Mughal Land Revenue and Administration

Land revenue was, in NCERT's own words, "the economic mainstay of the Mughal Empire", and the state built a real administrative apparatus around extracting it: officials to measure land, officials to assess what it owed, and officials to actually collect the amount. UPSC draws heavily on this chapter because it is dense with precise, easily confused technical terms, exactly the kind of vocabulary a matching or "which pair is correctly matched" question is built from. Getting jama and hasil, or khalisa and jagir, backwards is the single most common trap here. The chapter also covers peasant land rights, irrigation technology and the village community, genuine NCERT ground; the Banjara traders who moved grain across the empire are a real, separately examined part of Mughal agrarian history, drawn here from outside the specific NCERT chapter this note otherwise follows closely.

Peasants and their land: khud-kashta, pahi-kashta and how much a peasant actually held

Indo-Persian sources most often called a peasant a raiyat (plural riaya) or muzarian; kisan and asami appear too, asami used generically for a cultivator, though in some regional contexts (Bengal, for instance) it could specifically flag a comparatively well-off one. Seventeenth-century sources distinguish two kinds of cultivator by residence rather than wealth: khud-kashta peasants held land and lived in the village where they cultivated it; pahi-kashta peasants cultivated land in a village other than their own, on a contractual basis, either by choice, when another village's revenue terms were more favourable, or by compulsion, typically economic distress following a famine. This residence-based distinction, not a legal difference in ownership, is the trap: a pahi-kashta peasant was not a tenant without rights, simply a non-resident cultivator.

Cultivation rested on individual ownership: peasant land could be bought, sold and inherited like any other property, and a nineteenth-century description of the Delhi-Agra region, judged to hold equally for the seventeenth century, records cultivators marking each field's limits with raised earth, brick or thorn so that thousands of such fields could be counted and taxed within a single village. Actual holdings were modest: the average north Indian peasant rarely owned more than a pair of bullocks and two ploughs, often less. Wealth benchmarks varied sharply by region: in Gujarat, about six acres marked an affluent peasant; in Bengal, five acres was the upper limit of an average holding and ten acres made a peasant a rich asami. The same principle of individual, saleable ownership extended into the landed elite: women, including widows, held a documented right to inherit zamindari land in regions like the Punjab, and could sell or mortgage it freely; women zamindars are recorded in eighteenth-century Bengal, and one of that century's largest zamindaris, Rajshahi, had a woman at its head.

Assessing the revenue: jama, hasil and land classification

The office (daftar) of the diwan supervised the empire's fiscal system, and the amil-guzar was the actual revenue collector at the local level. Revenue arrangements had two stages: assessment, then collection. The jama was the amount assessed; the hasil was the amount actually collected, and NCERT is explicit that the state's assessed claims often went unrealised because of local conditions, so jama and hasil routinely diverged. Akbar's instructions to the amil-guzar allowed both cash and payment in kind.

Both cultivated and cultivable land was measured province by province, compiled in the Ain-i-Akbari (Abu'l Fazl's chronicle of Akbar's reign, the single most important source for this whole chapter). Akbar classified land into four types based on how regularly it was cultivated: polaj (cultivated every year without a break), parauti (left fallow for a time to recover), chachar (fallow for three or four years), and banjar (fallow for five years or more). Polaj and parauti land was further graded good, middling, or bad, and revenue was fixed as one-third of the average of the three grades' produce.

Collecting the harvest: kankut, batai and their variants

The Ain describes four methods of actually assessing the crop for collection. Kankut: officials estimated the standing crop by inspection (from the Hindi kan, grain, and kut, estimate). Batai (also called bhaoli): the harvested crop was physically divided between cultivator and state in the presence of both parties. Khet-batai: the fields themselves, not the harvest, were divided after sowing. Lang-batai: the cut grain was heaped and divided after harvesting. In 1665 Aurangzeb ordered his revenue officials to survey conditions of cultivation village by village and peasant by peasant before fixing the jama, "keeping in view the financial interests of the government, and the welfare of the peasantry", a source worth remembering for a question on Mughal revenue administration's stated intent versus its practice.

Irrigation technology: the wheel-and-pot lift of the araghatta

Rain-fed cultivation could not by itself support the range of crops Mughal India grew, so artificial lifting devices had to draw water from wells for the rest. Babur's own memoir, the Babur Nama, described exactly such a device operating in Punjab: two circles of rope, sized to the well's depth, joined by strips of wood carrying pitchers, formed a wheel positioned over the well; a second, toothed wheel fixed to the same axle interlocked with the pitcher wheel's own teeth, and a bullock walking in a circle turned that second wheel, so its motion continuously lifted a garland of pots and emptied them into a trough that carried the water out to the fields. This geared, animal-powered pot-wheel is what historians and medieval land records call the araghatta, the same device the West knows as the Persian wheel: a mechanical water lift, not a unit of revenue, an artisan guild, or a storage granary, so treat any option offering those as automatically wrong. Around Agra, Bayana and Chandwar, Babur recorded a cruder, purely manual alternative: a rope and bucket run over a roller fixed at the well's edge, with one person driving the bullock that pulled the rope and a second person emptying the bucket by hand, a far more labour-intensive method than the geared araghatta.

