An idea of medieval India

The author has devoted attention to issues like Indian feudalism and de-urbanisation

Economic History of India 

AD 1206-1526

The Period of the Delhi Sultanate and the Vijayanagara Empire

Irfan Habib

Tulika Books; 250 pages; Rs 280

This is the 14th in a 36-volume project on the history of medieval India planned by the scholar Irfan Habib under the aegis of the Aligarh Historians Society. Its objective is to provide an “authentic” and “evidence-based narrative of the social and economic conditions of human beings in medieval times”. The author has adopted the political economy approach and, on the basis of method of the materialistic interpretation of history, has presented his story in three well-researched chapters. 

The author has also devoted attention to important issues like Indian feudalism, de-urbanisation and de-industrialisation and has offered his comments on the basis of available evidence on these issues, which have been debated by other historians dealing with this important phase of Indian history.

The first chapter, “The Agrarian Order under the Delhi Sultanate 1206-1398,” shows that though, at the start of the Sultanate, agriculture was quite developed, the area under cultivation was limited and forests were quite extensive. Wells, canals were developed and wheat, pepper, opium, and so on were produced, as was the “largest volume of cotton in the world”. The extensive forest and waste lands that coexisted with full-fledged agriculture, says the author, “provided the basis for the existence of communities” following different occupations on the basis of the division of labour reflecting the caste system. Multiple and diverse economic activities existed under the Alauddin Khilji regime and “after the crops were removed from the fields the produce had to be subjected to different kind of processing which constituted a species of rural manufacture”.

If, on the one hand, what we have been able to find out about agriculture and rural manufactures shows that the three centuries cannot be described as “unchanging or moribund in any sense”, on the other, the picture was scarcely rosy for the ordinary peasant and village labourer who lived under “the ever-present threat of pauperization”. 

Rulers, whether Alauddin Khilji (1296-1316) or Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1324-1351), depended on financial resources based on “agrarian taxation policies and approaches”. When tax demands were impossibly heavy, “the people left their cattle… and fled into the jungle”. At the same time, peasants also revolted against oppressive taxation, and Firoz Shah (1351) made “the beginning of a regime, under which pressure upon peasants was much eased”. State policies, thus, played a major role in agrarian life, including in interventions during famine. 

In chapter 2, “Towns, Manufactures, Trade and Finance, 1206-1398”, the larger point that deserves to be made here is that India’s natural processes of economic growth were at work in the medieval age. As the author observes, “From the thirteenth century…not only the arrival of new crafts and techniques...but the Sultanate’s success in collecting a heavy land tax on a centralized basis also contributed to creating the basis for urban expansion…” The real significance of this statement is that students of political economy should always attempt to establish an organic relationship between the role of “the state” and the development of “economy” in society.

The negative side of this historical period, however, is that “…one can speak of urban growth in our period as a process that was partly parasitic in nature, flourishing on resources drained from the countryside”. Slavery was rampant in the urban population in this period and this slavery contributed to the creation of surplus value for manufacturers and traders. The author mentions that towns consisted of multiple classes like slaves, labourers, merchants and a “state-generated middle class” besides soldiers and other functionaries of the king. Alauddin Khilji employed as many as 70,000 workers on his buildings, mosques, towns and forts and excavation of tanks. Huge building expansion programmes were also made possible by what “amounted to a technological revolution in the sphere of building construction”.

The sack of Delhi by Timur in 1398 saw the centralised state replaced by small states in which local landed magnates, zamindars and many governors exercised their authority over the people living in their territories. However, the Lodi Dynasty (1451-1526) re-established the Sultanate and some of its economy on the eve of the Mughal invasion in 1526, but the story shifts to the south, especially Vijayanagar, a separate state beginning with 1346. 

Under Sikandar Lodi (1489-1517) the land tax was a major burden for the peasants but towns in the provinces that were transformed into independent principalities flourished, so much so that Babur (1526-1530) said of India that a “large manufacturing sector coexisted with an extensive network of credit and trade”. In the southern state of Vijayanagar “trade in the … empire was open to all foreigners.”

The contemporary message of this book is that colonisers came to “rob” India because they found a prosperous, growing economy. The study disproves the claims of colonial powers that they “civilised” India because the author clearly shows that the so-called uncivilised Indians were actively engaged in a highly productive economy when the colonisers came to plunder the country.