Assess the condition of peasantry during 13th to 17th centuries C.E.

Answer:

Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries the Indian peasant produced the surplus that sustained the Sultanate and the Mughal empire. His condition varied with region, reign and rank within the village, but the general pattern was one of subsistence under heavy state demand.

The burden of revenue

• Alauddin Khalji raised the demand to half the produce, assessed by measurement.
• Firoz Shah reduced the burden and introduced the irrigation tax (haqq-i-sharb).
• Sher Shah fixed one-third of produce with a patta and qabuliyat for each cultivator.
• Akbar's zabt system under Todar Mal used a ten-year average of prices and yields.
• Revenue was largely collected in cash, forcing sale of produce at harvest prices.

Stratification within the village

• Khud-kasht or riaya were resident cultivators with hereditary rights.
• Pahi-kasht were outsiders cultivating on temporary terms.
• Village headmen (muqaddams) and accountants held superior rights and paid less.
• Landless labourers, often of the lowest castes, worked for others.
• Irfan Habib emphasised that the village was far from an undifferentiated community.

Relief, resistance and hardship

• Taccavi loans were advanced for seed, cattle and wells in bad seasons.
• Remissions were granted in famine, though not always effectively.
• Flight from the land was the peasant's commonest form of protest.
• Armed peasant and zamindar revolts, of Jats and Satnamis, troubled the later empire.
• Famines, notably that of 1630-32 in Gujarat, caused immense mortality.

Contemporary testimony

• Pelsaert described the Indian peasant's poverty in stark terms.
• Bernier held that oppressive extraction discouraged improvement of the land.
• Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari records revenue rates, crops and prices in detail.
• Moreland compared conditions unfavourably with those of later periods.
• Some scholars caution that European observers exaggerated Indian misery.

The peasantry's condition was therefore one of persistent hardship, though not uniform misery. As Irfan Habib's Agrarian System established, a heavy and efficiently collected revenue demand left most cultivators near subsistence, while the upper stratum of the village prospered, and it was this pressure that ultimately produced the agrarian revolts of the late seventeenth century.