Chapter IV: Agricultural Production

I. LAND TENURES

BEFORE we enter on an examination of the system of agri- culture prevailing in India during the reign of Akbar, a few words must be said regarding the subject of land tenures. The terms on which land is held have everywhere an im- portant bearing on the degree of success attained in its utilisa- tion, and there is a special reason for noticing the subject in the case of India, because much of our knowledge of agri- culture is derived from records relating to the assessment and collection of the land revenue, and the information which they supply cannot be fully appreciated unless we possess some idea of the conditions in which it was obtained. At the close of Akbar’s reign, Indian tenures showed some develop- ment from the traditional system of the country, but no revolutionary changes had occurred, and the influence of the old ideas was still predominant. Traditionally there were two parties, and only two, to be taken into account; these parties were the ruler and the subject, and if a subject occupied land, he was required to pay a share of its gross produce to the ruler in return for the protection he was entitled to receive. It will be observed that under this system the question of ownership of land does not arise; the system is in fact ante- cedent to that process of disentangling the conception of private right from political allegiance which has made so much progress during the last century, but is not even now fully accomplished.¹ Nor was the occupation of land neces- sarily a right in the juridical sense of the word: the king required revenue, and the cultivation of sufficient land to supply his needs might be regarded rather as a duty, and might in some cases be enforced by appropriate penalties. In most parts of India the demand for land has become so great that the mention of duty in this connection may strike the reader as grotesque, but even in the present century there have been occasions in some of the more thinly populated States when this aspect of the relation was of practical import- ance, and when peasants were liable to get into trouble if they failed to cultivate a sufficient area: that the duty of cultiva- tion might be rigorously enforced at an earlier period may be inferred from the incidental report made by an English merchant on the east coast in the year 1632, that the local Governor had with his own hands cut a village headman in two pieces for not sowing his ground; it may be presumed that such a measure of severity was exceptional, but the story illustrates a side of Indian land-tenure which has now passed into almost complete oblivion.

The development of this original and simple form of tenure may be associated with the aggregation of small States into great Empires, which recurred periodically in India during the historical period. A conqueror might either step into the place of a vanquished king, or he might leave the king in possession but require him to pay tribute. In neither case would the change necessarily affect the position of the peasant, but the result of such political adjustments was not un- commonly an alteration either in the share of the produce claimed, or in the method of its assessment and collection, and these were matters in which the peasant was deeply interested. No argument is required to show that his economic position was affected by the share which had to be set apart, which might be one-tenth as under Firoz Shah or one-half as under Alauddin Khalji, but it is desirable to realise that changes in methods of assessment might be almost equally important, and as a matter of fact it is to such changes that the appearance of the modern Indian land- holder must be in great measure attributed. The revenue system prevailing in Vijayanagar may be taken as a type of one of the alternative methods of Imperial organisation. The revenue was collected by the nobles, who may be regarded as representing the successors of the kings formerly absorbed in the Empire ; they paid a certain amount to the Imperial treasury and retained the rest, so that we may regard the Empire as having been super-imposed on the system previously existing ; and when, a few years after Akbar’s death, the Southern Empire finally ceased to exist, the nobles remained in possession and resumed the position of kings. Whether the super-position of the Empire involved any change in the tenure of the peasants is a question which I am unable to answer : we do not know what share of the produce they had to pay before the Empire came into existence, and we can be sure of only one fact, that under the Empire the share was exceedingly high. Nuniz states definitely that the peasants paid nine-tenths to the nobles, who paid one-half of what they received to the Emperor : there is no doubt that this writer had access to good sources of information, but I can conceive of no form of agriculture in which producers could live on so small a proportion as one-tenth of the gross pro- duce of their holdings, and I am inclined to think that the expression should not be taken in its strict numerical sense, but rather as signifying a demand which seemed extraordinarily heavy. I feel a similar difficulty in accept- ing in its literal sense the statement made by de Laet that the Mogul authorities took nearly three-fourths of the gross produce, “leaving only one-fourth for the wretched peasants, so that they sometimes receive nothing in return for their labour and expenditure.” Most of de Laet’s in- formation on such matters seems to have come from the maritime districts, and I think that his statement, like that of Nuniz, is best read as indicating a very severe revenue demand rather than a demand of the precise proportion stated, though it is possible that (including extra payments) three-fourths were actually demanded in some parts of the country.

In the north of India Akbar’s administrative ideals favoured, as has been said in an earlier chapter, substitution rather than superposition ; he aimed, that is to say, at entering into direct relations with the peasants who came under his rule, but his policy was guided largely by practical considerations, and his revenue system was therefore by no means uniform. In Sind he maintained the original Indian practice, and took a share of produce from the peasants : in Bengal, Berar, and Khandesh he continued the revenue systems which he found in force—systems the exact nature of which is doubtful ; while in the heart of the Empire he introduced his own methods, based on those of his predecessor, Sher Shah, pushing them as far as could safely be done, but coming to terms with the zamindars when local conditions rendered this course desirable. It is not always possible to ascertain what system was in force in a particular area, but it is probably correct to say that in the most productive portion of Northern India, from Bihar to Lahore and Multan, the standard of revenue payments was set by the zabt, as the regulation system of assessment was termed. In this system Akbar fixed his claim at one-third of the gross produce, and in order to realise the revenue on this basis his officials determined the average yield of every crop grown in the country, and fixed cash rates representing one-third of this average yield valued on the results of ten years’ experience. The area sown with each crop was recorded season by season, and the demand on each peasant was calculated by applying the sanctioned rates to the area which he had cultivated ; thus a peasant cultivating land in the neighbourhood of Agra knew that he would be charged at the rate of 67 dams ¹ on each bigha sown with wheat, 49 dams on barley, 156 1/2 dams on indigo, 239 dams on sugar-cane, and so for each separate kind of produce, and similar schedules of rates were fixed for each agricultural tract to which the system was applied. Under the original Indian system, in which the produce was divided at harvest, the peasant and the State shared the risk of the enterprise; under the system introduced by Akbar, the peasant took most of the risk, and (in theory) all the extra profit, since his payments were determined by the crops sown and not by the harvests gathered, subject only to the possi- bility of a remission being granted in the event of a failure of the crop. The change thus operated, on the one hand, to increase the peasant’s interest in the success of his under- taking, and, on the other, to minimise seasonal fluctuations in the Imperial revenue, and while it did not amount to the establishment of a regular system of rents, it marks a definite step towards the transformation of the peasant into what is known as a cash-paying tenant; he did not know his liabilities definitely in advance, but he could calculate them for the season as soon as he had made his plans for sowing. Of the practical working of this system we shall speak later on; for the moment we may leave it with the remark that its introduction involved the collection of a large mass of data regarding the land, and that through the preservation of much of this information in the Ain-i Akbari we are able to arrive at a better understanding of the condition of the industry than if we were dependent solely on the casual observations of individuals.

II. THE SYSTEM OF AGRICULTURE

The literature of the period does not, so far as I am aware, include anything which can be described as a complete account of the system of Indian agriculture.¹ It would indeed be matter for surprise if such an account existed: the subject was not one to attract Indian writers of the time, while foreign visitors, whose interests centred for the most part in commerce, were content to enumerate and describe the products of the country without entering into details regarding the conditions under which they were produced. Writers of both classes, however, give us many partial glimpses of the subject, sufficient in the aggregate to furnish some approach to a general account provided that we have an outline or framework on which they can be arranged. This outline can, if I am not mistaken, be found in the theory of continuity. India did not experience between 1600 and 1900 an agricultural revolution such as in some other countries coincided with the adoption of a policy of enclosure, or followed on the development of the modern ocean-borne commerce: enclosure is only now becoming a question of practical interest, while the main results of modern conditions of transport are accurately known, dating as they do, for the most part, from the years following on the opening of the Suez Canal. The changes since Akbar’s time have indeed been numerous, and some of them have been important, but they have not sufficed to transform the system as a whole; the plough and the ox, the millets and rice, the pulses and oilseeds, and the whole tradition of the countryside link us with the sixteenth century and with far earlier times in the history of the people, and almost every detail mentioned by the authorities for our period can be realised instantly by any one who is moderately familiar with the life of the peasants at the present day. Take as an example the Emperor Babur’s description of the method of irrigation practised in the country round Agra: “ At the well-edge they set up a fork of wood, having a roller adjusted between the forks, tie a rope to a large bucket, put the rope over the roller, and tie its other end to the bullock. One person must drive the bullock, another empty the bucket ” : that is as true of the twentieth century as of the time to which it relates. Or take Garcia da Orta’s note on tillage in the Deccan uplands behind Goa : “ They do not till the land with manure and labour as we do. They sow on the face of the earth with very little tillage.” Turning to the Imperial Gazetteer, we may read of this country that “ a field of black soil requires only one ploughing in the year, and is seldom manured.” In the same way the reader will find that each detached observation falls into place on the assump- tion that the general system has been maintained, and it follows that, if we can arrive at a knowledge of the changes which have occurred, we shall be able to reconstruct the main outlines of the industry as it was practised three centuries ago.

