Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. Who authored the Ain-i Akbari, and in what year was it completed?
Answer: Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s court historian, authored the Ain-i Akbari; it was completed in 1598, Akbar’s forty-second regnal year, after five revisions.
Q. Distinguish between khud-kashta and pahi-kashta peasants.
Answer: Khud-kashta peasants were residents of the village in which they held their lands; pahi-kashta peasants were non-residents who cultivated land elsewhere on a contractual basis, by choice or compulsion.
Q. What is jins-i kamil? Give two examples.
Answer: Jins-i kamil, literally “perfect crops”, were cash crops the Mughal state encouraged peasants to grow for their higher revenue; cotton and sugarcane were jins-i kamil par excellence.
Q. What were milkiyat lands?
Answer: Milkiyat, meaning “property”, were the zamindars’ own extensive personal lands, cultivated for their private use with hired or servile labour, which they could freely sell, bequeath or mortgage.
Q. Distinguish between jama and hasil.
Answer: Jama was the amount of revenue assessed; hasil was the amount actually collected, which could fall short of the assessment because of local conditions.
Q. What was the village headman called, and who assisted him with village accounts?
Answer: The village headman was known as the muqaddam or mandal; he was assisted in preparing village accounts by the accountant, or patwari, of the panchayat.
Q. What does the term “jangli” mean in the context of this chapter?
Answer: Jangli described forest dwellers whose livelihood came from gathering forest produce, hunting and shifting agriculture; it did not mean an absence of “civilisation”, as some popular usage of the word connotes today.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. What were the three constituents of the village community?
Answer: The three constituents were the cultivators, the panchayat, and the village headman, known as the muqaddam or mandal.
Q. What is begar, and who complained about it in panchayat petitions?
Answer: Begar was unpaid forced labour. Archival petitions from western India, usually made by villagers from the lowest rungs of rural society, complained about extortionate taxation or begar imposed by “superior” castes or state officials.
Q. Name the four categories of land under Akbar’s classification system.
Answer: The four categories were polaj (annually cultivated, never fallow), parauti (temporarily left fallow to recover), chachar (fallow for three or four years), and banjar (uncultivated for five years or more).
Q. Name the four methods of revenue assessment and collection described in Source 6.
Answer: Kankut (estimating the standing crop), batai or bhaoli (reaping and dividing the harvest by agreement), khet-batai (dividing the sown field before harvest), and lang batai (dividing the cut grain into heaps).
Q. What was peshkash, and in what form was it often paid by forest peoples?
Answer: Peshkash was a form of tribute collected by the Mughal state; forest peoples often paid it in the form of a supply of elephants, which the state needed for its army.
Q. What were miras and watan?
Answer: Miras and watan were the hereditary landholdings that village artisans in Maharashtra received, often cultivable waste allotted by the panchayat, as compensation for their craft services.
Q. How did Aurangzeb’s 1665 order try to improve revenue administration?
Answer: Aurangzeb instructed his revenue officials (amins) to discover the actual state of cultivation, village by village and peasant by peasant, after minute scrutiny, and to assess the jama keeping in view both the government’s financial interests and the peasantry’s welfare.
3 3-Mark Questions
Q. What evidence does the chapter give for women’s active participation in the rural land market?
Answer: Instances from the Punjab show women, including widows, actively participating in the rural land market as sellers of property they had inherited. Both Hindu and Muslim women inherited zamindaris, which they were free to sell or mortgage, and women zamindars are recorded in eighteenth-century Bengal, including at the head of the Rajshahi zamindari, one of the largest and most famous of the period.
Q. Describe two ways in which the Mughal state’s authority reached into forested regions.
Answer: First, the state levied peshkash, tribute from forest peoples, often in the form of a supply of elephants needed for the army. Second, the royal hunt carried political meaning: court historians describe hunting expeditions as a way for the emperor to travel across his territories and personally attend to his subjects’ grievances, with court painters often inserting a small symbolic scene into hunt paintings to signal a harmonious reign.
Q. Why does the chapter caution against treating the Ain as a straightforwardly reliable source?
Answer: The Ain is, in the chapter’s own words, “a view from the top”: it was written to justify Mughal rule, so it treats any revolt as predestined to fail. It also contains numerous totalling errors, generally minor slips of arithmetic or transcription, and its coverage is skewed: detailed caste-composition data on zamindars is missing for Bengal and Orissa, and its price and wage data are drawn mainly from around Agra.
Q. What role did jati panchayats play in rural society, according to the chapter?
Answer: Each caste in a village had its own jati panchayat, which wielded considerable power: in Rajasthan, jati panchayats arbitrated civil disputes between members of different castes, mediated contested claims on land, decided whether marriages followed the norms of a particular caste, and determined ritual precedence in village functions. In most matters, except criminal justice, the state respected their decisions.
Q. Why might a peasant become a pahi-kashta cultivator rather than a khud-kashta one?
Answer: A peasant could become pahi-kashta either by choice, for example when the terms of revenue in a distant village were more favourable than in his own, or by compulsion, such as being forced by economic distress after a famine to seek land to cultivate elsewhere.
