Abstract
In the fascinating corpus of Indo-Persian poetry of early modern India, artists, craftsmen and others engaged laboriously in the thriving urban markets and often charmed their way into the hearts of the poets who wove colourful narratives of the cities with these groups at the forefront. Unfortunately, most modern studies of urban spaces in early modern India have remained focused on their elite inhabitants. To the uninitiated, this would appear inevitable, given the persistence of the traditional argument about the ‘lack of sources’, documenting the lives of the more modest inhabitants of these spaces. Nishat Manzar’s book is, therefore, a welcome addition to the limited scholarship that exposes the inaccuracy of this argument. The book explores the various facets of the lives of the urban wage earners who performed highly skilled as well as unskilled jobs, keeping the urban economies afloat, and yet continued to exist in the shadows of their social superiors.
The book begins with two assumptions—first that wage work existed in all sectors of the seventeenth-century urban economy, and that the variety of categories of wage earners belonged to the group identified as ‘lower strata or the common people’ (p. 17). Manzar takes the unusual but much needed approach of building a narrative that not only extends beyond the most overarching political formation of the seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire, but also bases itself primarily on European travel accounts and factory records. Manzar skilfully teases out a wealth of details from these accounts to introduce her readers to the complexities and nuances of the category of urban wage earners.
The first chapter focuses on the economies of the imperial, noble and European households. Manzar provides details on the all too familiar servers of these households like the eunuchs, artisans in the Karkhanas (imperial workshops) and also on the most nondescript of servants like the Sarafchis (food servers), Pankha Bardars (fan bearers) and Saqqahs (water carriers) along with their distinctive roles in managing the households. Of particular interest in this chapter are the descriptions of the European households and the ‘native servants’ in them. Manzar argues that the wages of the servants were so low that Portuguese, English and Dutch factors stationed in India could hire disproportionately large retinues of servants for their households for a small sum of money. The practice became so widespread that English company commanders had to repeatedly warn their employees of the futility of such expenses.
The second chapter is devoted primarily to artisans and other service providers who worked independently or in the European factories. Manzar manages to comb through an extensive body of primary and secondary source material to explain the workings of the complex systems of commodity production and sale in the urban milieu. The episodic details on everyday transactions among merchants, weavers, dyers and brokers enrich this chapter. These transactions were not always smooth; Manzar documents the conflicts that often resulted from ‘clashes between tradition and requirement’(p. 109), where more often than not the artisans managed to assert their demands. This dovetails with the issue of the exploitation and coercion in the exchanges between the artisans and buyers, which Manzar addresses rather briefly. She acknowledges not only the existence of coercion in the early modern state’s as well as the European companies’ dealings with the artisans but also emphasises on the latter’s ability to stage protests, defy orders, break contracts and also deceive their buyers on numerous occasions. The chapter also brings to light the high levels of expertise Indian artisans engaged in various crafts had achieved by the seventeenth century.
The third chapter deals with the consumption patterns of the urban wage earners. In the almost complete absence of any such information in the Persian sources, Manzar lets the European observers take over, but she is quick to point out their Orientalist biases. She argues that the European descriptions of the misery and poverty of the urban artisans and craftsmen need to be significantly nuanced. Although a section of population among them found it difficult to make ends meet, most led comfortable lives. The largest share of their income was spent on food, which was available at affordable prices in most regions. Social customs, caste and geographical locations usually determined people’s food habits. Basing herself on the prevailing prices of food grains and the wages of different categories of workers, Manzar argues that a person of even a meagre income could eat well. Clothing, however, remained rather simple and scanty from European standards.
The fourth chapter discusses wages of the different categories of service providers. Manzar begins this chapter with the assertion that wage work existed in all sectors of seventeenth-century economy. She cites the exhaustive lists of professions and their wages listed in Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari and counters Moreland’s opinion that wages listed in the Ain were not real. She also finds numerous instances in her sources to claim that wages continued to be revised in the subsequent periods. She highlights the case of the coolies or porters in the employ of the English East India Company at Bombay, who refused to work for the existing wages, citing inflation in the prices of commodities. It would, thus, appear that contrary to popular perception, the wage earners did not lack the agency to demand better wages for their work. Wages were not always determined by the amount of skill required for the job. Although the textile and allied industries required a refined set of skills, wages remained low. On the other hand, letter carriers who were deemed indispensable to maintaining the networks of communication and trade were in a position to demand very high wages. While those employed at the court received enough to sustain themselves, those working for the noble households were often forced to settle for much lower wages. The final chapter is an engaging account of the social lives and practices of the modest urban inhabitants. Manzar reconstructs an excellent account of their social interactions, rites of passage and entertainments from a variety of sources. She argues that despite their excellence in skilled work, most artisans were accorded a low social status in the caste-based society. A highly instructive list of proverbs on the social perception of the different castes of artisans adds significantly to our knowledge about their social subordination. The book also contains four appendices that strengthen the author’s arguments. Three of these are on the prices of commodities as documented in the Ain-i-Akbari, accounts of European travellers and the English factory records. The fourth contains an index of the units of weights, measures and coins.
Manzar’s book is a great accomplishment. Its greatest strength lies in the rich details the author has managed to sift out from an exceedingly large array of sources. Herein also lies a problem. One would have liked the author to engage more critically with the existing historiography on her subject. For instance, following Manzar’s succinct descriptions of the advances and expertise achieved by textile workers in India, the reader wishes that she would engage with the interventions of Prasannan Parthasarathi and others who argue that the existence of sophisticated systems of production and distribution, particularly in South India, had allowed the creation of a textile industry, in which the workers acquired better incomes than their European counterparts. India and the most commercially active zones of Europe had achieved similar levels of economic development before England, in particular, was quite suddenly propelled, on the path of industrialisation at the end of the eighteenth century, leading to the Great Divergence. The debate continues, as an equally strong argument emerges, stating that economic systems of Europe as also real wages were far more superior to those in India much before the onset of the Divergence. With the wealth of information on the unprecedented specialisation, division of labour and the weavers’ ability to adapt to the global demands that Manzar produces in the book, the reader would have liked her to address some of the important questions that the extensive historiography on India’s place in the global economy has engendered.
Also important, in my opinion, is gendering the category of the urban wage earners. Manzar acknowledges in her preface that wage earners include both men and women, and women continue to make appearances in the text as entertainers, attendants and servants in the elite households. However, as many writings on women’s work have demonstrated over the years, the experiences of female workers were quite distinct and do merit an independent discussion.
This must not detract from the fact that Manzar has produced an accessible, comprehensive and thought-provoking study that will help academics and students challenge the many shibboleths about the impossibility of doing the history of ordinary urban inhabitants of early modern India.