Service, Slavery and Social Dependency in Mughal South Asia

In Mughal South Asia, work could be paid by the day or month, tied to customary service rights, or compelled without wages. Enslavement created a more severe relation: a person could be bought and held as property. These arrangements shaped who performed domestic tasks, how labourers received support, and what claims employers and communities could make on their work. The Mughal dynasty lasted from 1526 to 1857; the evidence here chiefly concerns the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

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Enslavement and paid service

Historian Shireen Moosvi’s survey of labour in Mughal India estimates that around 1600 slavery formed a small part of the labour force and was concentrated in domestic service and concubinage, the keeping of an enslaved woman as a sexual partner. Free servants usually predominated in domestic work. Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) attempted to prohibit the slave trade and forcible enslavement, and freed people held as imperial slaves. Such measures did not end slavery: domestic slaves and concubines remained in elite households and those of officials and ordinary people.

Paid servants also worked across social ranks. Moosvi discusses a 1626 account of Agra, in northern India, describing servants in the households of soldiers, merchants and officials. In great households, servants often had distinct duties; those employed by lower officials and ordinary people more often combined tasks. An officer’s personal attendants in the mid-eighteenth century, for example, also cooked.

Wages and household work

In towns and imperial or aristocratic establishments, money wages were common. Daily rates applied to much skilled and unskilled work, while regular employees, including domestic servants, were often paid monthly. Employers might also provide food, lodging or old clothes, and salaries could be delayed. Women’s work crossed household and market settings: they weeded and transplanted crops, husked and ground grain, spun cotton and, in some crafts, earned wages directly.

At Akbar’s late-sixteenth-century court, Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari describes female supervisors for the women’s sections and one woman selected as their writer. Separately, he describes an expenditure writer attached to the private audience hall who kept accounts of cash and stores. When a woman sought a purchase within her salary, she applied to a cash-keeper; that officer sent a memorandum to the expenditure writer, who checked it before the general treasurer paid in cash. Abu’l Fazl places women guards inside the enclosure and eunuchs, castrated men serving in the palace, outside it, followed farther out by Rajput guards and gate porters.

For short journeys, Abu’l Fazl describes a guarded enclosure, pavilions for favored women, and tents for servants. A separate nearby enclosure housed female servants, while guards watched the approaches to the camp.

Customary village service

In villages, some occupations were supported by recurring customary entitlements rather than a wage for every task. Moosvi describes balutas, or rural service workers, such as hereditary barbers, potters, carpenters, blacksmiths and watchmen. They performed recognized services for villagers and could receive a small tax-free plot, a share of the harvest, or both. Extra work beyond the customary duties could bring additional payment.

These arrangements linked a family’s livelihood to its village, but they were not the same as legal ownership of a person. Moosvi notes that such customary rights and duties could keep families practically tied to a locality, while finding no legal bar to their movement. Caste shaped many occupations: a jati was a community whose members generally married within the group and inherited occupational expectations. The particular services and entitlements varied by place.

Compulsory labour and its limits

Begar was compulsory unpaid labour. In Kashmir, a Himalayan region in northern South Asia, Akbar’s 1597 order and Shah Jahan’s 1641 order addressed demands for people to pick and clean saffron and carry timber or firewood, as recorded in Moosvi’s account. A fort built by Akbar at Srinagar in the Kashmir Valley in 1598 carried an inscription stating that its construction workers were paid from the treasury and that no unpaid labour was used.