The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India c11.s2: Bare Subsistence
The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India c11.s2
- Language
- English
Bare Subsistence
c11.s2.1
According to W.H. Moreland the question really at issue was how to break the power of the rural leaders, the chiefs and the headmen of *parganas* and villages¹¹ Sultan Alauddin therefore undertook a series of measures to crush them by striking at their major source of power-wealth.¹² But in the process, leaders and followers, rich and poor, all were affected. The king started by raising the land tax (*Kharaj*) to fifty percent. Under rulers like Iltutmish and Balban, it does not seem to have been above one-third of the produce. Furthermore, under Alauddins system all the land occupied by the rich and the poor was brought under assessment at the uniform rate of fifty per cent. This measure automatically reduced the chiefs practically to the position of peasants. The king also levied house-tax and grazing tax. According to the contemporary chronicler Ziyauddin Barani, all milk-producing animals like cows and goats were taxed. According to Farishtah, animals up to two pairs of oxen, a pair of buffaloes and some cows and goats were exempted.¹³ This concession was based on the principle of *nisab*, namely, of leaving some minimum capital to enable one to carry on with ones work.¹⁴ But it was hardly any relief, for there were taxes like *kari*, (derived from Hindi word Kar), *charai* and *Jiziyah*. The sultans of Delhi collected *Jiziyah* at the rate of forty, twenty and ten *tankahs* from the rich, the middleclass and the poor respectively.¹⁵
c11.s2.2
In short, a substantial portion of the produce was taken away by the government as taxes and the people were left with the bare minimum for sustenance. For the Sultan had directed that only so much should be left to his subjects (*raiyyat*) as would maintain them from year to year without admitting of their storing up or having articles in excess. Sultan Alauddins rigorous measures were taken note of by contemporary writers both in India and abroad. In India contemporary writers like Barani, Isami and Amir Khusrau were inclined to believe him to be a persecutor of the Hindus. Foreigners also gathered the same impression. Maulana Shamsuddin Turk, a divine from Egypt, was happy to learn that Alauddin had made the wretchedness and misery of the Hindus so great and had reduced them to such a despicable condition that the Hindu women and children went out begging at the doors of the Musalmans.¹⁶ The same impression is conveyed in the writings of Isami and Wassaf.¹⁷ While summing up the achievements of Alauddin Khalji, the contemporary chronicler Barani mentions, with due emphasis, that by the last decade of his reign the submission and obedience of the Hindus had become an established fact. Such a submission on the part of the Hindus has neither been seen before nor will be witnessed hereafter. In brief, not only the Hindu Zamindars, who had been accustomed to a life of comfort and dignity, were reduced to a deplorable position, but the Hindus in general were impoverished to such an extent that there was no sign of gold or silver left in their houses, and the wives of *Khuts* and *Muqaddams* used to seek sundry jobs in the houses of the Musalmans, work there and receive wages.¹⁸ The poor peasants (*balahars*) suffered the most. The fundamentalist Maulana Ziyauddin Barani feels jubilant at the suppression of the Hindus, and writes at length about the utter helplessness to which the peasantry had been reduced because the Sultan had left to them bare sustenance and had taken away everything else in *kharaj* (land revenue) and other taxes.¹⁹
c11.s2.3
But there was much greater oppression implicit in this measure. It was difficult to collect in full so many and such heavy taxes. One of the standing evils in the revenue collection consisted in defective realization which usually left large balances,²⁰ and unrealised balances used to become inevitable. Besides, lower revenue officials were corrupt and extortionate. To overcome these problems, Sultan Alauddin created a new ministry called the *Diwan-i-Mustakhraj*. The *Mustakhraj* was entrusted with the work of inquiring into the revenue arrears, and realizing them.²¹ We shall discuss about the tyranny of this department a little later; suffice it here to say that in Alauddins time, besides being oppressed by such a grinding tax-structure, the peasant was compelled to sell every maund of his surplus grain at government controlled rates for replenishing royal grain stores which the Sultan had ordered to be built in order to sustain his Market Control.²²
c11.s2.4
After Alauddins death (C.E. 1316) most of his measures seem to have fallen into disuse, but the peasants got no relief, because Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq who came to the throne four years later (C.E. 1320) continued the atrocious practice of Alauddin. He also ordered that there should be left only so much to the Hindus that neither, on the one hand, they should become arrogant on account of their wealth, nor, on the other, desert their lands in despair.²³ In the time of Muhammad bin Tughlaq even this latter fear turned out to be true. The Sultans enhancement of taxation went even beyond the lower limits of bare subsistence. For the people left their fields and fled. This enraged the Sultan and he hunted them down like wild beasts.²⁴
c11.s2.5
Still conditions did not become unbearable all at once. Natures bounty to some extent compensated for the cruelty of the king. If the regime was extortionist, heavy rains sometimes helped in bumper production. Babur noted that Indias crops are all rain grown.²⁵ Farming in north India depended upon the monsoon rains coming from the Bay of Bengal. Artificial irrigation was there on a very limited scale, for irrigation is not at all a necessity in cultivating crops and orchards. Autumn crops (*Kharif* season) grow by the downpour of the rains themselves; and strange it is that spring crops (*Rabi* season) grow even when no rain falls. Young trees are watered during two or three years after which they need no more (watering)²⁶ as the ground gets soaked with rain in the monsoon season. Ibn Battuta gives a detailed description of the crops grown in India and adds: The grains that have been described are *Kharif* grains. They are harvested 60 days after sowing. Thereafter *Rabi* grains like wheat, barley and massoor are sown. These are sown in the very same field in which *Rabi* grains (are harvested). The soil of this country is very fertile and is of excellent quality. Rice is sown three times in the year. Production of rice is the largest in the country. Sesame and sugar-cane are also sown with *Kharif*.²⁷ Shams Siraj Afif writes that when, during the monsoon season, there were spells of heavy rains, Sultan Firoz Tughlaq appointed officers to examine the banks of all the water courses and report how far the inundations had extended. If he was informed that large tracts had been made fertile by the spread of waters, he was overwhelmed with joy. But if any village went to ruin (on account of floods), he treated its officials with great severity.²⁸
