Panchayats and headmen : –
🔹 Village panchayat was an assembly of elders, generally important people of village with hereditary rights over their property.
🔹 An oligarchy, panchayat represented various castes and communities in village, though village menial- cum-agricultural worker was unlikely to be represented there. Decisions made by these panchayats were binding on members.
Information About headmen : –
🔹 The panchayat was headed by a headman known as muqaddam or mandal.
🔹 Headman was chosen through the consensus of the village elders, and that this choice had to be ratified by the zamindar.
🔹 Headmen held office as long as they enjoyed the confidence of the village elders, failing which they could be dismissed by them.
🔹 The chief function of the headman was to supervise the preparation of village accounts, assisted by the accountant or patwari of the panchayat.
Panchayats funds and it’s used : –
🔹 The panchayat derived its funds from contributions made by individuals to a common financial pool.
🔹 These funds were used for defraying the costs of entertaining revenue officials who visited the village from time to time.
🔹 Expenses for community welfare activities such as tiding over natural calamities (like floods), were also met from these funds.
🔹 Often these funds were also deployed in construction of a bund or digging a canal which peasants usually could not afford to do on their own.
Functions Of Panchayats And headmen : –
- One important function of the panchayat was to ensure that caste boundaries among the various communities inhabiting the village were upheld.
- In eastern India all marriages were held in the presence of the mandal.
- Panchayats also had the authority to levy fines and inflict more serious forms of punishment like expulsion from the community.
Jati Panchayat : –
🔹 In addition to the village panchayat each caste or jati in the village had its own jati panchayat. These panchayats wielded considerable power in rural society. In Rajasthan jati panchayats arbitrated civil disputes between members of different castes.
🔸 Functions of Jati Panchayat : – They mediated in contested claims on land, decided whether marriages were performed according to the norms laid down by a particular caste group, determined who had ritual precedence in village functions, and so on.
🔹 In most cases, except in matters of criminal justice, the state respected the decisions of jati panchayats.
Expulsion from the community : –
🔹 The latter was a drastic step and was in most cases meted out for a limited period. It meant that a person forced to leave the village became an outcaste and lost his right to practise his profession. Such a measure was intended as a deterrent to violation of caste norms.
Corrupt mandals : –
🔹 The mandals often misused their positions. They were principally accused of defrauding village accounts in connivance with the patwari, and for underassessing the revenue they owed from their own lands in order to pass the additional burden on to the smaller cultivator.
Regulation of village society by the head of Panchayat ( in short points ) : –
- Assembly of elders.
- the decisions made by these panchayats were binding on the members.
- Headman of Panchayata was known as ‘muqaddam’ or ‘Mandal’
- He was chosen by elders and had to ratified by Zamindars of that area.
- the chief function of headman was to supervise the village account.
- The panchayat derived its funds from contribution made by individuals to a common financial pool.
- These funds were used to defraying the costs of entertaining revenue officers and for community welfare activities and to get rid of natural calamities.
- One important function of Panchayats was to ensure the cast boundaries among the various communities inhabiting in the village.
- Marriages were held in the presence of ‘Mandal’.
- Panchayat also had the authority to levy fines and inflict more serious forms of punishment like expulsion from the community
- In addition to the village panchayat each caste or jati had its own powerful Panchayats.
Village artisans : –
🔹 Marathi documents and village surveys made in the early years of British rule have revealed the existence of substantial numbers of artisans, sometimes as high as 25 per cent of the total households in the villages.
🔹 At times, however, the distinction between artisans and peasants in village society was a fluid one, as many groups performed the tasks of both.
Functions of village artisans : –
🔹 Cultivators and their families would also participate in craft production such as dyeing, textile printing, baking and firing of pottery, making and repairing agricultural implements.
🔹 Phases in the agricultural calendar when there was a relative lull in activity, as between sowing and weeding or between weeding and harvesting, were a time when cultivators could engage in artisanal production.
🔹 Village artisans – potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers, even goldsmiths – also provided specialised services.
Compensate for the services of village artisans ( miras or watan ) : –
🔹 They were compensated by villagers for his work by a variety of means.
