Beyond settled villages

The idea that rural India in the Mughal period was only about settled villages and plough agriculture is incomplete. A vast part of the countryside lay outside the reach of the plough, covered by forests and scrubland. The people who lived there — called jangli in contemporary texts — followed a way of life that was mobile, seasonal, and deeply tied to the forest. For the Mughal state, this world was not just a different kind of economy; it was a political problem.

The extent of forest cover

Forests were not a marginal feature of the landscape. Dense forest (jangal) and scrubland (kharbandi) stretched across huge areas: eastern India, central India, northern India (including the Terai along the Indo-Nepal border), Jharkhand, and the peninsular region down the Western Ghats and the Deccan plateau. While it is nearly impossible to calculate an all-India average for this period, informed guesses based on contemporary sources suggest that roughly 40 per cent of the land was under forest cover.

Who were the jangli?

The term jangli appears in Mughal texts. It is important to understand what it meant then, because the modern usage of the word carries a very different — and misleading — sense.

These activities were not random. They followed a strict seasonal cycle, which in turn shaped the lives of forest communities.

The seasonal cycle of forest dwellers

The textbook gives the example of the Bhils to show how this cycle worked:

This sequence did two things. First, it presumed mobility — you cannot stay in one place if your food sources change with the seasons. Second, it perpetuated that mobility, making it a distinctive feature of forest tribes. Unlike settled peasants who were tied to a fixed plot of land, the jangli moved.

The state’s view of the forest …