4 4-Mark Questions
Q. Compare the position of intermediate castes, such as the Ahirs, Gujars, Malis, Sadgops and Kaivartas, with that of menial groups like the majur, halalkhoran and mallahzadas.
Answer: Intermediate castes could rise in status: the Ahirs, Gujars and Malis rose in the hierarchy because of the profitability of cattle-rearing and horticulture, while the Sadgops and Kaivartas, pastoral and fishing castes in eastern India, acquired the status of peasants. Menial groups, by contrast, were assigned fixed, low-status tasks regardless of how much cultivable land was available: the majur worked as agricultural labourers, the halalkhoran (scavengers) were housed outside village boundaries, and Bihar’s mallahzadas were treated much like slaves. The chapter compares such groups, constrained by their position in the caste hierarchy despite comprising a large section of the village population, to the Dalits of modern India. Caste, in other words, correlated closely with poverty and status at the lower strata of rural society, but far less neatly at intermediate levels.
Q. What arguments does Abu’l Fazl give, in Source 9, for the reliability of his own method in compiling the Ain?
Answer: Abu’l Fazl says he spent much labour collecting the records and narratives of the emperor’s actions: he questioned servants of the State and old members of the royal family, examined both “prudent, truth-speaking old men and active-minded, right-actioned young ones” and reduced their statements to writing. Royal commands asked those in the provinces who remembered past events to send their notes and memoranda to the court, and the material collected was recited in the royal hearing. He drew on the chronicle kept by the Record Office from the Nineteenth Year of the Divine Era, on originals or copies of orders sent to the provinces since the Accession, on reports of ministers and high officials, and on the rough notes of well-informed men.
5 5-Mark Questions
Q. Examine the problems in using the Ain as a source for reconstructing agrarian history, and discuss how historians deal with them.
Answer: The problem of perspective. The Ain was authored by Akbar’s own court historian to present a vision of imperial social harmony, so it is, in the chapter’s words, “a view from the top”: peasants themselves left no written record of their own lives.
Errors of computation. Numerous errors in totalling have been detected, ascribed to simple slips of arithmetic or transcription by Abu’l Fazl’s assistants; these are generally minor and do not detract from the manuals’ overall quantitative accuracy.
Uneven coverage. Data was not collected uniformly: detailed caste-composition information on zamindars is missing for Bengal and Orissa, and the Ain’s price and wage data mostly reflect conditions in and around Agra, limiting their relevance elsewhere.
How historians cope. They supplement the Ain with sources written away from the Mughal capital, detailed revenue records from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, and the extensive records of the East India Company for eastern India, cross-checking the Ain’s top-down administrative view against these more regional and, at times, peasant-adjacent accounts of conflict and negotiation between peasants, zamindars and the state.
Q. To what extent can agricultural production in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries be characterised as subsistence farming? Give reasons for your answer.
Answer: The case for subsistence. Basic staples, rice, wheat and millets, were the most widely cultivated crops, since feeding the population was agriculture’s primary purpose, and rainfall levels largely decided which staple a region grew.
The case against a purely subsistence picture. The Ain records jins-i kamil, “perfect crops” the state actively encouraged for their higher revenue: cotton across central India and the Deccan, sugarcane in Bengal, plus oilseeds like mustard and lentils. Two or three crops a year (do-fasla or more) were common where water allowed, and the Ain records the Mughal provinces of Agra and Delhi producing 39 and 43 crop varieties respectively, Bengal 50 varieties of rice alone.
Conclusion. Subsistence and commercial production were closely intertwined within the same peasant holding, not two separate systems; an average peasant grew staples for the household and cash crops for the market side by side, so labelling this period’s agriculture purely “subsistence” understates how commercialised much of it already was.
Q. Examine the role played by zamindars in Mughal India.
Answer: Landed status. Zamindars were landed proprietors who lived off agriculture without directly farming, holding personal milkiyat lands worked by hired or servile labour, freely sold, bequeathed or mortgaged.
Sources of power. They collected revenue on the state’s behalf for a fee, and controlled military resources, most kept fortresses (qilachas) and armed contingents; the Ain records their combined strength across Mughal India at 384,558 cavalry, 4,277,057 infantry, 1,863 elephants, 4,260 cannons and 4,500 boats.
How zamindaris grew. Some began through conquest, confirmed by an imperial sanad; more commonly, through colonisation of new land, transfer of rights, state order, or purchase, which let people from relatively “lower” castes buy their way into zamindar status.
Economic role. Zamindars spearheaded agricultural colonisation, helped settle cultivators with cash loans, sold produce from their own lands, and often established markets (haats).
Relationship with peasants. Though clearly an exploitative class in aggregate, the relationship had real reciprocity: bhakti saints rarely blamed zamindars for oppression, usually targeting state revenue officials instead, and zamindars often sided with peasants in seventeenth-century agrarian uprisings against the state.
Q. Discuss the ways in which panchayats and village headmen regulated rural society.
Answer: Composition and authority. The panchayat, an assembly of elders with hereditary property rights, was usually a caste-mixed oligarchy whose decisions bound the village, though the menial agricultural labourer was unlikely to be represented on it.