Turning first to the crops grown, Abul Fazl has preserved for us lists giving the name of every crop which was assessed to revenue in Northern India, and we may be confident that no crop which was widely grown escaped assessment. These lists are very nearly identical with those contained in the agricultural statistics of the present day.¹ We find the cereals, rice, wheat, and barley ; the two tall, and several small millets ; the familiar pulses, and the usual kinds of vege- tables. We find also sugar-cane (both thick and thin), the fibres cotton and hemp, the usual oilseeds, and such miscel- laneous crops as indigo, poppy, pān, and singhāra. For the south we have no contemporary official records, but a com- pilation from the narratives of various travellers gives a similar list, nearly, but again not quite, identical with that of modern times. Taking the two lists together, it will be found that the only crop which can be said to have disappeared since Akbar’s time is āl (Morinda tinctoria), the dye-yielding shrub which was formerly of importance in parts of Central India, but which was driven out of cultivation in the last century by the competition of manufactured dyes. To set against this loss there are substantial gains, the “planters’ crops,” tea and coffee, such widely-grown staples as potatoes, tobacco, groundnuts, and sweet potatoes, and the food-grains, oats and maize. Indian agriculture has thus been enriched since the sixteenth century, but not to such an extent as to transform its permanent characteristics.

The statistics preserved by Abul Fazl render it possible to obtain a rough idea of the relative value of the crops grown in those parts of Northern India where the revenue was assessed on Akbar’s regulation system. That system aimed, as we have seen, at taking for the State the average money value of one-third of the gross produce, so that the sums demanded on equal areas of the different crops indicate the prevalent official view as to the proportionate value of each: the assessment of a bigha of wheat, for instance, at 60 dams meant that the assessors regarded the average value of a bigha of wheat as 180 dams; and if we put the assessment on wheat as equal to 100, we can show the assessments on other crops in a convenient form so as to bring out the relation in question. The figures for some of the principal crops stand as follows: they are based on the average of the various assessment rates in force under Akbar in the Mogul provinces of Allahabad, Agra, and Delhi.

So far as the food-grains are concerned, comparative values have changed very little; an acre of barley, or jowār, or gram is now worth, roughly speaking, 60 to 70 per cent of an acre of wheat, as was the case in Akbar’s time, and the small millets, acre for acre, are worth substantially less.¹ Oilseeds were proportionately less valuable than they are now, when a great and profitable export trade has grown up: sugar-cane, on the other hand, shows little change in the relative position, being still worth rather more than double the value of wheat. It is noteworthy that in Akbar’s time poppy was as valuable as sugar-cane: its present value in a free market is unknown because the price paid to the grower has long been fixed by the State on considerations of a different order, but if we take into account the revenue realised until recently from the sale of the drug, the position occupied by the crop will occasion no surprise. The high level of the comparative value of cotton is a point to be considered in connection with the industrial development of the country; it is clear that the raw material of ordinary clothing was expensive when judged by the prices obtainable for food-grains. Indigo also was highly valued, but in this case the cause is to be sought in commerce rather than in industry, for even in the sixteenth century this crop was grown mainly for the export market. It is tempting to pass from relative to actual values, and deduce from these data figures for the average yield of crops in Akbar’s time. Such a calculation is indeed possible on paper, but the uncertain factors are relatively large, and the result depends mainly on the values assigned to them by the individual calculator: in the present state of our know- ledge, therefore, it is better to resist the temptation offered by the figures, and to be content with the conclusion that on the whole the relative values of the various crops show little alteration, and that in cases where the change is marked an explanation can usually be found in the known history of the intervening period.

We know then that, apart from the exceptions already indicated, India taken as a whole yielded the same agricul- tural produce as she yields now. We know also that the distribution of the various crops followed the main lines determined by the conditions of soil and climate: Bengal depended mainly on rice, Northern India on cereals, millets, and pulses, the Deccan on jowār and cotton, the south on rice and millets ; and indications drawn from various sources justify the inference that there was less specialisation of cropping than is found at the present time. Specialisation was not indeed entirely unknown, for Bengal supplied sugar to many parts of India, while the production of indigo was to a large extent concentrated in two localities, Biāna near Agra, and Sarkhej in Gujarat, and both these instances throw light on the conditions affecting the process. Sugar was carried mainly by water, whether it went westwards to Agra or southwards to the ports of Malabar, that is to say, the trade was to a great extent independent of the high cost of land transit ; indigo, on the other hand, was carried by land from Agra to the Cambay ports or across the frontier to Persia, the export value of the commodity being exceptionally high in proportion to its bulk ; and thus we have in these instances early manifestations of the process of specialisation which has made such progress since the development of means of communication in the course of the past century. On the other hand, we look in vain for anything corresponding to the modern wheat tracts or cotton tracts, which are essentially the results of railway enterprise : cotton, at least, was more widely grown than is now the case, though the aggregate of production was probably less, and it is reasonable to infer that most parts of the country were nearly self-sufficing in the matter of clothes as well as of food and other requisites. We can therefore arrive at a general idea of the system of cropping practised in a particular part of India if we eliminate those staples which are known to have been subsequently introduced, and make due allowance for the progress of specialisation, and for the changes in regard to irrigation which we are about to discuss.

When we pass to a consideration of the implements used by the peasants of Akbar’s time, we can see at once that few changes can have taken place, for even at the present day the peasant’s equipment is so nearly the bare minimum required for his work that it is impossible to believe he was ever much worse off, while there are no grounds whatever for thinking that any useful implements have disappeared in the interval. Ploughs and hoes, water-lifts and minor imple- ments generally, all bear their age upon their face: their minute adaptation to the circumstances of each locality must be the result of slow growth, and their most striking char- acteristic, the economy of iron, finds its explanation in the high cost of that metal during the period when India depended for it on her own resources. As it happens, we have a striking confirmation of this inference in regard to water-lifts. Babur’s description of the ordinary plane-and-bucket lift has already been quoted, and his account of the Persian wheel used in the Punjab is equally convincing, so that there is no doubt that the existing implements were in use at any rate before Akbar was born; and though similar direct evidence in regard to ploughs has not come to my notice,¹ their antiquity is not likely to be seriously disputed. Whether implements in general cost the peasant more or less is a question which can- not be answered in terms of figures, but the difference either way was probably small: on the one hand, wood was easier to get than now, but iron was certainly much more expensive in terms of grain, while the cost of manufacture measured in the same currency has probably changed very little, and, on the whole, the quantity of produce required to maintain the supply of the necessary implements cannot have altered materially during the last three centuries.

As regards the supply of power, the peasant is probably somewhat worse off now than under Akbar. In most parts of the country, though not everywhere, there was more waste land available for grazing, and it is reasonable to infer that cattle could be obtained more cheaply and easily than is now pos- sible. As to the quality of the stock, no precise information has come to my notice. Various travellers describe one or other of the famous breeds of what may be termed carriage oxen, but these were luxuries for the rich, and, so far as I know, there is no description of the animals which drew the ploughs.

Quality apart, it may be recognised as probable that plough cattle were easier to get, and also to feed, than is the case at present. I do not think that we should be justified in inferring that the supply of manure was larger. Assuming that there were more cattle for an equal area of cultivation, it does not follow that their manure was available, for in that case there must have been more grazing and less stall-feeding, and the manure would have been left where it was dropped. I have found nothing to show that less dung was burnt in the sixteenth century : it was certainly used as fuel, as indeed was the case in parts of Europe about the same period, but the comparative extent of the practice remains a matter of conjecture.

