The Colas c25.30

c25.30

Little is known of the manner in which the officials of different grades were chosen for appointment in the first instance and for promotion to higher ranks thereafter. Birth and high connection must have conferred some advantage at the start, though the subsequent career might have depended largely upon the individual ability of a person, and the occasions for distinguished service which he got and utilised successfully. As even the succession to the throne appears to have been determined by a proper regard for the individual merits of those who might be deemed eligible for it, and as successive kings are seen to have used their discretion freely and fearlessly, not hesitating to keep out the unfit and always seeking to instal as heir-apparent the ablest person of their own generation or the next, it is not a violent assumption to make that the same stress on ability marked the choice and encouragement of public servants in the king’s service. The most common method of remunerating officials was that of assigning to each according to his status a certain extent of land⁷¹ which he held as his *jīvita*, and regular cash payments from the public treasury were practically unknown. But the income from such assignments usually consisted of two parts, one realised in kind and the other in cash payments. What was assigned in all these cases was by no means the absolute proprietorship of the soil which always belonged to the individual occupier or the village community, unless indeed their rights were bought out, but the rights of the central government to certain dues from the area so assigned.⁷² Such assignments often included a whole village, or even district,⁷³ and this is the reason why many officials are found described as possessors or leaders (*uḍaiyān*, *kiḻān*)⁷⁴ of particular villages or even *nāḍus*. It was open to the assignees to sell or otherwise alienate or give away in part or as a whole the rights assigned to them. The system was open to uncertainties and abuses, though perhaps effectively checked by the accurate record of landrights maintained by the government and by the public opinion of the villages themselves, ready to assert itself in various ways in those times.