Craft Production in Mughal Period (16th and 17th Century)

Craft Production in Mughal Period (16th and 17th Century)

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Craft production in Mughal India reached a remarkably high level, shaped chiefly by demand and consumption within the home market and closely tied to prevailing patterns of trade and commerce. By the 17th century, the surge in demand from overseas markets had grown so significant that it began to actively influence production itself. While Persian chronicles offer only limited information on the crafts and techniques of the period, the accounts of European travellers, together with the documents and correspondence of the various European trading companies, supply far more detailed evidence. This article surveys craft production in Mughal India across three broad areas — agro-based production (chiefly textiles, indigo, sugar, and oil), mining and metal-working, and other crafts including wood, stone, leather, paper, and pottery — before examining how production itself was organised, from the village-based jajmani system to the great Mughal karkhanas.

Agro-Based Production

India’s high level of cash-crop production — cotton, sugarcane, indigo, tobacco, and the like — meant that the crafts associated with these crops flourished in equal measure.

Textiles

Cotton

• Cotton textiles were manufactured practically all over the country, since — with the exception of the sub-Himalayan region — cotton could be grown almost everywhere. Abul Fazl provides a detailed list of the significant centres of cotton textile production:
  • Gujarat emerged as one of the most important textile-manufacturing regions, with its main centres at Ahmedabad, Broach, Baroda, Cambay, and Surat.
  • In Rajasthan: Ajmer, Sironj, and several smaller towns.
  • In U.P.: Lucknow and the towns around it, along with Banaras, Agra, and Allahabad, were prominent centres.
  • Other northern areas — Delhi, Sirhind, Samana, Lahore, Sialkot, Multan, and Thatta — produced textiles of good quality.
  • In Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa: Sonargaon and Dacca, Rajmahal, Qasimbazar, and Patna, along with numerous smaller towns nearby, were famous textile centres.
  • In the Deccan, Burhanpur and Aurangabad produced a fine variety of cotton cloth, while on the western coast of Maharashtra, Chaul and Bhiwandi had flourishing weaving industries.
  • The Qutab Shahi kingdom was also well known for its textiles, as were Masulipatnam and the Coromandal coast, while in the south, Coimbatore and Malabar were known for good-quality cotton.
• Many centres specialised in producing only yarn, which was then carried to weaving centres and even exported — spinning thus became a specialised occupation in its own right.
  • Gujarat supplied yarn to Bengal in the second half of the 17th century, while the especially fine yarn required for Dacca muslin was spun by young women using the takli (spindle).
• Among the significant varieties of cotton textile:
  • Bafta (from Gujarat), described in the Ain-i Akbari as a high-quality calico, usually white or of a single colour.
  • Tafta, a silk cloth sometimes interwoven with cotton yarn, and zartari, cloth interwoven with gold or silver thread.
  • Muslin (from Sonargaon, Bengal), a very fine, thin cloth, of which khasa was one particularly expensive and finely woven type.
  • Chintz (Chheent), cotton cloth printed or painted with floral or other patterns, with Ahmedabad acquiring particular fame for this variety.
  • Some cloths took their names from their place of production — such as Dariabadi and Khairabadi, Samianas (from Samana), and Lakhowries (from Lakhowar, near Patna).
  • The most common and widely demanded cloth was a superior white calico, known by different regional names — Ambartees in Bihar and Bengal, Bafta in Gujarat — while other celebrated varieties included the fine Khasa muslin of Bengal and the printed chintz.
• Manufacturing steps in cotton textile production followed a set sequence:
  • First, ginning — separating the seeds from the cotton — followed by cleaning with a bowstring by the carder (dhuniya).
  • The cleaned cotton was then spun into yarn on the spinning wheel, and the yarn was woven on looms by weavers, the most common loom being the horizontal pit-loom fitted with foot treadles.
  • The finished cloth was finally bleached or dyed before use.
  • Although these processes were carried out everywhere, certain centres gained particular prominence — Broach in Gujarat, for instance, was considered the best bleaching centre owing to the special quality of its water, so much so that the English East India Company sent baftas purchased at Agra and Lahore to Broach and Nausari for bleaching before export.
  • Dyeing and printing likewise became specialised professions, practised by the rangrez (dyers), who formed a distinct caste. Vegetable dyes were generally used — red obtained from chay or lac, and blue from indigo.

