Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire (A.D. 1346 – A.D. 1646) v2.c19.s3.9

v2.c19.s3.9

One characteristic feature of the Brahmans was their corporate life. We infer this not only from the fact that they held their offices in the agrahāras by monthly rotation but also from the grants which they jointly made for social and religious purposes. The tradition of living a corporate existence seems to have been handed down from very early times.² Thus the thousand Brahmans of Maddūr, for example, made a grant of twelve kaṇḍugas of wet land in Oragāla in A.D. 982 for the temple which Polayya had caused to be erected.³ This Maddūr is evidently the same Maddūr the Brahmans of which in A.D. 1327 made a grant, the details of which are missing, to five persons (named), during the month's headship of the Tantra-mantra-chintāmaṇi, the Śravaṇappāchārya Vijñēśvara Dikshitōpādhyāya.⁴ The term used for the "month's headship", which is missing in this inscription, of the learned Brahman of Maddūr (which was also called by the name the all-honoured great agrahāra Upēndrapura), is supplied by another inscription, relating to the same place, dated in the next year (A.D. 1328). This epigraph relates that all the Brahmans of the all-honoured great agrahāra Upēndrapura, during the month's headship (māsa-veggaḍelanadalu) of Aśama Dēva, (his descent given), made a grant to six persons (named), for the purpose of building Upēndrapaṭṭaṇa anew in the dry fields of Chiraduvu.⁵ In A.D. 1336 all the Brahmans of the same agrahāra, during the month's headship of Karaṭṭi of Udugundūr, gave a stone charter to Mambōja, son of the copper-smith Pemmōja, assigning to him certain specified lands for "having by the practice of his calling pleased the Brahmans."¹ If this was the case in A.D. 1336, we may not be far wrong in assuming that the custom of holding office by monthly rotation, at least so far as Upēndrapura *alias* Maddūr was concerned, must also have been in vogue in Vijayanagara times.