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Crafts and Statecraft in Eighteenth Century

Jodhpur
NANDITA PRASAD SAHAI
Modern Asian Studies / Volume 41 / Issue 04 / July 2007, pp 683 - 722

DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X0600237X, Published online: 11 January 2007
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X0600237X
How to cite this article:

NANDITA PRASAD SAHAI (2007). Crafts and Statecraft in Eighteenth Century
Jodhpur. Modern Asian Studies, 41, pp 683-722 doi:10.1017/
S0026749X0600237X
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Modern Asian Studies 41, 4 (2007) pp. 683–722.
C 2007 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0026749X0600237X First published online 11 January 2007
Crafts and Statecraft in Eighteenth

Century Jodhpur
NANDITA PRASAD SAHAI
Department of History, Hindu College, University of Delhi, India

Email: nandita_p_sahai@yahoo.com
Abstract
This essay argues that too much of scholarship on state formation in late pre-
colonial India has displayed an elitist bias and focused exclusively on the activities
and concerns of upper-caste ruling groups alone. Building upon recent trends
that have brought into view the roles of a greater diversity of groups, this article
explores the agentive role of the crafts and artisan communities in the state
formation of Jodhpur during the eighteenth century. This was a period when
the Rathor rulers of Jodhpur were unable to rely on the external support of
the Mughal Empire and felt compelled to forge alliances with new groups who,
perhaps, were previously marginal to political processes in the region. This, of
course, did not dissolve the difficult and often exploitative conditions under which
artisans worked, and though their agency was more reactive than creative, it did
serve to define and limit the levels of state appropriations in revenues and labour.
It is passé to acknowledge that history-writing has been marked by

discourses on elites by elites. This elitist colonization of the discipline
continues to persist in large measure, coloring our vision of state-
formation and statecraft. In more recent writings, however, the scope
of statecraft has gradually expanded to include not just elites but
‘middle classes’ too, and especially after the interventions of Chris
Bayly, a host of regional studies probing the transitory phase of
the eighteenth century, have discussed the inclusion of intermediate
groups like merchants, traders and townsmen, and a rural gentry in
the constitution of state power.1 Though they have indeed abandoned
The author is Reader, Department of History, Hindu College, University of Delhi,

Delhi, India.
The author can be contacted at: DII/2 Court Lane, Raj Niwas Marg, Delhi 110054,
India or by email at: nandita_p_sahai@yahoo.com
1
For early works see Richard B. Barnett’s North India Between Empires; M. N.
Pearson’s Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat; or Frank Perlin’s, ‘Of White Whales and
Countrymen in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Deccan’, pp. 172–237. After Bayly’s
683
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684 NANDITA PRASAD SAHAI
Orientalist and Marxist notions of a dichotomy and a hiatus between

the Indian State and Society, and built paradigms that recognize the
existence of a close nexus between ruling dynasties and dominant
groups, they have tended to limit themselves to defining ‘history’ and
‘politics’ almost exclusively in terms of the ideas and activities of the
socially superior groups. Numerous works can be cited to support this
thesis, and to name a few outstanding ones I might mention those
of Peabody on Kota in north-western India, of Dirks on Pudokottai
down south, of Wink describing Peshwa Maharashtra, or of Sushil
Chaudhary writing about Bengal.2
Extremely significant as the contributions of these works may be,
they are responsible for generating the impression that none but those
from the upper echelons of society were relevant to the processes
of power and state building in pre-colonial India. Was political
expediency and concerns of statecraft limited to the dominant elite
groups alone? Were the lower segments and their politics external
to the construction of state policies in all regions at all points in
time? Indeed, the studies of Habib, Muzaffar Alam, and R. P. Rana
on peasant rebellions during the century of transition from Mughal
to British imperial authority focused on the play of politics between
peasants, the rural gentry, and the state.3 Writing about peasants in
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, Muzaffar Alam’s The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North
India Also see Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-colonial South Asia’ in Past and
Present, No. 89, (1983), pp. 30–95. In his work Perlin studied the great ‘households’
of Maratha revenue collectors and the processes by which they used their positions
as village headmen to weave their webs of kinship in the countryside, tracing the
local level networks of support spreading along primordial lines that sustained the
Maratha regional polity. More recently, Nandini Sinha Kapur, in her study of state-
formation in early medieval Mewar, takes cognisance of autochthonous tribal chiefs
like the Bhils and their incorporation in the political structure of the state; see her
work, State Formation in Rajasthan: Mewar during the Seventh-Fifteenth Centuries (Manohar,
Delhi, 2002).
2
See Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge,
2003); Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge,
1987); André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under
the Eighteenth Century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge, 1986); Sushil Chaudhary, From
Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal (Delhi, 1995).
3
See Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India,: 1556–1707 (Bombay, 1963),
Alam’s ‘Aspects of Agrarian Uprisings in North India in the Early Eighteenth Century’
in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar (eds.), Situating Indian History for
Sarvepalli Gopal (Delhi, 1986), pp. 146–66; and two essays by R. P. Rana entitled ‘A
Dominant Class in Upheaval: The Zamindars of a North Indian Region in the Late
Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review
(hereafter IESHR) vol. 25, No. 4, (1987), pp. 395–410; and ‘Agrarian Revolts in
Northern India During the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries’ in IESHR, Vol. 17,
Nos. 3 and 4, (1981), pp. 287–326.

CRAFTS AND STATECRAFT 685
their capacity as tax payers, or when they desisted from doing so, the
central thrust of their explorations was essentially about why peasants
collaborated with zamindars to cease the submission of revenues and
defy Mughal authority at certain junctures in late 18th century. But
were peasants the only significant subordinate formation worthy of
notice, all other ‘inferior’ castes bereft of any form of political presence
and participation in pre-colonial India?
Reacting against this elitist orientation of history-writing on pre-
colonial India that has scholarship embracing the agrarian sector
at the most, this paper shifts its gaze from ‘high politics’ to grass
roots politics, and from the world of peasants to that of artisans and
statecraft they found themselves embroiled in. Indeed, many artisans
were agriculturists as well, and the two worlds were far from apart; but
I am interested here in focusing on the differences that distinguished
them. I perceive state-formation as an aggregative process that
provided a legitimating umbrella for the actions of various structures
and agents, and I include artisans as part of the political processes
to suggest that historians cast their net wider when they discuss the
scope of its constitution, the processes of its formation, and the range
of its concerns. Since power was fragmented, dispersed and diffused
among a large number of actors, and there was no single monolithic
social group in whom all authority resided, I am arguing for state
formation to be recognized, at least in certain spatial and temporal
contexts, as a much more incorporative process than is usually done.
A strong argument for noticing the state and its power relations
as an incorporative process has recently been made in an important
study by Farhat Hasan. Noticing the politics of the lower strata of the
bureaucracy—the mutsaddis, faujdars, qazis, and kotwals—and corporate
bodies of bania mercantile interests in the ports of Surat and Cambay
in Suba Gujarat during the Mughal period, Hasan rightly argues
that ‘imperial sovereignty entailed a politic incorporation of an ever-
increasing number of local intermediaries, on the principle of shared
sovereignty.’ And again, that the ‘center of political gravity, as it were,
was shifting downward to the lower, more locally rooted, links in
the system.’4 Most importantly, from my perspective, he points out
that ‘the political sphere was quite inclusive and included even the
common subjects. Their acquiescence was indeed crucial for the success of
4
See Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India,
c. 1572–1730 (Cambridge, 2004).

any political expedition or conquest.’5 (my emphasis) Unfortunately,

however, his study leaves undefined and undifferentiated terms like
‘common subjects’ and ‘urban dwellers’, and presenting negligible
documentation on the state’s power relations with peasants, artisans
and other ‘common subjects’, appears to define the lower and the
subaltern primarily in terms of the banias!
This paper focuses on craft groups, a numerically substantial
low caste mélange of communities who come across as being of
immense importance to the economy of Marwar. Scholars on medieval
India did often concede the significance of artisans to the Mughals,
but they failed to view craftsmen as social entities to be studied
on their own terms.6 Whether proponents or detractors of the
‘deindustrialisation’ thesis, a majority of them mentioned artisans in
passing, as a template used to measure the ‘health’ of the Mughal
economy. The issue that dominated the historiography thereafter
was to gauge the potentialities of capitalistic development in Mughal
India, and to assess the degree of subordination of craft production
to mercantile capital.7 Yet other studies focused on the eighteenth
century, mentioning artisans to prove the hypothesis of economic
resurgence in certain pockets of the Mughal empire, or to argue for
5
See Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India, p. 30.
6
See W. H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar (London, 1920), and its sequel,
From Akbar to Aurangzeb (London, 1923); Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal
India; Hamida Khatoon Naqvi, Urban Centres and Industries in Upper India, 1556–1803
(Bombay, 1968); and Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal
India, 1639–1739 (Cambridge, 1991) pp. 104–12.
7
Irfan Habib argued that no such transformation was imminent and that the
economy of north India as late as the eighteenth century showed negligible signs
of moving in this direction; see Habib, ‘Potentialities of Capitalistic Development
in the Economy of Mughal India’, Journal of Economic History (U.S.) vol. XXIX, No.1,
March 1969: also in Enquiry, N.S. Vol. III, No. 3, 1971. Expressing diametrically
opposite views were the two Soviet scholars V. Pavlov, Historical Premises for India’s
Transition to Capitalism (Moscow, 1978) and A. I. Tchicherov, India: Economic Development
in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, Outline History of Crafts and Trade (Moscow, 1971).
Tapan Raychaudhuri took a more sophisticated position on the issue, postulating that
traditional forms of artisanal production and relationships coexisted with large-scale
production for the market. Noticing a gradual progression of the artisans from the
jajmani system to production for the market, he argued that in this process craftsmen
became dependent on merchant capital. However, despite the clearly attested increase
in external and internal demand for goods, he saw no major structural changes either
in the manufacturing sector or in financing and marketing, and thus contrasting
the European ‘putting-out’ system with the Indian ‘advance and order system’, he
maintained a balance between the power of the merchant and the vulnerability of the
artisan. See Raychaudhuri, The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 1, (Cambridge,
1982). See Chapter on Non-Agricultural Production.

