Mughal-Period Land, Revenue and Agrarian Society

Detailed chapter description

Mughal rule did not replace the agrarian society of Mithila, Vajji and Anga with a single uniform land system. It superimposed imperial fiscal claims, assignments and administrative categories upon village production, regional chieftaincies, hereditary local offices and ecologies shaped by the Ganga, Gandak, Kosi and their tributaries. The most useful contemporary source, Abu’l-Fazl’s A’in-i Akbari, gives unusually detailed fiscal statistics for the Bihar subah, including the sarkars of Tirhut, Hajipur and Munger. Yet those figures record assessed revenue and administrative knowledge; they do not by themselves tell us what every cultivator paid, what every zamindar retained, or how much was actually collected in a flood-prone year. This chapter therefore reconstructs Mughal agrarian society through a layered method: official statistics, regional revenue documents, the history of Bihar’s zamindars and chieftains, agrarian ecology, and later gazetteer summaries are used together but never treated as interchangeable archives. The Mughal state’s agrarian income depended on the crop produced by cultivators, but the path from field to treasury passed through multiple claims. Irfan Habib’s central warning remains essential: the Mughal land revenue was neither a modern property tax nor simply a landlord’s rent. It was a state claim upon agricultural produce, expressed through assessment, rates, measurement, crop estimates and cash equivalents. In regional society this claim interacted with the rights of zamindars, village headmen, hereditary record-keepers and cultivators. To study revenue is therefore to study power, labour and negotiation: who could demand, who could record, who could resist, who advanced cash, and who bore the risk when crops failed.