The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.55

v1.c17.55

In accordance with the apparently undeveloped condition of political organisation, we learn little of the administration of justice. That the king exercised criminal and civil jurisdiction, assisted by assessors, is a conclusion which must rest for its plausibility on analogy and on the later practice in India; for no passage in the Rigveda definitely alludes to the sovereign as acting in either capacity. It is therefore at least probable that his functions as judge were still confined within narrow limits. One word in the Rigveda shows that the system of wergeld was in full force, a man being given the epithet *çatadāya*, which denotes that the price of his blood was a hundred cows. In one hymn the Paṇi, whose niggardliness made him the chief object of dislike to the greedy Vedic poets, is declared to be a man only in so far as he has a wergeld, here called *vairadeya*, 'that which is to be paid in respect of enmity.' The crime, however, of which most is recorded in the Rigveda is that of theft, including burglary, housebreaking, and highway robbery, crimes which clearly must have been of frequent occurrence. The punishment of the thief seems to have rested with the person wronged: there are clear allusions to binding the thief in stocks, presumably with a view to induce his relatives to pay back to the aggrieved man the loss he has sustained. In one passage of the Rigveda there is a probable reference to the employment of trained men to recover stolen cattle, just as the Khojis of the Punjab down to modern times were expert at this difficult employment. Of death as a punishment for theft, as in later times and in other primitive societies, curiously enough nothing appears in the Rigveda.