50 Years of The Agrarian System of Mughal India
50 Years of The Agrarian System of Mughal India
50 Years of The Agrarian System of Mughal India
Abstract: The year 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Irfan
Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India. The book was a revised and enlarged
version of a D. Phil. thesis submitted in 1958 at the University of Oxford, where the
author had gone on a Government of India scholarship from 1955 to 1958. This Special
Essay reviews and analyses the main features of a book that remains a landmark,
and which, upon publication, struck even its critics as being singular in a seemingly
well-worn field.
The year 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Irfan Habib’s The
Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707) (Habib 1963; henceforth ASMI). The
book was a revised and enlarged version of a D. Phil. thesis submitted in 1958 at
the University of Oxford, where the author had gone on a Government of India
scholarship from 1955 to 1958. The subject was ambitious, not only in the width of its
scope, but also because W. H. Moreland had covered the field earlier in his Agrarian
System of Moslem India (Moreland 1929) – and Moreland had also dealt with related
economic aspects in his India at the Death of Akbar (Moreland 1920) and From
Akbar to Aurangzeb (Moreland 1923). The general subject had been dealt with from
a nationalist point of view by Radhakamal Mukerjee in The Economic History of
India, 1600–1800 (Mukerjee 1934).
The acclaim received by Irfan Habib’s 454-page book, which was printed in the same
uninviting format as other academic works printed at the highly reputed G. S. Press
of Madras, needs to be explained. In an immediate but long response to the book in
the journal Enquiry, the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri prefaced a critical review
with the following words:
Once in a very long while something happens to stir the turbid and yet extensive
waters of Indian historiography. The publication of Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System
of Mughal India is generally recognised – even in the most unlikely quarters – as one
of these rare occasions. (Raychaudhuri 1965)
It is necessary to understand the features of a book that struck even its critics as
being singular in a seemingly well-worn field. The first was its extensive scope, its
attempt to cover all aspects of agrarian life, production, consumption, trade, and
famine, and to go on to such issues as the layers of agrarian rights of peasants and
zamindars, and the state’s taxation and administrative systems – all ending, finally,
in an interpretation of the process of change within the agrarian order. An integrated
study of all these phenomena and inter-relationships was absent from earlier work.
Secondly, there was a fundamental extension of the source-base: Habib went to
an impressive range of Persian manuscripts and archival documents, travellers’
accounts and modern official literature, scouring them for all kinds of information.
This enabled him to establish many points of detail and meanings of technical terms,
besides clarifying various modes of administrative practices, which had remained
obscure or even unknown to his predecessors. In the Appendices to his book, Habib
established the values of units of measures, weights, and money, which are essential
for any statistical work on Mughal India. The precise and clear style of writing also
helped, although the lengthy footnotes were forbidding. Finally, an approach that an
Italian reviewer recognised as “a quite definitely socialist standpoint” put the book at
a distance from the kinds of controversies that had engaged the nationalists and their
critics in the historical arena thus far (Pignatelli 1964–65).
There was another aspect to the response following the publication of ASMI: its
impact on Marxist historiography. Habib was already a Communist when he went
It was a matter of surprise to many that Irfan Habib did not let ASMI be reprinted
or issued in a revised edition for as many as 36 years, so that the original edition of
The 548-page reincarnation of ASMI is nearly 100 pages longer than the original
edition. A very large amount of information has been added from a huge mass
of new evidence, and practically all the evidence used earlier has been critically
re-examined, and large portions of the text extensively rewritten. The main
structure of the original edition has been retained, except for Chapter IV (“Village
Community”), which has been entirely recast and greatly enlarged. Such an
enormous effort at updating the work merits due appreciation; in addition, there
are new ideas and important modifications of the older interpretation that need to
be noted. Some of these are identified in what follows, not necessarily in the order
of their importance.
The discerning reader will notice that, in Chapter 1, “Agricultural Production,” the
information on agricultural technology is much richer and more surely handled than
in the first edition. Much of this is due to the attention Habib has paid since the late
1960s to the history of technology, ancient and medieval.
In his preface to the second edition, Habib writes that in view of “the additional
information” he has collected (notably, it would appear, from the rich collection
of documents from Vrindavan), “my views on the nature of the village community
have changed substantially.” This can be seen best by juxtaposing the two passages
quoted below, one from the first edition and the other, which has replaced the earlier
version, from the second edition.
The community, by sustaining village sufficiency, enlarged the surplus, and made its
realisation easier; the [village] oligarchs as controllers of the community mechanism
became petty sharers in the surplus; but it was the Mughal ruling class, to which the
major share of the surplus went in the form of tax, that was the ultimate beneficiary.
All the three elements formed in normal times a cohesive exploitative whole. (Habib
1999, pp. 159–60)
In a footnote (Habib 1999, p. 160, fn 64), the author makes it clear that he is no
longer arguing that “the growth of differentiation and the existence of an internal
oligarchy were signs of the disruption and decline of the community.” Surprisingly,
no one seems to have noticed that this understanding is not only contrary to what
Habib had earlier held but in contradiction with practically every other theory of
the village community, with the possible exception of Marx’s, which did see the
community as a supporter of “despotism” (based on the tax–rent equivalence) and
itself tarnished by inequality.
