Cities, Villages and Community Life in Mughal South Asia

From the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, most people in Mughal South Asia lived in rural settlements, while cities concentrated courts, officials, soldiers, artisans, merchants and service workers. Grain, taxes, craft production, credit and travel linked village households to towns, capitals and ports. In the regions now divided among India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, local work and imperial movement shaped distinct communities.

Village work and service relationships

Cultivating households combined family labor with animals, tools and, during demanding seasons, hired workers. Agricultural laborers might receive cash or grain by the day or season. Women weeded and transplanted crops, ground grain, tended cattle and spun or processed fibers; their work often contributed to household income without a separate wage being recorded.

Some villages supported hereditary service groups. The historian Shireen Moosvi describes arrangements in which rural specialists such as carpenters, smiths and potters received grain, shares of produce or land in return for customary duties. These relationships tied particular service and caste groups, hereditary communities that generally married within the group, to cultivating households: a carpenter might maintain ploughs and carts, while a potter supplied storage and cooking vessels. Artisans also took market orders and traveled to places where merchants or patrons offered work.

Local headmen and record keepers dealt with revenue officials and helped document cultivation, dues and land claims. In Malwa, in present-day west-central India, a 1658 boundary inquiry sent village headmen and revenue officers along a disputed boundary with witnesses before they recorded a settlement. The walk turned local knowledge of fields and markers into a revenue record.

Markets and urban neighborhoods

Periodic markets and permanent bazaars let rural producers sell grain, cloth and other goods and obtain tools or credit. Larger towns supported specialist workshops and merchants with customers beyond one district. In Patna, in present-day Bihar, India, English East India Company factors established a temporary silk-winding workshop in 1620 that employed nearly one hundred people. The example shows a trading company organizing paid production alongside independent and household work.

In Delhi, now India’s capital, during the 1660s, the French traveler François Bernier described open shops beneath rows of arches, with storage behind them. Some families lived above or behind commercial premises. He also saw modest mud-and-thatch dwellings occupied by soldiers and followers alongside the larger houses of nobles, placing lodging and trade within the same urban streetscape.

Neighborhood life also depended on institutions and service occupations. A kotwal, or city magistrate, supervised security and market order. Water carriers, domestic servants, animal keepers and construction workers supplied daily needs. Mosques, temples and shrines gave residents places to gather, though their role varied with the neighborhood and community.

Capitals, ports and mobile courts

When a Mughal ruler shifted residence, the traveling court brought officials, guards, household staff, artisans and suppliers onto the road. Bernier describes the camp as organized by departments, with tents arranged around the emperor’s quarters, transport animals and carts carrying supplies, cooks serving the household, and guards keeping night watches. Merchants set up a market beside this moving population, where camp residents could obtain food and other necessities.

In Dhaka, present-day Bangladesh, the seventeenth-century Bara Katra combined merchants’ and travelers’ accommodation with shops near the Buriganga River. Its endowment provided income for repairs and assistance, connecting trade, lodging and charitable support within a regional port city.