The state backed irrigation beyond what individual peasants could build: it dug new canals (nahr, nala) and maintained older ones, Shah Jahan's reign seeing the repair of the shahnahr in Punjab. Cattle also powered the plough itself: a light wooden plough with an iron tip or coulter cut a shallow furrow that preserved moisture through the hottest months, seed was mostly broadcast by hand though a bullock-drawn drill existed for some crops, and hoeing and weeding used a narrow iron blade fitted to a wooden handle.

The zamindars: a service-holding elite, not just landowners

Zamindars lived off agriculture without directly cultivating land themselves. They held extensive personal land called milkiyat ("property"), which they could sell, bequeath, or mortgage freely and cultivated for their own private use, often with hired or servile labour. Separately, zamindars often collected revenue on the state's behalf, a service (khidmat) for which the state compensated them financially, and this revenue-collecting role, not milkiyat ownership, was their main source of power. Most zamindars had fortresses (qilachas) and armed contingents; the Ain records the combined zamindari military strength across Mughal India as 384,558 cavalry, 4,277,057 infantry, 1,863 elephants, 4,260 cannons, and 4,500 boats, a startling figure worth remembering for scale-of-power questions. A zamindari could be expanded by conquest, but only when confirmed by an imperial order (sanad); it more commonly grew through the slower, state-sanctioned processes of colonising new land, transfer of rights, or purchase.

The village community: panchayat, headman and artisans

The village itself, not just the peasant household, was the basic social unit, made up of three constituents: the cultivators, the panchayat, and a headman known as the muqaddam or mandal. Caste ran through this community unevenly. A sizeable share of cultivators worked as menial or agricultural labourers (majur), assigned degrading tasks and held to poverty regardless of how much cultivable land lay around them; NCERT itself draws the direct parallel to the position of Dalits in modern India. In Muslim communities, menials such as the halalkhoran (scavengers) were housed outside the village boundary; in Bihar, the mallahzadas ("sons of boatmen") were treated much like slaves. Status was not fixed everywhere, though: a seventeenth-century Marwar manual lists Rajputs among the peasantry sharing status with the lower-ranked Jats, the Gauravas cultivating around Vrindavan sought Rajput status in the same century, and castes such as the Ahirs, Gujars and Malis rose in the hierarchy on the profitability of cattle rearing and horticulture; in eastern India the pastoral and fishing Sadgops and Kaivartas similarly acquired the status of peasants.

The panchayat was an oligarchic assembly of village elders representing the various castes and communities present, though the village's own menial-agricultural labourers were unlikely to sit on it; its decisions bound the members. It was headed by the muqaddam or mandal, chosen (some sources suggest) by consensus among the elders and ratified by the zamindar, holding office only as long as the elders' confidence lasted and dismissible by them. The headman's chief job was supervising the village accounts, assisted by the patwari, the village accountant; funds came from a common pool that villagers themselves contributed to, spent on entertaining visiting revenue officials and on community works, such as a bund or a canal, that individual peasants could not afford alone. Mandals were not always honest: they were regularly accused of defrauding village accounts in collusion with the patwari, and of underassessing the revenue owed on their own land so the shortfall fell on smaller cultivators instead, exactly the kind of "who benefited" trap UPSC likes to build a statement question around. The panchayat also policed caste boundaries directly, in eastern India even requiring marriages to be held in the mandal's presence, and could fine or, in serious cases, expel an offender from the community, a punishment that cost the person the right to practise their profession. Separately, each caste or jati in a village ran its own jati panchayat; in Rajasthan these arbitrated disputes across castes over land, marriage norms and ritual precedence, and the state generally left jati panchayat verdicts alone outside criminal matters. Villagers, often from the poorest rungs, also petitioned the panchayat against a zamindar's or official's extortionate tax demands or unpaid forced labour (begar), treating the panchayat as an appeal forum that would enforce a customary right to subsistence; where reconciliation failed, a peasant's strongest weapon was simply deserting the village, a real option given how much uncultivated land and competing demand for labour there was.

Artisans, potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers and even goldsmiths, made up a substantial share of village households, in some Maratha surveys as much as a quarter; the line between artisan and peasant was often blurred, since cultivator families also wove, dyed, printed textiles or fired pottery in the lulls of the agricultural calendar. Villagers typically paid artisans a share of the harvest or an allotment of land, which in Maharashtra became a hereditary holding termed miras or watan, though outright cash payment (later, in retrospect, labelled the jajmani system) is also recorded. British officials in the nineteenth century liked to describe this whole structure as a self-sufficient "little republic" of fraternal equals; NCERT explicitly rejects the label, since individual ownership of assets and deep inequalities of caste and gender sat underneath it, with a small, powerful group actually running the village's affairs, exploiting its weaker members, and dispensing its own justice.

