Foreign travellers who visited India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries present a picture of a small group in the ruling class living a life of great ostentation and luxury, in sharp contrast to the miserable condition of the masses – the peasants, the artisans and the domestic attendants. Indigenous sources do not disagree; they often dwell on the luxurious life of the upper classes, and occasionally refer to the privations of the ordinary people. The sharp contrast between the standards of living of the ruling classes and the common people was, of course, not peculiar to India; it existed in a greater or lesser degree everywhere, including Europe.

Such extremes in income and wealth must, of course serve as a warning against attempting any study of ‘average’ standards of life during the period. One further difficulty is that quantitative data are few and hard to interpret. One must primarily make the best of the qualitative evidence as it has come down to us, though remembering all the time that it is likely often to be distorted by bias as much as ignorance.

Owing to the marked division of seventeenth-century Indian society into classes and strata with great differences in income, customs and patterns of consumption, it will be convenient to treat separately the standards of living of the peasantry, the city poor, the middle strata and the nobility.