The World of Labour in Mughal India (c.1500–1750)

Abstract

SUMMARY: This article addresses two separate but interlinked questions relating to India in Mughal times (sixteenth to early eighteenth century). First, the terms on which labour was rendered, taking perfect market conditions as standard; and, second, the perceptions of labour held by the higher classes and the labourers themselves. As to forms of labour, one may well describe conditions as those of an imperfect market. Slave labour was restricted largely to domestic service. Rural wage rates were depressed owing to the caste system and the ''village community'' mechanism. In the city, the monopoly of resources by the ruling class necessarily depressed wages through the market mechanism itself. While theories of hierarchy were dominant, there are indications sometimes of a tolerant attitude towards manual labour and the labouring poor among the dominant classes. What seems most striking is the defiant assertion of their status in relation to God and society made on behalf of peasants and workers in northern India in certain religious cults in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Water and Work in Mughal Gardens and Landscapes

“…It sheds additional light on the gendered division of water labor, estimating how many calories were burned and how much food was required to sustain workers of different ages and genders (cf. Moosvi, 2011). Water-lifting from wells required an extraordinary expenditure of physical energy, compared to daily food energy needed and the purchasing power of Mughal wages.…”

“…7). In further examples, men irrigated fields with draft animals and women transplanted paddy (Moosvi, 2011). Some paintings showed simple water levers with counterweights (dhenklī) used for shallow lifts from surface water bodies and shallow wells.…”

Money and social inequality: The views of Abū’l Faẓl

“…Merchants and artisans (peshawarān wa bāzārgān) appear as a single group at number two which is unprecedented. 3 These classes were at the bottom of the Sasanian hierarchy or at best number three in T] øsð and Kåshifð. At number three in Abø'l Faz[ l's scheme are men of the pen (ahl-i qalam) such as philosophers, physicians, accountants, engineers and astronomers forming a single group.…”