The History of Bengal (Vol. I: Hindu Period; Vol. II: Muslim Period 1200–1757) v1.c19.s1: I. Sources

v1.c19.s1.1

The materials available for the reconstruction of the economic history of Bengal in ancient times are extremely meagre. There are no such documents as the Domesday Book, the court rolls, the guild rolls, the pipe rolls and the craft ordnances and statutes, on which a student of the early economic history of England depends for his study. Yet it will be wrong to suggest that nothing like these ever existed in ancient Bengal. A large number of inscriptions, belonging to the Gupta and post-Gupta periods, reveal that during the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. there existed in this province a class of officers called *pustapālas* or record-keepers, who were attached both to the villages and district head-quarters, and whose obvious business was to maintain records of lands with their boundaries, demarcations and titles. It is a misfortune that not a fragment of these valuable records, written perhaps on palmyra-leaves, has come down to us. But this may not be the only loss that posterity has suffered. A careful study of the inscriptions of the Sena kings seems to suggest that by the beginning of the twelfth century A.D. Bengal had something like authoritative field-to-field, or cadastral, surveys and their accompanying record of holdings and rentals. There are reasons for believing that these surveys were not confined merely to lands and villages gifted away in pious endowments and thus rendered revenue-free, but extended to others from which the kings continued to derive the bulk of their revenue. What a wealth of materials we would have had to work upon, if the records of the *pustapālas* and the land-surveys of the Sena kings had been preserved! In their absence, all that we can do is to glean a few isolated facts concerning the economic condition of the people from such fragmentary sources of information as archaeology, occasional notices contained in literature, and the accounts of foreign travellers and historians.