s sexual chastity that death, through sati, was preferred to ‘loss of honour’ to an enemy.”

Forests and Tribes

·       How were forests used by the various social groups in Mughal India? If you have to think about this question, keeping in mind our present day environmental consciousness, how would such activities affect the ecologies of the forest?

·       How has the use of the term ‘jangli’ changed from Mughal to British India? Discuss the livelihood of one such ‘jangli’ tribe?

·       What kind of conflicts took place among the hill tribes of Mughal india? Can you find out the story behind one such conflict.

·       Suggested activity: Who lives in the forests of India now? What impressions or stereotypes do you have of such people? List them down on a piece of paper or discuss it with your group. Can you compare these impressions against facts available in reliable sources? Document the process at each stage.

The Zamindars

·       How did the zamindar consolidate power which did not involve direct conquest?

·       Find out about two famous zamindars of Mughal India and examine the kind of information available on them on the internet. Document your sources carefully. What picture emerges out of this search?

·       What could be some of the possible oppressive practices that the zamindars imposed upon the peasants?

Land and Revenue Systems

·       Can you identify the problems in the Mughal land revenue system from the account provided in your text-book? Would such a system promote a society of social equity?