Silk

• Silk was another major textile item. Abul Fazl mentions Kashmir as producing abundant silk textiles, while Patna and Ahmedabad were known for their silk fabrics, and Banaras was equally famous.
  • In the 17th century, Bengal produced the largest quantity of raw silk, exported both abroad and to other parts of India, with silk fabrics manufactured at Qasimbazar and Murshidabad.
  • In 1681, London silk weavers petitioned the British Parliament to ban the import of Bengal silk through the English East India Company, and the import of Bengal silk fabrics was indeed stopped in 1701. Nevertheless, Bengal remained India’s premier centre for the production of both silk textiles and raw silk.

Wool

• The most celebrated woollen product was the Kashmiri shawl, exported across the world, made from fine wool imported from Tibet.
  • Akbar promoted shawl manufacture at Lahore, though the products there could never match the quality of genuine Kashmiri shawls.
  • Finer varieties of woollen textiles were generally brought in through the Europeans for the use of the upper classes, while blankets made of wool were produced almost throughout North India.

Other Textile Items

• Cotton durries were produced widely, as were carpets of both silk and wool — carpet weaving formed yet another branch of textile production, with Bihar, Delhi, Agra, Lahore, and Mirzapur serving as well-known northern centres, and Warangal equally renowned in the south.
  • The overall output of carpet weaving remained relatively small, and Persian carpets continued to be preferred and used; Akbar himself took special interest in developing silk-carpet manufacture in the royal karkhana, modelled on the Persian style.
• Tents, used mostly by the royal establishment and the nobility, were also manufactured — Abul Fazl mentions eleven types of tents — while embroidery, worked on all kinds of textiles using cotton, silk, or gold and silver thread, formed a further allied craft.

Indigo

• Demand for indigo, both within the country and for export, was very high. Except in the hilly regions, indigo was available across the country, with the finest variety secured from Bayana, near Agra, followed by the somewhat lesser but still valuable Sarkhej variety, near Ahmedabad.
  • In North India, Agra and Lahore were the two other cities where indigo dye could be purchased in large quantities, while on the Coromandal coast, Masulipatam was another significant market for the dye.

Sugar, Oil, and Related Products

• Since sugarcane was cultivated widely, sugar too was manufactured across the country, generally in three forms: gur or jaggery, powdered sugar, and the finer-grade granules known as candy.
  • Jaggery was produced in every sugarcane-growing area and consumed mainly locally, while the two finer qualities were manufactured chiefly in Bengal, Orissa, Ahmedabad, Lahore, Multan, and parts of Northern India.
  • The cane-press used for extraction was operated either manually or with animal power, and Bengal sugar was considered the best, being in great demand for export to Europe and Persia.
• The extraction of oil was likewise mostly a village-based industry — oilseeds were pressed in a simple oil-press, operated manually or by animal power, by the specialised caste known as telis, with the residual material used as animal feed.

Minerals, Mining and Metals

Deep mining was not practised in India during the 16th and 17th centuries, though surface mining for a wide range of minerals and metals was widely carried out.

Mineral Production

• Salt: An essential commodity in which India appears to have been broadly self-sufficient. Its sources included the Sambhar lake in Rajputana, the Punjab rock-salt mines, and sea water — the last drawn upon mainly in Sind, the Rann of Cutch, other coasts of Gujarat, Malabar, Mysore, and Bengal. Since salt was not available everywhere, it became one of the major articles of both regional and inter-regional trade.
• Saltpetre: One of the most significant mineral products, used primarily as an ingredient of gunpowder.
  • It was initially extracted at Ahmedabad, Baroda, and similar centres, but as supply failed to meet demand, production spread even to the Delhi-Agra region; through the second half of the 17th century, Patna in Bihar emerged as a major centre for procuring saltpetre.
  • Indian artisans used earthen pans for boiling saltpetre, while the Europeans used iron or copper pans; the traveller Tavernier (17th century) noted that the Dutch were even using imported boilers from Holland.
• Other minerals such as alum and mica were produced on a smaller scale.

