The Rashtrakutas and their Times c17.s2.1

c17.s2.1

Village accountants were hereditary officers all over the Deccan like the village headman till 1914 when most of them were induced to resign their rights in several districts. Their influence till then was as great as, if not greater than, that of the village headman. We find them figuring in the documents along with the village headman, and it has been the clerical work connected with the village administration, which must have been relegated to some other officer. Obviously it is these who are referred to by the terms yuktas or niyuktas. Some of the big villages may have had two officers to look to this clerical work; one of them may have been the accountant and the other the sub-accountant. Upaniyuktas and Niyuktas figure together in some records and that can be explained only on this hypothesis. Like the office of the village headman these offices were also very probably hereditary in our age as they were till recently. No yuktas or upaniyuktas figure as donors in our period; we hardly get any evidence suggesting that these officers wielded anything like the influence that was wielded by the village headman. It is, therefore, clear that the offices of the yuktas and upaniyuktas were more or less clerical, and did not carry the same privileges or prestige as that of the village headman.