The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c22.51

v1.c22.51

The large part of the population employed as ranchmen in tending cattle has scarcely been alluded to as yet. They were perhaps the original ‘people,’ before agriculture was much practised and when merchants were few. At the time of the epic they seem to have become partly cattle-raisers and partly farmers, while the occupation of ranchman proper had fallen into the hands of barbarians who could not understand Āryan speech. Yet the one example of which the epic takes note shows that these were merely the cowboys who guarded royal cattle (*Mbh.*, IV, 10, 1). The king is here represented as having a royal picnic on the occasion of a ‘cattle-branding,’ when the court goes into the country and the ‘ears of the cattle are marked’ for the year. It is on this occasion that the Kurus lift the cattle of the Matsyas. Though accounts of such border-raiding in the old Vedic style are rare and this passage in particular can by no means claim special antiquity, yet it doubtless reflects a not uncommon state of affairs². Very little in regard to these lowly members of the State, the cowboys and herdsmen, is to be gleaned from the epic; but one passage states what the low labourer of the ‘people-caste’ is to earn *per annum*: ‘he should receive the milk of one cow for the care of six cows; and if he tend a hundred head he should, at the end of the year, receive a pair. If he acts for the master as overseer of flocks or in agricultural labour, he should have one-seventh of the proceeds or increase, but, in the case of small cattle, a small part (‘one-sixteenth’; *Mbh.*, XII, 60, 24 f.). The six ‘distresses’ of a farmer do not include excessive taxation, but raiding by a foreign king is included among them¹.