economic deprivation and hence a dark century where the processes
of deindustrialisation were manifest.8 Common to all these studies
was the use of artisans as some kind of yardstick to measure the
vibrance of the Mughal economy in contrast to the colonial economy
that followed. Recently, Eugenia Vanina’s monograph on urban crafts,
for instance, explicitly stated the laudable objective of studying not
only the technology and organisation of craft production but also the
people who crafted them, and the social relations they were embroiled
in. The discussion that followed, however, failed to recognize artisans
as anything more than economic units, and did not analyze the politics
of their life worlds.9 Historical scholarship is clearly not convinced
about viewing artisans as politically significant members of the state
whose relevance to politics and statecraft can be a meaningful subject
of analysis. This paper, instead, focuses its gaze on artisans, and
unravels competing agendas of the Jodhpur state in its interactions
with manufacturing castes during the latter half of the eighteenth
century (roughly contemporaneous with the Rathor Maharaja Vijai
Singh’s reign).10
The repeated references I find in Marwari literature, even when of
different genres, of a group name for craft castes is pavan jatiyan. Both
Nainsi’s Vigat11 and the ghazals (poems) of the Jain yatis (saints) refer to
lowly occupational groups by this term.12 Said to be a group of thirty-six
8
Christopher Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars (Cambridge, 1983) falls in the
former category while B. L. Bhadani, Peasants, Artisans and Entrepreneurs: Economy of
Marwar in the Seventeenth Century (Jaipur, 1999) for instance, subscribes to the latter
view; see pp. 360–73.
9
See Eugenia Vanina, Urban Crafts and Craftsmen in Medieval India (Delhi, 2004).
10
I am aware of only two studies on artisanal struggles during the pre-colonial
period: the first is Irfan Habib’s ‘Forms of Class Struggle in Mughal India: Peasant
and Artisan Resistance’, in his collection of articles titled Essays in Indian History:
Towards a Marxist Perception (New Delhi, 1995). The second is Gautam Bhadra’s essay
entitled ‘Two Frontier Uprisings’ Subaltern Studies, Vol. 2 (ed.) Ranajit Guha (Delhi,
Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 43–59. The essay describes two revolts from the
Bengal and Assam region, provoked by a major change in the Mughal policy towards
particular occupational groups. Both however, tackle only minimally and superficially
the engagements between artisans and their antagonists, and notice no identity of
interests, no ambiguities, and no inconsistencies in the agendas of the dominant and
the subordinate.
11
See Muhnot Nainsi’s Marwar ra Parganan ri Vigat (ed.) Narain Singh Bhati
(Jodhpur, 1968–69), Vol. I, pp. 390–1, and p. 497; and Vol. II, p. 10, pp. 85–6, and
p. 310; A gazetteer-like compendium that enumerates the major castes residing in
the different parganas and major qasbas of the Jodhpur kingdom, the Vigat includes
the first crude census for the region.
12
See Yati Shri Manrup’s ‘Nagaur Ki Ghazal’ in Parampara, Rajasthani Ghazal
Sangrah, (ed.) Vikram Singh Rathor (Chaupasani Shodh Sansthan, Jodhpur, 1964),

occupational castes, the term includes a diverse range of people from

artisans and professionals, service castes, performing artists, to even
prostitutes and beggars. Including textile spinners (pinjaras), weavers
(julahas), dyers (rangrez, rangara, Nilgar or indigo-dyers), printers
(chhipa), tailors (darzi), goldsmiths (sunar), copper and bronze casters
(kansara/thathara), gold in-lay workers (chitara), carpenters (khati),
potters (kumhar), stone-workers (silawat), laquer bangle-makers
(lakhara), washer-men (dhobi), cobblers (mochi), barbers (nai),
soap-makers (sabangar), beggars (kunjarha), garderners (mali), oil-
pressers (teli), liquor-brewers (kallal), and prostitutes (nagar nayika),
the deployment of this encompassing category lumped together the
socially down-trodden, the materially impoverished, and the politically
marginalised. Etymologically, the epithet pavan jat is derived from
the term pavan- ‘the recipient’- implying those castes who received
patronage from the superior castes.13 Other local terms to refer to
artisans are pun jat or nauni-pauni, said to be derived from paun or
pun – ‘little less than one’- implying an ‘incomplete’ person. Obviously,
this was to indicate the low status of this section in the perception of
the higher castes, further corroborated by the use of another term
kamin (the lowly) for them. The fact that all these groups belonged
to the Shudra varna at the lowest rungs of the caste ladder explains
these derogatory terms of reference used for subordinate groups.
Indeed, poverty and inferior social status combined to render
them vulnerable. Was their clout in society, however, as minimal
as their social rank would seem to promise and allow? What were
the temporal and spatial constraints of Marwar that made crafts
and its manufacturers more germane to state concerns than usually
imagined? Especially in the context of eighteenth century Marwar,
why do records suggest vigorous efforts on the part of the Rathors to
court, appease and incorporate craft castes, and what strategies did
they employ to achieve their agenda? This paper tries to address the
above questions; and finally, it also focuses on the competing agendas
of the rulers that often caused contradictory, ambiguous trends in
pp. 48–9. Written in the folk literature tradition, Marwari ghazals give descriptions of
contemporary urban centres of Marwar.
13
I derive the etymological origin of the term pavan (recipient) from Sitaram Lalas,
Rajasthani Sabad Kosh. (Tritiya Khand, Pratham Jild), p. 2410. Norbert Peabody, however,
translates the term as ‘purifying castes’, though he does not offer any explanation
or source for his somewhat different rendering of the meaning; see his essay ‘Cents,
Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India’
Comparative Study in Society and History (2001), pp. 827–8.

their policies, and notices the multiple and shifting concerns of the
state get reflected in variable experiences of artisans.
Politics of Incorporation in the Eighteenth Century Context
That military might and coercive strength have historically been the
primary bulwark of state power is beyond dispute. Political theorists,
from the classical to the modern, however, recognize that there were
other more subtle ingredients as well that went into the crucible to
produce power. Classical cultural prescriptions on statecraft (rajniti)
and the art of kingship (rajdharma), believed to be the foundation of
relations between the ruler and the ruled in pre-colonial India, had
supported a broad based incorporative politics structured to protect
its weakest subjects. Though descent from an eminent lineage, a
commanding personal presence, competence at courtly etiquette, and
bravery in the battlefield were important indices that determined the
legitimacy of royalty, the one requisite that stands out as being basic
was that the king be a defender of his people, capable of preserving
internal order and preventing external aggression. Differences in
emphasis may be discerned, but classical texts on kingship, from
the ancient Dharmasastra14 and the Arthasastra,15 the Manu-smritii,16
to the eighteenth-century Ajnapatra,17 displayed a striking continuity
in regard to the duties and obligations they advised for a righteous
ruler. Protection of the subjects also meant attempts to maintain their
economic well-being, and in fact most political treatises emphasised
the upliftment of the people as fundamental to the enrichment of
the treasury since the two were intimately linked and fundamental
to each other.18 Several texts also emphasized charity, gift-giving and
munificence as a religious duty of rulers, especially in times of crises.19
14
P. V. Kane, History of Dharmashastras, 3 vols (Poona, 1946), pp. 210 and 223.
15
R. P. Kangle, The Kautiliya Arthashastra: An English Translation (University of
Bombay Studies in Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali, 1963), No. 2, Part II, pp. 364–5.
16
Manu-smriti with the Manubhasya of Medhatithi, ed. Ganganath Jha, 2 vols.
17
Strikingly reminiscent of the Arthasastra, the Ajnapatra was written between 1700–
1716 by Ramchandra Nilkant, one of the senior ministers of the Marathas. See S. V.
Puntambekar, ‘The Ajnapatra or Royal Edict’ in Journal of Indian History, Vol. VIII, (1),
April 1929, p. 104.
18
For an elaboration of these ideas, see Eugenia Vanina, Ideas and Society In India:
from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (Delhi, 1996), pp. 16–51.
19
Prasannnan Parthasarathi’s recent study The Transition to a Colonial Economy:
Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 121–
48 elaborates at length the cultural context of ‘moral polity’ that characterised the

Though chronicles that cite these obligations on the part of Kings

and notables are often panegyric works built around the generosity
of the politically powerful, the significance of these sources lies in
pointing to the expectations from ‘good rulers’ and the attributes of
just and benevolent kings.20 The rulers’ role as a magnanimous donor,
bestowing alms upon religious mendicants, supporting eleemosynary
for religious establishments, feeding the subjects when crop failures
occurred, extending taccavi advances to finance cultivation and
construction of wells, sponsoring the construction of water reservoirs,
and rescuing dependents through relief and rehabilitation, finds
mention in numerous early modern textual narratives.
At least in rhetoric if not in reality, this ethico-political terrain of
state building was acknowledged in Marwar too, evident in a proverb
popular in the Jodhpur region that runs: Raja rau daan are paraja rau
samman i.e. ‘it is befitting for a King to be generous with charity
and the subjects to be deferential towards him’.21 In the eighteenth
century environment of political instability and struggles for the
throne, a ‘fit’ between the office of the king and the actual ruler was
more critical than ever to his popular acceptance as legitimate. This
rhetoric constituted the guiding principle for kings and subjects in the
eighteenth century, though how far they adhered to its dictates varied
in different contexts.22
Thinkers in modern times, whether Weber or Foucault, had
emphasized that few regimes could sustain themselves on appeals
to coercive power alone, and Foucauldian interpretations of power
elaborated that state power has always rested not only in the influence
of dominant social groups and their brute capacity to discipline but
also in political and ideological traditions of conciliation and building
pre-colonial South Indian state. He traces the transformation in the nature of the
state with the inception of British colonialism, and emphasises that they experienced
no such constraints of legitimacy that would check and limit their power. Though
relatively less direct on pre-colonial polity, Radhika Singha’s conclusions about the
colonial state also suggest similar distinctions between the pre-colonial and colonial
polities; see Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi,
1998).
20
For an elaboration of these ideas, see Sanjay Sharma’s Famine, Philanthropy and
the Colonial State: North India in the Early Nineteenth Century (Delhi, 2001), pp. 171–81.
21
See Vijay Dan Detha, Rajasthani-Hindi Kahavat Kosh, (new series) Vol. 5 (Borunda,
2002), p. 3053.
22
See Stewart Gordon, ‘Legitimacy and Loyalty in Some Successor States of
the Eighteenth Century’ in J. F. Richards (ed.) Kingship and Authority in South Asia
(Madison, 1978).

consent.23 The core problem of governance lay in the success of the
efforts to incorporate people into a polity and economy in such a
way that they accepted the political and legal authority centered
on the state. These processes appear to have been at work since
long in the construction of kingship in pre-colonial India, demanding
and necessitating an administrative strategy cast in a politically
incorporative idiom.
This concern was more pronounced in the eighteenth century when
the Rathor Rajput rulers of Jodhpur gradually lost the backing of the
imperial Mughals and experienced intense stresses and instability.
During the phase of Mughal support, the threat of internal revolts had
diminished, refractory nobles had succumbed before a superior force,
and the concept of monarchical absolutism that was a characteristic
feature of Mughal imperial authority, had infiltrated Rajput notions
of kingship, making for stricter subordination of the clan leaders
to Rathor monarchical authority. But with increasing instability at
the core of the Mughal centre, it became necessary for the local
rulers of Marwar to consolidate their autonomous hold over their
patrimonial homelands (watan) and negotiate with myriad forces
to maintain their regime. Jodhpur was now increasingly suffused
with internal tensions, contradictions, factionalism at the court, and
increased economic impoverishment.24 Leading nobles such as the
thakurs of Pokharan, Aua, Nimaj, Rian, Asop, Kuchaman, Ras, Khairwa,
Bhadrajun and Raipur, or the heads of the Champawats, Udawats,
Mertia, Kumpawats, Karnot and Karamsot clans again wielded immense
power by virtue of their claiming coparcenership with the Rathor
ruling dynasty.25 The land holdings of these local aristocrats became
practically hereditary now, the nobles and clan leaders regaining
their old power in Marwar.26 In the absence of imperial sanction of
23
See Max Weber in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), p. 78; and Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1991).
24
Shiv Dutt Dan Barhat, Jodhpur Rajya Ka Itihas, 1753–1800 (Jaipur, 1982),
pp. 137–47.
25
See Visheshwarnath Reu’s ‘Marwar Ki Samant Pratha’ in Parampara, No. 95–96,
in which he analyses the pressures that these subordinate Rajput sardars constantly
exerted on the Rathor rulers. For a general argument analysing the decentralised
stresses of Rajput polity see Richard G. Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule: State-
Hinterland Relations in Pre-Industrial India (University of California Press, Berkeley,
1971).
26
Rosemary Crill, in her recently published work notes that during the early
decades of the eighteenth century several thikanas had become powerful enough to