Metals

• India lacked gold and silver mines in the proper sense — the well-known gold deposits at Kolar were never explored, and while small quantities of gold could be obtained from riverbeds, the cost of procurement generally exceeded its value.
• Copper: Rajasthan was the principal centre for copper production, with mines located at Khetri.
• Iron: The most commonly found metal, with mines widely distributed across the north, east, west, central, and southern parts of the country.
  • Abul Fazl records Bengal, Allahabad, Agra, Bihar, Gujarat, Delhi, and Kashmir as iron-producing regions, while Chhotanagpur in Bihar and adjoining parts of Orissa also produced large quantities.
  • Iron from the south was converted into steel, used to manufacture the famous Damascus swords, admired throughout the world.
• Lead: Found in north and western India.
• Diamond: The diamond miners of Golconda were the most renowned, with other notable sources at Panna in Madhya Pradesh and Chhotanagpur in Bihar.

Other Craft Production

Wood-Based Crafts

• Wood was used for a wide range of items, including palanquins, bullock-drawn carts, and both small and large boats.
  • The ports along the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal — Thatta, Surat, Bassein, Goa, Cochin, Masulipatam, Satgaon, and Chittagong — were significant ship-building centres. As European trading activity intensified, they had their ships repaired at these very ports, finding Indian vessels better suited to eastern waters, and consequently purchasing ships built in India.
  • Wood was also used for doors, windows, furniture, and boxes.

Miscellaneous Crafts

• Stone-cutting: An important craft, since stone was widely used in the construction of houses, palaces, forts, and temples — Indian stone-masons were renowned for their skill.
• Leather goods: Shoes, saddles, book covers, and similar items were manufactured all over the country as part of non-agricultural production.
• Paper: Manufactured at a number of centres, including Ahmedabad, Daulatabad, Lahore, Sialkot, and Biharsharif near Patna.
  • Ahmedabad paper came in several varieties and was exported to Arabia, Turkey, and Persia; paper from Kashmir was likewise famous, though manufacture in South India remained limited, and most paper produced was hand-made and of a coarse variety.
• Pottery: Earthenware was produced for cooking, storing water, and storing grain, and most houses had earthen tiled (khaprail) roofs.
  • Beyond coarse pottery, fine crockery was also made — the traveller Manucci (1663) described earthen crockery “finer than glass and lighter than paper.”
  • Glass manufacturing was likewise undertaken in many parts of the country.
• Indian craftsmen also produced soap, objects of ivory and shell, and articles made of horn.
• Many crafts were forest-based: lac, for instance, was used to manufacture bangles, to varnish doors and windows and toys, and to prepare a red dye — Bengal lac was considered the finest, and was also used for sealing purposes.
• Pearl fisheries were practised in the sea waters along the southern coast.

Taken together, these varied forms of craft production contributed significantly to the economy of Mughal India.

Organisation of Craft Production during the 16th and 17th Centuries

The organisation of production varied considerably from craft to craft and industry to industry, shaped by the specific needs and requirements of each.

Artisans and Master-Craftsmen (Ustads)

• The scale of the workforce engaged in constructing royal buildings in medieval India was enormous.
  • Alauddin Khalji engaged 70,000 workers for his buildings; Babur claimed that 680 workmen worked daily on his buildings at Agra, while 1,491 men worked as stone-cutters across his projects at Agra, Sikri, Bayana, and Dholpur.
  • Under Akbar, 3,000–4,000 artisans, labourers, and other functionaries worked daily to construct the Agra fort, with a further 8,000 labourers employed to supply stone and lime; Tavernier records that twenty thousand men worked incessantly on the construction of the Taj Mahal.
• Beyond such large construction projects, numerous artisans were employed across the various urban and rural manufactures.
  • Although generally organised on a caste basis, there was sufficient flexibility to add new workers to any craft in response to rising demand.
  • The major industry was the textile industry, based principally on cotton but supplemented by silk or tussar, produced mainly in Bengal, which was often used to make cloth mixed with cotton, or dyed and painted.
  • Carpentry — which included ship-building — and the production of leather goods were other major industries, supplemented by metallurgy, paper-making, glass-making, and similar crafts.
• Rural artisans producing articles of daily use formed a regular part of the village establishment, known as the jajmani system.
  • The most crucial services were those of blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, and shoemakers, who were usually paid in kind.
  • The system was far more organised in the Deccan and Maharashtra, where village artisans and servants were termed balutedars, alongside another group known as alutedars.
  • As the money economy penetrated the countryside and demand rose, this subsistence-oriented system began to change: by the 17th century, payments in cash or kind for additional work — or entirely on a piece-work basis — coexisted alongside the older, more widespread practice of allocating fixed shares of produce or land to artisan families.
  • By the mid-18th century, production for long- and medium-distance trade depended entirely on artisans who had become fully independent of the jajmani system.
  • As demand grew further, rural artisans appear to have begun catering to urban markets as well, with the village artisan proving quite mobile, moving from village to village or to nearby towns.

