Tradition · labour & military system
The paik system
The Ahom state's basic institution: every adult male was a paik, organised in units of four, twenty, hundred and thousand, owing labour rather than tax — so many days a year on embankments, tanks, roads and temples, and military service when called, in rotation so that the fields were never empty.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Patron dynasty
- Ahom
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 26.980, 94.640
Worth knowing
It built the Rang Ghar, the tanks at Sivasagar, the roads and the fleet that won Saraighat, and it collapsed under Burmese invasion and then British annexation, which replaced obligation with cash revenue. The paik registers are also the reason Assam has population records from the sixteenth century.
Connections (1)
- Imperial administration ofDamodar
The paik obligation built the embankments, tanks and roads of the Brahmaputra valley — a river that shifts channel violently and floods annually, and whose management is a permanent public-works problem. Bengal's Damodar had the same problem solved differently and much later, by colonial engineering and then by a river valley corporation. The Ahom answer was to own everybody's labour a few weeks a year, which worked for six centuries and could not survive being converted into cash revenue.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Paiks”. The Ahom buranji chronicles (trans. S.K. Bhuyan); Edward Gait, A History of Assam (1906).
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