"An important feature of agriculture in Mughal India has been the large number of crops raised by the peasants". Illustrate by giving examples.

Answer:

Mughal agriculture was remarkable for its diversity. The Ain-i-Akbari and other contemporary records list a very wide range of food and cash crops, reflecting varied soils and climates, an extensive irrigation base and the strong pull of the market on the cultivator.

Food crops

• Wheat, barley and gram dominated the rabi harvest of the north.
• Rice was the great kharif staple of Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and the coastal south.
• Millets, jowar and bajra, sustained the drier tracts of the Deccan and Rajasthan.
• Pulses of many kinds were grown everywhere as a source of protein.
• The Ain-i-Akbari records revenue rates for a great many separate crops.

Cash crops

• Cotton, grown widely in Gujarat and the Deccan, fed the great textile industry.
• Sugarcane was extensively cultivated in the doab and Bengal.
• Indigo of Bayana and Sarkhej was famous and exported to Europe.
• Opium, tobacco and oilseeds were grown for the market.
• Silk in Bengal and pepper and spices in the south supplied the export trade.

New crops and horticulture

• Tobacco, maize, potato, chilli, pineapple and tomato arrived through the Portuguese.
• Tobacco spread rapidly in the seventeenth century despite Jahangir's disapproval.
• Mango, orange and melon horticulture was actively encouraged by the emperors.
• Irfan Habib mapped this diversity in his Agrarian System of Mughal India.

Why such diversity was possible

• Varied soils and rainfall permitted different crops across the empire's regions.
• Two and sometimes three harvests, kharif, rabi and zaid, were taken each year.
• Extensive well and canal irrigation supported the more demanding crops.
• Revenue assessed in cash under the zabt system pushed peasants towards marketable crops.
• Higher revenue rates on cash crops show the state actively encouraged them.

The diversity of Mughal cropping is thus amply illustrated by the sources. As Irfan Habib demonstrated, the cultivator raised both subsistence and market crops and readily adopted new introductions, which indicates an agriculture responsive to demand and considerably more commercialised than is often assumed.