When we turn to the supply of water for irrigation, we must draw a sharp distinction between what is now the main canal tract and the rest of the country. In reading the narratives of writers who travelled north and west of Allahabad, we are at once struck by the scantiness of the allusions to this subject. The practice of irrigation was probably unfamiliar to most of the visitors, and we should naturally expect that they would record it as a novelty, but, as a matter of fact, they say very little about it. In some cases their silence may be explained by the season : Steel and Crowther, for instance, who travelled from Agra to Persia in 1615, and write enthusiastically about the system of irrigation in the latter country, performed the journey as far as Lahore in April and May, when little irrigation would have been seen. This explanation cannot, however, apply to a case like that of Finch, who marched from Agra to Lahore in January, and noticed only that a small water-channel had been cut to irrigate one of the royal gardens ; and taking all the accounts together, it is difficult to resist the inference that in this part of the country irrigation was a much less conspicuous feature of the winter landscape than it is to-day. The meagre descriptions of agriculture contained in the Ain-i Akbari give a similar impression : in these the general emphasis is on the rains crops, and almost the only definite statement regarding irrigation in the Account of the XII. Provinces is that in Lahore irrigation was chiefly from wells. Babur, writing early in the sixteenth century, comments on the absence of artificial canals in India, and hazards the explanation that water is not absolutely requisite, the autumn crops being nourished by the rains, while “spring crops grow even when no rain falls.” This observation, which could be made by no modern visitor to the Punjab, is in accordance with what is known about the sources from which water could be obtained. Practically the whole canal system is of later date: in Akbar’s time there were some inundation channels on the Indus, and there were the remnants of the aqueducts constructed by Firoz Shah to supply the gardens and cities established by him, but the value of these works was essenti- ally local, and the country as a whole depended either on wells or on the minor streams which were utilised by means of temporary dams. We must therefore picture conditions in the north as approximating to those which now prevail in the centre of the country, large expanses of dry cropping with patches of more productive land in places where a stream could be utilised or where efficient wells had been made.

The change in the rest of India has been much less striking. The face of the country supplies sufficient proof that the construction of wells and reservoirs is no novelty, and it is probable that in proportion to population the area irrigated in the time of Akbar was of about the same order of magnitude as at the beginning of the present century: it may have been substantially less, it may possibly have been somewhat greater, but I do not think that the difference can have been very marked. In peninsular India embank- ments have been built and have burst, wells have been sunk and have collapsed, for an indefinite number of centuries. So far, then, as regards the material conditions, the information which is available points to a system of agriculture generally similar to that which prevails to-day. In the next section we will consider the personal element in the industry.

III. PEASANTS AND LABOURERS

A knowledge of the system of agriculture prevailing in the sixteenth century enables us to arrive at certain conclusions regarding the numbers of the population by whom it was carried on, but before we take the facts of our period into consideration, we must glance at the general relation subsisting between the numbers of a community and the area cultivated by its members. Putting aside instances of the commercial use of land, and confining our attention to agriculture pursued as a means of direct subsistence, we find that the particular system followed in any region depends partly on the soil, climate, and other durable elements of the environment, and partly on the capacities of the people by whom it is carried on. We find also that the area cultivated under such a system is limited by the quantity of labour available, and that this limitation operates at the seasons of maximum pressure. Unlike most industries, agriculture of the type we are considering does not offer an unvarying amount of employment throughout the year, but is marked by an alternation of slack and busy times ; in some cases the pressure is greatest at seed-time, in others at harvest, and in others at some intervening period, but the result in each case is the same. The area cultivated will never be much greater than can be dealt with : it may fall far below this standard in unfavourable years, but so long as the motive to cultivate exists at all, the tendency will be to sow as large an area as can be matured, but no more. If, while other conditions remain substantially unchanged, the numbers of the rural population decline, then the area cultivated will fall off ; if the population rises, the area will also rise, until no more land remains within reach, and the resulting congestion will tend to restore the balance, whether it leads to migration or to an increase in mortality, but, short of congestion, the relation between numbers and cultivation will remain approximately constant.

Even at the present day Indian agriculture is still very largely in the “subsistence stage,” that is to say, the pro- duction of food for the family is still the first care of the individual peasant, and we shall be justified in concluding that the relation between numbers and cultivation has not varied greatly during the last three centuries, provided that we find reason for thinking that the conditions have remained substantially unchanged. There are no grounds for supposing that the permanent conditions of soil and climate have altered in any way, and we have seen in the last section that the changes in crops and methods have not been marked ; it remains to inquire whether the men themselves have changed. There is no evidence to show that Indian peasants and labourers were either more or less efficient in Akbar’s times than at the present day. As we shall see in a later chapter they ate the same food then as now, and it is probable that they got a little less to eat rather than a little more ; there were fewer influences in operation to stimulate the growth of intelligence ; as we shall find later on, there was much less hope of keep- ing the fruits of additional effort ; and in the absence of direct evidence it is reasonable to infer that the quantity and quality of the work done by ordinary men were at any rate not greater than they are. To take concrete illus- trations, I do not think that it would be possible to show grounds for holding that there has been a material change in the time spent in ploughing an acre of land, in transplanting an acre of rice, in weeding an acre of cotton, in hoeing an acre of sugar-cane, or in harvesting an acre of wheat ; and if so much be granted it follows that, in those parts of India where agriculture has not greatly changed, a given cultivated area implies somewhere about the same rural population at any period in the last three centuries. This conclusion does not involve uniformity in extent, but only in point of time ; at the present day we find consider- able variations in the numbers of people required in different localities, and the implication is that these variations have persisted without substantial change. At the beginning of the present century there were from 100 to 120 persons to each 100 acres of “normal cultivation” in some of the western districts of the United Provinces,¹ while there were from 60 to 70 persons to 100 acres in other districts lying farther south; the difference between these figures is adequately explained by permanent features of the environment, and the conclusion is that it has probably persisted with relatively little change, and that the western districts required somewhere about 100 to 120 persons, and the southern somewhere about 60 to 70 persons, to cultivate 100 acres in the time of Akbar and throughout the intervening period.

The position we have now reached is that, taking a wide view of India as a whole, the system of agriculture has not changed materially, and that in any particular region the numbers of the rural population have varied approximately with the area under cultivation. In theory this result is compatible with a very wide range of variation in the average size of holdings; it could be reached if the entire rural population held land, and also if the land were occupied by a small number of substantial farmers employing numerous landless labourers, but I do not think either of these extremes is in accordance with the facts of Akbar’s age, and there are indications that, while landless labourers existed in numbers, the bulk of the cultivators were, as they are now, small men with limited resources. To take the latter point first, the recurring references to the village headmen in Akbar’s administrative instructions appear to me to indicate the presence of numerous cultivators in each village, and I draw the same inference from the fragmentary accounts of life in Southern India, while a further reason for regarding the holdings as small is that in the literature of the time we do not meet with substantial capitalist farmers, who would almost certainly have made their appearance if they had been the predominant class. Where we meet the cultivator he is an inconspicuous unit very much as he is to-day, and he is also commonly short of ready money. Akbar directed his revenue officers to advance money to needy cultivators, and we may take his instructions as evidence of a deficiency of capital, though we cannot infer from them that the need was adequately met by State loans. Again, there is the story told by Jauhar how peasants living near Lahore were accustomed to give their wives and children in pledge to the bankers for money advanced on account of the revenue collections ; that story indicates a financial position familiar at the present time, though the particular form of security offered has now become obsolete. Again, when an English merchant went into the villages near Agra to buy indigo in the year 1614, we are told that he followed the custom of the country and distributed advances, to be adjusted when the indigo should be ready for delivery ; and about the same time another merchant, writing from Ahmadabad, advised that capital must be provided for daily purchases of indigo from the country people, " who are constrained to sell to engrossers at very low prices for want of money to supply the needful." Similarly we read that the Portuguese missionaries at Thana found it necessary to provide for their converts clothes and food, seed, cattle, and ploughs, in fact to find all the capital required to enable them to pursue their occupation. These instances are few, but they cover a fairly wide area, and I cannot recall any passage which suggests a contrary inference. The evidence is undoubtedly scanty, but what evidence exists is consistent with the predominance of small holdings and needy peasants rather than with large farmers in command of the capital required by the size of their undertakings.

On the other hand, it appears to me to be certain that in the sixteenth century, as at the present day, the rural population included a large number of landless labourers. It is true that I have failed to find any mention of such a class in contemporary literature, but in this case silence does not justify the inference that the agricultural labourer did not exist ; it indicates merely that the topic had no interest for the writers whose works we possess. The argument in support of the existence of landless labourers may be summarised as follows. We know that early in the nineteenth century India was full of such labourers, occupying or emerging from the position of serfs. This servile class must either have existed in Akbar’s days, or have come into existence in the intervening years. The latter hypothesis is very highly improbable, since such a social revolution must have left its mark on the history of the time, and until any evidence of its truth is produced, we must believe that village serfdom is an institution of old standing, dating from a period far earlier than that of Akbar. This belief is in accordance with what we know of the social history of the world at large, and of India in particular ; it is in itself probable, and there is no reasonable alternative.

