Peasant-State Relation in Late Medieval North India (Mewat)

Abstract

Studies on peasantry in medieval India 1 , particularly peasant protests in the late Mughal period, have not adequately addressed the issue of class consciousness in peasantry or that of class character of peasant protests against the state. In a way, agency has been denied to the peasantry in collectively developing and articulating an informed understanding of its distinct social position and economic interests as a class, as well as in protecting those interests. This essay retrieves this agency by arguing that the peasantry in late medieval north India, that is, late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries ce, did develop a degree of self-consciousness as a class and that its conflict with the state did betray a certain class character. The folksongs and folktales popular among the peasantry since the medieval times have all the ingredients with which to construct a definite peasant class ideology that included conceptions of economic interest, social ethics and relation with the ruling class. On the basis of hitherto understudied Rajasthani documents, the article details the various ways in which the state intervened in the peasants’ socio-cultural and economic lives and the ways in which the peasants responded to these interventions. It also shows how the peasants’ class consciousness conditioned their engagement with the state in specific areas, whether grievance redressal, conflict resolution or agricultural production and surplus distribution. Furthermore, it discusses how caste consciousness in a stratified peasant society impinged on its class consciousness. However, there remained certain limits to the fuller development of this class consciousness, which ultimately constrained the fuller realisation of the potential of peasants’ class struggle against the state. The essay locates these limits in the peasants’ periodic negotiations with the state and their belief in the ideal of a non-conflictual, harmonious relation with the state.