Work and Household Routines in Mughal South Asia

From the empire’s founding in 1526 to its formal end in 1857, work in Mughal South Asia ranged from seasonal cultivation to household craft, market trade and service in elite establishments. Accounts from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries show how tasks, skills and payment were organized in particular settings.

Field work and village services

Cultivating households worked with their own cattle and tools, while family members supplied much of the labor. Ploughing and sowing gave way to weeding, transplanting and harvest work; when a cultivator needed additional hands, agricultural workers could be hired by the day or season and paid in cash or kind. A harvest also supported village specialists whose work kept farming and domestic life going.

In some villages, hereditary barbers, potters, carpenters, blacksmiths, watchmen, shoemakers and sweepers received small tax-free plots or shares of grain from cultivators in return for customary services. They could earn extra payment for work beyond those duties. The arrangement tied a craft or service to the village’s land and harvest: a blacksmith’s repair work, for example, supported the tools used by cultivators, while grain shares linked the specialist’s livelihood to harvest time.

Women’s labor was part of both field and household production. Historian Shireen Moosvi documents weeding and transplanting, tending cattle, picking saffron in Kashmir, husking and grinding grain, separating cotton seeds from fibre (ginning) and spinning yarn. In pottery, women prepared clay while men worked it on the wheel. A painting made around 1595 shows women pounding and sifting limestone for mortar, then carrying lime and bricks to bricklayers. These tasks joined food, textile, pottery and building work to the household economy.

Craft work at home and in workshops

Many artisans, including weavers, ironsmiths, carpenters and oil pressers, worked at home and sold finished goods there or at a market or fair. A home could therefore be both a production space and a shop. A merchant’s advance, called dadani, changed the terms: after receiving money before production, an artisan might promise to work for that merchant alone or supply goods at an agreed price. The advance financed materials and labor, while the order limited the maker’s choice of buyer.

Other production took place in a karkhana, a workshop maintained by a ruler, noble or merchant. In 1620, English East India Company agents opened a temporary silk-winding workshop at Patna, in present-day India, that employed nearly one hundred people. Moosvi considers silk winding suited to piece rates, payment for each unit completed. Abu’l Fazl’s account of Akbar’s court, written in the late sixteenth century, describes more than one hundred offices and workshops, with separate treasurers and regular accounts of receipts and spending.

Skills could be learned through close instruction. Abu’l Fazl recounts that Akbar noticed Daswanth, the son of a palanquin-bearer, drawing on workshop walls. Daswanth was already in the workshop’s service; Akbar then placed him under the painter Abd al-Samad’s instruction, and he became one of the court’s leading artists. The episode records recognition and training under an established master.

Wages, servants and compulsory work

Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari, an account of Akbar’s administration and household around 1595, lists money rates for skilled and unskilled work. In towns, daily wages were common; regular artisans and servants could be paid monthly, sometimes partly in old clothing. Construction work could also be paid by the piece. Accounts mention delayed salaries, showing that a stated rate and the timing of payment were separate matters.

Household service changed with the employer’s means and rank. Francisco Pelsaert, writing about Agra, in present-day India, around 1626, described servants in the households of soldiers, merchants and officials. In a great lord’s house, Pelsaert said, servants had distinct duties; attendants serving a more modest official could combine roles. A mid-eighteenth-century account, for example, describes an officer’s personal attendants also working as cooks. Some employees received monthly wages, while others combined tasks.

Compulsory labor could disrupt ordinary work. Begar meant unpaid labor demanded for tasks such as carrying baggage. In Kashmir, Akbar issued an order in 1597 and Shah Jahan another in 1641 against extracting unpaid labor for picking and cleaning saffron or carrying timber and firewood. An inscription at Akbar’s fort in Srinagar, built in 1598, instead declared that labor there had been paid from the imperial treasury. The records connect seasonal work, public building and payment to specific state actions in Kashmir.