The mansabdari system: zat, jagir and khalisa land

At the apex of the administrative structure sat the mansabdari system, a military-cum-bureaucratic apparatus responsible for both civil and military affairs. Mansabdars were paid in one of two ways: some in cash (naqdi), most through revenue assignments called jagirs in different parts of the empire, periodically transferred between mansabdars rather than held permanently. Land whose revenue was reserved directly for the imperial treasury, rather than assigned as a jagir, was called khalisa land. The jagir-versus-khalisa and jagir-versus-milkiyat distinctions (a jagir was an assignment of the right to collect revenue, not ownership of the land itself) are exactly where UPSC likes to test whether a candidate actually understands the system rather than having memorised the term.

Trading communities: the Banjaras

Villages fed a wider commercial world beyond their own boundaries, and one professional group above all carried its bulk trade: the Banjaras, a peripatetic community that moved as whole households rather than as solo traders. Jahangir's own memoir records them as a distinct class of people who kept roughly a thousand oxen each, ferried grain from villages into towns, and accompanied Mughal armies on campaign, a single army's Banjara train sometimes running to a hundred thousand bullocks or more. A travelling group was called a tanda, led by a hereditary or elected headman titled naik (from the Sanskrit nayaka); pack oxen, not carts, made the Banjaras useful, since unpaved tracks and the sheer bulk of foodgrain moved most efficiently on animals' backs rather than wheels. Because the Mughal state kept no dedicated department to supply food and fodder to a marching army, it leaned on Banjara tandas to provision campaigns instead: the best-documented example is the Deccan campaign under Asaf Khan around 1630, when two Banjara naiks remembered as Bhangi and Jhangi supplied the army's commissariat with a reported 180,000 bullocks, a scale worth holding onto for any question testing how large a single tanda's operation could genuinely get.

Distinguish the Banjaras clearly from a zamindar's own haats (markets), the local exchange points zamindars themselves established to sell the produce of their milkiyat land: a haat was a fixed point of local exchange, while a tanda was itself mobile, the actual mechanism that physically moved bulk grain between a village's surplus and a town's, or an army's, demand.

The exam traps: what UPSC actually tests here

Four confusions recur across PYQs on this chapter. First, jama is the demand, hasil is the actual receipt, not synonyms. Second, khalisa land funded the treasury directly; jagir land's revenue was assigned to a mansabdar, and a jagir was reassigned, not inherited. Third, a zamindar was not simply a landowner: milkiyat was their own cultivated property, but their real power came from the state-compensated service of collecting revenue on its behalf, a role granted, not innate. Fourth, distinguish the four assessment methods by what was actually divided: kankut estimated the standing crop, batai divided the harvested produce, khet-batai divided the field, and lang-batai divided the cut grain.

A further set of traps sits in this chapter's less-revised ground. Fifth, khud-kashta and pahi-kashta describe residence, not legal status: a khud-kashta peasant cultivated land in their own village, a pahi-kashta peasant cultivated another village's land under contract, and neither term implies a difference in ownership rights. Sixth, the araghatta is the geared, bullock-turned pot-wheel Babur described in Punjab, not a revenue term, a guild or a granary; distinguish it from the simpler rope-and-bucket lift used around Agra. Seventh, a village's muqaddam or mandal was the headman, chosen by and answerable to the village elders, not an appointee of the state; the patwari was the accountant who assisted him, a different office entirely. Eighth, the Banjaras moved grain in ox caravans called tandas led by a naik, a role and vocabulary distinct from a zamindar's own fixed local market, the haat.

Quick revision points

• Jama = revenue assessed; hasil = revenue collected. The amil-guzar was the local revenue collector, under the diwan's fiscal office.
• Akbar's land classification: polaj (always cultivated) → parauti (short fallow) → chachar (3-4 years fallow) → banjar (5+ years fallow).
• Assessment methods: kankut (crop estimate), batai/bhaoli (harvest divided), khet-batai (field divided), lang-batai (cut grain divided).
• Zamindars: held milkiyat (personal property) and collected state revenue as khidmat (compensated service); expansion by conquest needed an imperial sanad.
• Mansabdari system: paid via naqdi (cash) or jagir (revenue assignment, periodically transferred); khalisa land funded the treasury directly, not any mansabdar.
• Khud-kashta (resident) versus pahi-kashta (non-resident, contractual) peasants; land was individually owned, bought and sold; wealth benchmarks: about 6 acres was affluent in Gujarat, 10 acres made a rich asami in Bengal.
• Araghatta (Persian wheel): a geared pot-wheel turned by a bullock, described in the Babur Nama; the state also dug and repaired canals (nahr, shahnahr).
• Village structure: panchayat (elders' assembly) plus muqaddam/ mandal (headman) plus patwari (accountant); separate jati panchayats handled caste-specific disputes; the "little republic" idea is a colonial-era myth NCERT explicitly rejects.
• Banjaras: peripatetic grain carriers moving in tandas led by a naik; supplied Mughal armies' grain in the absence of a dedicated commissariat department.

Once jama/hasil, the four land grades, the four assessment methods, and the khalisa/jagir/milkiyat distinctions are solid, practise the matching-style and "which statement is correct" questions built around this chapter. The newer ground, khud-kashta/pahi-kashta, the araghatta, village panchayats, and the Banjaras, is just as fair game and just as often the difference between a familiar-sounding question and one actually answered correctly.