The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c19.11

c19.11

When so much is uncertain about the number and nature of the taxes levied, any conclusions about their incidence and their pressure on the people will not be easy to formulate. However, some stray facts that can be gathered from the inscriptions may be set down here. But no general conclusions can be drawn from these exceptional instances which throw little light on the normal system of administration. A record (No. 8 of 1913) of the famous Pāndya emperor Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāndya (*acc.* A.D. 1251) seems to register the curious fact that the villagers had to make use of the *vāram* and *kadamai* income from the *vārapparru* and *kadamai-parru* respectively, in securing the friendship of the agents of Sundara Pāndya. Perhaps, as the official epigraphist suspects¹ ‘the villagers had actually to bribe them (the royal agents) if they were to attend to their avocations undisturbed.’ An inscription (No. 81 of 1916) in the twenty-second year of Māravarman Kulaśēkhara I, corresponding to A.D. 1290, mentions that a certain chief captured a part of the country around a village and fixed the heavy sum of 4,000 (gold pieces?) as the tax levied from the inhabitants (*ūrōm*) of the village including *araiśumakkal* and *mudaligal* for the current year and the year before, and that the villagers in order to pay this amount had to sell their property, cattle, etc. and some of them even their lands to a neighbouring temple. But this, evidently, was an act of oppression on the part of a petty local chieftain that had no sanction from the state.² Two inscriptions of Māravarman Sundara Pāndya (Nos. 73 and 91 of 1924) of the first half of the thirteenth century A.D. from the Ramnad district seem to contain more direct evidence of heavy and oppressive taxation; one of them states that the people of two villages were very much impoverished by the taxes they had to pay and began to feel ‘that life in the woods would be preferable’; and the other ‘records that owing to the inability of the people to pay the revenue according to the old rates obtaining from the fifth year of the king, the standard of land-measure was altered’³ a rather curious method, as it strikes us, of lightening the burden. Another interesting record (No. 357 of 1922) which probably belongs to the seventh year of Māravarman Kulaśēkhara (acc. A.D. 1268) comes from the Trichinopoly District and ‘records that the revenue expected for the sixth and seventh years (of the king) from the village of Marudūr in Uṟattūr-kūṟṟam failed as there were no people to cultivate the fields’; but in this case, the whole nāḍu in which the village was located took upon itself the burden of the taxes due to the royal treasury from Marudūr, and was in return allowed ‘to give away Marudūr to two individuals for providing offerings to the god’ in the neighbourhood for the prosperity of the nāḍu.¹ A record of Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāndya from the Tanjore district (No. 93 of 1911) ‘supplies the information that a registered tenant of certain lands having run away and his friends, who stood personal surety for him, being asked to pay the taxes which had fallen into arrears until the twenty-second year of the king, they got the houses and the fields of the tenant to be sold to the temple and redeemed their responsibility in the transaction.’² Another record of the same king (No. 289 of 1913) from Chidambaram contains an order for the remission of certain taxes on some lands which, being close to the sea, ‘had become filled up with sand and overgrown with weeds’. We may also note that a Śoḷavandān inscription of the second year of a Māravarman Sundara Pāndya ‘records the remission of certain taxes on the occasion of the king’s coronation.’ (No. 80 of 1905).