The Colas c28.4

c28.4

We lack all means of reaching a reliable conclusion on the important question of the numbers of the population. There is not even a passable guess on this subject in any of our records, Indian or foreign. And it seems never to have occurred to a government, which was very strict about maintaining a very minute record of land rights for its revenue purposes, that it might order a periodical census of the population under its control; for it is extremely unlikely that if such a practice had existed, we should have heard nothing of it in the thousands of inscriptions to which we owe practically all our knowledge of the organisation and working of the government in those days. We are therefore driven to depend solely on rather vague personal impressions derived from a study of the records of the age. It is remarkable that most of the villages and towns known to us now are mentioned with almost the same names in the inscriptions; some of them, like Uttaramērūr in Chingleput, Śendalai and Tiruviḍaimarudūr in Tanjore, Tiruverumbūr and Lālguḍi in Trichinopoly, and others that could be named in the Madura and Tinnevelly districts, were clearly more populous and flourishing than the places that now go by those names. On the other hand, there is no evidence that the larger cities were not quite as large as the average Indian city of to-day, very large modern centres like Madras, and perhaps Madura and Trichinopoly, excepted. The average administrative unit in charge of one officer of the central government was more or less of the same size as the modern Taluq; but it may also be that the size of the Taluq is itself the result of an ancient administrative tradition. The evidence on the state of agriculture, industry and trade, on the army and navy, and on the amount of labour and resources applied to the erection of public works of a useful as well as ornamental nature also tells in favour of our postulating a numerous and busy population. Internal peace was on the whole well maintained; and there was no great difference between now and then in the ideas relating to marriage or the standard of life. There cannot be the slightest doubt that under the Cōḻas of the Vijayālaya line, Southern India was vastly more populous and that social life had become far more complex than in the Śaṅgam Age. It seems equally clear that the numbers of the people could not have been anywhere near what they are now after nearly 150 years of *pax Britannica*. We may imagine that we may find a parallel in this respect immediately before the establishment of British rule, say about the end of the eighteenth century.