legitimacy to a specific contender for the throne, struggles among

Rathor kinsmen for acceptance as the rightful ruler were perennial.27
Simultaneously, the collapse of the Mughal umbrella facilitated the
Marathas to gain leverage in the power politics of Marwar. Under
the Holkars and the Scindias, Marathas began to attack garrisoned
forts and towns of Jodhpur, and cut off communications that adversely
impacted on the trade of the affected regions. Five years of incursions
from 1752–56 depleted the Rathor treasury and left the crownlands
uncultivated. The peasantry dispersed, commerce diminished owing
to the pillage at the behest of mercenary Pindari troops in the
employ of Marathas.28 Under increasing Maratha pressure, the Rathor
ruler Vijai Singh bought peace in 1756 and agreed to cede Ajmer
to them. He also agreed to surrender huge sums of money as war
indemnity and tribute and the chieftaincy was thus reduced to a
tribute-paying vassal status of the Dakhaniyas, the local term used
by the Marwaris for the Marathas.29 Maratha defeat in the battle of
Panipat provided temporary relief to Vijai Singh, but their demands for
tribute remained a constant financial burden on Vijai Singh’s depleted
exchequer.30
The Maharaja tried to put his house in order, consolidate his
position and strengthen his military preparedness. This entailed an
astronomical rise in the demand for cash. European use of artillery
and gunfire put a pressure on eighteenth-century patrimonial regimes,
requiring investments towards the recruitment of standing armies
develop their own ateliers where patronage to renowned artists was extended on a
scale parallel to that of the Jodhpur Durbar; see Crill’s Marwar Paintings: A History of
the Jodhpur Style (Jodhpur, 2000), pp. 54–115.
27
For instance, in the middle of the century a bitter conflict ensued after Maharaja
Abhay Singh died; his son Ram Singh and brother Bakhat Singh vied for the throne,
could enjoy extremely shorlived reigns of less than an year each, with the conflict
persisting thereafter between Ram Singh and Bakhat’s son Vijai Singh. Similarly, the
last decade of the century saw the cousins Bhim Singh and Man Singh simultaneously
claim the throne of the state; See Jagdish Singh Gehlot’s Marwar Rajya Ka Itihas,
p. 132–46.
28
For details on Pindarees’ mode of operation, see Stewart Gordon, Marathas,
Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth Century India (Oxford, 1994); also see G. R.
Parihar, Marwar and the Marathas (Jodhpur, 1968), pp. 90–1.
29
A letter from Mahad ji Scindia to Vijai Singh dated June 8th, 1769, outlines
the terms and conditions for these payments; also see G. R. Parihar, Marwar and
the Marathas (Jodhpur, 1968), pp. 85–9. A whopping sum to the tune of fifty lacs was
demanded by the Marathas as war indemnity, and a regular annual tribute of hundred
and fifty thousand rupees too.
30
The Marathas demanded three lacs of rupees in 1761 and another ten lacs in
1765. See Marwar Khyat, Vol. 111, pp. 34–7.

manned by mercenary soldiers, preferably adept in the use of firearms,
as well as the need to import large numbers of war-horses. While
the urgency to respond quickly to this challenge was felt far more
acutely by kingdoms in the east and the south of the subcontinent
than by Jodhpur, military fiscalism was indeed a reality that made
the regularity if not the expansion of revenue generation an even
more pressing necessity.31 The Maharaja tried to meet the financial
crisis by levying new taxes and raising rates of existing ones, but
in a situation of Maratha invasions, revolts of recalcitrant jagirdars,
political turbulence and economic dislocation, the people of Marwar
resented the Maharaja’s attempts at tightening the purse strings.
In this unstable environment of the century once Mughal protection
was no longer available to the Marwar rulers, military threats from
within and without had to be faced by them through their own internal
resources. Rathor rulers now often found their hold over the gaddi
fragile and precarious.
In a recent study, Mridu Rai convincingly argued that despite failing
to employ incorporative strategies towards the Muslim populace, a
Hindu Dogra regime was able to establish and sustain its sovereignty
over the Muslim subjects of the Kashmir valley due to British
authorization and support to their rule.32 Exclusionary policies
negligent towards substantial sections of subjects were perhaps
possible where strong imperialist powers buttressed the authority
of local Rajas. But when circumstances caused such support to be
withdrawn, as in the case of the Rathor rulers of Jodhpur after the
weakening and collapse of Mughal authority and support, would the
local rulers not experience an exaggerated sense of precariousness,
and feel constrained to build a more incorporative state? Received
wisdom on this issue after all emphasises that the power base of the
state tends to be too narrow unless it is able to achieve legitimation
through politico-ideological processes grounded in a broad consensus.
The wide-ranging pressures discussed above caused in eighteenth
century Jodhpur a tremendous hunger for both material and
31
See Burton Stein, ‘State Formation and Economy Reconsidered’ in Modern Asian
Studies, Vol. 19 (3), 1985, pp. 387–413.
32
See Mridu Rai, Hindu Kings, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir
(Delhi, 2004). She rightly contends that Dogra identification and promotion of Hindu
interests, especially those of Kashmiri Pandits, to the exclusion of Muslim sentiments,
and harnessing of Hindu legitimising devices alone at the cost of hurting Muslim
religious sentiments, could not have been possible without British imperialist backing
to these policies. Their support, in effect, abrogated the need for a broad-based state.

manpower resources. The acute aridity and adverse ecological

conditions of the region, however, meant that physical resources were
inflexible, and not much wealth could be generated by a more efficient
exploitation of the same. As for human resources, nature repeatedly
depleted them, but in a pre-machine age, human labour was crucial
to production. Skilled manpower was the natural option that needed
to be developed and harnessed effectively. The Rathors therefore fully
realized the need to invest not only in forging alliances with powerful
lineage chiefs and politically influential clansmen but also in their
productive forces, in particular, those in possession of special skills so
that they remained within rather than abandoned the harsh environs
of Marwar.
That the Jodhpur rulers realized the importance of productive
labour even earlier is apparent in their early efforts at enumeration
of caste data, as in Nainsi’s Marwar ra Parganan ri Vigat. Peabody and
Arjun Appadurai argued that such computations of human inventories
were ‘tied, in these pre-colonial regimes, to taxation, to accounting,
and to land revenue. . .’33 Making a distinction between the logic
of taxation and social control, Peabody asserted that caste-sensitive
lists of households (gharam ri vigat) tabulated by Nainsi were for
fiscal purposes. Sumit Guha, on the other hand, argued that these
are indicative of the state’s interest in policing and social control
that would of course require knowing the country.34 Whether geared
primarily to the goal of revenue collection or social governance,
these census operations were mired by primitive methods of a state
whose information system was dependent on the collaboration of
local elites to keep the news runners moving and the newsletters
flowing in. Political surveillance had clearly not developed too far, and
early modern means of transport and communication disabled the
state to predict and monitor signs of agitation among the labouring
groups.
In these conditions of relatively low levels of administrative control
and coercive capacity, the systematic maintenance of records of
popular grievances, as in the Jodhpur Sanad Parwana Bahis, the primary
source of evidence from which I derive my argument, was more than
33
Peabody, ‘Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial
and Early Colonial India’ pp. 819–50; and Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial
Imagination’ in Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and
the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 329–30.
34
Sumit Guha, ‘The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600–1990’,
Comparative Study in Society and History, 2003, pp. 148–67.

a mere academic exercise.35 Its purpose, I submit, was to catalogue
information pertaining to the different people residing in Marwar in
an effort to penetrate deeper and know the realm, thereby gaining
better control over them. It was a political strategy that signalled
a programme of political incorporation, and though clothed in a
discourse of patriarchal benevolence and paternal concern, in fact the
state exerted to discipline firmly its subjects. Even if the effectiveness
of their project is debatable, that ‘knowing’ and monitoring the
populace was part of the royal agenda of ‘dominating and mastering’
is not.36 Intelligence gathering, written documentation, and political
reporting became imperative in eighteenth century states, and in
the intense competition for resources among the newly emergent
successor regimes, the Rathor elite came to grips with their needs
of lucre and labour by evolving a different idiom and vocabulary of
politics that was acutely sensitive to the need for carrying the ‘people’
along.
This is not to say that in the earlier periods repression was the
only form of exercising power; in fact my argument is based on the
premise that the exercise of power generally entailed a combination
of the ‘carrot and the stick’. But in view of the aggravation in tensions
and increased competition for resources, there seems to have been a
more intense need to be placatory if not solicitous, particularly towards
those who tilled and toiled. This trend was possibly a wider one, where
regional states in the eighteenth century grew closer to their ‘people’
than ever before, the political institutions more democratic in some
senses. Being far smaller in size, their reach was deeper, and they
were far more closely integrated and responsive towards their realm
than the erstwhile larger imperial government with its wider concerns.
35
These were collated in the Jodhpur Sanad Parwana Bahis (henceforth J.S.P.B.) that
have been composed in ‘Old Western Rajasthani’ or ‘medieval Marwari’ language
and written in the Devanagari script. These bahis have been systematically arranged
chronologically in a hundred and two volumes covering V.S. 1821–1995 or A.D.
1764–1938, preserved at RSAB, JRS. Records have been arranged pargana-wise, with
documented provenance starting from the Vikrami Samvat month of Chait Sudi 1 up to
Falgun, and ending on Chait Badi 15. Each folio is numbered, the sides conventionally
identified as ‘A’ and ‘B’, and bears the name of the pargana and the name of the Kachedi,
Chauntara or Sayar at which the dispute was registered. I have used the first sixty bahis
covering the period up to A.D. 1818 when contact with the British government and
their intervention in the affairs of Jodhpur began.
36
I derive this line of argument from Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge,
1996), pp. 365–70, where the context is different but the state’s concerns seem
similar to me.

