The correct answer is Option (1) → Eighteenth century
These are eighteenth-century records of Bengal zamindars paying artisans a small daily allowance and diet money; such payment was later called the jajmani system, a term not in use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
NCERT (2026-27): “2.3 Village artisans …
The most common way of doing so was by giving them a share of the harvest, or an allotment of land, perhaps cultivable wastes, which was likely to be decided by the panchayat. In Maharashtra such lands became the artisans’ miras or watan – their hereditary holding. Another variant of this was a system where artisans and individual peasant households entered into a mutually negotiated system of remuneration, most of the time goods for services. For example, eighteenth-century records tell us of zamindars in Bengal who remunerated blacksmiths, carpenters, even goldsmiths for their work by paying them “a small daily allowance and diet money”. This later came to be described as the jajmani system, though the term was not in vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. …” |