The headman’s role. The muqaddam or mandal, chosen by elder consensus and ratified by the zamindar, held office only as long as he retained the elders’ confidence; his chief duty was supervising village accounts with the patwari’s help, though corrupt mandals sometimes underassessed their own revenue in league with the patwari, shifting the burden onto smaller cultivators.
Upholding caste norms. A key function was policing caste boundaries, in eastern India every marriage required the mandal’s presence “chiefly to prevent any offence against their caste”; panchayats could levy fines or, in drastic cases, expel a member, making them an outcaste who lost the right to practise his profession.
As a court of appeal. Petitions to the panchayat, often from the lowest rungs of rural society, complained of extortionate taxation or begar; petitioners treated the panchayat as a moral court of appeal guaranteeing a customary right to basic subsistence, especially in times of drought.
Limits. When panchayat compromise failed, peasants often simply deserted the village rather than continue disputing, since uncultivated land elsewhere was relatively easy to find.
Q. To what extent do you think caste was a factor in influencing social and economic relations in agrarian society?
Answer: At the lower strata. There was a direct correlation between caste, poverty and social status: menial groups like the majur, halalkhoran and mallahzadas were assigned fixed low-status tasks and stayed poor regardless of how much cultivable land was available, comparable, the chapter notes, to the Dalits of modern India.
At intermediate levels. The correlation was far less neat: a seventeenth-century Marwar manual lists Rajputs as peasants sharing space with lower-status Jats, the Gauravas around Vrindavan sought Rajput status, and the Ahirs, Gujars and Malis rose through profitable cattle-rearing and horticulture, while the Sadgops and Kaivartas gained peasant status through pastoral and fishing occupations.
Among zamindars. Caste was one factor, alongside services (khidmat) performed for the state, behind the zamindars’ elevated status; Abu’l Fazl’s account shows a dominant upper-caste Brahmana-Rajput combine at the top, alongside a real presence of intermediate castes and Muslim zamindaris.
Conclusion. Caste mattered enormously, but as a factor working alongside wealth, service to the state, and sheer economic opportunity, not as a rigid, unchanging determinant of a person’s or a group’s place in rural society.
6 6-Mark Questions
Q. Write a note on the Ain-i Akbari: its structure, purpose and value as a historical source.
Answer: Structure. Completed in 1598 after five revisions, the Ain was the third book of the larger Akbar Nama (the first two books being a historical narrative). The Ain itself is made up of five books (daftars): manzil-abadi (the imperial household), sipah-abadi (military and civil administration, with sketches of officials, scholars and artists), mulk-abadi (fiscal administration, including the detailed “Account of the Twelve Provinces”), and the fourth and fifth books, covering religious, literary and cultural traditions and Akbar’s “auspicious sayings”.
The mulk-abadi’s tables. Below the level of the suba (province), the mulk-abadi gives sarkar-level tables in eight columns: pargana/mahal, forts (qila), measured area (arazi and zamin-i paimuda), cash-assessed revenue (naqdi), charitable grants (suyurghal), zamindars, their castes, and their troop strength (sawar, piyada, fil).
Purpose. The Ain was part of a larger imperial project of classification, meant to inform Akbar about the customs and practices across his territories, and to present a vision of an empire held together by social harmony under a strong ruling class.
Value and limits. Its quantitative evidence on agrarian relations is uncontested and marks a real break from the medieval chronicle tradition of writing only about wars and dynastic politics. Yet its data has totalling errors and skewed regional coverage, and it remains, in the end, a view of society from the top.
7 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark According to this passage, what did nineteenth-century British officials call the Indian village?
Answer: A “little republic” made up of fraternal partners sharing resources and labour in a collective.
(B) 2 marks Name two features of actual rural society that the chapter says contradict this description.
Answer: The chapter points to individual ownership of assets, and deep inequities based on caste and gender distinctions, with a group of powerful individuals actually deciding village affairs and exploiting weaker sections.
(C) 3 marks How should a historian read a source like a British official’s description of Indian villages, in light of this contradiction?
Answer: Such descriptions may reflect the observer’s own ideal, an imagined, self-governing “republic”, rather than describe rural society as it actually functioned. A historian needs to cross-check this kind of impressionistic outside account against internal evidence, such as caste hierarchy, panchayat petitions and land-market records, before accepting it as an accurate picture of how the village really worked.
(A) 1 mark According to this passage, from what point did Abu’l Fazl’s chronicle of events begin?
Answer: From the Nineteenth Year of the Divine Era (Akbar’s reign), when the Record Office was established.
(B) 2 marks What does this passage suggest about Abu’l Fazl’s method of gathering information?
Answer: It suggests a systematic, document-based method: he drew on an institutional archive, the Record Office, rather than relying only on personal memory or informal report.
(C) 3 marks Does this passage, on its own, answer the criticism that the Ain gives only “a view from the top”? Explain.
Answer: No. Even a careful, well-documented, archive-based method still reflects what the imperial court chose to record and preserve. Peasants themselves left no comparable archive of their own, so this passage shows the Ain’s institutional rigour on administrative and quantitative matters, but it does not by itself supply the peasants’ own perspective, which remains missing from the source.