The line between urban and rural society, the small town and the big village, is a fine one and traditionally depends on whether or not a majority of the population supported itself other than by fishing, farming or tending herds. The principal theme of thirteenth-century urban society is the challenge of population growth, perhaps the most decisive changes in urban society reflect what responses were made to the problems of growth. The concept of urban citizenship was as yet a hazy notion, but in places where the city was the state, being a citizen conferred advantages. The political and economic freedom was an ambiguous benefit to half of urban society: women. Urban society offered some single women new opportunities, either through religious experimentation or the burgeoning wage economy, to live in ways not completely shaped by men. Widows were in the best position to take advantage of all this, but poor women remained the most desperate members of urban society.

The cities and towns of the Indian sub-continent served as the repositories of higher culture and learning, both as reservoirs in which were preserved the Sanskritic and Indo-Islamic 'Great Traditions' and as conduits through which those traditions could be transmitted to society as a whole. Considering the enormous diversity of urban economies and urban cultures spanning the sub-continent, it would be impossible to speak of a typical Indian city of the Mughal period. The relations between the urban population and the Mughal state were determined in large measure by the fact that the traditional Indo-Muslim city, like the traditional Islamic city in north Africa and the Middle East, lacked any kind of corporate or municipal institutions. The kōtwāl's authority was so extensive and touched so many aspects of urban life, the towns and cities of Mughal India must have been very strictly controlled on behalf of the central government.