Q1.
Discuss in class how the paik system affected the daily lives of the people in the Ahom kingdom, both in terms of challenges and benefits, and helped the king manage both the army and the economy.
Answer
First, be exact about what the system was. Under the paik system, “every able-bodied man” had to “provide service to the state through labour or military duty in exchange for land rights”. So a paik was not a soldier by profession. He was a cultivator who owed the state work — and the state paid him not in coin but in the right to hold land.
| Benefits for the people | Challenges for the people | |
|---|---|---|
| Land | You held land without needing cash to pay revenue. Your obligation was work you could actually perform. | The land right was tied to the service. Stop serving and the basis of your holding is gone. |
| Time | Service was in rotation, so a household was not stripped of its men all at once. | A call-up at sowing or harvest could cost a family its year. Farming does not wait. |
| Work done | The labour built embankments, roads and tanks that the same villages used. You could see what your work produced. | Your labour was not your own to sell. What was built was decided by the state. |
| War | You fought on your own ground, for your own valley, alongside neighbours — which is a strong reason to fight well. | Ordinary cultivators bore the risk of war directly, and repeatedly. |
How it solved the king's two hardest problems at once:
- The army problem. The chapter states the outcome exactly: it “allowed the rulers to create public infrastructure and maintain a large standing force without a permanent army.” A permanent army must be paid in every month of peace. A paik force costs nothing until it is called.
- The economy problem. The same men, in the same rotation, dug the trenches, raised the embankments and built the boats. The kingdom got its public works out of the same arrangement that got it its soldiers — one obligation, two returns.
Why it worked here in particular: in the Brahmaputra valley the skills a farmer already had were the skills war demanded. Rowing, digging, archery, handling boats — these were daily work before they were military duty. The Mughal general Ram Singh noticed it: “Every Assamese soldier is expert in rowing boats, in shooting arrows, in digging trenches, and in wielding guns and cannons.” That is not a compliment about courage; it is a description of what the paik system produced. At Saraighat in 1671, Lachit Borphukan and his 10,000 men defeated a Mughal force of 30,000.
For your class discussion — the comparison worth making: every state in this chapter faced the same problem, and each solved it differently. The Delhi Sultanate used the iqta: territory assigned to nobles who collected taxes to pay for troops. Akbar used mansabdari: officers ranked by mansab, keeping fixed numbers of elephants, horses, camels and troops, and paid in jagirs. The Ahoms used the paik: labour owed by everyone, paid in land rights. Ask your class which of the three puts the heaviest burden on the ordinary cultivator — and which gives him the most in return.