The evidence of fact on which this argument is based will be found mainly in the Report on Slavery, to which reference has been made in a previous chapter. That Report does not indeed give a complete view of the position : the Commissioners relied mainly on information obtained from judicial officers, and it is only in a few localities that they recorded the obser- vations of men who had studied the question at first hand ; their inquiries did not extend to the whole of what is now British India, and there are obvious gaps within the area which they cover. The Commissioners distinguished between regular slavery and the institution which they described sometimes as predial slavery, sometimes as agricultural bondage, and sometimes by the use of the law-Latin phrase, adscripti glebae, and the result of their investigations was that rural serfdom, or its trace, was found practically wherever it was looked for. Thus in some districts of Bengal it was reported that the agricultural slaves were generally sold with the land, and it may be remarked that Sir William Macnaghten lays it down as settled law that hereditary serfs are subject to the laws of ancestral real property. Sir Edward Colebrooke spoke of the claims of landholders in Bihar over their heredi- tary serfs as at that time nearly obsolete. The Commissioners obtained " no evidence of the present existence of the in- stitution in the Western Provinces " (that is in parts of the United Provinces), but they thought it probable that " some- thing of the kind prevailed up to the period at which they were brought under British rule." " During the government of the Nawab the people on each property were held in a great measure to be adscripti glebae." In Azamgarh the low-caste villagers were still required to render the landholder “many personal services. . . . Under former governments . . . they were predial slaves. . . . A chamar can now sue his zamindar in the criminal court. Nothing vexes or annoys the zamindars in our whole system as much as this.” In Kumaun no free labour was procurable, but the “slaves of the plough” were distinguished from domestic slavery. In Assam there was much slave labour, but no free labour was employed in agri- culture. So much may be said regarding Northern India. In Madras the Board of Revenue reported that “throughout the Tamil country as well as in Malabar ¹ and Canara, far the greater part of the labouring classes of the people have from time immemorial been in a state of acknowledged bondage, in which they continue to the present time.” The Board did not know of serfdom in the north of the Presidency, but the Commissioners had reason to believe in its existence. In Coorg also predial slavery had existed from time immemorial. In Bombay the evidence recorded was scanty and unsatis- factory, but it disclosed the existence of serfdom in Surat and the southern Maratha country.

These facts appear to me to prove that a servile labouring class was a normal element in the rural popu- lation up to the introduction of British rule, and conse- quently in the time of Akbar. Further confirmation of this view can be drawn from the systems of paying wages in kind, which prevailed so widely in the last century and which are still far from being extinct. Those systems can be explained convincingly as a natural development from the time when cultivators had merely to feed and clothe their serfs: they can scarcely be explained at all on any other hypothesis. Existing social relations point in the same direc- tion, and in my opinion we are justified in regarding the rural population of Akbar’s time as constituted of peasant cultivators, artisans, labourers, and menial servants, very much as it is constituted now, the main difference being that labourers and servants were not then free to choose their masters, but were bound to work for the cultivator or culti- vators to whom they were assigned by the custom or tradition of the village. We cannot be certain of the precise propor- tion borne by each of these classes to the total population : it is possible that there were fewer cultivators and more labourers, but it is equally possible that cultivators were relatively more numerous than now, and in any case we are justified in concluding that, taking cultivators and labourers together, the proportion of workers to work has not under- gone any material alteration.

We must now attempt to form some idea of the income of commodities obtained by the rural population, a matter which is largely independent of the precise distribution of the produce between cultivators and labourers. We have found reason to conclude that the part played by man has undergone little change ; he has on the whole grown the same crops by the same methods, and has probably expended about the same amount of energy in the process, so that if there has been any material change in the average income ¹ per head of the rural population, the cause must be sought in the response of the land. The question whether the return yielded by the land has altered materially in the course of the last three centuries is one to which popular opinion is prepared to give an im- mediate answer, but in this case, as in some others, popular opinion is not based on exact thinking, and it is necessary to draw some distinctions before we accept the current view that fertility has decreased. The average yield of land estimated over a long period may be affected by (a) change in fertility of the land under cultivation throughout the period, (b) change in the quality of the land under cultivation at different times, or (c) changes in crops and methods. Popular opinion has fastened on the first of these factors, and asserts that acre for acre the land yields less than it did, but this assertion rests on no objective evidence, and it is rendered improbable by what is known regarding the course of " fertility." Peasants in India, as elsewhere, will indeed always tell a sympathetic audience that the yield of their land has fallen off; such statements are not evidence of fact, but only of the psychological attitude of the people who make them, and they will continue to be made so long as the golden age is sought for in the past. They find, how- ever, a certain excuse in what is known about the course of agricultural production. When new land is brought under cultivation the yield is in the early years ¹ abnormally high, and then falls to a lower level at which it remains approxi- mately constant, so long as the methods of treatment are not altered: a cultivator whose ideals are founded on the distant epoch when his land was virgin soil can thus say with truth that the yield is less than it was, since it is certain that at some period or other all the land in India was in this condition, and we may agree that whatever land was newly brought under cultivation in the latter years of Akbar’s reign yielded more largely then than it yields now, provided that cultiva- tion has been continuous throughout the intervening period. On the other hand, it is highly probable that the land which was already under regular cultivation at that period has, under similar conditions, given an approximately constant return, and clear, positive evidence would be needed to estab- lish the fact that a decline has occurred over the bulk of the old-established cultivation. No such evidence being in existence, we are justified in concluding that there has been no marked general change in fertility other than the reduction which resulted when the land ceased to be " virgin soil." ²

The position is essentially different in regard to the second factor : cultivation has certainly extended since Akbar’s time in large parts of India, and extension of cultivation ordinarily implies a decrease in the average yield when the whole area, old and new, is taken together, for the obvious reason that the best land is usually the first to come under the plough, and that people cultivate inferior soils only when the best land no longer suffices. We may agree then that this cause has operated to reduce the average yield, and attempt to form a rough idea of its importance by calculating the effect on the lines adopted in Akbar’s assessment of the land revenue, which assumed approximately equal areas under the three classes of land recognised as “ good,” “ middling,” and “ bad.” If we take the yield of some particular crop to be 12 maunds per bigha on good, 9 on middling, and 6 on bad land, and assume the areas in each class to be equal, then the average yield is 9 maunds ; if cultivation extends by 20 per cent, all “ bad ” land, the average falls to 8.5 maunds ; if the extension is 33 per cent, the average is 8.25 maunds ; if 50 per cent, it is 8 maunds. Thus with moderate extensions of cultivation, such as we have seen in Chapter I. are probable in the country between Agra and Lahore, the average yield might have been reduced by an amount of the order of 10 per cent on the rather violent assumption that all the new land is of the worst class. In cases where the extension has been very great, as in Bihar and the east of the United Provinces, this assumption becomes inadmissible, because, in clearing large areas of waste, land of all classes will be reached, and the proportionate reduction in the average will be considerably less. The figures given are of course an illustration only, but if the reader will take the trouble to vary them in accordance with agricultural probabilities, and to generalise the results so obtained, he will find that the reduction in average yield is a small figure compared with the percentage of increase in cultivation. In other words, the effect of extension of area to poorer soils is very apt to be exaggerated ; it does in fact reduce the average yield, but not as a rule to the extent that a casual observer would suppose.

On the other hand, the effect of the third factor—changes in crops or methods—may be very great. To take a single illustration : Let us suppose that while cultivation extends by 50 per cent, a canal system is introduced irrigating one-third of the total area, which we assume to have been originally dry. The increase of cultivation would, as we have seen, by itself reduce the yield from 9 maunds to 8, but the additional water- supply would more than counterbalance this, and the new average would on these figures be about 9$\frac{1}{3}$ maunds, while if, as is probable, the canal led to improved cropping, the increase in average yield might be very substantial notwithstanding the extension of cultivation to poorer soils. My object in giving these illustrations is to bring out the fact that in the period under consideration two opposing tendencies have been at work to affect the average yield of the land : on the one side, extension of cultivation has tended to reduce the average by a relatively small amount over large areas ; on the other side, improvements in cropping and in water-supply have tended to raise it very substantially in the tracts where they have come into operation. It would be absurd to strike a balance offhand for the whole of India and assert that the average yield has either risen or fallen, but it is safe to say that these opposing tendencies have had very different results in different parts of the country, and in the next section I shall attempt to carry the matter a little further, so as to obtain a more definite idea of the condition of the agricultural industry in those parts of the country for which the requisite data are available.