c11.s2.6
But the basic policy of impoverishing the people, resulted in crippling of agricultural economy. By the Mughal period the condition of the peasantry became miserable; if there was any progress it was in the enhancement of taxation. According to W.H. Moreland, who has made a special study of the agrarian system of Mughal India, the basic object of the Mughal administration was to obtain the revenue on an ever-ascending scale. The share that could be taken out of the peasant's produce without destroying his chances of survival was probably a matter of common knowledge in each locality. In Akbars time, in Kashmir, the state demand was one-third, but in reality it came to two-thirds.²⁹ The Jagirdars in Thatta (Sindh) did not take more than half. In Gujarat, according to Geleynsen who wrote in 1629, the peasant was made to part with three-quarters of his harvest. Similar is the testimony of De Laet, Fryer and Van Twist.³⁰ During Akbars reign, says Abul Fazl, evil hearted officers because of sheer greed, used to proceed to villages and *mahals* and sack them.³¹ Conditions became intolerable by the time of Shahjahan when, according to Manucci, peasants were compelled to sell their women and children to meet the revenue demand.³² Manrique writes that the peasants were carried off to various markets and fairs, (to be sold) with their poor unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children all crying and lamenting³³ Bernier too affirms that the unfortunate peasants who were incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, were bereft of their children, who were carried away as slaves.³⁴ Here was also confirmation, if not actually the beginning, of the practice of bonded labour in India.
c11.s2.7
In these circumstances the peasant had little interest in cultivating the land. Bernier observes that as the ground is seldom tilled otherwise than by compulsion the whole country is badly cultivated, and a great part rendered unproductive The peasant cannot avoid asking himself this question: Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come tomorrow and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess and value without leaving me the means (even) to drag my own miserable existence? - The Timariots (Timurids), Governors and Revenue contractors, on their part reason in this manner: Why should the neglected state of this land create uneasiness in our minds, and why should we expend our own money and time to render it fruitful? We may be deprived of it in a single moment Let us draw from the soil all the money we can, though the peasant should starve or abscond³⁵ The situation made the tax-gatherer callous and exploitative on the one hand and the peasant fatalistic and disinterested on the other. The result, in Berniers own words, was that most towns in Hindustan are made up of earth, mud, and other wretched material; that there is no city or town (that) does not bear evident marks of approaching decay.³⁶ Wherever Muslim despots ruled, ruin followed, so that, writes he, similar is the present condition of *Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Palestine*, the once wonderful plain of *Antioch*, and so many other regions anciently well cultivated, fertile and populous, but now desolate Egypt also exhibits a sad picture ³⁷
c11.s2.8
To revert to the Mughal empire. An important order in the reign of Aurangzeb describes the Jagirdars as demanding in theory only half but in practice actually more than the total yield.³⁸ Describing the conditions of the latter part of the seventeenth century Mughal empire, Dr. Tara Chand writes: The desire of the State was to extract the economic rent, so that nothing but bare subsistence. remained for the peasant. Aurangzebs instructions were that there shall be left for everyone who cultivates his land as much as he requires for his own support till the next crop be reaped and that of his family and for seed. This much shall be left to him, what remains is land tax, and shall go to the public treasury.³⁹
c11.s2.9
Conditions could not always have been that bad. There were steps taken from time to time to help cultivation and ameliorate the condition of the agriculturists. Shamsuddin Iltutmish constructed a large tank called *Hauz-i-Shamsi*. Traces of Alauddin Khaljis *Hauz-i-Khas* and Firoz Tughlaqs irrigation canals still exist. Similar steps taken in Mughal times are also known. But such steps in aid of the development were taken because these could offer better means of increasing the revenue. Some steps which looked like helping the agriculturists, sometimes resulted in their perpetual penury. For example, a very common administrative measure of the medieval times was to advance loans to peasants to help them tide over their difficulties. But the important ideal entertained by rulers can be best summarized in the words of Sher Shahs instructions to his *Amils*: Be lenient at the time of assessment, but show no mercy at the time of collection. This was, on the face of it, a good principle. But even Sher Shah Suri, renowned for his concern for the wellbeing of cultivators, was much more keen about the benefits to be drawn by his Afghan clansmen from the lands they administered. He sent his good old loyal experienced servants to districts which yielded good profits and advantages and after two years or so transfered them and sent other servants like them that they may also prosper.⁴⁰ It was of course the peasant who paid for this prosperity.