Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire (A.D. 1346 – A.D. 1646) v1.c10.s5.t2.93

v1.c10.s5.t2.93

There is every reason to believe that the Government gave receipts to the people for the taxes paid by them. Here however we have epigraphical evidence at variance with contemporary comments. Nuniz, whose accuracy was by no means so infallible as one may wish it to be, informs us that the king granted no receipts to the nobles from whom he received revenue. "In this way the kingdom of Bisnaga is divided between more than two hundred captains who are all heathen, and according to the lands and revenues that they have so the King settles for them the forces that they are compelled to keep up, and how much revenue they have to pay him every month during the first nine days of the month of September. He never gives any receipts to them, only, if they do not pay they are well punished, and are ruined and their property taken away."³ From this we may infer that if the granting of receipts for moneys received was unknown to the monarch, it must necessarily have been a matter of which the royal officials were ignorant in the kingdom. Whether a government which, according to the same traveller, trained in the royal palace women to "compare their books with those of the writers outside",¹ could have failed to institute a system of granting receipts, is a question which may pertinently be asked in spite of the adverse evidence of Nuniz. The fact that there were tax-collectors make us believe that they must have had a system of assuring the people for the revenue which the latter gave to the Government. Our surmise is strengthened by the evidence of an inscription dated A.D. 1558-9 which is positive about the granting of receipts by officials on behalf of the Government. This epigraph informs us that it was authorized that taxes should be levied in the Chadalavāḍa village in the Nellore district, and that the temple people themselves should credit the taxes to the estate of Śrī-Raghunāyakulu, and grant receipts to the merchants who buy there and receipts for the taxes raised in the two simas.²