Without having examined and studied the records of other periods and
regions, however, this formulation is hypothetical, and I must restrict
my comments to eighteenth century Marwar alone. The question to
then address is: which social groups did the Jodhpur state need to
court and incorporate, and which alliances did it forge for economic
and political stability?
Artisans, the Criticality of Commercial Stability, and the

Paradox of Caste
That the Rathors forged a web of political networks, geared to form

stable alliances for aligning powerful lineage heads and collateral
chiefs on their side is well known; yet it is this ‘high politics’ that
continues to draw attention. It remains completely unnoticed and
devoid of comment, however, that the rulers were also engaged in
assiduous courting of mercantile and artisanal talent, and that this
too was central to Rathor politics, especially at the ground level. What
explains Rathor statecraft and efforts to conciliate, accommodate, and
integrate groups engaged in manufacturing and commerce into the
body politic?
Christopher Bayly’s examination of the North Indian doab regions
and Sumit Guha’s exploration of materials from eighteenth century
Maharashtra have revealed that landed potentates recognised the
potential value of commerce for their regimes, and that consequent
eagerness to concentrate mercantile and artisanal forces in their
territories saw them embroiled in an unceasing competition for
productive forces.37 Bayly also pointed out that a state ‘could only
survive if it penetrated further beneath the level of the pargana
administration and into the tight clan-like brotherhood of peasant
farmers. . .’38 Would these tendencies, I argue, not be much more
intense in Marwar, the ‘Land of Death’ whose arid, desert-like
landscape incapable of supporting high agricultural yields put an
unusually high premium on mercantile capital and artisanal labour
that together generated the wealth of Marwar? Located in the
western part of modern-day Rajasthan, Marwar suffered frequent
37
See Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars; and Guha’s ‘Potentates, Traders and
Peasants: Western India, c. 1700–1870’ in Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
(eds.), Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia (Delhi, 1996), pp. 71–84.
38
See Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, p. 5.

droughts, famines and epidemics, and was also therefore called
Marudhar, Marusthal, and Marudesh due to its high mortality
rates. The silver lining to this harsh reality was that it left the
road network dry and traversable through the year, even during
monsoons, and merchandise laden on bullockcarts, moving from the
hinterland to the Gujarat ports of Surat, Cambay, etc., could be
transported comfortably through Marwar.39 Its geographical location
made Marwar the only viable commercial channel in western India,
crucial to the economy of not only Rajputana but all of north India.
Low monsoonal rains and seasonal rivers rendered complete reliance
on agriculture impractical, and the focus of the economy turned to
trade and animal husbandry from the earliest times, relying on the
in-built advantages of a relatively arid environment. Placement in the
transit trade of the region encouraged the emergence of market towns
and manufactures.40 Though the seventeenth century commentator
Nainsi described merely nine cities in his des, listing Jodhpur, Merta,
Sojhat, Jaitaran, Siwana, Jalor, Sanchor, Pokharan and Phalodi, the
nineteenth century Mardum Shumari mentioned about two-dozen cities,
and many more rurban qasbas.
Data from the region reveal that a larger proportion of the revenue
earnings of the Rathors of Jodhpur came from the non-agricultural
sector of the economy than from the agrarian. The huge quantum
of income from the commercial domain impressed upon the rulers
the absolute criticality of the stability of trade and transport for
the vibrance of the economy and political viability.41 The Rathors
therefore actively courted mercantile and artisanal talent, their efforts
calculated to ensure that the presence of commercial castes and their
productive labour would enrich the kingdom’s coffers, discouraging
39
See V. K. Jain, Trade and Traders in Western India, 1000–1300 (New Delhi, 1990).
40
See B. D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi, 1994),
Chapter 4, ‘Markets and Merchants in Early Medieval Rajasthan’, pp. 89–119.
The author has noticed the emergence of two clusters of commercial settlements
in the region during the pre-twelth century period. Inscriptional evidence points to
Ghatiyal, Mandor, and Ratanpur as substantial exchange centres around Jodhpur, and
another cluster around Nadol, at Narlai, Dhalop, Sevadi and Badari. Chattopadhyaya
postulates that despite being local centres of exchange, they were nevertheless points
of intersection for traffic of varying origins, and it is perhaps the nature of interaction
with traffic from the outside that gave rise to a certain measure of hierarchy among
exchange centres.
41
From the late seventeenth century, a rapid rise in the proportion of non-agrarian
to agrarian taxes is evident, and the percentage of the former, called Bija Rakama (other
amounts) or sair, went upto 44% of the total revenue collected in the year 1682 A.D;
see Vigat I, pp. 167–8.

them to emigrate and contribute to the neighbours’ wealth. The rulers

saw in this sphere an opportunity to raise finances through trade-
related levies, and made vigorous attempts to create infrastructural
facilities, carefully enhancing and nurturing the transport, credit,
and market mechanisms to transform the arid uninviting landscape
into one of the most vibrant commercial economies of contemporary
India.
That trade and commerce had become very important to this
kingdom is evident from the immense concentration of mercantile
groups in the urban centres of Marwar. This is evident in Nainsi’s
census figures that indicate that by the mid-seventeenth century
Mahajans owned over one-third of the inhabited dwellings in the cities
of the region.42 Prominent merchants were invited by the rulers to
settle in Marwar, and with state help in the shape of free land to build
shops and houses, established their business houses in the region.43
During the initial stage of establishing their business in Marwar, many
were given partial or full exemption from payment of taxes.44 The
Rathor Maharajas gave them robes of honour (Sirapaos) as well, in
addition to jagirs and numerous expensive gifts of elephants, horses,
jewels, palanquins, etc.45 The state often stood guarantee for the
loans taken by traders, and even mediated when they ran into trouble
with money-lending sahukars.46 The subsequent spread of Marwari
merchants across the North Indian plains, right up to the eastern
42
See Nainsi’s Vigat, Vol. I, pp. 391 and 497; and Vol. II, pp. 9, 83, 224, 310. The
city of Jodhpur had 616 shops owned by mahajans according to the same source; see
Vigat, Vol. I, pp. 186–7.
43
For instance, Heera Nand Manak Chand Jewellers were given a haveli to live
in and five bighas of land free of cost in Merta. See J.S.P.B. 2, 1822/1765, f. 42A.
Money-lenders Sada Ram and Shri Ram were given in gratis one bigha of land in
Jodhpur. See Khas Rukka Parwana Bahi No. 1, document dated Asoj vadi 13, 1842/1785,
Jodhpur Records.
44
Ibid., document dated Posh Sudi 2, 1824/1767. Records mention Shah Bhola
Nath of Agra, who set up shop in Jodhpur, as having received fifty percent exemption
from the payment of dan, mapa, rahdari, and other taxes. Similar concessions were
extended to Bal Kishandas Gangadas Khandelwal of Bharatpur, whose business
straddled the chieftaincies of Jodhpur and Bharatpur; ibid., document dated Shrawan
vadi 12, 1847/1790.
45
J.S.P.B. 9, document dated Kartik vadi 13 (folio number is not clear) 1826/1769,
Jodhpur records, R.S.A.B.
46
J.S.P.B. 14, 1831/1774, ff. 44–45. When Jivandas Lohiya of Nagaur, for instance,
incurred tremendous losses in his business, and the money-lenders were pressurising
him for an early repayment of the loan, he sought the Maharaja’s (Durbar’s)
intervention. On his request the Durbar persuaded the creditors to accept that
Jivandas would pay fifty percent of the loan immediately and the rest through

peripheries of the subcontinent, is a success story whose antecedents
can be traced to this early period of growth.
The rulers also attracted artisans and craftsmen to gravitate to this
region, for as mentioned earlier, human labour was in high demand
in the pre-industrial age, and eighteenth-century kingdoms constantly
competed not only for material but also manpower resources. Artisans
of course belonged to the Shudra varna constituting the underbelly of
society, but in fact they occupied a far more ambiguous position than
usually imagined, and much of the richly textured realities of their
lifeworlds get compromised when we ignore these anomalous facets
in their social standing. The shifting contours of the boundaries
defining their position, and the fuzziness of agendas the dominant
pursued in their relationships with artisans is perplexing at first
glance, but a closer look helps these to emerge more clearly.
It is well known that the caste system inscribed craft castes with
a ritually impure status and this constituted the source of their
subordination. Paradoxically, artisanal manipulation of their polluting
functions and status simultaneously lent them strength. Different
artisanal groups possessed specific skills for the manufacture of
craft goods and the caste system prescribed that these be practised
exclusively by the particular craft group. None but the luhars could
craft ploughshares and iron tools; the khatis alone manufactured the
Persian wheel for irrigation, the cots and stools that made homes
comfortable, and different wooden implements. The presence of
kumhars was essential for every household to procure cooking and
storing vessels of clay. Equally indispensable to every settlement
were bhambhi, raigar, and mochis for none other than one from
their caste would remove dead carcasses, flay rotting animals, and
manufacture commodities of routine use from the hides thus procured.
Similarly, the presence of julahas, rangrez, nilgar, charhawas, and
chhipas was extremely critical, as were the roles of sunars, churigars
and lakharas. It was inconceivable for rulers to perpetuate their
glory without silawats and chejaras who would erect magnificent
monuments that future generations may remember them by. A vast
presence of political and mercantile elites resulted in a substantial
demand for manufactured goods, and the monopoly of single castes
over particular trades caused extreme dependence for the fulfilment of
these myriad needs. Both functional requirements as well as those for
instalments. Jivandas was indeed relieved and the claims of the sahukars settled
amicably.

pomp and ceremony needed large numbers of artisans. Thus though

shunned for their ritually unclean status and functions and exploited
due to their socio-economic vulnerabilities, the services they provided
to caste society made artisanal roles vital and their work indispensable.
This possession of skills and their non-substitutibility due to caste
rigidities lent strength, albeit limited, to the position of craftsmen and
ensured that the elites do not oppress them beyond limits, without
due consideration of the repercussions of their actions.47 Retention
of these productive castes in their respective territories by spatially
fixing them within their bounds was critical to the elites and the state
felt compelled to employ statecraft not only in their dealings with
dominant sections but also with productive labour.48
This need for holding on to skilled workers in their territories was
accentuated by the fact that Marwari craftsmen were habituated
to recurrent emigrations. Harsh environmental conditions and few
possessions that often did not include land to tie them down, rendered
craftsmen unusually mobile. Their relocation from one to another
qasba or village is in fact the most noticeable feature about Marwari
artisans’ lives in the state records, recording of these movements
reflective of the anxiety that it caused the rulers.49 A favourable
land-man ratio ensured that there was enough space where an
aggrieved artisan could settle and find alternate patrons. Hence
artisans often deserted their ancestral homes for more conducive
locales and the elites felt constrained to devise ways of retaining them.
Khati Hire of village Angota, for instance, migrated away due to Jat
harassment in his village. His expertise in his craft led the Chaudhari
of the village to persuade him to return, with the promise that he
alone would monopolise the khati’s labour and in exchange would
give the khati land to cultivate. The Chaudhari assured Hire that he
would not allow the Jats to harass him. Instead, three other khatis
47
See J.S.P.B. 50, 1854/1797, f. 85A.
48
In situations where the local khati or kumhar had migrated out, the agriculturists
suffered immense inconveniences, and the village elites had few options but to try
and coax or even cajole the aggrieved artisan to return. The artisans leveraged on this
clout, and documents reveal that the dominant castes were forced to offer a range of
concessions to have the pavan jat relent.
49
Chhipa Mahmad of Piparh, Nilgar Fazal of Nagaur, Darzi Mohan of Jaitaran,
Khati Dhaniye of Village Saisada, Julaha Jivadan of Didwana, Luhar Rohtas of Village
Sihat, and many others are recorded to have relocated, their prolonged absence
causing property disputes when they returned; see J.S.P.B. 8, 1826/1769, f. 2B, ibid.,
No. 9, 1827/1770, f. 62A, ibid., No. 11, 1829/1772, f. 175A, ibid., No. 15, 1832/1775,
f. 561; ibid., No. 16, 1833/1776, f. 127B, ibid., No. 18, 1835/1778, f. 18B, respectively.

