The revenue-yielding land administered directly by the imperial Revenue Department was known as khalisa. Ordinarily the most fertile and easily administered lands were brought within the khalisa.
The extent of such lands varied from time to time. Jahangir reduced the extent of khalisa lands, but Shah Jahan increased it. Again in the later years of Aurangzeb’s reign lands were released from tht khalisa area for jagir assignments. KJialisa lands were often converted into jagirs and vice versa.
In the Mughal agrarian system there were a number of intermediaries such as the zamindars, the muqaddams or the mukhiyas, the chaudhuris, the talluqdars etc. Virtually the entire country was under the jurisdiction of one or another type of intermediary who played a very important political, administrative and economic role in the Mughal Empire.
Their principal duties were to submit revenue returns, to maintain law and order and to ensure that assessments were reasonably made. The Mughal Empire was fundamentally dependent on the cooperation and support of the zamindars.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Towards the close of Aurangzeb’s reign the burden of the share of different categories of zamindars as also of the imperial revenue demand ultimately fell on the cultivators, which placed a great strain on the agrarian economy. As the imperial authority declined and the pressure on jagirs increased, the agricultural economy had to face a crisis which began to deepen in the eighteenth century.
Agricultural Production: An important feature of Indian agriculture during the Mughal period was the large number of food and non-food crops. The Ain-i-Akbari gives revenue rates for sixteen crops of the rabi (spring) harvest, and twenty- five crops of the kharif (autumn) season.
The seventeenth century saw the introduction and expansion of two major crops-tobacco and maize. Sericulture also witnessed enormous expansion during this century, making Bengal one of the great silk-producing regions of the world. Horticulture also witnessed some important developments.
An interesting feature of agriculture during the Mughal times was the mobility of peasantry. In this connection we find two terms – the khudkasht and the paikasht or pahikasht – frequently mentioned in the contemporary sources.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The interpretation of these terms is disputed, but according to the widely accepted meaning of the terms, khudkasht was a peasant proprietor who was “directly exercising proprietary rights over land either as a peasant proprietor or as a person cultivating his lands or as a person who had given out his land to his tenant farmers”.
Pahikasht referred to peasants who either cultivated the lands in other villages or took up cultivation of others’ lands as tenant farmers. During the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries there was no shortage of land and fresh virgin lands were being brought under cultivation.
The Indian peasantry in the Mughal Empire was highly stratified and there was considerable difference in the size of holdings, produce and resources of the peasants within the same locality.
The difference in the size of holdings and resources of the peasants had its implications on the cultivation of different crops. The market and cash crops, such as cotton, sugarcane, indigo, opium, etc., which required larger investment, were cultivated only by the bigger peasants or small zamindars. During the seventeenth century, India produced enormous quantities of ‘industrial crops’.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
There were two factors – natural and human- which accounted for serious interruptions or violent setbacks in agricultural production. The first factor was climatic which in severe conditions often resulted in recurring famines leading to set backs in agricultural production.
The mortality in each major famine, which was often accompanied by pestilence, was frightening. The human facto related to agrarian exploitation which was so oppressive to the peasantry that no spectacular increase in agricultural production was possible.