2 - Maharashtra and the Deccan

Summary

The information relating to the standard of living in the Deccan and Maharashtra is scarce and fragmentary. On the basis of such unsatisfactory data, a sketchy account is given below of the rural people, the urban residents and government servants.

RURAL PEOPLE

As was pointed out in chapter IX, there was a considerable economic differentiation among the peasantry in the medieval Deccan. The small peasants who held the land below 10 acres or so as well as the village artisans and servants may be regarded as the rural poor. Though the living conditions of the small peasants of the time is little known, there is hardly any doubt that the ordinary rural folk used to live in mud huts thatched with straw. They seem to have worn fewer clothes than they do now, possibly due to the simpler habit of the age.

When the village artisans and servants collectively called twelve balutedārs were given their balute-payment in cash instead of in kind, the annual amount was Rs. 10 each to carpenter, leather-worker, rope-maker, and mahār (an untouchable caste of watchman and other menial workers), Rs. 5 each to blacksmith, potter, barber, and washerman, and Rs. 2½ each to goldsmith, astrologer, Hindu temple-keeper, and Masjid-keeper in a western Deccan village towards the end of the eighteenth century. At any rate, these cash payments were remarkably small in amount as compared with urban wages to be mentioned later. Moreover, it should be noted that the balute-payment was not made to each family of balutedārs but to each watan, so that if there were several families sharing a watan, they had to divide the money among themselves.