What Habib evidently regards as his core thesis, “The Agrarian Crisis of the Mughal
Empire,” which forms Chapter 9 of the book, has largely remained the same, with
information added to make it that much richer. The same argument is again put
forward, with quotations from successive writers, that things were getting worse as
compared to previous times (ibid., pp. 371–73). But a caveat is now inserted: “One
has to take into account the universal propensity to contrast the grim present with a
rosier past” (ibid., p. 371). More importantly, there is now an explicit recognition of
the ideological backwardness of the rebelling peasants. In a paragraph inserted near
the end of the chapter, we are told:
If peasant distress was at the root of these rebellions that shook the Mughal Empire
to its foundations, the rebellions themselves represent a historical paradox in that the
alleviation of such distress nowhere forms part of the rebels’ proclaimed objectives
or of their actual deeds and measures. . . . The weakness of the Indian peasants’
consciousness, an elementary failure on their part to recognise a peasant brotherhood,
out of a welter of castes and religious sects, calls for reflection. (Ibid., pp. 404–05)
Since the second edition carries the same title as the first, and “revised” is not a
sufficient indication of the enlargement and changes carried out, it has not had the
impact that one might have expected. Very few journals in India, and none abroad,
have cared to review it. The important new interpretation of the village community
has gone largely unnoticed, not to speak of the numerous refinements introduced in
the formulations of the first edition. The fact, however, that the publishers issued a
paperback edition the very next year of its publication, and that there have been at
least eight reprints since then, suggests that the book has an increasing number of
readers (despite the lack of translation of the revised edition into any of the Indian
languages) and is bound to make its influence felt on Indian historiography.
To ask whether more could have been expected from the second edition may seem
to be an ungracious question, but is surely an appropriate one in any academic
discourse. One aspect in which the second edition of ASMI offers no improvement
on the first edition is on the question of gender. It continues with the unspoken
assumption that one can ignore the treatment meted out to women as being outside
the scope of agrarian history. This is all the more surprising since Habib himself
wrote a pioneering essay, “Exploring Medieval Gender History,” for the Indian History
Congress in 2000, just a year after the appearance of the second edition of ASMI. He
made two important points in the essay: first, the exploitation of women in medieval
India often took the form of assigning them some of the hardest forms of manual
labour, such as flour-milling, carrying bricks, and spinning (which causes great strain
to the fingers); secondly, the sub-exploitation of women by men of the exploited
classes was a major ideological means of binding the men to the existing social order.
Neither of these two points is touched upon in the second edition of ASMI.
Another grouse one could have is related to Habib’s avoidance of any direct debate
with his critics. While he is punctilious in acknowledging any contribution to the
subject under consideration, in however minor a detail (for example, see the note
on mawas; Habib 1999, p. 379), this courtesy is not always extended to scholars who
tend to disagree with him on major issues. In his preface he explains that this is due
to limitations of space; he has offered his evidence, so let the reader decide between
him and his critics (whom, in most cases, the reader is left to trace for himself). A
rare exception is a reference to Sanjay Subrahmanyam in a footnote (ibid., p. 448) to
a discussion of the “price revolution.” The points raised by Tapan Raychaudhuri in his
long critique, published in Enquiry (Raychaudhuri 1965), are not directly addressed,
and his paper does not appear in the book’s Bibliography. Other critics, like M. Athar
Ali and J. F. Richards, do appear in the Bibliography, but their views, as well as mine,
on the agrarian crisis have not been deemed worthy of explicit notice in the book.
References
Athar Ali, M. (1966), The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Asia Publishing House,
Bombay.
Davies, Colin C. (1965), “Review of The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707)
by Irfan Habib,” History, Journal of the Historical Association, vol. L.
Gupta, D. N. (ed.) (1995), Changing Modes of Production in India: An Historical Analysis,
Hindu College, Delhi.
Habib, Irfan (1963), The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707), Asia Publishing
House, Bombay.
Habib, Irfan (1969a), “Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis,” Enquiry, New Series, vol. 3,
no. 2.
Habib, Irfan (1969b), “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal
India,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 29, March.
Habib, Irfan (1971), “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal
India,” Enquiry, New Series, vol. 5, no. 3.
Habib, Irfan (1975), “Colonialization of the Indian Economy, 1757–1900,” Social Scientist,
no. 32, March.
Habib, Irfan (1982), An Atlas of the Mughal Empire, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
Habib, Irfan (1983), “Marx’s Perception of India,” The Marxist, vol. 1, no. 1.
Habib, Irfan (1985a), “Studying a Colonial Economy – Without Perceiving Colonialism,”
Modern Asian Studies, vol. 19, no. 3.
Habib, Irfan (1985b), “Processes of Accumulation in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India,”
Indian Historical Review, vol. XI, nos. 1–2.
Habib, Irfan (1987), “A System of Trimetallism in the Age of the Price Revolution”, in
J. F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India, Oxford University Press,
Delhi.
Habib, Irfan (1995a), Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception, Tulika Books,
New Delhi.
Habib, Irfan (1995b), “Mode of Production in Medieval India,” in D. N. Gupta (ed.), Changing
Modes of Production in India: An Historical Analysis, Hindu College, Delhi.
Habib, Irfan (1999), The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707), second (revised)
edition, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
Habib, Irfan (2000), “Exploring Medieval Gender History,” paper presented at a symposium,
Indian History Congress, Aligarh.