Meadteval îndia

The Study of a Civilization

IRFAN HA BI B
 CIVILIZATION

STUDY OF A
INDIA:
THE
MEDIEVAL

60
who
rights to nayakas,
w.

his taxation were

The king assigned local
administrators,
arnd were call
as well as
military captains collections into
the royal exche.
upon to pay part of
their tax
The foundations of the financial strength
of the Vijayanagars
Vijayanagara
whOSe high magnitude ic
land tax,
Empire lay in the heavy
considerable data collected by T
evident from the
detects a heavy increase
Se
Mahalingam. Indeed, N. Karashima
in taxation in the Tamil country, upon its annexation by exation by
and it would seem that the first known peasant
VIjayanagara;
uprising in Tamilnadu, with clear demands recorded on rebel

nscriptions set up in 1429, was provoked by oppressive fiscal

and other measures. The cycle seems to be a repetition of
what had in the Delhi Sultanate under
happened Muhammad
Tughluq.
Economy and Society
The Sultanates did of the social institutions
not alter many
inherited from 'Indian feudalism'. The
the caste
village community and
system were not subverted, notably, perhaps, because,
by helping to keep social order stable, they facilitated
agrarian
exploitation. The peasant, though theoretically deemed free
hurr), was not really free from extra-economic constraints.
Nonetheless, the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate was
accompanied by important economic changes. One such change
stemmed from the imposition of the cash-nexus, that is,
requiring the payment of land-tax in money, side by side with
the raising of the rate of land-tax to the level of rent, This led
to a considerable expansion of 'induced' trade, by which foot
grains and other rural products were drawn to the towns. Wn
this, a new phase of urban growth became possible. Delhi and
Daulat b d (Devagiri) rose in the fourteenth century to be
of the great cities of the world: and there were other 1ag
 POLITY, E
ONOMY,soOCIETY
61
wns as well,like Multan, Kara, Awadh
(Khamb yat), and
Gulbarga. (Ayodhya), Gaur,
Cambay
Empire,
Vijayanagara, the capital
o fthe Vijayanagara was considered by
visitor in 1520 to be as large Portuguese
a
as Rome (which then had a
opulation of about 60,000). Numismatic evidence alters
matically, as the Delhi Sultans began their gold and silver
ide copper from early in the thirteenth
nintage alongsid.
century,
thereby evider brisk commerce with abundance of large
ansactions.' Despite the Mongol conquests of the western
transactions."

borderlands, India'. extermal trade, both overland and ocea

grew
considerably during this period. Chinese 'junks' of
called south Indianports especially for
mmense size
im
on

and
pepper, and the celebrated Chinese admiral Zing He's
pepper;
visited Malabar ports for commercial purposes
shins repeatedly
from 1405 to 1433. Similarly, Iranian ships from the Persian
from the Red Sea regularly sailed to
Gulf and Arab ships
the Portuguese began violently to disrupt
Malabar ports, until
1498. It waswidely noted as an established
this commerce after
net inmporter of gold and silver
fact that India was a large
External contacts led to important processes of
which in turn
technological diffusion (see Chapter 2.2 below),
introduced by
affected craft production. The spinning wheel
increase her
the fourteenth century, by enabling the spinner to
output some six-fold, must have greatly enlarged yarn
production; and the subsequent introduction of treadles in the
loom must have similarly speeded up weaving. Sericulture was
established in Bengal by the fifteenth century. Paper
manufacture was already well established in Delhi in the
thirteenth century. Liquor-distillation was reported to be an
Cxtensive industry in Delhi and its neighbourhood by the
CiOse of the thirteenth century. Building acivity attained a
EW SCale by the large use of brick and mortar, and by the
 A CIVILIZATION
MEDIEVAL INDIA:
THE STUDY OF
62

techniques.
adoption of vaulting
was a reverse side to these developments as well
There

Slavery already existed

in India; but probably the scaleo
enslavement grew substantially in the thirteenth and fourteenth
enth
centuries, as slaves were captured both in war and in lieu of
unpaid taxes. They were put to work at both domestic service
ce
and crafts. In the Delhi market early in the fourteenth centur
a woman slave for domestic work cost no more than a milch
buffalo. Sultan Firoz Tughluq was reputed to possess 180.000
slaves, of whom 12,000 worked as artisans. His principal
minister, Khn Jahn Maqbkl possessed over 2000 women
slaves.
To extent, slave-labour might have helped to
some

circumvent the lack of availability of caste-labour for new or

expanding crafts. But the way Hindu masons have left their
marks, inscriptions and
graffiti on important 'Saracenic
monuments that they helped to build, shows that it was
not
long before many caste-labourers too adapted themselvesto
the use of new techniques.
Just as, apart from allowing
little more flexibility, the
a
Sultanate left the caste system and its
inequities practically
untouched, so was also the case largely with the treatment of
women. Since Islam
permits daughters to inherit their parents
wealth (though only a half-share as compared to sons) and
allows widow remarriage (a custom
already common among
lower castes in India), widow-burning (sati) and widow
repression remained alien to Muslim custom. But Islamic law
shared with the dharmashastra a
tolerance of polygamy and
unrestricted concubinage. It also
heavily stressed an enforcea
seclusion and veiling of wonmen
and permitted pre-puberty
marriages. An assertion of women's inferiority
seen to be
was generauy
firmly made in certain Quranic verses." T wa
 POLITY, ECONOMY, SOCIETY 63