Two Categories of Artisans

• Rural, part-time artisans, often indistinguishable from cultivators — including oil-pressers, indigo and saltpetre workers, and sugar manufacturers.
  • Their work was seasonal, many engaging in manufacture for only five or six months of the year; as demand rose, some began letting out their land to others for cultivation, a pattern also seen among cocoon producers as silk demand increased.
  • Weavers, too, formed part of the traditional system of supplying cloth to villagers in exchange for a share of the produce, often retaining a small family plot to keep them tied to the village, while selling any surplus in the market.
• Professional artisans in towns and villages formed the second category.
  • As trade and manufacture expanded, merchants gradually extended control over these professional artisans through the dadni or putting-out system, binding them not merely through loans but by supplying raw materials and even dictating the size and pattern of each piece.
  • In the Coromandal, for instance, Kasi Viranna brought all the weaver settlements between Madras and Armagaon under his control, so thoroughly that these came to be known as “Viranna’s villages.”
  • In such cases, even artisans who owned their own looms tended to become effectively wage-earners, since the cost of raw materials and labour was fixed by the merchant. In 1676, local merchants in Madras told representatives of the English East India Company that they had “raised the wages of their weavers to get a better quality of cloth.”
  • This was not, however, capitalist production in the true sense of the term — the Russian scholar Chicherov termed it “deconcentrated capitalist manufacture,” observing that it did not overthrow the old mode of production but rather tended to preserve it, presenting everywhere an obstacle to the emergence of a genuinely capitalist mode of production.
• Unlike Europe, the concentration of manufacturing industries in towns, to the exclusion of villages, never took place in India.
  • Villages continued to sustain traditional crafts such as sugar, oil, indigo, and raw-silk manufacture, while also developing localised centres of specialised production — as in the coastal belt from Madras to Armagaon, where artisan villages specialised in producing cloth for export.
  • According to Orme, by the mid-18th century there was hardly a village near the main roads and large towns of Bengal where every inhabitant was not engaged in textile manufacture — a pattern echoed in regions such as Gujarat and Awadh.
  • For the most part, artisans continued to work on a domestic basis — in a weaving family, for instance, women and children cleaned the cotton and spun the thread, while the men worked the loom — and artisans generally owned their own tools.
  • Only in the royal karkhanas did craftsmen work together at a single site under supervision, provided with both tools and raw materials by the state — a model that a few of the wealthier, more powerful nobles may have replicated.
  • It was only in certain large enterprises — the construction of public buildings, public works such as tanks, diamond mining, and ship-building — that large numbers of workers were brought together under some form of central supervision.
    • As many as 20,000 to 30,000 workers were employed in the diamond-mining fields at any one time, with 2,000–3,000 workers under a single contractor. Most such arrangements, however, remained ad hoc, with workers dispersing once the immediate task was complete.
  • In other words, there was hardly any stable organisation underpinning large-scale enterprise in Mughal India.

Master-Craftsmen (Ustads)

• An alternative path of development saw certain master craftsmen rise to become organisers of production, merchants, and financiers in their own right.
  • This class had grown considerably in both economic and social standing, as reflected in Abul Fazl’s ranking of these “artificers” in the second rank of society, alongside merchants, below nobles and warriors but above the learned and religious classes.
  • Their social importance is further attested by two surviving farmans of Akbar granting land to master-craftsmen.
  • In Bengal, affluent master-weavers employed their own capital and sold goods freely on their own account; by the mid-18th century, a master textile-printer in Awadh is recorded as having as many as 500 apprentices.
  • In Kashmir’s shawl industry, some master-craftsmen owned up to 300 looms, while master-carpenters at Surat, and in Bengal and Bihar, hired other carpenters for ad hoc work.
  • As the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri observes, “the emergence of artisans as ‘capitalist-entrepreneurs’ — Marx’s ‘truly revolutionary way’ in the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism — was thus not absent from the Indian scene.”

