Peasants and their lands

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about 85 per cent of India's people lived in villages. Farming was the base of the economy.

But peasants did not write about themselves. So our main source is the Ain-i Akbari by Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's court historian, which records how the state organised agriculture and collected revenue. It is a view from the top, written for the court.

Historians supplement it with revenue records from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, and with the extensive records of the East India Company.

The Mughal records called peasants raiyat (plural riaya) or muzarian; they also used the words kisan and asami. There were two kinds of peasants: khud-kashta, who lived in the village where they held their land; and pahi-kashta, non-resident cultivators who farmed land elsewhere, either by choice or because of distress.

Most peasants in north India had at most a pair of bullocks and two ploughs; some had more. Land was individually owned, and could be bought and sold, like any other property. Peasants farmed; others wrote about them.