were induced by the Chaudhari to settle in the village to carry out
woodwork for the Jats and the village community at large.50 Clearly,
administrative authorities had few options but to adopt strategies of
integration for keeping their productive forces within the territories of
Jodhpur.
The fact that pre-colonial states such as that of Marwar did not
possess adequate resources to exercise sustained coercion and ensure
the submission of the subordinate over prolonged periods of time was
another reason for the Rathors’ efforts to limit their extortions and
employ the rhetoric of righteous rule. I am by no means suggesting
that the maximisation of revenue and labour appropriation did not
constitute the central concerns of a state, especially when unable to
make substantial technological breakthroughs; indeed, expanding the
material resources was fundamental to the logic of survival of an early
modern state. The thrust of my argument, rather, is that appeasement
of the productive castes and investments towards assiduously courting
mercantile and artisanal talent also constituted a basic tenet of the
rulers’ policies. Artisans’ impure status paradoxically crystallised into
a source of their ‘power’. If every kind of artisanal service was to be had,
contenders for authority had to display a certain degree of piety and
extend patronage towards the crafts. To enjoy uninterrupted services
from the pavan jat, without fears of shortage of labour or disruption of
services, dominant castes were forced to offer a range of concessions.
The imperative of self-preservation and promotion was paramount and
both the rulers and the ruled were locked in mutual dependence. The
point I am making is that incorporative politics were practised and new
alliances forged without dismantling old ones with powerful lineage
heads and mercantile cliques. The following sections discuss how the
rulers sought to spatially fix within the territories of Jodhpur, artisans,
a group of castes habituated to frequent and recurrent migrations.
Courting Artisans and Strategies of Integration
If penetration of state power ‘required not only the coercive force of

the state, but also an ideology which justified the appropriation of
growing quantities of revenue’51 a variety of subtle strategies needed
to be employed for the purpose. I discuss below multiple initiatives at
50
J.S.P.B. 24, 1837/1780, Fol. 174B.
51
See Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, p. 11.

legitimation, some directed towards wooing the non-elite populace at

large, and others addressing more specifically atisanal interests.
At the ideological level, the fact that Vijai Singh actively opted
for the devotional (bhakti) tradition of worship that emphasized
egalitarian values and had a positive appreciation of a householder’s
concerns, perhaps had something to do with his anxiety to legitimate
kingship in the perception of the widest possible numbers of his
subjects. As opposed to adopting Brahmanical Hinduism which was
associated with caste hierarchy and a belief in liberation from the
cycle of rebirths (moksa) through renunciation (sanyas), the Maharaja’s
adherence to the principles of bhakti was perhaps geared to a larger
agenda that was not merely religious in nature. Vijai Singh became
a devotee of the Vaishnava sect and extended lavish patronage to
the Vallabh Sampradaya that believed in the worship of Krishna. More
than simply representing Krishna, notes Peabody, ‘Vallabha idols were
believed to contain the deity’s immanent presence and to possess (and
emanate) his mystical powers.’52 Rather than worshipping images of
Krishna in dalliance with his beloved Radha, the Vallabha sect that
Vijai Singh chose to adopt and popularise believed in the maternal
or familial love that Krishna’s foster mother Yashoda felt for her
‘divine charge when he was an infant.’ Was Vijai Singh suggesting
the replication of the mother-child bond between himself and his
subjects, or perhaps that if people would worship him as they did Lord
Krishna, he too had the divine power to shower benedictions on them?
One can only conjecture on these issues, and what I strongly suspect
is that he attempted the accumulation of ‘symbolic capital’, to quote
Pierre Bourdieu, by binding the supernatural powers of Krishna’s deity
to the service of his rule, and thereby buttressed the legitimacy of
his kingly authority.53 The sect’s distinctive non-ascetic position, the
musical and congregational styles of worship, offerings of food, and the
observation of daily routines of the Lord that closely resembled those
of the domestic lives of ordinary people, helped the development of
intimacy between the disciples and their Lord. Vallabha deities were
renowned for satisfying various pleas of their devotees, which further
aided the process of bonding between the ruler and his subjects.
52
Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity, p. 51.
53
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, 1977). I
owe this line of argument to Peabody’s case study of Kota, where he has meticulously
traced somewhat similar trends.

His active patronage and grants of land to the sect helped Vijai Singh
earn personal merit, and the propitious effect of lavish benefactions, it
was hoped, would protect dynastic stability. Devotees from all over the
kingdom congregated at Jodhpur for special occasions, and festivals
like the Annakut and the Mahotsav witnessed the distribution of lavish
gifts by the state. Under the influence of this sect, Vijai Singh banned
cow slaughter and the consumption of meat and alcohol, and instead
ordered those engaged in the professions of slaughtering animals
and brewing liquor to take up masonry and construction work.54
Nobles and rich merchants became enthusiastic devotees particularly
drawn to this sampradaya, though contrary perhaps to Vijai Singh’s
hopes, its popularity remained limited to those with large resources.
Elaborate rituals associated with the Vallbha Sampardaya entailed huge
expenditures and unfortunately failed to attract the common masses
in any substantial numbers.55 Even so, the greater support of the
populace and access to vastly increased amounts of merchant capital
helped Vijai Singh counter rival contenders to the throne. By linking
royal and sectarian authority and by closely identifying polity with
religion, Vijai Singh sought to restore the political fortunes of the
regime and achieve greater alignment between his interests and those
of the wider community. Since the Mughals had declined and their
ability to bolster tributary rulers and their regimes had diminished,
these strategies of statecraft appear to be experiments aimed at
stabilizing the regime.
Petitions, Judicial Dispensation and Legitimation
The Rathor state also garnered popular support by making the

instrument of petition available to its subjects, and maintaining
records of their grievances. They entertained these petitions regularly,
dispensing justice to resolve not only intra-caste and inter-caste
disputes, but even complaints against their own state functionaries.
54
See J.S.P.B. 1, 1821/1764, f. 67B; ibid., 25, 1832/1775, f. 406; ibid., 28,
1839/1782, f. 199B ibid., 40, 1846/1789, f. 115B. The killing of animals and
consumption of their flesh was strictly forbidden by the Maharaja in the khalisa
territories, and gunegari fines imposed on defaulters. There were, thus, numerous
petitions for mercy, informing that the culprit had been wrongly identified. For the
decree putting restrictions on the consumption of liquor see J.S.P.B.16, 1833/1776,
f. 40B.
55
Vikram Singh Rathor, Marwar Ka Sanskritik Itihas (Jodhpur, 1996), pp. 27–30.

A Rangrez of Pali, for example, complained of harassment at the

behest of the Pali District Magistrate (Hakim) and subordinate officer
(Silepos). The dyer was using an expensive opium dye kasumba to
colour fabrics when the two officials were passing through the area
in the midst of Holi celebrations. Without a thought about how much
it would cost the poor man, they wasted six buckets of his dye in
playing Holi. When the Rangrez objected, they beat him till he bled.
In response to his appeals, the state reprimanded the errant officials
and ordered that the Silepos compensate the dyer by paying rupees two,
not so insignificant an amount in the eighteenth century.56 In another
instance, the kumhars of Desuri complained at the Durbar that a
petty official had misbehaved with the daughter-in-law of their caste-
fellow kumhar Rupla. They asserted that the official Ahmad Khan had
insulted another woman on an earlier occasion, and the Hakim had
desisted from taking Ahmad to task. Despite the Hakim’s best efforts
to save the official, the Durbar thought it expedient to dismiss Ahmad
Khan.57 Darzis of Merta complained that the City Magistrate (Kotwal)
had demanded of them a new tax in the shape of food (kansa) on certain
ritual occasions. The tailors objected and invoked lack of precedent
as the ground for their protest against this new demand. The state
forbade the Kotwal, emphasising that past practice and custom of
the area did not support such levies.58 In fact innumerable records
cite artisanal complaints against state officials (ohdadars), village
functionaries and those from superior castes, detailing persecution,
abuse, victimisation and violation of their rights. The Durbar’s orders
in most cases reflect the patriarchal rhetoric of the rulers, aimed
both at curbing the discriminatory and oppressive conduct of its
subordinates and disallowing them from breaching the limits of their
jurisdiction.
This concern to curb the indiscriminate exercise of power by
subordinate officials was a result of the fact that the state or the ruling
class comprised a complex structured hierarchy with dispersed foci of
power, several layers of authority and multiple levels of command.
Rather than being a monolith or one single entity which adopted a
uniform policy on all issues, different groups of those invested with
power often developed a relationship of friction with one another,
and worked at cross-purposes in a struggle to check the other. Given
56
J.S.P.B. 8, 1825/1768, f. 58A.
57
J.S.P.B. 53, 1856/1799, f. 162A.
58
See J.S.P.B. 19, 1834/1777, f. 82A.

this multi-centred diffusion of power, the manufacturing and service
castes found themselves confronted with oppression from certain
state authorities and patronage or protection from those trying to
counterpoise them, thus resulting in variable experiences. The mutual
rivalries among members of the ruling class ensured that some of the
undue demands and deviations of errant officials were corrected by
the superior power centre. The central administration tended to be
vigilant about the conduct of the local officials, and artisanal petitions
against petty officials often drew a favourable response from Shri
Huzur’s Durbar.
The fact that the Durbar was exercised with the need to dissolve
tensions and remove grievances by allowing the subjects to petition
was, I believe, the result of a calculated move on the part of the state, a
matter of deliberate policy born out of the state’s keenness to provide
to its subjects a legal channel of communication and protest. Their
intention was to stay abreast with popular grievances, not just those
that elites regularly communicated to them due to their close access
to the rulers, but also those of the lower formations like the artisans
so that the rulers could take remedial action before resentments and
frustrations boiled over in the shape of revolts against the state. The
artisans, on their part, learnt quickly about the inherent value of
petitioning to remind Shri Huzur, the Maharaja, of his paternalistic
responsibilities and frequently appealed against illegitimate (gair
wajib) demands perceived as unjust by them. Differences between
the state’s and the subjects’ readings of legitimate and illegitimate
exactions were of course numerous, and tensions born out of divergent
interpretations a question of enquiry that I address in another essay.59
Acute awareness of the need for broad-based support encouraged
the state authorities not to impose elite prescriptions in matters
of civil law and instead honour the customary laws of different
craft communities in matters pertaining to commensal practices,
marriage customs, property and inheritance disputes etc. Since the
conventions and usages differed from one to another community,
and these were traditionally enforced by caste councils ( jati
panchayats) of every craft, the state co-opted these ground level
organs of self-governance to administer assemblies of artisans in
59
See Nandita Prasad Sahai, ‘Artisans, the State and the Politics of Wajabi in
Eighteenth Century Jodhpur’, IESHR, Vol. 42, (1), 2005, pp. 41–68.

