In an eighteenth-century Bengal village, a zamindar pays the village…

In an eighteenth-century Bengal village, a zamindar pays the village carpenter a small daily allowance and diet money for his work. This kind of arrangement later came to be described as:

Answer & explanation

Correct answer: option 1

The correct answer is Option (1) → The jajmani system

Option (1) The jajmani system — Correct. Paying artisans by a negotiated allowance, mostly goods for services, was later called the jajmani system. The term itself was not used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Option (2) The miras or watan system — Incorrect. Miras or watan was the hereditary land holding of artisans in Maharashtra, given for their services. The Bengal carpenter was paid a daily allowance and diet money instead.

Option (3) The mansabdari system — Incorrect. The mansabdari system ranked Mughal officers and fixed their salaries. It had nothing to do with village carpenters.

Option (4) The zabt system — Incorrect. Zabt was a Mughal system of assessing land revenue by measurement. It concerned the state's revenue from land.

NCERT (2026-27): “2.3 Village artisans …
Village artisans – potters, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers, even goldsmiths – provided specialised services in return for which they were compensated by villagers by a variety of means. 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. …”