IV. AGRICULTURE IN ITS LOCAL ASPECTS

In this attempt to indicate the condition of agriculture in certain parts of India, it is convenient to follow, so far as it goes, the arrangement of the " Account of the XII. Subas," included in the Ain-i Akbari, an account which, with all its omissions and imperfections, is still the nearest approach we possess to a systematic survey. The first province dealt with is Bengal and Orissa, and here Abul Fazl records merely that rice predominated, and that the harvests were always abund- ant, information which, so far as it goes, agrees essentially with the conditions prevailing at the present day. From other sources we learn that sugar-cane was a common, and valuable, crop, as is still the case, but beyond these facts there is no precise information, while, in the absence of any statistics of the area under cultivation, our knowledge of the numbers of the population is too vague to furnish any assistance. We can, however, be sure that maize and tobacco have both assumed their present position since the time of Akbar, while the extension in area and the rise in value of the jute crop are so recent that the facts can readily be ascertained. So far as I know, this fibre is not named by any contemporary writer, but it was probably grown in Akbar’s time, since Abul Fazl tells us that “ a kind of sackcloth ” was produced in what is now the district of Rangpur, and we may infer that it was used to make clothes from the fact that jute-clothing was the ordinary wear of the poorer classes as lately as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its transformation from a low- grade fibre grown for local consumption to one of the great staples of the commerce of the world is the outstanding fact in the agricultural history of the province, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the change has resulted in a sub- stantial increase in the average of production per head of the rural population.

Conditions in Bihar show a more radical alteration. According to the statistics in the Ain-i Akbari, the area under cultivation was very much less than now, probably not more than one-fifth for the province as a whole, and there are good reasons for thinking that the class of crops was comparatively high : there was indeed little indigo,¹ and no potatoes, tobacco, or maize can have been produced, but poppy was widely grown, and (apart from rice), wheat, sugar-cane, and cotton seem to have been among the principal staples. Fitch tells us that Patna exported cotton, much sugar, and very much opium ; the Ain mentions the abundance and high quality of the sugar-cane, and though it says nothing about wheat, I believe that the Mogul capital was supplied largely from this part of the country. This last point needs a little explanation. So far as I know, none of the travellers who visited Bengal noticed a large surplus of wheat, but observers in other parts of India write of wheat coming from Bengal. Sir Thomas Roe, speaking of the Mogul Court, says that Bengal " feeds this country with wheat and rice," and the factors at Surat wrote about the same time, " we deny not but that Bengalla brings wheat, rice and sugar to India," India being in this passage used in the restricted sense to denote the west coast. Now, it is possible that at this time¹ Bengal may have produced wheat for export in some quantity, but it appears to me to be more probable that the wheat really came from Bihar, and was carried both up the river to Agra and down the river to the Bengal ports. The Surat factors would naturally hear of the point where the sea-voyage began, not of the locality of production, and we need assume only that Roe was told in general terms that provisions came from the direction of Bengal.² However this may be, I think there can be little doubt that the average value of the crops grown was at least as high as now, if not higher, and that the average yield per acre was substantially greater, because with a very small area under cultivation the quality of the land must have been on the average superior. The probabilities are therefore that in Bihar the average of production per head was dis- tinctly higher than now, though the total production must have been very much smaller.

The Mogul province of Allahabad corresponds roughly to the eastern districts of the United Provinces, now a typically congested area. The land was certainly not crowded in Akbar’s time, when cultivation reached only about one-fifth of the present standard, and in this respect the conditions approximated to those which prevailed in Bihar, though judging from the revenue statistics the cropping was of a less remunerative type. The Ain tells us that agriculture was in a flourishing state, but does not indicate any par- ticular feature except the absence of jowār and bājra, crops which are still very rare in this part of the country ; such general assertions of prosperity count for very little, and I do not know of any references to the subject in other contemporary authorities. It is, however, certain that the large stretches of inferior clay which characterise this part of the country were for the most part untilled in Akbar’s time ; the yield given by these soils is very small, and their exclusion would raise the average of production by an appreciable amount, so that here, as in Bihar, the average was probably greater than now.

Of the province of Oudh we are told very little. Abul Fazl remarks again that agriculture was flourishing, but he mentions only the superior varieties of rice obtainable in the northern districts. There is no hint of the remarkable system of well irrigation which now characterises the south of the province, and of course there was no maize, while the revenue statistics suggest that rice and millets were much more im- portant than the winter crops, such as wheat. No definite inference can be drawn from these scanty data, but I am inclined to think that the average of production may have been even less than now in those parts of the province where cultivation had long been established.

The Mogul province of Agra was not homogeneous, in- cluding as it did part of the Gangetic plain and also a portion of what is now Rajputana, and for our present purpose it is convenient to neglect the latter area, and consider the northern portion along with the adjoining province of Delhi. In this tract the changes which have occurred amount very nearly to an agricultural revolution. The area cultivated in Akbar’s time was, as we have seen, about three-fourths of the present standard, but the cropping appears to have been of an inferior grade. Neither Abul Fazl nor any other authority tells us of any production of special note, and the fact that wheat and sugar were imported from the eastern provinces shows that the country was not even self-sufficing in what are now two of its staple exports. The change must be attributed mainly to the construction of canals, which has rendered possible the developments on which the tract now depends, great expanses of wheat and sugar-cane, and of irrigated cotton and maize, forming a marked contrast to the millets, pulses, and oilseeds which must have been the staples at the earlier period. Some idea of the productivity of this tract, taken as a whole, can be formed from the fact that the revenue claimed from it by Akbar ranged from 20 to 30 dams a bigha,¹ while the average rate was over 50 dams in Allahabad, and probably well over 60 dams in Bihar; these rates are, it will be remembered, proportionate to the produce as valued by the assessors, who thus considered that a bigha near Jaunpur or Benares yielded as much as 2 bighas between Agra and Saharanpur. In this case there can be no doubt whatever that the average of production has greatly increased since the time of Akbar, and the same conclusion holds, though perhaps not to the same extent, of the adjoining province of Lahore.²

Up to this point it is possible to form a general idea of the position of agriculture in the time of Akbar, but when we turn to the country lying south of the great plains, we find that our sources of information begin to fail us. Of Ajmer we can say only that agriculture was very backward, and that winter crops were scarcely grown; in this case, it is probable that the average of production has not changed to a material extent. Malwa, too, probably shows little change, for the antiquity of its present system of agriculture is apparent to any observer, and the few statements made by Abul Fazl concerning it are still substantially true. The Mogul province of Berar has developed into an extensive cotton tract within the last two centuries, but I have found no data on which to base even a guess at its average production in Akbar’s time : Gujarat, on the other hand, was certainly highly cultivated, but here, too, data for a comparison are wanting. The difficulty becomes greater in the case of the Deccan and of Vijayanagar, where there is nothing to take the place of the Ain-i Akbari, and we can say in a general way only that the country produced the same staples as it yields to-day. Thévenot, for instance, noted rice and cotton everywhere, and sugar-cane in some places, in the Deccan, while Portuguese narratives¹ tell us that the upland of Vijayanagar yielded rice, cotton, jowār, and other grains and pulses of whose names the writers were ignorant, and on the coast we hear frequently of coco palms, and, in Malabar, pepper. Of all this vast tract of country we know only that (apart from a few later introductions such as groundnuts) methods and products alike show little change ; we cannot say whether the average of production has risen or fallen, but the variations which we have found farther north should serve as a warning against the assumption that there has been a uniform move- ment in either direction. In the north we have seen that the resultant of the opposed forces at work has been different in different parts of the country : Bengal probably yields more, and Upper India certainly does so, but much if not all of the intervening country has a lower average to-day than in the time of Akbar, and within these limits individual villages or parganas have probably been affected in different ways ; it is reasonable to conclude that something of the same sort has happened in the south, and that while some portions of it are on the average richer, others are poorer than they were.

The final result of this analysis cannot be stated in precise or arithmetical form. We do not know the income of commodities which India yielded at the close of the sixteenth century, and any dogmatism as to its amount would be un- justifiable, but the data appear to me to be sufficient to indicate that, taking the country as a whole, the average per head cannot have been greatly different from what it is to-day. The main lines of agriculture have not changed, and the tendencies affecting the amount of production have operated in opposing directions. On the one hand there is the undoubted fact of a great increase in popula- tion, which has necessitated the cultivation of inferior soils, and thereby reduced the average of production per head ; on the other hand there have been the introduction of new and more remunerative crops, the provision of increased facilities for irrigation, and other changes in detail, which have increased the average income of large portions of the country to an extent more than sufficient to mask the operation of the former tendency. We cannot state the results in quantitative terms, but it is obvious that the change on balance is not very great. Individual students may fairly form different opinions on the question whether the average income of commodities produced by the rural population of India is on the whole a little greater, or a little less, than it was, but the available data indicate that the order of magnitude has not altered materially ; a given number of people, peasants and labourers together, raise somewhere about the same amount of produce as the same number raised in Akbar’s time, and if producers were in a position to consume all the produce they raised, we should reach the conclusion that their economic condition has not greatly changed. At this point, however, we must take the environment into account, and ascertain the proportion of the gross income which was left to the rural population after the claims of other parties had been met.

