Forests and Tribes

The Forest as a World Apart

Rural India in the Mughal period was not just about settled villages and plough agriculture. Vast stretches of the subcontinent were covered in forest — dense woodland called jangal or scrubland known as kharbandi. These forests stretched across eastern India, central India, northern India (including the Terai along the Indo-Nepal border), Jharkhand, and down the Western Ghats and the Deccan plateau. While it is impossible to fix an exact all-India average for forest cover during this period, informed estimates based on contemporary sources suggest it was around 40 per cent.

The people who lived in these forests were called jangli in contemporary texts. This term did not mean they were uncivilised, as the modern usage of the word might suggest. Instead, jangli simply described those whose livelihood came from gathering forest produce, hunting, and shifting agriculture. These activities were closely tied to the seasons. Among the Bhils, for example, spring was for collecting forest produce, summer for fishing, the monsoon months for cultivation, and autumn and winter for hunting. This seasonal cycle both assumed and encouraged mobility — a defining feature of forest-dwelling tribes.

For the Mughal state, the forest was a troublesome place — a refuge (mawas) for rebels and troublemakers. Babur himself noted that jungles provided a good defence, “behind which the people of the pargana become stubbornly rebellious and pay no taxes.”

How the Outside World Entered the Forests

External forces penetrated the forests in several ways.

State demands and tribute. The Mughal army needed elephants, so the peshkash (tribute) collected from forest people often included a supply of elephants. The hunt itself was a powerful symbol in Mughal political ideology. Regular hunting expeditions, according to court historians, allowed the emperor to travel across his vast territories and personally attend to the grievances of his subjects. Court painters often depicted the hunt, inserting a small scene somewhere in the picture that symbolised a harmonious reign.

Clearing forests for agriculture. A sixteenth-century Bengali poem, Chandimangala by Mukundaram Chakrabarti, tells the story of Kalaketu, who set up a kingdom by clearing forests. The poem describes outsiders coming from various lands — Das people from the north, harvesters from the south, and Zafar Mian with twenty-two thousand men from the west. They brought heavy knives, axes, and battle-axes. Having cleared the forest, they established markets. The poem vividly notes: “Hearing the sound of the axe, tigers became apprehensive and ran away, roaring.”

Trade between hills and plains. Abu’l Fazl describes the transactions between hill tribes and the plains in the suba of Awadh (present-day Uttar Pradesh). Goods from the mountains — carried on the backs of men, stout ponies, and goats — included gold, copper, lead, musk, yak tails, honey, chuk (an acid made from orange juice and lemon boiled together), pomegranate seed, ginger, long pepper, majith root (a plant producing red dye), borax, zedoary (a root resembling turmeric), wax, woollen stuffs, wooden ware, and various birds of prey. In exchange, the hill people carried back white and coloured cloths, amber, salt, asafoetida, ornaments, and glass and earthenware.

Commercial agriculture. The spread of commercial agriculture was a major external factor affecting forest dwellers. Forest products like honey, beeswax, and gum lac were in great demand. Gum lac became a major item of overseas export from India in the seventeenth century. Elephants were also captured and sold. Trade often involved barter. Some tribes, like the Lohanis in Punjab, were engaged in overland trade between India and Afghanistan, as well as in town-country trade within Punjab itself.

Social and Political Changes Among Tribes …