their routine lives.60 Administrative exigencies of ensuring efficient

and economically cheap governance of the lower formations also
dictated that the Jodhpur state work in tandem with the caste
councils of artisans. Considerations of statecraft discouraged the state
administration from disrupting locally embedded bodies, for that
would offend popular sensibilities, and invite their protest. In fact,
rather than erode the authority of this competing centre of power,
the state encouraged artisans to approach their caste council for
the restoration of social harmony. In an interesting case, a darzi of
village Bilu was punished by the Parbatsar District Court (Kachedi)
for defying the law instead of taking his grievance to his jati panch.61
Bilu, enraged over his sister’s miseries when her husband brought
another woman to live with him, had murdered his brother-in-law.
Even when approached for direct intervention, the state often referred
disputes to pre-existing caste councils for resolution. To mention a few,
the disputes over betrothal issues between julahas Badha and Nura of
Nagaur,62 between suthars Toghale of village Dhaharhin and Bhagwan
of Taranki,63 or between luhars Basta of village Lambiya and Gordhan
from Devali,64 were delegated to their respective jati panchayats to
resolve. As local grass-roots institutions for human and resource
management at the community level, caste councils were made
participatory organs that effectively mediated state-artisan relations.
This participative, collaborative exercise of power through an agency
internal to those governed, and therefore relatively unobtrusive and
invisible, was crucial in making the administrative system more
acceptable to the subjects.
When, however, the caste councils’ efforts to discipline its members
clashed with the state’s concerns of realpolitik, their mutually
conflictual agendas caused tensions too. Accomodations with the space
the caste leaders ( Jati Panch) enjoyed as dispensers of justice in
civil suits involving customary laws were common, but the state
administration invariably clashed with these caste bodies when the
latter expelled any of its caste members. Temporary ostracisation
60
For an elaboration on the interface between craft caste councils and the Jodhpur
state, see Nandita Prasad Sahai, ‘Collaboration and Conflict: Artisanal Jati Panchayats
and the Eighteenth Century Jodhpur State’, The Medieval History Journal, Vol. 5:1
(2002): 77–102.
61
See J.S.P.B. 5, 1823/1766, f. 236A.
62
J.S.P.B. 18, 1834/1777, f. 26A.
63
J.S.P.B. 36, 1844/1787, f. 34A.
64
J.S.P.B. 6, 1824/1767, f. 97A.

by the community was not objected to, but when the Panch ordered
permanent excommunication ( jat bahar kadh devo), the state generally
exercised its appellate authority in a more decisive way and often
over-ruled the verdict of the caste bodies, causing discordant notes in
their mutual relations.65 In the case of Darzi Kisora the caste council
ordered his boycott since, despite repeated warnings and milder forms
of punishment, he did not terminate his illicit relations with Darzi
Naga’s wife. The state, however, looked for ways whereby he may be
reinstated after paying fines, performing penance and promising to
reform himself in future.66
The state’s pro-active stand arguing for reintegration of the
outcaste, even at the cost of intensifying tensions with the caste
council concerned, was prompted by the severe implications of boycott
and excommunication both for the individual as well as the state.
An order of expulsion from a caste was like the passing of a death
sentence that deprived the person of his only source of livelihood.67
An expelled person could no longer practice the occupation of his
former caste. Neither could he become a member of any other caste
since membership could be acquired only by birth, and the right to
practice a particular occupation was hereditary. Social ostracisation
in such cases was so acute that even if he did try to continue practising
his vocation, the village folk refused to accept him as a client and he
lost all erstwhile patrons. Strict censure implied that if despite the
ban, a husband took back an erring wife or a father received home an
outcaste son, they too were liable to be outcaste. It was this principle
that led the jati panchayat of Jodhpur to order the excommunication
of Chhipa Isak for allegedly helping his brother escape after raping
a chhipi. They alleged that Isak had extended shelter to his errant
brother and therefore insisted that Isak bear the brunt of his brother’s
misdemeanour. The state however ordered the caste council to revoke
their verdict.68
The state’s interest in ensuring the reinstatement of excommunic-
ated individuals into their communities was dictated by a number
65
For a fuller discussion of these issues see Nandita Prasad Sahai, ‘Collaboration
and Conflict’, pp. 77–102.
66
J.S.P.B. 16, 1833/1776, f. 69B, and J.S.P.B. 18, 1834/1777, f. 52A.
67
Ibid. In Padam Kumhar Paima’s case mentioned above, the jati panchayat not
only excommunicated him but also threatened to boycott him professionally, i.e., they
ordered that none of the villagers would buy earthen vessels from him. The loss of
market and therefore a livelihood was sure to bring any erring person to heel!
68
J.S.P.B. 11, 1828/1771, f. 184A.

of factors. In the case of artisans in particular, every individual

represented a productive resource that was extremely valuable to
a labour-starved economy. As part of a community, every craftsman
generated a certain surplus that the state valued and wished to extract,
while an expelled artisan, in the absence of a source of livelihood, was
a burden both on himself as well as on the authorities. He was likely to
migrate, and this would mean complete loss of control over his surplus
labour. In such cases, therefore, the state generally chose to project
its ‘patriarchal’ posture and rescued from starvation and ‘social death’
subjects who appealed for pardon. After all, once expelled from his
caste, the only patron an individual could plead with was his king- the
‘pater familias’. More generally speaking too, free-floating individuals
bereft of a community identity were potential criminals who often took
to breaking the law. Devoid of social ties and pressures, the likelihood
of their refusal to abide by social rules and norms was high. As such,
it was in the state’s interest to have everyone fully integrated and
well settled in his or her respective community. Evidence from other
regions like Maharashtra and Bengal also suggests similar concerns of
the state since dispensation of justice had, as already noticed, a much
larger role in local politics than mere implementation of righteous
rule and enforcement of law and order.69
Even in cases that did not relate to severe penalties like expulsion,
the domain of justice was an arena of negotiation and contest, and
as much as the former had an impact on politics, politics too shaped
the outcome of the judicial process. Much as the state desired to
conciliate productive labour, competing agendas ensured that justice
dispensed by the rulers was attenuated by factors such as their need to
avoid offending powerful potentates and individuals whose wealth and
command of military strength may threaten their own position. The
state was far from being omnipotent, and in fact had to constantly
reckon with the relative power and resources of rival foci of power,
many of whom were often the offenders and the accused. They posed
threats of retaliation against any penal action curbing their unjust
ways, and the state had few options but to reconcile to their status
and accommodate their excesses. A news report of 1781 cites that
Kumhar Narano of village Dudhorh in Sojhat was murdered by the
jagirdar’s men, allegedly on the ground that the Kumhar had made an
69
On Maharashtra, see Sumit Guha, ‘An Indian Penal Regime: Maharashtra in
the Eighteenth Century’, in Past and Present, No. 147, 1995, pp. 101–26. For Bengal
see Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law.

attempt to steal from the fortress. They claimed that on seeing him
prowl around in the night, they had presumed him to be a thief and
stabbed him to death. Though the Kumhar’s family brought the facts
to light that the Kumhar was involved in a love affair with the
jagirdar’s slave (goli), and this indiscretion had cost him his life, the
state merely ordered for verification of the allegation of theft and
penalties to be decided accordingly.70 The fact that even on suspicion
of theft, the guards should have done no more than arresting the
kumhar, and that killing him was clearly an abuse of their power, was
neither noticed nor commented upon by the state authorities. In many
contexts, indeed, extra-ordinary justice was devised for extraordinary
individuals, and rather than causing public humiliation or awarding
incarceration, mutilation or capital punishment to powerful culprits,
the rulers imposed fines and mildly chastised the defendant. In view
of contradictory pressures of the need to ally with the strong without
antagonising the ‘weak’, of curbing the excesses of the powerful
to maintain control over them without earning their exaggerated
hostility, the state policy appears fuzzy, artisans at the receiving end
of variable experiences vis-à-vis the state. Judicial dispensations of the
state most definitely fail to construct any consistent pattern in this
regard.
Concerns of Revenue and Begar
While the role of judicial dispensations in the unfolding of the

rhetoric of rajdharma was restricted to the litigants, the one area
where all artisans felt the impact of state policies was that of revenue
appropriations. The plethora of taxes imposed by the state was a
burden that artisans, many of whom living on a bare subsistence
level and unable to put aside anything but a negligible surplus to
submit as taxes, could ill afford to pay. The state therefore often
granted tax exemptions or concessions as a conscious part of state
policy, these making immense political sense in an environment
where artisans may migrate if their pleas for relief were not heard.
Several documents record that artisans cited indigence (nandari) and
deprivation as grounds for their appeals for mercy, and the durbar
70
The jagirdar’s version was that the Kumhar had made a hole in the fortress
wall with the intention of stealing, and that when the night watchmen saw him, they
stabbed him on the assumption that he was a thief. J.S.P.B. 25, 1838/1781, f. 246B.

was empathetic to their appeals for mercy, ordering concessions in

the taxes demanded of them.
The rulers generally pegged their revenue demands as per past
practice, and any levy beyond customary levels could be petitioned
against as being illegitimate (gair wajib), the rulers compelled to
withdraw demands that were lacking in precedent. Khatis of Sojhat,
for instance, claimed they had enjoyed exemption from paying tax on
transporting cartloads of timber (kabada). When asked to pay the same,
they requested the authorities to desist from flouting traditions. Their
petition found a favourable response, and the authorities ordered that
the convention in this matter should continue to be honoured.71 Rather
than demand taxes, the subsistence of the destitute was subsidised by
the state, and the rulers felt obliged to honour precedents. A document
of 1791 from the Merta Kachedi states that:
A petition is recorded here that the blind, lame, insane, childless men
and supportless/abandoned women in the pargana used to receive grains
[subsistence] earlier. Since the danga [disruption of law and order due to
Maratha raids] [they] have not been receiving this aid. There are only about
thirty-forty persons in need of such support, and if each could be given dhai pav
[little over half a kilo] of grains, they would be able to manage. The Durbar
has ordered grains for rupees one each to be given per person.72
In bad years especially, the state, even if reluctantly, granted

remissions for whole parganas hit by drought, famine, floods, or pests.
Rioting in the wake of Maratha raids, and internal feuds that got
a spurt, affected production adversely and became an occasion for
demanding concessions. Lakhara Sade Khan of Merta had to pay
tribute (rekh) to the state for the two villages he held; but since they
were low-yielding and had produced a particularly poor harvest in
1785, he sought and was granted exemption.73 Similarly the julahas
claimed they were impoverished due to riots caused by Lodha Sahmal
and petitioned for tax concessions; the state ruled in their favour and
reduced the revenue demand.74
Anxious that the numbers of the producing groups residing
in their kingdom must not dwindle, the rulers tried to restrain
oppressive officials and local authorities whose exactions threatened
to cause emigration. The demand for goods and services in begar
71
See J.S.P.B. 6, 1824/1767, f. 88B.
72
See J.S.P.B. 43, 1848/1791, Fol. 105A.
73
See J.S.P.B. 32, 1842/1785, f. 57A.
74
See J.S.P.B. 47, 1853/1796, f. 88B.

