Contestations and Accommodations: Mewat and Meos in Mughal India

This book presents a detailed account of the social, economic and political history of the Mewat region of North India, covering the period from 13th to the early 18th century. Denting the conventional image of communities in medieval India as self-sufficient, changeless and autonomous entities, it takes up the case of the Meos of Mewat to argue that these communities have regularly undergone profound socio-economic changes.

Further delineating Mewat’s ecology and its impact on the economy, it lays bare the process of community formation among the Meos in the wake of their peasantization and Islamicization. It also throws light on the emergence of a new class of zamidars, namely the Rajputs and the Jats, at the cost of the old landed elites—the Khanzadas and the Meos—that generated significant agrarian turmoil in the rural society at lange.