V. THE ENVIRONMENT AS AFFECTING AGRICULTURE

Hitherto we have looked at the agriculture of the period as an entity complete in itself, and we have now to enlarge our view by taking account of the relations between the peasants and other portions of the community, and to inquire to what extent the townsmen and the administrations of the sixteenth century promoted or retarded the success of the industry. We must not of course look for a policy of direct and conscious improvement such as has recently been initiated; that is essentially a modern development, and in Akbar’s days there were no men of science investigating the peasant’s problems, no skilled engineers designing implements to meet their needs, and no financial talent devoted to organising their markets or facilitating the supply of capital. Probably the only scope for action of the kind lay in the construction of irrigation works, and in this matter I am inclined to think that while the advantages of action were recognised in theory, very little was accomplished in practice. Akbar directed his provincial governors to be energetic in “the making of reservoirs, wells, watercourses, gardens, sarais, and other pious foundations,” and no doubt this direction expresses his administrative ideal, while Abul Fazl states in general terms that “many wells and tanks are being dug,” but his silence may be taken as proving that there was no special organisation for the purpose and that no detailed regulations had been issued. We have seen that the administrative arrangements of the Empire were not of a kind to produce officers who would display a vigorous initiative in such directions as these, and it appears to be probable that such action as was taken was spasmodic, and that where wells and reservoirs were made at the public cost, they were usually, and in accordance with precedent, designed for the comfort and convenience of townsmen and travellers rather than for the needs of the ordinary peasant. I have found nothing to suggest that conditions in the Deccan kingdoms were in this respect different from those prevailing in Northern India. In the south, Mr. Sewell tells us that in the first half of the six- teenth century the Emperor Krishna Raya had busied himself in improving irrigation in the neighbourhood of his capital, and it is possible that after the collapse of the central authority some of the lords of Vijayanagar may have pursued a similar policy in the interests of their own estates. In his picturesque account of a visit to Olala near Mangalore, della Valle mentions that the Queen was engaged in superintending the construction of a reservoir, and similar examples of individual effort were doubtless to be found in other parts of India, but there is no trace of anything like a consistent policy directed to meeting the needs of the country systematically, nor, it may be added, do we find any suggestion of arrangements for keeping existing works in proper repair.

We may consider next the influence exerted by the system of commerce : it makes a very great difference to agriculture whether the peasant has access to a free market and can count on getting price for quality, or is in the hands of a practical monopoly interested chiefly in buying at the cheapest possible rate. It is not altogether clear how far the peasant was dependent on the market in Akbar’s time : in some places he paid his revenue in kind, and then the market meant comparatively little, since, as we shall find, he had not much to spend, but in the Mogul Empire at least payment in cash was common,¹ though its precise extent is doubtful, and cash payment involved finding a market for at least one- third of the gross produce of the season. The internal com- mercial system of the country appears to have been organised much as at present, but with two main differences : transport was more costly and dangerous, and consequently the merchants required a much wider margin between the prices at which they bought and sold, while the buyers for export houses, who have made things distinctly better for the peasant, had not come into existence at this time.² So far then as the peasant had to sell, he was dependent on a system even less favourable to him than that which now exists, and which is justly regarded as one of the greatest drawbacks to the progress of agriculture. Under that system the peasant is the last person to benefit by a rise in price, while he is the first to suffer from a fall, and the greater and more frequent the fluctuations the worse is his position. I have found no materials for estimating directly the course of local markets in Akbar’s time, but I think it is reasonable to infer that fluctuations were at least as great in the sixteenth century as in the first half of the nineteenth before the development of communications had unified the markets of the country. The conditions which prevailed at that time have been clearly described by Sir Theodore Morison in chapter xii. of The Industrial Organisation of an Indian Province, and a study of the figures given by him is the best way of realising the position of those peasants who had to sell their produce, and who had no alternative but to accept the price offered by the local dealers.

In ordinary times then the peasant did not derive much assistance from his environment. The same statement must be made regarding the exceptional periods of stress when agriculture was disorganised by the failure of the rains. We know that most parts of India were afflicted by famine at some time or other during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,¹ and the knowledge may be taken as an assurance that the climate has not changed materially in the intervening period. It is, however, impossible to compare the frequency of famines in the two periods because the significance of the word has altered in the interval : a famine is now a period when distress is such as to require the intervention of the State, but if we were to rely upon the chroniclers of the sixteenth century, we should define it as a period when men and women were driven by hunger to eat human flesh. Badaoni wrote as follows of the famine of 1555 : “the author with his own eyes witnessed the fact that men ate their own kind, and the appearance of the famished sufferers was so hideous that one could scarcely look upon them. What with the scarcity of rain, the famine and the desolation, and what with uninterrupted warfare for two years, the whole country was a desert and no husbandmen remained to till the ground.” Of the same period Abul Fazl wrote that “men were driven to the extremity of eating each other,” and of the later famine of 1596, we are told again that men ate their own kind, and that the streets and roads were blocked up with dead bodies. Akbar endeavoured to relieve distress in this latter case, but the organisation in exist- ence at the time was probably unable to do more than provide food for the starving in the towns and cities, and the effect of these recurring visitations must have been a disorganisation of agriculture such as can scarcely now be conceived. It must be remembered then that the annalists tell us only of the extremity of distress; it was not worth their while to mention the recurrence of ordinarily unfavourable seasons which in modern times would be met by measures of relief, and we must not treat their silence as evidence that nothing was wrong. In forming our ideas of the condition of the industry, we must make allow- ances not merely for occasional periods of entire collapse, but for more frequent seasons of local or partial failure, and we must recognise that, alike in greater calamities and in lesser, the peasant was ordinarily left to bear the burden unassisted, except in so far as he might be able to secure a reduction in the revenue demand.

So far then as active measures are concerned, the rest of the community did little or nothing to promote the prosperity of agriculture: on the contrary, the peasant had cause to fear rather than to welcome association with the townsmen and the officers of Government,¹ and in particular he did not enjoy that security of tenure which is the first condition of successful peasant-farming. The question whether a peasant had a legal right to remain in occupation of his holding was argued at great length during the early part of the nineteenth century : here we are concerned not with the juridical position but rather with the practical aspect of the matter. Could the peasant count on remaining undisturbed, or did disturb- ance in fact occur with sufficient frequency to cause a general feeling of insecurity? The evidence on this point is small in volume, but one fact alone appears to me to be conclusive. At the outset of his reign Jahangir tells us that he gave an order “that the officials of the Crown lands and the jāgīrdārs [grantees] should not forcibly take the ryots’ lands and cultivate them on their own account.” This order is one of a series designed to remedy popular grievances; from our knowledge of Jahangir’s administration, we should not be justified in assuming that it had more than a slight and transient effect, but we may be sure that the grievance was sufficiently real and widespread to have attracted the attention of a new Emperor engaged in formulating a policy which should rally the people to his throne. The order applies, it will be noticed, to all land whether administered directly or granted as jāgīr, and we may safely infer that the ordinary peasant ran a real risk of having his holding taken from him. This inference finds strong confirmation in the account given by de Laet, who, after noticing the dispossession of important grantees, goes on to say that the common people were much harassed, and often compelled to change their land every season, sometimes because the Administration wanted it, and sometimes because it was to be given to some one else, so that the cultivation of the whole country was rendered inefficient. The risk of disturbance would not be great in a village distant from the administrative headquarters, or in the case of a holding without some special attraction of its own; but any one who might be inclined to work up his land to more than the average level of productiveness must have known that his tenure was at the mercy of any grasping officer or grantee whom accident might bring into his vicinity, and this knowledge would of itself be fatal to any profitable development of agriculture. That agriculture was in fact un- progressive at this period may be inferred from the observa- tions of travellers of a later date like Mundy and Bernier. The former tells us that the peasants near Agra were treated " as Turks treat Christians," " taking from them all they can get by their labour, leaving them nothing but their bad, mud-walled, ill-thatched-covered houses and a few cattle to till the ground, besides other miseries." Bernier states that owing to the oppression of officials and grantees the ground was seldom tilled except under compulsion, that no person was willing and able to repair the water-channels, and that the whole country was badly cultivated ; or, in other words, that the natural effects of insecurity of tenure were obvious. This evidence is applicable only to the Mogul Empire, and it is possible that conditions were more favourable in the Deccan kingdoms or in Vijayanagar, but I have found no observa- tions regarding the position in these countries, and I do not know of any grounds for thinking that in the matter of security the southern peasant was in practice materially better off.

