Q.What are the problems of using official sources in writing about the history of peasants?

The biggest problem with using official sources like the Ain-i-Akbari to study peasants is that they were written from the perspective of the state, not the peasant. The Ain was designed to record revenue, land, and administration — it tells us what the Mughal empire wanted to collect, not what peasants actually experienced.

Several specific issues arise:

• Silence on peasant life: The Ain gives detailed data on crop yields, prices, and revenue rates, but says almost nothing about how peasants lived, what they thought, or how they resisted oppression.
• Top-down bias: The author, Abu'l Fazl, was a courtier writing to glorify Akbar's rule. The source treats peasants as a resource to be managed, not as people with their own agency or struggles.
• Incomplete coverage: The Ain focuses on the core Mughal provinces and on revenue-paying land. It ignores marginal groups, shifting cultivation, and regions outside imperial control. …

To understand the problems of using official sources for peasant history, you first have to appreciate what these sources were made for. The Ain-i-Akbari, written by Abu’l Fazl in the late 16th century, was not a neutral record of rural life. It was a manual of imperial administration — a tool for the Mughal state to assess land, fix revenue, and control its vast agrarian base. The peasant appears in its pages only as a taxpayer, a producer of surplus, a number in a revenue schedule. The state wanted to know how much land was under cultivation, what crops were grown, and what share of the harvest could be claimed as tax. It did not care about the peasant’s name, his family, his debts, his festivals, or his grievances.

This creates the first and most fundamental problem: the peasant is invisible as a person. The Ain-i-Akbari gives us detailed classifications of land — polaj (land continuously cultivated), parauti (fallow), banjar (waste) — and precise revenue rates for different crops. But it never tells us what a peasant thought about his landlord, how he coped with a drought, or whether he resisted oppressive demands. The source treats the peasant as a passive object of policy, not as an active historical agent. If you rely only on such official records, you end up writing a history of the state’s intentions, not of the peasant’s experience.

A second problem is the silence on conflict and resistance. Official sources are written from the perspective of the ruling elite. They record what the state did — surveys, assessments, grants — but they rarely mention peasant revolts, everyday forms of resistance like flight or foot-dragging, or the violence of revenue collection. When the Ain-i-Akbari does mention peasants, it is usually in the context of fixing a just revenue or praising a benevolent emperor. The messy, brutal reality of exploitation — the zamindar’s exactions, the moneylender’s grip, the famine that drove families off the land — is almost entirely absent. A historian who uses only these sources would paint a picture of a smoothly running agrarian machine, which is far from the truth.

A third problem is the bias of perspective. Official sources are written by literate, urban, elite men — courtiers, clerks, revenue officials. They bring their own assumptions about peasants: that they are ignorant, superstitious, in need of guidance, or simply a resource to be managed. This language seeps into the record. The peasant is rarely described with dignity. When a revolt is mentioned in a later Mughal chronicle, it is called a “disturbance” or “rebellion” — never a justified protest against injustice. The historian who uncritically adopts this vocabulary ends up reproducing the elite’s judgment, not understanding the peasant’s world. …