(free, unremunerated) exceeded the capacity or willingness of the
artisanate, and frictions due to forced extractions both by hereditary
officials of the village and state functionaries were common. The
Chaudhari of village Phidoth demanded water pots (matkis and ghara)
in begar from Kumhar Amare of the village. Asserting that these were
an illegitimate demand, the Kumhar refused to part with the same
without payment. The Chaudhari, in retaliation, assaulted him and
took away the kumhar’s pots and pans forcibly, compelling Amare to
complain. The state empathised with the kumhar’s sense of outrage,
forbade future extortions, and ordered the Chaudhari to return all that
he had forcibly taken from the kumhar.75 Kumhars and Nais of village
Khatu had a conflict with their jagirdar over his demand for beth begar,
and threatened to leave their homesteads.76 Kumhars of Sambhar did
not merely warn but actually implemented their threat by abandoning
their homes and moving away to Parbatsar. The provocation for this
extreme step was the persistent harassment they were faced with
due to ceaseless forced extractions of clayware by the local gentry.77
Though deteriorating central control was not always successful in
curbing the exploitative proclivities of lower state functionaries, the
state certainly appears to be struggling to prevent gair-wajib conduct
on the part of their ohdadars.
In years of financial distress, especially in the last two decades of
the eighteenth century, the state’s proclivity to enhance its revenues
increased. Depleted coffers were unable to cough up enough funds
and on one pretext or another, the state levied new taxes on different
communities or enhanced the quantum of money to be paid for the
extant ones. The year 1789 seems to have been particularly difficult
for the administration, forcing them to throw caution to the winds
in making fresh demands time and again. Pinjar bab, for instance,
had never been imposed on the cotton-carders of the villages of
Gorwad in Desuri, but was demanded in 1789.78 The dyers of Pali had
traditionally been dyeing with kasumba, an expensive dyeing material,
without paying any special tax for it. In 1788 Khatris and Chhipas
got permission to use kasumba after depositing a tax, and the state
75
J.S.P.B. 13, 1830/1773, f. 49A.
76
J.S.P.B. 22, 1836/1779, f. 18A. For an elaborate discussion on this issue, see
G. S. L. Devara, ‘Bikaner Niwasi aur Deshantar Gaman Pravarti: Satrahavin avam
Atharvin Shatabdi mein’, in Proceedings of Rajasthan History Congress (1974), pp. 42–8.
77
J.S.P.B. 16, 1833/1776, f. 151A.
78
See J.S.P.B. 41, 1846/1789, f. 364B. The cotton-carders appealed against the
demand.

now decided to use this opportunity to earn extra revenue by taxing

the rangrez community’s consumption of kasumba as well. A sanad
of 1789 therefore ordered that all the dyers residing in Pali must
deposit a rupee with the Durbar on using about forty kilos (man)
of kasumba.79 Again in the same year, a house tax (ghar ginti) was
imposed on the kumhars of village Dhakarhi in Sojhat, while those of
kasba Maroth too complained that a sanad of V.S. 1822 had exempted
them from paying dand kholarhi tax but this was again being demanded
of them in 1789.80 Yet again, we have the printers, basket-makers,
goldsmiths, cobblers and other leather-workers from Pali complain
that a maintenance tax for the village headman (chaudhar bab) had
earlier been levied at the rate of rupees three per household from
those living in old Pali alone, but now in 1789, craftsmen residing in the
market area of the new city had also been asked to deposit the same.81
Towards the end of the century the additive impact of raised taxes
had tormented people such that those with meagre resources were
left completely indigent. Julahas Imambagas and Isakh of Nagaur, for
instance, cited their reduction to complete impoverishment (nandari)
as the cause for their petition for tax concessions.82 These pressures
reached such a point that the Darzis of Didwana ultimately complained
in a petition of 1797, lamenting their plight due to the levy of new
taxes. They remembered fondly the ‘good old’ days when tax burdens
were smaller and prompt payment of wages marked Rathor rule,
and asked of the state how the poor were expected to manage with
heavy taxes and irregular wages? ‘Irhn tare garib log majuri kirhn tare
nibhe?’83 Equally apparent in the documents is a parallel process where
artisanal petitions against enhanced taxation and other transgressions
in customary usage saw the state backtrack and withdraw the new
levies.
The fear of production, agrarian and commercial, coming to a halt
as a result of artisanal migration, also pushed the rulers to provide
collective public good in the difficult times of the latter decades
of the century. The Durbar arranged for loans for the purchase
of seeds, and it ordered the local village authorities to reduce or
79
See J.S.P.B. 41, 1846/1789, f. 325A.
80
See J.S.P.B. 41, 1846/1789, f. 199B; J.S.P.B. 41, 1846/1789, f. 441B respectively.
81
See J.S.P.B. 41, 1846/1789, f. 339B.
82
In view of their problem, they were allowed exemption from payment of sal bab;
see J.S.P.B. 47, 1853/1796, f. 88B.
83
See J.S.P.B. 49, 1854/1797, f. 112A.

withdraw their revenue pressures to endurable levels.84 The remission
depended either on the will of the ruler or in proportion to the loss
suffered. Traders were prohibited from exporting foodgrains during
famines so that the local people’s requirements may be adequately
met.85 The Hakims were ordered by the state to distribute cooked
food everyday, especially amongst people unable to work—the blind,
insane, handicapped and orphans.86 In fact in the last two decades of
the century, the major dilemma of Rathor statecraft seems to have
been to raise enough revenue to maintain the court, without raising the
quantum of enhancement so much as to drive the labouring population
out of the territories of Jodhpur.
Such a situation, for instance, arose in the year 1782 when the
state’s burden of taxes was perceived as unendurable, and craftsmen
asserted their resentment by refusing to work. The news report states
that:
the khatis of Bilarha were ordered to pay vachh virad tax. Claiming that
the Hakim’s parwana (order) of A.D. 1763 (V.S. 1820) had granted them
exemption, they insisted that the state demand be withdrawn. The Durbar
enquired from the local people, and learnt that in fact the khatis had paid
this tax traditionally (sadamad); hence they refused to grant exemption. . . .
All the khatis then got together as one (eko kar nei) and struck
work (kam chhod baitha). The state was alarmed and decided to appoint
substitutes to replace the errant khatis. The administration further
retaliated by banishing the defiant khatis, and also ordered that the
rebels would be severely punished if they tried to influence the new
recruits.87 In their view, petitions were legitimate but refusal to pay
a tax that had traditional sanction and had only been withdrawn
as a temporary concession amounted to revolt and necessitated
repression.88 The khatis, on the other hand, contested this reading
of the tax demand, convinced that a long-standing exemption had its
own sanctity that could not be violated. Negotiations broke down and
84
See J.S.P.B. 30, 1840/1783, f. 355A.
85
See J.S.P.B. 30,1840/1783, f. 456B.
86
See J.S.P.B. 30, 1840/1783, f. 460A.
87
See J.S.P.B. 28, 1839/1782, Fol. 276A.
88
The churigars (ivory bangle-makers) of Jalor, for instance, had petitioned that
the previous administration had exempted them from payment of the chothai tax.
Despite the resource crunch by mid 1770’s, the Jodhpur Durbar sent an order
(parwana) to the officers of the Jalor customs’ treasury (Sair) not to demand this
tax from them; see J.S.P.B. 14, 1831/1774, Fol. 135. Confrontation, however, was
gair-wajib, and needed to be summarily crushed.

the rebels were banished. The outcome notwithstanding, let us not

lose sight of the caution displayed by the state in first determining the
validity of the petition from the artisans. Nor should we lose sight of
the momentary self-confidence and the resoluteness with which the
khatis defended their customary rights. Between the two lay the spaces
where the rulers and the ruled defined, transgressed, contested, and
reformulated the limits of ‘appropriate’ (wajib) conduct.
Artisanal Wage Labour and the State
To prevent labour unrest, the rhetoric if not the practice of wajabi was
employed just as much when the state invited talented craftsmen to
settle in their territory and offered lucrative terms of employment.
Their extension of incentives to attract skilled labour to migrate
and add to Marwar’s material wealth, and their active patronage
and protection ensured the relocation of artisans to their kingdom.89
Artisanal settlements in muhallas were facilitated by the state, and
they were sensitive to the needs of caste members to reside in their
own colonies. When the houses of many luhars of Luharpura in Nagaur
collapsed due to the Maratha raids, the state was keen to ensure that
they did not abandon the city.90 The Durbar therefore ordered for the
luhars to be given substitute houses on the crownlands in the city.91
Not only this, the local administration was specially directed to charge
the same low rate of taxation from them that they were paying while
living in Luharpura, a low class colony located on the fringes of the city.
Though the rates of taxation were higher in the heart of the city, these
luhars were protected against higher revenues as a special favour. In
addition the state took care to ensure that they settle together in
the same muhalla since they preferred to live close to their caste-
fellows. As mentioned before, different craft communities observed
distinct customs and religious practices, and worshipped specific caste
deities. The rulers were generous with grants of land as religious
89
Gulam Muhammad, a well -known calico-printer of Nagaur, hailed from Multan;
See J.S.P.B. 25, 1838/1781, f. 216.
90
J.S.P.B. 42, 1847/1790, f. 28A.
91
Plots of 20 gaz by 12 gaz were ordered to be measured and given from Khalisa
territory in the city of Nagaur to Luhars Alabagas, Yaru, Kayam, Bajid, Bahdar and
Jamal of Luharpura; The authorities orderd that pattas for the same be issued after
taking rupees 20/ each from every Luhar; J.S.P.B. 43, 1848/1791, f. 84B, ibid., 44,
1849/1792, f. 170A, ibid., 44, 1849/1792, f. 188A, ibid., 48, 1853/1796, f. 9A.

charities so that artisans may have their preferred shrine in their
colony.92 Patriarchal postures to validate their rule softened the stark
material interest of the rulers, and led them to combine coercion with
pacification in their struggle to contain the inherently tension-ridden
relations between the dominant and the subordinate.
Artisans who acquired exceptional proficiency in their trade were
often recruited by the state to work in state workshops (karkhanas) and
meet the demands of the royalty. Alternately, Marwari elites tended
to meet their needs by commissioning contracts with independent
artisans who were summoned for a fixed period and given wage
employment.93 Many craftsmen in fact alternated between working
temporarily for the state authorities, and then reverted to crafting
commodities for sale in the market. Such wage-based project-oriented
contracts, at least theoretically, tended to have the benefit of allowing
the employer and the employee freedom to enter other relationships
with suitable partners in future.94
In addition to wages, allowances in kind, mostly in the shape of
grains, were a critical element in the strategy of legitimation.95
Termed petia (from the generic word pet or stomach), this gift of grains
(anna) represented the touchstone of royal character, and constituted
an emotional and symbolic investment towards close bonds in a patron-
client relationship. The embedded meaning in this gift of grains/food
from the master carried immense significance in an environment of
hunger and dearth, reinforcing the equation between the ‘giver’ and
the ‘recipient’ as one of ‘nurturer’ and ‘nurtured’. It was a structured
and institutionalised form of annadana, and I would even argue that
though its economic rationale of facilitating distribution of produce
cannot be ignored, this ideological basis of symbolically buttressing
the relationship between the employer and the employee needs as
much reiteration. A record of 1768, for instance, states:
92
The khatis and luhars of the city were wooed with land grants for building
temples within their colonies, specifically for their use; J.S.P.B. 1, 1821/1764, f. 36A;
ibid., 1821/1764, f. 25B.
93
Khati Reham Ali and some luhars were summoned to build a staircase, Luhar
Ajmeri was summoned for ironwork, and numerous construction workers were
periodically summoned for building work; see J.S.P.B. 1, 1821/1764, f. 17B; J.S.P.B.
23, 1836/1779, f. 35B; J.S.P.B. 43, 1848/1791, f. 41A, J.S.P.B. 23, 1836/1779, f.
201B, and J.S.P.B. 23, 1836/1779, f. 184B, respectively.
94
That artisans in fact enjoyed negligible freedom to refuse state employment is
an issue I discuss later in this section.
95
On related issues, see Gloria Goodwin Raheja, The Poison in the Gift: Religious
Prestation and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village (Chicago, 1988).