as we can see in the verses of Amir

mmon
for noralists,
and "I_ämi, to call on women to keep themselves
Khusrau

clusively engaged
with spinning and the like and not stir out
house.2The fact that IItutmish's daughter Raziyya
f the
of
claimed to be a reigning Sultan in her own right (1236-40)
cems to have caused great scandal1 - though seemingly more
seems

among later writers than among contemporaries. However,

there is nothing in Islam against women being taught to read
and write, and a late fifteenth-century painting in a dictionary
shows a small girl learning to read along with boys before a
school master (Fig.2.1).
It is not easy to characterize the social formation that
existed during the thirteenth-fifteenth centuries in terms of
designations and definitions available in historical theory. The
urban expansion, arger use of money and increase in trade,

Fig. 2.1. Children at school,

Miftahu'l Fuzala, Br. Lib. MS, fifteenth
CCury. Note the girl among the children and the school master's
rod.
 CIVILIZATION

STUDY
OF A
THE
INDIA:
MEDIEVAL

64 ian feudalism'.
feudalism'. The ttax-
o.
from Indiar
fundamentally
distinguish
it Marx's 'Asiatic
with Marx's Asiatic nMo
suggests
kinship
rent
equivalence
some other aspects
other aspects of the
the lato
atter
to ignore
one is ready and unstable towne
provided in kind Is4
tax-payment mainly
model, e.g.,
Delhi
S u l t a n a t e were, in fact, markdd
centuries of the
The three and saw much urban gro h.
monetization,
increase in
by an to avoid giving a definits
safer at present
therefore, be
It may, and economy
the system of polity
we
to the form of
name
have described.

Footnotes
the Delhi Sultanate and tha
1. For the political History of
see Mohammad
Habib and K.A. Nizami
contemporary states,
of India, Vol.V (The Delhi
(eds.), A Comprehensive History
1970. See also Peter Jackson, The Delhi
Sultanat), New Delhi,
Sultanate: A Political and Military History,
Cambridge, 1999. On
Some Aspects of Muslim
administrative aspects, see R.P. Tripathi,
1956.
Administration, 2nd rev. ed., Allahabad,
2.
2. W.H. Moreland, Agrarian System of Moslem India, Cambridge,
1929, pp.216-23.
of Ala'uddin Khalji: a Defence
3. Cf. Irfan Habib, 'Price Regulations
Economic and Social History Review
of Ziy Baraní', Indian
XXI(4), 1984, pp.393-414.
and
4. Cf. Irfan Habib, 'Agrarian Economy' in: Tapan Raychaudhuri
Economic History of India, 1,
Irfan Habib, The Cambridge
Cambridge, 1982, pp.63-66.
See T.V. Mahalingam, Administration
and Social Life Under
5.
for the nyaka system,
Vijayanagar, Madras, 1940, pp.195-202
and pp.41-56, 90-98, for taxation.
New Economic Formano
6.
6. See Noburo Karashima, Towards a
South Indian Society Under Vijayanagar Rule,
Delhi, 1992, pp.15
country, au
for increase in taxation in the Tamil
142-44, 148-53,
pp.142-53 (chapter co-authored with Y. Subbarayalu) ror
is WH
peasant uprising. Sultans is
the Delhi
7.
7. The standard work on the coinage of SultansofDe
Nelson Wright, The Coinage and Metrology ofthe
Delhi, 1936.
 POLITY, ECONOMY, SOCIETY
65

Goe Simon Digby, °The Currency System, in: Cambridge Economic

8. History of India 1, op.cit., .93-101, where much attention is
devoted to India's imports of old and silver and their sources.
o Irfan Habib lavery', in: Cambridge Economic History of India,
9.
I, op.cit., pp.89-93.
10 See Pushpa Prasad, Sanskrit Inscriptions of Delhi Sultanate, 1191-
1526, Delhi, 1990, pp.xxviii-XXx.
11.
On the status of women in Muslim law and in the custom of
Muslim communities, see Rueben Levy, The Social Structure of
slam, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1957, pp.91-134. The Quranic verses
are II, 233, and II, 228.
12. Amir Khusrau, Hasht Bihasht, ed. M. Sulaiman Ashraf,
Aligarh,
1336/1918, p.28; 'Ismi, Futkhu-s Salat+n, ed. A.S. Usha, Madras,
1948, p.134.
13. Illustrated MS of Mahmkd Shdiabdi,
Mifthu 'l Fuzal, compiled
1469, British Library Or. 3299, f.278b.
14 On Marx's concept of the Asiatic
Mode, see Irfan Habib in: Iqbal
Husain (ed.), Karl Marx on India, New
Delhi, 2006, pp.xx-xxv.