Do you think that the agrarian crisis of the 17th century led to the disintegration of the Mughal empire? Discuss.

Answer:

The agrarian crisis thesis, developed above all by Irfan Habib, holds that the Mughal revenue system pressed the peasantry beyond endurance and provoked the revolts that destroyed the empire. The argument has great force, though later scholarship has qualified it substantially.

The nature of the crisis

• The revenue demand rose towards the theoretical maximum of the surplus.
• Jagirs were transferred frequently, so assignees extracted the maximum before moving on.
• Zamindars and revenue officials added their own exactions to the state demand.
• Peasants abandoned land, fled to forests or turned to armed resistance.
• Cultivation contracted in some regions, reducing the revenue base further.

Evidence of agrarian revolt

• The Jat risings around Mathura from 1669 were led by Gokla and later Rajaram and Churaman.
• The Satnami rebellion of 1672 in Narnaul drew on peasant and artisan discontent.
• The Sikh movement under Guru Gobind Singh and later Banda Bahadur had agrarian roots.
• Maratha expansion drew on similar rural discontent in the Deccan.
• Zamindars frequently led these movements, giving them organisation and arms.

The jagirdari crisis

• Satish Chandra emphasised the shortage of jagirs (be-jagiri) as the mechanism of collapse.
• Deccan conquests added nobles faster than they added assignable land.
• Nobles competed for assignments and squeezed their jagirs harder.
• The crisis of the jagir and the crisis of the peasant reinforced one another.

Qualifications and alternative views

• J.F. Richards questioned whether the revenue burden was uniformly unsustainable.
• M. Athar Ali stressed the political competition within the nobility.
• Muzaffar Alam showed that regional prosperity coexisted with imperial decline.
• Aurangzeb's religious policy, wars and long absence in the Deccan were independent causes.
• Regional powers rose partly because of local economic vitality, not only imperial failure.

Assessment

• The revolts were led as often by zamindars as by peasants themselves.
• Their causes were regionally varied, combining economic with religious and political grievance.
• The empire survived these revolts for decades, so they were not immediately fatal.
• They nonetheless drained resources and exposed the limits of imperial authority.

The agrarian crisis was therefore a genuine and major cause of Mughal disintegration, but not the sole one. As the debate between Irfan Habib and Satish Chandra indicates, peasant revolt and the shortage of jagirs together undermined the empire, while political, military and religious factors, and the rise of vigorous regional powers, completed the process.