Looking for sources

Our understanding of rural society in the Mughal period comes with a built-in limitation: the peasants themselves left no written records. They did not write about their own lives, struggles, or views. Everything we know about them comes from sources created by others — usually by the state or by elites who observed rural life from a distance.

The most important source for the agrarian history of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is the Ain-i Akbari (often called simply the Ain), written by Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s court historian. This chronicle is not a neutral description of village life. Its central purpose was to present a vision of Akbar’s empire as a place where social harmony was guaranteed by a strong ruling class. In the Ain, any revolt or assertion of independent power against the Mughal state is portrayed as doomed to fail. This means that whatever the Ain tells us about peasants is a view from the top — the perspective of the court, not the peasant.

That said, the Ain is still invaluable. It meticulously records three things the state did:

• Arrangements made to ensure cultivation
• Methods for collecting revenue through state agencies
• Rules governing the relationship between the state and rural magnates (the zamindars)

Fortunately, the Ain can be cross-checked and supplemented by other sources. These come from regions far from the Mughal capital and give us a more grounded picture:

• Detailed revenue records from Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• Extensive records of the East India Company, which provide useful descriptions of agrarian relations in eastern India (these are also discussed in Chapter 10 of the NCERT textbook) …