Ashok V. Desai in The Telegraph, Calcutta:
“In 1972, I took time off from work and taught in Delhi School of Economics. Once when I was browsing in the bookshops close by, I came across Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari. There I saw some statistics of the Mughal empire. I compared them with recent ones, and concluded that the average real wage of Akbar’s courtiers was 45 per cent higher than the average Indian real wage in the 1960s.”
Read the full article: Foibles of historians
churumuri 
The myth making Marxist history does not end with Mughal period. In recent times the myth that agri production in West Bengal was increased during 1980s due to land-reformation by CPIM led Left-front Govt is another myth.
Marxist history depends on which Central Committee /Polit Bureau member now in Control. Not only its dumb, its full of acts of omissions and commissions. Take the example of (in)famous incident when Jyoti Basu was denied PMship of India by CPIM Central Committee which Basu termed as “Himalayn Blunder” . This incident does NOT even find one mention in the “OFFICIAL HISTORY” of CPIM which was published a year or two back.
Marxism much like other authoritarian ideologies of Nazism, Islamism has been fundamentalist to the core and destroyed human enquiry, progress to a great degree in last 100 years. Thank God, its almost dead now except in the zoos of JNU, Aligarh.
For a balanced unbiased declonized economic history of the world, particularly of Asia, I found “Re-Orient” by AG Frank very useful.
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Rubbish. However has written this has no clue about economics and money. How can you compare and link two disparate times and currencies. Obviously the Gross domestic produce during the time of Akbar was way lower than what we have now.
Must be some fan of U R ananthamurthy or some eminent hostrians trying to paint the Mughal period as the golden age.
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Yes..those were the great times of Mughal Rule. We need Mughal rule back. We badly miss those Randi khanas..those harems…. We dont get to hear news stories of a son killing his father to become king…of lakhs of temples destroyed and kafir women raped…and shown the light of jihad…ah those 72 virgins….here on earth….jannat !! Lets all vote Congress in 09..
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for a more detailed critique of the “Habib/Moosvi” thesis, see here –>
Click to access WorkingPaper14-FE.pdf
—–
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Hahahahhah! ತುಂಬ ಚೆನ್ನಾಗಿದೆ ಈ ಸಾಬರ ಆರಾಧನೆ! ಚುರುಮುರಿ- you are exposing your chopped vital organ far too many times.
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There is a crude guide of comparing GDPs of different periods and areas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison
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Did it include Dhimmis’ wages as well?
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Why dont you guys read papers/articles on indian independence movement and see who were rich before the arrival of British to india?.
Delhi School of Economics teaches sufficient that’s sufficient anywhere in the world!!
If some one does not know how it is calculated , why dont you ask somebody who knows it??!!
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Rooster!
A witty observation!
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Someone else will come out with a new theory that wages during the Mauryan period were higher than the Mughals!
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@Coffee Addict
>>Someone else will come out with a new theory that wages during the Mauryan period were higher than the Mughals!
I don’t think so. Because our pseudosecular friends may feel that minorities(Mughals) are being discriminated. :P Infact they may force people to believe that wages during the Mughal period were higher than the Mauryan!
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Looking at tell-all phrases like “ಸಾಬರ ಆರಾಧನೆ”, “Dhimmis’ wages”, “Randi khanas” etc, it is clear that “We, the brainwashed” cannot even be troubled to read the full piece. Just a Muslim name is enough to hold forth.
Ashok Desai’s piece is a rant against Marxist “hostrians”, against Marxist “hostrians”.
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Prashant, The paragraph given by Churumuri is conveying opposite of what article is trying to say. And I must admit, every link given in Churumuri is not worth reading. :)
You might (not) like it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtwKb0jny9c
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Sisya,
A super link! After reading through this thesis, I can see that Desai has cooly borrowed a few ideas and has thrown in his own ‘wrapper’ without ever leaving his Internet connection while knocking off this column for Telegraph:)
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Even if we were to take this argument on its own merits, the comparison seems to be between courtiers of Akbar’s time to the average Indian wage in the 60s. Not sure if this is an apples to apples comparison. Courtiers would be the equivalent of our upper level service officers (from the administrative, foreign and other services that are under the government.) Would this argument still apply in that case?
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