The influence of the environment was thus, on the whole, distinctly unfavourable to the progress of agriculture. The peasant obtained very little active help from the other classes of the community ; he was placed at a disadvantage in his relations with the market, and any tendency which may have existed towards enterprise was sterilised by the nature of the Administration. Our next object is to consider the share of the peasant’s income which the community claimed. We have seen in the first section of this chapter that Akbar demanded the equivalent of one-third of the gross produce, and that in the south the proportion was almost certainly higher, though it cannot be determined with precision. The share claimed by Akbar was in itself high,^1 whether it is judged by Hindu texts or by the standard of his Moslem predecessors. The texts indicate that from one-sixth to one-twelfth was considered reasonable, though as much as one-fourth might be taken in emergencies. The claims of Moslem rulers had varied widely, but had usually been pitched lower, and in the exceptional case of Alauddin Khalji, who demanded one-half, the motive was administrative rather than fiscal, the measure being avowedly part of a system “for grinding down the Hindus and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion.” Akbar’s assessment was based on no such motives, but its severity will be at once apparent to any one who is familiar with the level of rents in Northern India at the present day ; for readers who do not possess that knowledge, it may be worth while to go into the matter in some little detail, bearing in mind that the question at issue is the livelihood of a large proportion of the population of the Empire, and that while Akbar’s assessment was high, the rest of India probably paid substantially more.

The burden of the revenue can be stated most clearly in terms of money. According to the calculations regarding the purchasing-power of the rupee which have been used in an earlier chapter, a peasant who wanted a rupee would have to offer in the vicinity of the Mogul capital more than seven times as much grain as in the years 1910-12, about eleven times as much oil-seeds, probably seven times as much raw sugar, or a quantity of cotton which is probably somewhat less, but cannot be determined accurately on the available data. It is therefore well within the mark to say that a rupee cost such a peasant at least as much produce as 7 rupees cost in the years before the war, and it is reasonably certain that at a distance from the capital the divergence in prices was even greater ; consequently we shall be understating the average burden on the peasant if for comparative purposes we take seven as the factor of purchasing-power. Making use of this factor, and taking the average of Akbar’s assessment rates for the three provinces of Allahabad, Agra, and Delhi, we shall find that the amount claimed on an acre ¹ was equiva- lent to the demand shown below in the money of 1910–12.

AKBAR’S REVENUE DEMAND PER ACRE CALCULATED IN MODERN CURRENCY

These rates, it must be noted, are for the crop, not for the year ; a peasant would pay, for instance, about 4 rupees on an acre of the inferior millet sāwān, but if he followed it with a crop of gram he would have 10 or 12 rupees more to pay in the second half of the year. It is scarcely necessary to say that a rental demand based on these figures would be unthinkable at the present day ; it is just conceivable that equivalent rents might be exacted for a short time from a village of exceptional fertility and resources by a landholder who set the provisions of the law aside, but these rates are not limited to exceptional cases, but are the average for a large part of Northern India, and no modern Settlement Officer would think for a moment of framing his assessment on any such basis.

The difference in the level of the demand may be further illustrated by calculating the revenue which would be due at Akbar’s rates on the crops now grown in the country where they were in force. Such calculations are too long to give in detail, but as an example I may take the result for the crops grown in the year 1915–16 in the four large districts of the Meerut division. Assessing these districts on the lines adopted in Akbar’s time, but giving all doubtful points in favour of the peasant,¹ and thus understating the theoretical revenue by a substantial amount, I find that the average sum which the Mogul would have claimed on an acre of occupied land exceeds the present average rent-rate by the following percentages:

That these high percentages are not due to some local cause may be inferred from the fact that the excess for the Oudh district of Unao is 97, while going farther east, the excess for Ghazipur is 128, and for Jaunpur as much as 193; and on the basis of these calculations I think it may be said that where the regulation system of assessment was in force Akbar claimed as revenue at any rate about twice as much as present- day landholders claim for rent. There are indications in his regulations of a possibility that the amount of the claim could be reduced by collusion with subordinate officials, but in that case it may be doubted whether the saving to the peasant would have been very great; unless the subordinates differed from their modern representatives, they would have claimed very nearly the whole of the fraudulent reduction, and left the peasant only sufficient to make the transaction worth his while.

These calculations leave out of account the legal and extra- legal cesses which the peasant now pays. The amount of these cannot be ascertained with precision, but they may fairly be set off against the similar payments made at the earlier period. We know of at least one general cess imposed by Akbar—the dahseri, a charge of about 25 lb. of grain on each acre cultivated—and we hear of other local cesses, such as that imposed on the neighbourhood to meet the cost of building the fort at Agra. I read the rules regarding the record of crops as imposing cesses to be paid for the maintenance of the officials engaged in the measurements made every season,¹ and in any case there can be no reasonable doubt that they “lived on the country,” as similar officials hope to live at the present day. Where the land had been granted as jāgīr, the extra-legal charges were probably higher, especially after the lapse of Akbar’s efforts to curtail this system. Hawkins, who acquired his knowledge as a grantee (though an unsuccessful one), depicts his fellows as “racking” the poor in order to get whatever they could before losing the grant, and Jahangir’s accession edicts, already quoted, speak of various burdens “which the jāgīrdars of every province and district have imposed for their own profit.” We cannot state in precise figures the total sums paid by the peasants, but we can be fairly certain that they were substantially in excess of the revenue calculated on the prescribed rates, and it is not impossible that they may have occasionally approximated to the proportion of “nearly three-quarters” of the produce, which, as we have seen, is given by de Laet.

We have no direct information regarding the demands made on peasants holding land administered by zamindars, but it may be conjectured that they were somewhat better off than those of their fellows who were subject to grantees. The grantee was ordinarily a stranger, concerned only to fill his pockets; the zamindar was a more permanent feature of the locality, and in some cases bound to the peasants by hereditary position and tribal relationship, while he was dependent upon their support in the contingency—never very remote—of his going, or being forced, into rebellion. It is probable therefore that the ordinary zamindar treated his peasants comparatively well, and this inference is supported by the fact recorded by Bernier half a century later, that “many of the peasantry, driven to despair by so execrable a tyranny, abandon the country” and sometimes “fly to the territories of a Raja, because there they find less oppression and are allowed a greater degree of comfort.” Bernier also states that the fear of losing peasants in this way operated to mitigate the tyranny of the Mogul governors, and though it is probable that the tyranny was worse under Shahjahan than under Akbar, we may still believe that the jurisdiction of some at least of the zamindars offered a refuge from oppression at the earlier period.

In the Mogul Empire, then, the peasant who was assessed under the regulation system had to surrender in the form of revenue a very much larger share of his gross income than his successor now pays as rent. Of the provinces assessed on other systems, we know that in Sind the peasants paid one-third of the produce in kind, but less than half of this rate was taken in Ajmer, where the administration was not effective. The position in Bengal, Berar, and Khandesh is uncertain ; they were recent acquisitions, and the maintenance of the old assessment systems may mean either that a change would have brought no more revenue, or that an immediate enhancement was considered dangerous on political grounds. I conjecture that the burden of revenue in these cases was lighter, but not much lighter, than in the regulation provinces, but I know of no evidence on the point. As regards the position in other parts of India, we have seen reason to believe that the revenue demand, stated as a share of the gross produce, was substantially higher in the south than in the north, and it follows that the peasants in the Deccan and in Vijayanagar were probably worse off than those in Mogul territory. Thus the final result of our inquiry is that while the average of agricultural produc- tion per head of the rural population, taking India as a whole, was probably not very different from what it is now, the share left to the peasant for disposal was on the average very much less ; the " average " peasant may have handled about the same gross income as now, but, if he did, he kept a much smaller share for his own use.

VI. THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE IN THE VILLAGES

The conclusions which have been reached regarding the condition of agriculture will be referred to again in subsequent chapters, but before leaving the subject for the moment we may bring together what we have learned regarding the lives of the men and women engaged in the industry. The ordinary village labourer was probably about as well or as badly off in ordinary years as he is now : there is, so far as I know, absol- utely no direct contemporary information regarding his means of livelihood, but it is safe to assume that as a serf he had a little, but only a little, more than the bare minimum necessary for his subsistence. In unfavourable seasons his position was very much worse : he is now certain of finding employment on relief works when there is nothing to do at home, but in the sixteenth, and indeed far into the nineteenth, century he had the choice between the certainty of starvation at home and the probability of starvation on the roadside or in the jungle. Whether he had a reasonable chance of bettering his condition and rising in the world is a question on which there is no direct evidence. As a serf, he was not free to leave his village in search of work, and we may presume that his masters would allow him to go only when the number of labourers exceeded the requirements of the village. The demand for general labour was certainly much less than at present : there were no great factories or railways, and, except in the cities and the seaports, there are no signs of anything approaching to a labour market. I am inclined to think that the difficulty of leaving a village, coupled with the uncertainty of getting work elsewhere, must have discouraged any tendency to migration, and that the immobility of the agricultural labourer of the present day has its roots in the centuries during which there was little to tempt a man to venture away from his village, so long as the village could supply his food.

