Abstract
The book under review in many ways brings back peasant communities in medieval and early modern India to the centre stage of historical analysis. Straddling the methodological frameworks of history from below and microhistory, the work examines the evolution of the social identity of a pastoral community as peasants, their worldviews of the state and king, and the political configurations of the society from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. As a follow-up to Bhardwaj’s preceding work titled, Contestations and Accommodations: Mewat and Meos in Mughal India (2016), the present book also focuses on the Meos, a peasant community located in the Mewat region of Delhi and Agra provinces (subas) of the Mughal Empire in the northern and western parts of India. Due to the hilly topography of the Aravalli range, the Mewat region was of particular strategic importance to the Sultanate and Mughal states as a defense frontier and a connecting route in the trading networks. Nestled amongst the rocky slopes and valleys of the Aravalli hills, the Meos often supplemented their income from pastoralism with predatory activities and thus became an eyesore for the state machinery. Their persisting recalcitrance in the payment of agrarian revenue even when they settled down as peasants in the Mewat region, further pigeonholed the Meos in the Indo-Persian and colonial records as unruly marauders; a stigma that got inscribed in the historical memory till modern times. Incidentally, the root word Mev/Mewas from which the word ‘Meo’ is derived means ‘a hiding place for the robbers’ (pp. 14–5).
Divided into six chapters and prefaced by an Introduction, the book challenges such a stereotype in addition to a peasant society typecast of isolation and self-sufficiency. Based on a range of official records from the local to the central level, and a rich selection of Mewati folk tales, the first three chapters titled, ‘State Formation in Mewat’, ‘Socio-economic Transformation in Mewat’ and ‘Islamization in Mewat’ discuss the process of transformation from pastoralists to peasants that resulted in ruptures and hierarchies within the Meo society. The large-scale clearing of forest areas, construction of forts, and military operations by the Delhi Sultans coupled with Meo migration to the plains due to demographic pressures resulted in the lineage groups (pals) acquiring the Hindu kin identity (gotras) with the acceptance of the Hindu customs and forms of worship. In addition, the tribal leaders (chaudhuries) adopted the Rajput practice of subscribing to elaborate genealogies that bequeathed a newfound prestige upon their faltering status. Finally, with the annexation of Mewat by the Mughal emperor, Akbar (r.1556–1605) in the sixteenth century, the Meo society was completely peasantised with a zamindari (superior landed rights) status. They evaded taxes, defied the authority and often confronted it. The chapters also inform us that the crystallization of the peasant identity was also accompanied by a simultaneous decline in the political status of the Meos, especially of the Khanzadas (Mewati chieftains) who despite having their chiefdoms in Mewat and being a part of the Sultanate nobility in the fourteenth century, could never establish a state due to the Mughal annexation of the region. The contestation of power that further intensified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the increasing political autonomy of the Mughal mansbadars (military bureaucrats), the Kachchwahas of Amber, and the emerging class of landed elites like the Jats and Rajputs in Mewat, disenfranchised the Khanzadas and Meos and marginalised them as mere landlords in the rural society.
Bhardwaj questions the supposed internal cohesion and the autonomy of the Meo community that has been romanticised by many scholars. Highlighting the economic and social stratification within the Meo peasant community that comprised upper-caste groups (khudkashts, gharuhallas) with their implements and landholdings, middle-caste groups, (gavetis or palatis) bearing the entire burden of revenue, depressed peasants (pahis) who wandered from village to village in search of livelihood and finally the low-caste landless group (Kamins), who sold their labour for agricultural wages, the author also tells us about the political and social interactions of the Meos with other groups like the Ahirs, Meenas, Jats, Rajputs, Malis, and so on inhabiting the Mewat region.
Bhardwaj tells us that one of the important factors that shatter the idea of the community’s allegedly idyllic seclusion was the process of Islamisation that influenced its identity for a long time to come. The engagement with religious mystics (Sufis) and administrative appointments in the Sultanate and Mughal states induced the Meo society to absorb these changes, but the resilience of the traditional community identity defied religious and political watertight compartmentalisation. The Meos observed both the Hindu and Muslim ritual practices while adopting Muslim names. Underscoring such fluid identities and a gradual process of acculturation, the author negates formal conversion, state patronage, coercion, and egalitarianism as reasons for Islamisation.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 titled, ‘Conflict over Social Surplus’, ‘Changing Dynamics of Peasant-State Relation in Mewat, and ‘Perceptions of Kingship in Peasant Society’, respectively, highlight the relationship between peasants, landlords, and the state that converged in the repressive practice of revenue farming (ijaredari) from the late seventeenth century. Documenting various forms of protest, namely, armed rebellion, desertion of villages, petitions to the Mughal court, pilfering, and deliberately downgrading the crop at various stages of production for a reduced revenue estimate, we are presented with a nuanced picture beyond the binaries of the oppressor and oppressed. The Meo worldview developed a ‘self-consciousness as a class with distinctive economic interests’, and a perception of the state and its relations with it (p. 4). In a refreshingly nuanced analysis, Bhardwaj delineates a moral world of social ethics predicated upon which was the conviction of the Meo peasants that the state will resolve conflicts, redress grievances over surplus distribution and tax payment, show magnanimity in case of default payments, and deal firmly with illegitimate demands of various claimants (rajadharma). We are told that the peasants accepted the demand of taxes as the customary right of the state that they were dutybound to pay (prajadharma), but were not obliged to pay non-customary dues and if oppressed, they would resist. Thus, highlighting the presence of a class consciousness that subsumed even the caste identities, the analysis attributes a strong agency to the peasants rather than reducing them to the status of helpless destitutes. The rigorous historical analysis of folksongs and folktales performed widely delineates effectively the moral world of peasants and their everyday forms of protest and hence were useful archives for reconstructing peasant histories.
While the analysis is layered and thought-provoking, one cannot help feeling that the author has romanticised and idealised the peasant’s agency and his value system. The caste identities undoubtedly brought about group solidarity across economic differences, often reducing the poor peasant to a status of a foot soldier fighting for the interests of the oppressive landlord of the same caste, weakening the ties of class consciousness. Consequently, despite numerous rebellions in the Mewat region especially in the eighteenth century, the rural order hardly changed. Nevertheless, the arguments in the book describing peasants as architects of their fate in many ways counter the history from above and its monopolising of the historical discourse.