79Famine and Zamindar Uprisings According to our sources the reign of Farrukh Siyar (1713–19) opened with two disastrous famines. In the beginning of Farrukh Siyar’s reign, (p.32) ‘the calamities of death and fire and the scarcity of foodgrains reached a limit that nobody had ever seen or heard of in the past’.31 Awidespread epidemic raged in the wake of the famine. Scarcity of rain, shortage of food and the epidemic took hundreds and thousands of lives of men and animals. ‘In and around the towns, the cities, the wards and the villages in the whole kindgom’, as a contemporary chronicler in his typical Persian style observes, ‘there was nothing to see and think about save the heaps of bones and the human skulls.’32 Owing to the great famine and the severe epidemic, ‘scores of common people and imperial troopers died in Delhi for want of bread and became carrion feed of kite and crow’.33

Although the chroniclers generalize the bleak situation for almost the whole of the empire, the severity appears to have been confined to Delhi and its surroundings alone.34 The prices of foodgrains in Delhi seem to have become twice as high as those of 1707.35 Subsequently, the superintendents of the grain markets and grain dealers were ordered by the emperor to see to it that foodgrains were available in Delhi at fair prices. Cultivators were exempted from paying revenues on foodgrains.36 We do not know if these measures, if at all implemented, mitigated the suffering of the people. Even if they eased the distress,37 the relief was short-lived. In 1717, Delhi was hit by an another severe famine. ‘The people were in the grip of great distress, (p.33) commotion broke out all around and they brought the leaves of karyal from the jungle, boiled them and ate them. When that too was exhausted, they encountered death [lit. it was the turn of death]. One to two hundred people died daily in the towns and villages. Scores of them vacated their houses and left for other territories while most of them sold women and children for little.’38

Famines following the failure of the monsoons were not unprecedented in Mughal India. The Mughals had also dealt with them with some amount of success. Farrukh Siyar, too, showed the will to encounter the consequences of the droughts. The widespread agrarian uprisings, aggravating the problem of

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the nobility and the mansabdars, however, seem to have rendered his efforts ineffective. Of more serious consequence for the empire was the dislocation in the balance of the state’s (p.34) relations with the intermediaries. Apart from the provinces, the parganas (administrative divisions, districts) all around the vicinity of the imperial capital were rocked by the zamindar uprisings. So long as the Mughals could maintain the aura of their might, the zamindars, either in fear or to further their own interests, remained subservient. The Sikh uprisings in the beginning of our period had noticeably exposed the myth of Mughal military supremacy. The news of the defeat of the Mughal Emperor, Jahandar Shah, at the hands of a prince (Farrukh Siyar) at Jaju in January 1713 further encouraged the zamindars in the vicinity of Agra and Delhi.39 A hurried survey of the Akhbarat, keeping in view the references to such uprisings in the earlier records, enables us to appreciate the magnitude of the zamindar revolts during the period. Disturbances in chakla Etawah of Agra province which lay on the grand highway from Delhi to Agra and on to Allahabad, Benaras, Patna and Bengal and occupied an important economic, political and military position, are, for instance, a case in point. The Rajputs and the Afghans seem to have been the major source of threat in the chakla.40 It is significant to note that the zamindar uprisings in Awadh, assumed serious proportions in Farrukh Siyar’s reign.

Admittedly, the situation deteriorated due to the famines and the politics of intrigues and counter-intrigues at the court. The zamindars were emboldened to rise in arms in the face of the steadily weakening centre. The central government failed to provide adequate military assistance to the nobles— governors, faujdars, etc.—posted in these regions to quell these disturbances. These nobles some of whom gradually broke away from the centre repeatedly ascribed the centre’s failure to the dominance and machinations of one or the other faction. The intensity of the revolts in drought years may also be explained in terms of scarcity.

(p.35) It is difficult to explain these disturbances in terms of the poor peasants’ predicament. It is also difficult to suggest that the initiative for these came from the hard-pressed cultivators and that the zamindars joined the fray to provide leadership in their battle against the Mughals. Details from different regions militate against any interpretation common to all cases, all regions. While in some cases the zamindars and the peasants fought hand in hand against the Mughals, in some others there was no coordination in their actions, even if these were directed against the Mughals. In still other cases, the zamindars’ fury was directed against the other zamindars and the peasants. Out of the four cases of zamindar disturbances in chakla Etawah taken randomly from the Akhbarat, for instance, two basically represented an inherent social conflict among the various zamindar groups themselves rather than their antagonism as a class against the Mughal state. In such cases, Mughal officials and the army were expected to defend and protect the zamindars who became victims of the ravages of the bigger zamindars. Dalpat Singh, the zamindar of the village of Chharoli, pargana

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Deokali invaded a village in the zamindari of one Kunwar Sen. The faujdar of Sikandra came to the rescue of Kunwar Sen and Dalpat Singh died fighting in the battle. In an another instance, the zamindar of the village Atha in pargana Jalesar was killed and his women and children were forced to leave the village as a result of their clash with another zamindar of the same pargana.41 Further evidence to prevent us from making any unqualified generalization about these rural disturbances has been discussed in some recent studies of the different regions of the empire.42

In this connection it is interesting to note that Churaman, the leader of the Jat zamindars offered a sum of Rs 8,00,000 to Saiyid Abdullah Khan to win a peace with the Mughals in Farrukh Siyar’s reign. Notable also, is a report about a trading caravan with 1300 (p.36) cartloads of ghee which was plundered (possibly by the zamindars) near Hodal in the vicinity of Delhi.43 The rebel zamindars were thus not so weak and indigent. It would appear that it was the strength and the money that the zamindars had acquired in the long period of stability which enabled them to rise to secure still more. The differential impact of the price rise of the seventeenth century provided them with opportunities to gain in power. This they acquired at the cost of both the weaker elements of their own class as well as state officials whose claims to revenue they felt had been superimposed over their rights. We will examine below in the chapters on Awadh and the Punjab some evidence to this effect, namely, the prosperity and rise in strength of the local magnates leading to their resistance to imperial prerogatives.