It is, however, quite possible that individual labourers could hope to rise to the position of cultivators, and that the aspirations, like the fears, of the modern labourers are founded on the experience of centuries. There is evidence in the Report on Slavery, already quoted, that servile labourers were in some cases allowed to hold plots of land, which they could cultivate when their labour was not required elsewhere, and, unless the attitude of the people has changed in the last three centuries, I do not think that an ordinary village—at least in Northern or Central India—would have prevented an indi- vidual from gradually extending his holding, provided that there was land to spare and that the supply of labour was sufficient. Promotion of this kind would have been facilitated in many parts of India, though not everywhere, by the exist- ence of vacant culturable land, and it may perhaps be assumed that the difficulty of finding capital could be gradually over- come by a thrifty man with a recurrence of favourable seasons. It is possible then that a career was open to the exceptional labourer, though I know of no evidence bearing directly on the point ; the ordinary labourer was probably resigned, as he still often is, to the position into which he had been born.

Regarding the actual cultivator of the soil, we have seen that he was much worse off in ordinary seasons than is the case at present ; in any case he had less money to spend on clothes, comforts, and luxuries, and in some parts of the country he must sometimes have been short of food. In bad seasons his position was no better than that of the labourer ; there is no trace of any systematic attempt to keep villages going through a period of calamity, or to restore them when the calamity had passed away, and when the stock of food was exhausted there was nothing for it but to take to the roads or the jungles, and, as we have seen, to sell off the children as the last realisable asset. Famine was not the only calamity to be feared ; wars and rebellions might at any time paralyse the life of the villages while the oppression of the State officials might drive the peasants themselves into revolt. It would, however, be a mistake to look only on the dark side of the cultivator’s life. In the intervals between famines and other calamities, a thrifty man, who understood the art of dealing with the revenue authorities, might gradually improve his position and extend his holding so as to secure a comfortable income, while in times of stress the more adventurous souls might migrate to less unfavourable surroundings, or, as Bernier says,¹ “ seek a more tolerable mode of existence either in the towns or in camps.” But when all possible allowances are made, the most probable conclusion seems to me to be that the ordinary cultivator was much worse off than he is to-day, paying a larger share of his present income to the sleeping- partners in his industry, and discouraged from almost every form of enterprise by the uncertainty which clouded the future.

Of the position of the zamindars it is not possible to say much. Those of them who appeared at Court and secured a definite rank (mansab) probably lived like the rest of the courtiers and officials ; we get scarcely a glimpse of the life of the others who remained within their own jurisdictions, and can only conjecture that they lived like those of their successors—more common in the last century than in this— who distrust new ideas and maintain the old traditions of their country-side. Probably some of them performed valuable economic functions in helping and supporting their peasants, while others were parasites pure and simple ; but it is impossible to say which class predominated, and of their general attitude we know only that it was such as to arouse strong disapproval in official circles.²

AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER IV

SECTION 1.—The third book of the Ain (vol. ii. of the translation) gives a large quantity of information regarding the revenue system of Northern India; this information has been discussed in a paper by Mr. Yusuf Ali and the present writer in Journal R.A.S., January 1918, and the account in the text, which is based on that paper, differs in some important details from what will be found in some of the current manuals of Indian history. There is much less first-hand evidence regarding conditions in the south, where reliance must be placed on casual notices such as those in Sewell, 373, 379, and Barbosa, 289, 296. The quotation from de Laet is p. 125 ; the penalty for failure to cultivate is quoted from English Factories 1630-33, p. 233.

SECTION 2.—The observations regarding the course of agriculture are, as a rule, scattered and fragmentary. For the north of India most of the information comes from the Ain (Book iii. and “Account of the XII. Subas”); Babur’s observations begin on p. 484 ; Finch’s remarks are scattered through his journal in Purchas; for Terry, see Purchas, II. ix. 1468 ff. For tillage in the Deccan, see Garcia da Orta, 308, and compare Imperial Gazetteer, xi. 308. The crops of Northern India and the revenue rates are in Ain, translation, ii. 70-114 ; those of the south are collected chiefly from Garcia da Orta and from Sewell. For the acclimatisation of maize, etc., see de Candolle under the various crops. The use of dung as fuel is mentioned in de Laet, 116, and Mundy, ii. 71.

The observations quoted on irrigation in Northern India will be found in Purchas, I. iv. 431, 519, and Babur, 486. For the history of the canals, see Imperial Gazetteer, iii. 316 ff.; also a paper by Major Colvin in the Journal A.S.B., March 1833. Wells and reservoirs are mentioned passim in Sewell, Thévenot, and other authorities besides those quoted.

SECTION 3.—The facts referred to in the earlier paragraphs of this section are drawn from the Ain, or such authorities as Sewell or Hay for the south, but the argument depends more on the general attitude of these and other writers than on their statements of particular facts. The instances given of scanty resources will be found in Ain, translation, ii. 44 ; Elliot, History, v. 138 ; Letters Received, ii. 103, 148 ; Maffeius, Transactions, 36. The facts regarding serfdom are from the Slavery Report, the whole of which should be read by any one who wants to realise the position ; the quotations in the text are from pp. 38, 39, 93, 97, 113, 149, 157. The dictum as to the legal position of serfs is in Macnaghten’s Principles, 130.

SECTION 4.—In this section I have used the results of the examination of Abul Fazl’s statistics, to which reference has been made under Chapter I. Most of the statements of facts come from the “Account of the XII. Subas,” in Ain, translation, vol. ii. For Bengal, see pp. 121-123 (also Imperial Gazetteer, iii. 204); for Bihar, p. 151 (also Fitch, in Purchas, II. x. 1736 ; Roe, i. 218 ; Letters Received, iv. 320); for Allahabad, p. 158 ; Oudh, p. 171 ; Agra, p. 179 ; Delhi, p. 278 ; Lahore, p. 312 ; Ajmer, p. 267 ; Malwa, p. 195 ; Berar, p. 229 ; Gujarat, p. 239. For Southern India, see (e.g.) Thévenot, 219, 240, and Sewell, 237.

SECTION 5.—Abul Fazl’s references to irrigation works will be found in Ain, translation, i. 222, and ii. 38. For irrigation in the south, see Sewell, 162, and della Valle, ii. 338. Mundy, among other writers, mentions (ii. 84) that reservoirs and similar works were seldom repaired. The quotations regarding famines are from Elliot, History, v. 490, and vi. 21, 193 ; other references to the subject will be found under chap. vii. 4. Akbar’s orders as to remission of revenue are in Ain, translation, ii. 45. Jahangir’s prohibition of forcible ejectment is in Tuzuk, i. 9 ; de Laet’s remarks on the subject are on p. 125 ; oppression by grantees is noticed in Thévenot, 145, and Bernier, 226. The quotation from Mundy is ii. 73. Alauddin’s revenue policy is expounded in Elliot, History, iii. 182.

For the purchasing-power of the rupee, see the present writer’s paper in Journal R.A.S., October 1918, 375 ff. The revenue rates used in the calculations are taken from Ain, translation, ii. 91 ff. ; the modern data are from the Season and Crop Report, and the Revenue Administration Report of the United Provinces for 1915–16. For cesses, see Ain, transla- tion, i. 275 ; Badaoni, ii. 74 ; Hawkins in Purchas, I. iii. 221 ; and Tuzuk, i. 7. For migration of peasants, see Bernier, 205, 231. The revenue rates charged in Sind and Ajmer are in Ain, translation, ii. 338, 267.

Notes

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of collectors, but the question is not of much practical importance, since it is reasonably certain that the sums actually demanded were nearly if not quite as large as the standard rates. The bigha was the unit of land- measurement, and was intended to be a little more than half an acre.

^1 It is perhaps desirable for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Northern India to point out the difference between rent rates and revenue rates. At present the tenant cultivator pays rent, out of which his landholder pays the revenue : under Akbar there was usually no landholder, and the culti- vator paid the revenue direct to the State. In studying the comparative incidence of the revenue it would be an obvious error to compare rent with revenue, but in the present section we are concerned with what the peasant paid, not with what the State received, and we have therefore to compare Akbar’s revenue with the rent charged by modern landholders. As we shall see, Akbar’s revenue was something like double the modern rent, and consequently it was four times or more the modern revenue, which is rather less than half the rent.

¹ Bernier, p. 205.

² Abul Fazl says that “ the general custom of Indian zamindars is to leave the path of single-mindedness, and to have an eye to every side, and to join any one who is victorious or who is making increasing stir ” (Akbar- nama, translation, ii. 96), but we do not know how far economic motives influenced their conduct in matters of politics.