Discuss the working of Zamindari System under the Mughal rulers. Also describe the role played by the Zamindars in the agrarian economy of Mughal India.

Answer:

The zamindars occupied the crucial middle ground of the Mughal agrarian order, standing between the imperial state and the peasantry. Holding hereditary superior rights over land, they collected revenue, maintained armed retainers and were indispensable to the working of the whole system.

The nature of zamindari right

• Zamindari was a hereditary, saleable and transferable right in the land, not ownership of the soil.
• It carried a customary share of the produce, commonly around ten per cent of the collection (nankar).
• Zamindars ranged from great chieftains and rajas to petty village proprietors.
• Many were of the same caste and locality as the peasants they oversaw.
• Irfan Habib distinguished the primary zamindar from the intermediary and the autonomous chieftain.

Their working relationship with the state

• They assisted the jagirdar or imperial officer in assessing and collecting the land revenue.
• They maintained armed retainers, supplying troops to the empire when required.
• Where they resisted, military expeditions were mounted against them.
• The state alternately conciliated and coerced them, since it could not dispense with their local knowledge.
• Many were absorbed into the mansabdari system, especially Rajput chiefs.

Their role in the agrarian economy

• They financed the extension of cultivation by advancing seed, cattle and taccavi loans.
• They settled peasants on waste land and founded new villages.
• They maintained wells, tanks and local irrigation works.
• They organised local markets and were the channel through which the surplus reached the towns.
• They provided continuity of local authority as jagirdars were frequently transferred.

Tensions and later significance

• Their interests clashed with those of the jagirdars seeking maximum short-term extraction.
• Zamindar-led revolts, of Jats, Satnamis and others, troubled the later empire.
• Satish Chandra saw the zamindar-jagirdar conflict as central to the Mughal crisis.
• The Permanent Settlement of 1793 later converted their right into landed property.

The zamindari system was thus the indispensable intermediary mechanism of Mughal agrarian administration, supplying both revenue and local order. As Irfan Habib and Satish Chandra have shown, the zamindars were at once agents of the state's extraction and organisers of agrarian production, and their eventual estrangement from the empire contributed materially to its decline.