Mochi Mohammad used to receive grains and allowances [petiya] [from the
government]. After he died, [faut huvo], the grant of allowances is reported to
have ceased. Mohammad’s son Kamal has petitioned for these to be resumed.
Shri Huzur has therefore ordered that the amount of grains and allowances
that Mohammad was granted may now be given to his son Kamal. The same
may be drawn on the Chauntara accounts.96
Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam draw attention to the shift from
land-based dana in earlier periods to this ‘gift of grains’ as representing
a changing context where the gift is consumed soon after it is given.
It leaves no residual that would support further claims on the donor
or encourage a binding web of bilateral relations between the donor
and the donee. Though their analysis has emerged from a different
context of late sixteenth century Nayaka period South India, it is
indeed interesting and plausible, requiring further investigation.97
Wages and petia allowances were combined with liberal doles to
attract artisans to participate in state service as and when required,
and to encourage them to continue in service. Artisans in state
employment often pleaded for material assistance during life cycle
rituals, and many had the government rescue them in moments
of need. The state, for instance, ordered the Merta Kachedi to
grant Darzi Dolo twelve rupees for his marriage.98 When Darzi Asa
and Khati Rupa petitioned for monetary help for their daughters’
weddings, the rulers ordered the Nagaur Sayar to give hundred rupees
for the marriage expenses of the former and thirty for the latter.99
Generosity was shown not only towards currently employed craftsmen
but ex-employees as well, as in the case of a Khati who was given
reemployment with all the allowances, and advance salary too was
extended so that he may meet the marriage expenses of his daughter
comfortably.100 Darzi Rupo, who had been a Gajdhar (those carrying
96
See J.S.P.B. 8, 1825/1768, f. 58A. Kamal’s petition also demonstrates that
underlying the placid plea he made, he was conscious of the impropriety, and thought
it judicious to draw the state’s attention. His petition is an expression of a knowledge
not dominated by power.
97
See Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
Symbols of Substance,: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamil Nadu (Delhi, 1992), especially
pp. 57–73.
98
J.S.P.B. 9, 1826/1769, f. 82A.
99
See J.S.P.B. 13, 1830/1773, f. 64B; ibid., 13, f. 1A. The much larger amount for
Asa was perhaps a result of the much longer period for which he and his ancestors
had served the state.
100
Ibid., 11, 1828/1771, f. 14B. The administration arranged for an impermanent
house and a large cooking vessel (karhaw) when the wedding of a churigar’s daughter
was due; see J.S.P.B. 14, 1831/1774, f. 227A.

out measurements on land etc.) with the state, continued to receive
a small daily allowance even when he injured his eyes and could not
serve the state any longer.101 A sense of obligation characterised state
interactions with employees whose ancestors had been in state service.
The following record is a case in point:
Songar (leather-worker) Udayraj of Jaitaran petitioned that three years ago
he had served with the Merta army, and before that in the forces of Sambhar.
He was present in the battles of Tunga and Khirima and served well. His
marriage is due, hence Shri Huzur has ordered that rupees twenty five be
presented to him from the Jaitaran Kachedi.102
Other initiatives to draw artisans close to the state and win their
support for the ruler included rewarding outstanding workmanship
with inam in the shape of cash, land, or an honour like the presentation
of a turban (pag) from the Maharaja.103 The Kachhwahas of Amber,
Ranas of Udaipur, rulers of Kota and Bundi, of Sirohi, Alwar, as
also Malwa, and the Peshwas in the Deccan, were all engaged in
enticing skilled manpower to make their home in their respective
states, extending patronage in different forms, and the Rathors felt
pressured to outdo the others to protect their interests.104
Wage relationships had to be at least partially voluntary if mass
desertion was not to jeopardize the state’s interests. To an extent,
not withstanding Gyan Prakash’s rejection of the relevance of the
tem ‘free’ in the Indian context, one may label such ‘wage labourers’
as unaccustomed to coercion and therefore ‘free’.105 A cursory
examination leads to the impression that artisanal labour relations in
the cities of Marwar were totally contractual, forged between formally
free and equal parties, starkly contrasting those in the countryside
where they were constantly exposed to asymmetrical relations with the
landlords and village money-lenders. A closer look, however, reveals
that even in urban centres, the feudal ethos saw extra-economic
101
J.S.P.B. 9, 1826/1769, f. 70A.
102
J.S.P.B. 39, 1845/1788, f. 235B.
103
Kotwali-Chabutara-Jamabandi Bahi No.754 of Pargana Jalor records that Sorgar
(gunpowder maker) Lala was given a turban as inam by the Durbar; see f. 25.
104
See, for instance, Dastur Komwar, Jaipur Records Section, R.S.A.B; or Edward
Haynes, ‘Patronage for the Arts and the Rise of the Alwar State’ in Karine Schomer,
Joan L. Erdman, Deryck O. Lodrick and Lloyd I. Rudolph, (eds.), The Idea of Rajasthan:
Explorations in Regional Identity, (American Institute of Indian Studies, Manohar
Publishers, New Delhi, 1994), Vol. II, pp. 265–89.
105
Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1–12, 218–25.

coercion being used, artisanal concurrence to work for the state often
presumed rather than sought. The latter decades of the century, for
instance, saw delays and default in payment of wages and artisans
became reluctant to work for the state, dithering from reporting
when summoned. Record after record from this period emphasised
the date by when khatis, silawats, luhars etc. had to report for duty.106
Assurances that they would receive their wages without delay were also
given to induce them to come.107 If resistance on the part of artisans
persisted, the state used coercive ploys to impress them into service
by overawing them. A document of 1800 reports an incident where
the state administration, in its desperation, had sent messengers on
horse-back to scare the silawats of Makrana into immediately reporting
for work. Disinclined to obey but fearful about the consequences of
defiance, the stone-workers flew from their village with their families.
The resultant chaos saw one of them lose an infant and another’s wife
had a miscarriage.108 Such militarised recruitments became much
more common during the colonial era, but that they were being
practised when necessary even by indigenous rulers during the pre-
colonial era cannot be disputed.
Another case in point is that of Luhar Ajmeri of village Rohal. A
fine of rupees forty-one, indeed a huge amount in the eighteenth
century, especially for a low income individual, was imposed on him
on grounds of non-obedience of state orders. His crime was that when
the caste head (Luhar Mehatar) arrived in the evening with summons
for work at the Nagaur wood-cum-iron workshop (Kilikhana), Ajmeri
deferred his departure till the next morning. The Mehatar asked
him to furnish the raw materials, the collection of which needed
some time. The Mehatar chose to read the delay as defiance, and his
complaint cost the luhar dear, burning a huge hole in his pocket.109
Though he petitioned, the fine on Ajmeri was merely reduced but not
withdrawn.110 Ajmeri and other subalterns neither enjoyed the option
106
Ibid., 21,1835/1778, f. 300B; ibid., 23, 1836/1779), f. 130A and 184B; ibid., 25,
1838/1781, f. 90B; ibid., 41, f. 105B.
107
Ibid., 25, f. 92B; ibid., 41, 1846/1789, f. 102A.
108
See J.S.P.B. 54, 1857/1800, f268B.
109
The fact that despite being a caste-fellow, the Mehtar complained is indicative
of multiple and fragmented identities, ambiguous relationships among artisans. For
more on this, see Nandita Prasad Sahai, ‘Crafts in Eighteenth Century Jodhpur:
Questions of Class, Caste, and Community Identities’ Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient, vol. 48(4), 2005.
110
J.S.P.B. 23, 1836/1779, f. 35B.

to refuse state summons nor did his convenience in the matter carry
any weight. If the requirement of the state was urgent, he had no choice
but to comply immediately. Shifting agendas of the state implied that
though realpolitik may require the rulers to placate artisans, other
objectives often enjoyed precedence.
Concluding Remarks
Arguing that state politics need not necessarily be studied in the

context of elites to the exclusion of lower formations, this paper
examined the Jodhpur rulers’ constraints and concerns in devising
conscious policies for incorporating craft groups into the body politic.
This mapping of the rulers’ efforts to court artisans and the perception
that they too were inclusive to considerations of statecraft, integral
to the ‘low politics’ of the state, does not imply that artisans led
privileged lives, sheltered from exploitation and oppression that was
their lot in other regions. The logic of the state’s survival dictated
maximisation of resources, appropriated largely from the toiling lot,
and this basic agenda remained the predominant guiding principle
of governance in Marwar too. Rather, the thrust of the argument is
that the rigours and excesses of revenue and labour appropriations
were mitigated and partially checked by considerations that are rarely
noticed when studies insist on harping on the predator-prey equation
between the rulers and the workers, to the exclusion of all other
dimensions of the relationship. In practise, the exchanges between
the state and the crafts implied numerous ambiguities, the petitions
revealing exploitative tendencies, artisanal lament against abuse and
oppression of a diverse nature, as well as paternalistic postures adopted
by the state. Subtle forms of discipline and control over the people, the
productive assets of the state, were devised and the picture of statecraft
that emerges from the dialogue between those ‘above’ with artisans
‘below’ is indeed complicated by contradictory impulses, competing
agendas, and confusing anomalies.
Since Marwari sources from different genres strongly suggested the
participation of lower strata like artisans in the pre-colonial polity,
this paper used their case study to argue for the acknowledgement
of the place and role of a wider spectrum of groups in politics and
statecraft. Though elitist sources and their production of knowledges
desist from admitting as such, a teasing of historical materials from
other regions too, I suspect, would be indicative of the role of lower

formations in contemporary polities. I submit therefore that scholarly

interest, at least in post-modern times, develop in those directions
rather than conniving with the neglect and biases embedded in elitist
sources vis-à-vis the lower castes.111
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Crafts and Statecraft in Eighteenth Century

NANDITA PRASAD SAHAI

Modern Asian Studies / Volume 41 / Issue 04 / July 2007, pp 683 - 722

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Crafts and Statecraft in Eighteenth

Department of History, Hindu College, University of Delhi, India

It is passé to acknowledge that history-writing has been marked by

The author is Reader, Department of History, Hindu College, University of Delhi,

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Orientalist and Marxist notions of a dichotomy and a hiatus between

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any political expedition or conquest.’5 (my emphasis) Unfortunately,

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occupational castes, the term includes a diverse range of people from

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Politics of Incorporation in the Eighteenth Century Context

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Though chronicles that cite these obligations on the part of Kings

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legitimacy to a specific contender for the throne, struggles among

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manpower resources. The acute aridity and adverse ecological

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Artisans, the Criticality of Commercial Stability, and the

That the Rathors forged a web of political networks, geared to form

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them to emigrate and contribute to the neighbours’ wealth. The rulers

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pomp and ceremony needed large numbers of artisans. Thus though

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Courting Artisans and Strategies of Integration

If penetration of state power ‘required not only the coercive force of

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legitimation, some directed towards wooing the non-elite populace at

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Petitions, Judicial Dispensation and Legitimation

The Rathor state also garnered popular support by making the

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A Rangrez of Pali, for example, complained of harassment at the

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their routine lives.60 Administrative exigencies of ensuring efficient

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of factors. In the case of artisans in particular, every individual

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