The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c19.s9.74

v1.c19.s9.74

Land might, at least in the kingdom of Magadha, be given away, and in that of Kosala, be sold. In the former case, a Brāhman landowner offers a thousand *karīsas* of his estate as a gift⁴; in the latter, a merchant (by a little sharp practice) entangles an unwilling noble in the sale of a park⁵. And in the law-books we read that land might be let against a certain share of the produce⁶. The holdings too in the arable land, called the *khetta*, of each village would be subject to redistribution and redivision among a family, as one generation succeeded another. It is not clear whether any member of a village community could give or sell any of the *khetta* to an outsider. It is just possible that the old tradition, expressed in the Brāhmaṇas when a piece of land was given as a sacrificial fee—‘And the Earth said: Let no mortal give me away!’⁷—may have survived in the villages as a communal, anti-alienising feeling concerning any disintegration of the basis of their social and economic unity. We should anyway expect, from what is revealed in the early Buddhist books, to find such a sentiment upheld, less by the infrequent rural autocrat and his little kingdom of country-seat, tenant-farmers, and *serfs*, than by the preponderating groups of cultivators, each forming a *gāma*.