The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c19.s9.138

v1.c19.s9.138

As for the Kshatriya clansmen of the republics mentioned above, they were largely cultivators of the soil. For instance, in the *Kunāla Jātaka*, it was the workmen in the fields of the Sākiyan and Koliya ‘*bhojakas, amaccas*, and *uparājas*’ who began to quarrel over the prior turn to irrigate⁷. In the earliest Indian literature agricultural and pastoral concepts play a great part. But even if this implied that a special dignity attached to agriculture, it does not follow that any such tradition survived, if it survived at all, associated with any section of society. There was among Indo-Āryans little of the feudal tie between land and lord with lordship over the land-tillers, which made broad acres a basis for nobility in the West. However they accomplished their prehistoric invasion of the Ganges basin, ‘land-grabbing’ does not seem to have been carried out *pari passu* with success in generalship. This may have been because the annexation of land to any wide extent meant clearing of jungle. Except among Dravidian and Kolārian towns along the rivers, the task of the invaders was more like that of pioneering settlers in America. And there we know that land is not an appanage involving special privileges and entailing special claims, but a commodity like any other.