2 - Agrarian Economy

Summary

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION

A religious divine of Delhi (c. 1354), reflecting upon the necessity of everyone having resources (māya) before taking up a profession, cites the example of the peasant (muzāri') who needs to have seed, a pair of oxen, and tools and implements. Possession of land is not included among the essential prerequisites. Clearly, our divine was living in a period of land abundance. We know from other evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that large tracts of the Gangetic plains were still under forest. In the thirteenth century tigers harassed wayfarers between Badaun and Delhi; and in the next century we read of jungles in the middle Doab (the tract between the Yamuna and Ganga) large enough for vast numbers of peasants to take refuge in, during times of trouble. It was quite different from the conditions prevailing even by the end of the sixteenth century, when land in the tract was almost fully under cultivation.

Agriculture was carried on by peasants living in villages. Each village is said to have contained 200 or 300 men. Cultivation was based on individual peasant farming, and the size of land cultivated by them varied greatly, from the large holdings of the khots or headmen, to the petty plots of the balāhars, or village menials. Below the peasantry there must have existed a large landless population, composed of the ‘menial’ castes. But we have no information about them in our sources, and we must assume their existence only on the basis of what we know of later conditions.