🔹 The most common way of doing so was by giving them a share of the harvest, or an allotment of land, perhaps cultivable wastes, which was likely to be decided by the panchayat.
🔹 In Maharashtra such lands became the artisans’ miras or watan – their hereditary holding.
Jajmani system : –
🔹 Eighteenth-century records tell us of zamindars in Bengal who remunerated blacksmiths, carpenters, even goldsmiths for their work by paying them “a small daily allowance and diet money”. This later came to be described as the jajmani system.
Village as a “little republic” : –
🔹 Some British officials in the nineteenth century saw the village as a “little republic”. Because villages were made up of fraternal partners of sharing resources and labour in a collective. However, this was not a sign of rural egalitarianism.
🔹 There was individual ownership of assets and deep inequities based on caste and gender distinctions. A group of powerful individuals decided the affairs of the village, exploited the weaker sections and had the authority to dispense justice.
Money in the village ( Shroff ) : –
🔹 The seventeenth-century French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier found it remarkable that in “India a village must be very small indeed if it has not a money- changer called a Shroff.
🔹 (They) act as bankers to make remittances of money (and who) enhance the rupee as they please for paisa and the paisa for these (cowrie) shells”.
Role of women in the agrarian society during the Mughal period ( in short points ) : –
- Women an men had to work shoulder to shoulder in the fields. Women sowed, needed threshed and winnowed the harvest.
- Nonetheless biases related to women’s biological functions did continue.
- Artisanal tasks such as spinning yarn, sitting and kneading day for pottery and embroidery were among the many aspects of production dependent of a on female labour.
- They were considered as an important source en agrarian society because they were child bearers.
- Due to malnutrition, frequent pregnancies and death during child birth, there was a high mortality rate.
- The women were kept under strict control.
- Documents from western India Rajsthan, Gujrat and Maharashtra record petitions sent by women to village panchayats, seeking redness and justice.
- Amongst the landed gentry women had the right to inherit property, ex. Punjab show the women as the seller of property.
Role Of Women In agrarian Society ( in detail ) : –
🔹 the production process often involves men and women performing certain specified roles. women and men had to work shoulder to shoulder in the fields. Men tilled and ploughed, while women sowed, weeded, threshed and winnowed the harvest.
🔹 Menstruating women were not allowed to touch the plough or the potter’s wheel in western India, or enter the groves where betel-leaves (paan) were grown in Bengal.
🔹 Artisanal tasks such as spinning yarn, sifting and kneading clay for pottery, and embroidery were among the many aspects of production dependent on female labour. The more commercialised the product, the greater the demand on women’s labour to produce it.
🔹 Women were considered an important resource in agrarian society also because they were child bearers in a society dependent on labour.
Issues faced by Women ( shortage of wives ) : –
🔹 High mortality rates among women owing to malnutrition, frequent pregnancies, death during childbirth often meant a shortage of wives.
🔹 This led to the emergence of social customs in peasant and artisan communities that were distinct from those prevalent among elite groups.
🔹 Marriages in many rural communities required the payment of bride-price rather than dowry to the bride’s family.
🔹 Remarriage was considered legitimate both among divorced and widowed women.
Punishing Men And Women For Walking On The Wrong Path : –
🔹 The household was headed by a male. Thus women were kept under strict control by the male members of the family and the community. They could inflict draconian punishments if they suspected infidelity on the part of women.
🔹 Wives protested against the infidelity of their husbands or the neglect of the wife and children by the male head of the household, the grihasthi. While male infidelity was not always punished, the state and “superior” caste groups did intervene when it came to ensuring that the family was adequately provided for.
🔹 In most cases when women petitioned to the panchayat, their names were excluded from the record: the petitioner was referred to as the mother, sister or wife of the male head of the household.
Women’s Right To Property : –
🔹 Amongst the landed gentry, women had the right to inherit property. Instances from the Punjab show that women, including widows, actively participated in the rural land market as sellers of property inherited by them.
🔹 Hindu and Muslim women inherited zamindaris which they were free to sell or mortgage.
🔹 Women zamindars were known in eighteenth-century Bengal. In fact, one of the biggest and most famous of the eighteenth-century zamindaris, that of Rajshahi, had a woman at the helm.