Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c9.31

c9.31

The policy of Delhi Sultanate of leaving the bare minimum to the peasant helped in Firozs Dewshrime. Under Muslim rule, a substantial portion of the agricultural produce was taken away by the government as taxes and the people were left with the bare minimum for subsistence in order to impoverish them because it was thought that wealth was the source of "rebellion and disaffection.⁷⁵ This policy was in practice throughout the medieval period, both under the Sultans and the Mughals. Conditions became intolerable by the time of Shahjahan as attested to by Manucci and Manrique. Peasants were compelled to sell their women and children to meet the revenue demand. 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 lamenting, to meet the revenue demand. Bernier too affirms that the unfortunate peasants who were incapable of discharging the demand of their rapacious lords, were bereft of their children Who were carried away as slaves.⁷⁶ As in the Ottoman Empire, Christians and Jews turned Muslim were trained to fight their erstwhile brethren, so also in India in the medieval period Hindus captured and converted were made to fight their erstwhile brethren in Muslim wars of conquest. Trained or accustomed to fighting their own people, these converts to Islam are posing various kinds of problems in the present-day India and Eastern Europe.