Production for the Market

• Production for the market took place mainly at the level of independent artisan production, with the textile trade showing the highest degree of specialisation — carding, spinning, silk-thread winding, weaving, bleaching, dyeing, printing, and painting each performed by a distinct group of workmen.
• Peasants in villages played a crucial role in several manufacturing activities: they formed the core workforce in agro-based crafts such as indigo and sugar, as well as the spinning of silk and cotton yarn and the manufacture of salt and saltpetre.
• Localisation of manufacture was an important feature of the period, with different regions specialising in the production of specific crafts — European traders noted that they had to travel from place to place to procure the commodities they sought.
  • Masulipatam and Benaras are each said to have had around 7,000 weavers, while Qasimbazar had approximately 2,500 silk weavers.
• At the individual artisan level, the craftsman himself procured raw materials and tools, carried out the manufacture, and even retailed the finished products — invariably working from his own house.
  • With little capital to work with, individual output remained small, forcing merchants to make considerable efforts to procure sufficient quantity, while quality, too, varied.

Dadni

• These constraints gave rise to a revised production model known as dadni, or the putting-out system.
  • Under dadni, merchants advanced money to artisans, who in turn promised to deliver goods by a given date — placing the merchant in a position to dictate his own specifications.
  • The practice became so widespread in the textiles sector that it grew difficult to obtain cloth without first making an advance payment to the artisan; in South India, virtually every artisan settlement along the Coromandal coast fell under the control of one trader or another.
  • The dadni system thus empowered the buyer to dictate both the quality and quantity of goods produced: the artisan gained the money needed to purchase raw material along with a guaranteed sale, but lost control over the sale itself.

Adoption of Technology

• It has often been remarked that Indian craftsmen were able to produce goods of very high quality using remarkably simple tools.
  • One reason for this was a general indifference to labour-saving devices, owing to the limited size of the domestic market and a fear that such devices would cause unemployment.
  • In 1672, for instance, the Dutch in Coromandal successfully introduced a technique that quadrupled the production of iron nails and cannon balls, but local authorities banned the new technique for fear it would deprive many locksmiths of their livelihood.
  • As Tapan Raychaudhuri notes, “both early modern Europe and medieval China were far ahead of mid-eighteenth century India in such crucial fields of technology as the use of wind and water power, metallurgy, printing, nautical instruments, and basic tools and precision instruments.”
• This is not to say that no technological progress occurred in medieval India.
  • India was able to produce, chiefly at Surat, ships as good as any sent from Europe to Asia, as well as manufacture heavy guns, and there were also modifications made to the techniques of raw-silk reeling, indigo and saltpetre manufacture, and the arts of dyeing and printing cloth, often at the instance of European trading companies.
  • This suggests that Indian artisans were not inherently opposed to new techniques, so long as these did not threaten their livelihood, and instead augmented their income.

Manufactories

• In 1620–21, the English factory at Patna established what was probably the first unit of its kind for winding silk yarn, employing around 100 workmen; the Dutch factory at Qasimbazar employed 700–800 weavers in its silk operation — though such instances of concentrated manufacture remained largely sporadic.
• Another area where large numbers of workmen were assembled at a single site was ship-building and building construction, while two further sectors employed sizeable numbers of workers, though not highly skilled artisans:
  • The diamond mines of Golconda and the Deccan, where miners were paid daily wages; in Bihar, approximately 8,000 men came to the diamond fields each mining season (December–January), typically peasants and workers arriving after sowing their own fields.
  • The production of saltpetre, where large numbers of workers similarly laboured under a single master in small groups — known in Bihar as nooneas. As demand rose, the Dutch and English established their own refining units, with workmen operating equipment supplied by these European companies.

