Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c10.12

c10.12

To flee and settle down in forests was a very successful survival strategy of the Indian people and this is vouched by many observers including Babur. He says that when he arrived in Agra, neither grain for ourselves nor corn for our horse., was to be had. The villagers, out of hostility, and hatred to us had taken to thieving and highway-robbery; there was no moving on the roads All the inhabitants (*khalaiq*) had run away in terror.¹¹ And naturally they had sought refuge elsewhere. For at another place he writes that In Hindustan villages and towns are depopulated and set up in a moment If they (the people) fix their eyes on a place in which to settle they make a tank or dig a well Khas-grass abounds, wood is unlimited, huts are made and straightaway there is a village or a town. There was no dearth of forests and no dearth of water therein.¹² The countryside was studded with little forts, many in inaccessible forests, some surrounded with nothing more than mud walls, but which nevertheless provided centres of the general tradition of opposition and unrest. For, the more the repression the more the resistance. Even emperor Jahangir in the seventeenth century confessed that the number of the turbulent and the disaffected never seems to diminish; for what with the examples made during the reign of my father, and subsequently of my own, there is scarcely a province in the empire in which, in one quarter or the other, some accursed miscreant will not spring up to unfurl the standard of rebellion; so that in Hindustan never has there existed a period of complete repose.¹³ In short, in such a society, the millions of armed men, observes Dirk H. Kolf, cultivators or otherwise, were its (governments) rivals rather than its subjects.¹⁴ The one attacked from the open, the other often warded off the attack from jungle hide-outs. Those who took to the forest, stayed there, eating wild fruits, tree-roots, and coarse grain if and when available,¹⁵ but surely all the time guarding their freedom.