History · Ch 8 — Peasants, Zamindars and the State — Agrarian Society and the Mughal Empire
Village artisans
Village artisans
The village economy of Mughal India was not just about peasants and land. A significant part of daily life and production depended on a dense network of exchange between cultivators and the many artisans who lived alongside them.
Marathi documents and early British village surveys show that artisans could make up as much as 25 per cent of all households in a village. This is a substantial number, and it tells us that craft production was not a separate, urban activity — it was woven into the fabric of rural life.
However, the line between a peasant and an artisan was often blurry. Many groups did both jobs. Cultivators and their families regularly took part in craft work themselves — dyeing cloth, printing textiles, baking and firing pottery, and making or repairing agricultural tools. The agricultural calendar had natural breaks — between sowing and weeding, or between weeding and harvesting — when there was less work in the fields. This was the time when cultivators turned to artisanal production.
Alongside these part-time craftworkers were full-time village artisans: potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers, and even goldsmiths. They provided specialised services that the community needed. In return, they were compensated by the villagers in several ways.
The most common method of payment was a share of the harvest, or an allotment of land — often cultivable waste land. This allotment was usually decided by the village panchayat. In Maharashtra, such lands became the artisan’s miras or watan — a hereditary holding that passed down within the family.
Another system involved a direct, mutually negotiated arrangement between an individual artisan and a peasant household. Here, payment was mostly in the form of goods for services — not cash. For example, eighteenth-century records from Bengal mention zamindars who paid blacksmiths, carpenters, and even goldsmiths with “a small daily allowance and diet money”. This kind of arrangement later came to be called the jajmani system, though the term itself was not used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. …
The painting is a single, continuous scene of textile production set in and around a village. It is not divided into separate panels, but shows several stages of the work happening at the same time, so the viewer can follow the process from raw material to finished cloth.
In the foreground, you see women spinning thread on a simple hand-spindle (takli) and men working at a loom, weaving the thread into fabric. Nearby, large vats or dyeing pits are shown, with cloth being dipped into coloured liquid — this is the dyeing stage. The painting also includes a scene of cloth being printed or stamped with patterns, probably using wooden blocks. The layout is not strictly sequential; instead, the different activities are arranged across the picture plane to suggest they are all part of the same village economy.
The setting is clearly a village: you can see thatched roofs of huts, a courtyard, and perhaps a tree or two, indicating that this work is happening right where people live. There are no labels or arrows in the original painting — the artist relied on the arrangement of figures and objects to tell the story. What the painting teaches is that textile production was not a separate, factory-based industry in Mughal times. It was deeply embedded in village life, often done by the same families who worked the fields. The textbook text reinforces this: cultivators and their families would spin, dye, and weave during the lulls in the agricultural calendar — between sowing and weeding, or between weeding and harvesting. So the painting is a visual record of that seasonal, household-based craft work. …