Mughal Agriculture and Landholding

Mughal agriculture joined the work of cultivating households to seasonal water, labor, local rights and demands on produce. From the empire’s establishment in 1526 to the end of its court in 1857, those relationships changed across regions and generations. Evidence from Akbar’s late-sixteenth-century administration and seventeenth-century Malwa shows how fields supplied both household needs and commercial markets, while several people could hold claims connected to the same land.

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Crops and seasonal work

Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari, an account of Akbar’s government compiled around 1595, separates crop prices by spring and autumn harvests. Its spring list includes wheat, barley, gram, lentils, peas and mustard; its autumn list gives several kinds of rice and paddy. The tables show how Akbar’s administration grouped crops by season, while farmers’ choices depended on local rainfall, flood and irrigation. Rice and monsoon-dependent crops relied on summer rain or stored and channelled water, while winter crops such as wheat matured through the cooler season.

Between sowing and harvest, cultivation required repeated work. A cattle-drawn wooden plough opened a shallow furrow, and the lighter plough disturbed less soil than a heavy turning plough. Farmers commonly scattered seed by hand, though a seed drill was used for some crops; cotton could also be planted by making individual holes for the seed. Hoeing and weeding kept competing growth down.

Cultivating families worked with their own cattle and tools, and women took part in weeding, transplanting, animal care, grain husking and grinding. Shireen Moosvi’s study also records women picking saffron in Kashmir, where a high-value crop called for a region-specific harvest task. Larger cultivators could hire additional workers for daily or seasonal jobs, with wages paid in cash or kind. This divided some work between family members and hired laborers while tying both to the crop calendar.

Village services could also be paid through claims on land and harvests. Shireen Moosvi describes hereditary carpenters, blacksmiths, potters and other rural workers receiving small tax-free plots, shares of grain at harvest, or both in return for recognized services to villagers. These customary rights linked the repair and making of tools to the agricultural cycle.

Water, fields and local claims

Rainfall and river floods supplied much of the water, while wells and tanks allowed cultivators to supplement them. A wooden dhenkli, or lever scoop, raised water from a well and tipped it into a field channel; it suited a short lift, while deeper wells required other devices. Canals and channels also supported cultivation where available, and their use depended on maintenance and on who could draw from a source.

A 1653 dispute in Malwa, in central India, shows how such rights operated. The villages of Navgaon and Khilchipur were established users of a shared pond; cultivators from Tornod began drawing its water for their fields, encroaching on that existing claim. A jagirdar, the official assigned local revenue, ordered that the Navgaon and Khilchipur users retain their possession of the pond water. His decision protected an established irrigation arrangement against a neighboring village’s new use.

Cultivation and layered landholding

The Persian term zamindar, literally “landholder,” covered varied rural authorities, from powerful chiefs to village-level holders and headmen. Some collected dues, negotiated with imperial officers or maintained armed followers. Cultivators’ rights to work particular fields could coexist with those claims and with the state’s right to demand revenue from the area. In eastern Bengal, in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta of modern Bangladesh, a 1688 imperial farman, or order, encouraged cultivation of waste land. Hanafi jurists, members of an Islamic legal school, and the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, a legal compilation sponsored by Aurangzeb, discussed claims by cultivators who cleared and settled such land alongside the rights of revenue holders and the state treasury. These texts recognized reclamation as a source of rights in Bengal while negotiating how those claims related to older cultivation and revenue assignments.

A jagir assigned an imperial servant the revenue of specified fiscal units to support his household and service. It gave the recipient a claim on income, usually realized through local officials and intermediaries, rather than direct possession of every field. Grants, village service claims, cultivation rights and revenue assignments could therefore overlap. Records mattered when families sought recognition, inheritance or reconfirmation of the claims they held.

Credit, harvests and exchange

A household might keep some grain for its own use and sell some produce to obtain cash for dues, tools or other purchases. Crops grown mainly for sale, such as cotton or sugar cane, added a further link between cultivation and processing or trade. Whether a family sold surplus or depended on market sales, the amount of cash due and the timing of a harvest shaped its ability to meet obligations.

Credit bridged the gap between the cost of sowing and the return from a harvest. In Malwa, the family of local revenue officers had borrowed from banjara traders, who also moved grain over long distances to towns and armies. In 1660, Purshottam Das, son of Mohan Das, repaid most of the loan his father and the father’s brothers had left unpaid; a bond for twenty-five rupees remained. The document made the balance and the family members responsible for settling it explicit. Later generations of the same family borrowed from Hindu and Afghan lenders. These cases show how landholding status did not prevent cash shortages, and how grain trading, credit and family claims met in local transactions.