Karkhanas

• Karkhanas formed part of the royal establishment as well as of the nobility, producing goods for the consumption of the royal household and court; many high-ranking nobles maintained their own karkhanas as well, usually to produce expensive and luxury items.
  • Skilled artisans worked together under one roof to manufacture the goods required, supervised by state officials.
  • Such karkhanas arose largely because artisans, on their own, lacked the capital needed to invest in goods on the scale required for royal needs, and because the state, given the value of the raw materials involved, was reluctant to let artisans work with them independently at their own premises.
  • Karkhana production was generally not intended for the market, but for the personal consumption of the emperor and nobility.
• Thus, the process of production was gradually changing during this period — a good deal was happening, but on a limited scale, and the sum total of these developments did not amount to a decisive break with the past. Continuity remained the dominant feature, even as the changes in organisation proved more fundamental than those in technique.

Mughal Karkhanas

• The Mughal karkhanas stand as prime examples of the collective, large-scale employment of artisans and craftsmen within a substantial industrial organisation, the largest of these being the Imperial karkhanas.
• In Mughal India, the state functioned as the largest manufacturer in respect of several commodities, establishing workshops not only at the capital but also across the provinces.
  • Many of the requirements of Mughal royalty and nobility were met by these karkhanas, which manufactured cloth, robes, arms, furniture, utensils, metal-work, jewellery, and miniature paintings, generally using raw materials supplied by the state or by nobles.
  • The output of these karkhanas was rarely sold on the open market, being reserved instead for royal use, gifts, provincial revenue payments, and export. The manufacture of cotton cloth remained the principal industry — Abul Fazl, in the Ain-i Akbari, specifically refers to the cotton fabrics of Khandesh.

(1) Imperial Karkhanas

• The Imperial karkhana was placed directly under the Mughal Emperor and managed by the royal department.
  • Under Akbar, imperial karkhanas existed at Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore, and Ahmedabad; under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, Delhi too came to have an imperial karkhana.
  • Bernier has left an eyewitness account of the Imperial karkhanas at Delhi, while Abul Fazl describes several such establishments in the Ain-i Akbari, noting that the Diwan-i-Buyutat (also called Diwan-i-mir saman) was placed in charge of the Imperial karkhanas.
  • The specialised craftsmen assembled in each karkhana were placed under the charge of a supervisor called the malik. Each karkhana also had, besides its own expert for the particular article, two additional officials — the Accountant and the Mushrif — while the Darogah was responsible for inspecting the production of all articles and maintaining quality control.
  • For the Imperial karkhanas, the most experienced artisans in the region were specifically chosen, appointed, and registered, and working hours and regulations were strictly enforced. Akbar himself took a personal interest in practising the crafts of an ordinary artisan.

(2) Provincial Karkhanas

• Karkhanas were also maintained by several provincial governors and nobles, organised along much the same lines as the Imperial karkhanas.
  • The governors of provinces such as Agra, Ahmedabad, and Kashmir actively patronised the manufacture of local products, while silk weaving flourished as a prosperous industry in Bengal.

(3) Private Karkhanas

• Some nobles and members of the royal family maintained and managed private workshops, mainly for the manufacture of luxury articles intended for personal use as well as for presentation to the emperor.
  • Shah Jahan, Dara Shikoh, Jahan Ara, and Aurangzeb each maintained their own individual karkhanas to satisfy personal requirements.
  • Every noble’s karkhana was superintended by a Darogah, with other essential functionaries including tahvildars and mushrifs (to maintain commercial records), along with shahs and bhayyas, who were responsible for security.

(4) Other Types of Karkhanas

• During the later Mughal period, a number of artisans who had accumulated capital by various means went on to open their own karkhanas, employing other artisans on a wage basis.
  • Many merchants and brokers likewise maintained karkhanas, with some relocating their operations to rural regions to take advantage of cheaper labour and raw material and thereby increase their income.

In summary, craft production under the Mughals combined an extraordinarily high level of skill and regional specialisation — visible above all in the textile trade, but equally in metal-work, mining, and construction — with an organisational structure that remained, at its core, decentralised and continuous with the past. Whether working within the village jajmani system, as independent artisans selling in local markets, as dependent producers bound by the dadni system, or as skilled craftsmen assembled under state supervision in the great Imperial, provincial, and private karkhanas, the Mughal artisan formed the backbone of an economy whose products — from Dacca muslin to Kashmiri shawls to Golconda diamonds — carried India’s reputation for craftsmanship across Asia and Europe alike.