4 - Land revenue and rural society

Summary

Despite centuries of Muslim dominance in the Indo-Gangetic plain, Akbar's officials found consolidation of state power incomplete. In the second half of the sixteenth century both force and diplomacy were needed to subdue and pacify rural society. Even within the zone of direct administration, in the most fertile hinterlands of the towns, supposedly inhabited by subjects regulated by a tax system, the Mughals confronted only partially subdued local polities. In more distant regions were barely tributary areas that had been recently settled and colonized by Hindu and Muslim armed warrior-pioneers. Extension of centralized administrative control over these areas would be unprecedented.

In one pargana after another armed, potentially hostile, warrior lineages–Rajputs, Jats, and other locally rooted caste elites – ruled the cultivating peasantry. These local aristocratic lineages and their lineage heads or chiefs dominated individual parganas, or segments of parganas by virtue of conquest, migration and colonization. Parganas in the north were miniature kingdoms containing from as few as twenty to as many as two hundred contiguous villages. These were the primary building blocks of political control in Indian rural society – not individual villages.

Local elites had performed a key role in organizing, financing, and leading peasant-cultivators in a process of jungle-clearing and settlement. Often this expansion required armed battle with indigenous “tribals” or non-Hindu groups who cultivated and settled much less intensively than the newcomers.