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Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s9: King not owner of land

Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s9

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King not owner of land

c11.s9.1

The evidence of the Greek writers on the royal ownership of all land in the state has been noticed elsewhere. But the idea of the whole state being the property of the king was unknown to Indian tradition, and Kauṭilya does not assert such ownership for the king. It was admitted on all hands that the king had an interest in the land in as much as he was entitled to a sixth of its produce, the price of the protection he accorded to the people and their possessions ; by virtue of this eminent domain, the monarch controlled and regulated the use of land, and in the chapter on the superintendent of agriculture (*Sitādhyaksha*)² Kauṭilya is seen stretching this right of regulation to its utmost limits. The rules in this chapter, if enforced all round, would have made all agriculture a vast state-regulated enterprise ; the scheme of warehouses maintained by the state and controlled by a superintendent, *Koṣṭhāgārādhyaksha*, set forth elsewhere in the *Arthaśāstra*, shows that this plan of regulation included extensive market operations on the part of the government. Thus without actually asserting the king's ownership of the soil, Kauṭilya advocated and doubtless introduced into the administration all the detailed supervision and control of agricultural and marketing operations that would have arisen from such ownership ; and Greek observers who saw them with Hellenistic eyes naturally thought that in India as elsewhere, as for example in Ptolemaic Egypt, the king was the owner of the soil, the cultivators being his tenants³.

c11.s9.2

² *Ibid.* II. 24 ; also II. 2. The phrase *svabhūmau* in II. 24, 2 does not mean 'Royal domain' but 'land suited to the growth of particular produce', as Ganapati Sastri rightly glosses. Perhaps it is a mistake for *sva-sva bhūmau*.

c11.s9.3

³ The Hellenistic view is set forth thus by Rostovtzeff in his *Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic world*, p. 269. "Absolute rule meant, alike from the Egyptian and from the Macedonian point of view, the ownership of the State, of its soil and subsoil, and ultimately of the products of the soil and the subsoil. The state was the 'house' (*oikos*) of the king, and its territory his estate. So the King managed the state as a plain Macedonian or Greek would manage his own household". This view of polity never obtained in India. So far as I know there is only one instance in Indian literature of the apparent assertion of royal ownership of all land and water, and that is in the verse cited by Bhaṭṭasvāmi in his commentary—*KA.* II, 24 : *Rājā bhūmeḥ patiradṛṣṭaḥ śāstrajñair udakasya ca, tābhyām anyat tu yad dravyam tatra svāmyam kuṭumbinām.* But even here *pati* may indicate no more than the right of eminent domain, as is clearly the case with the expression ‘bhūsvāmī’ in a closely argued passage of Kātyāyana which has not been always correctly understood in spite of the excellent gloss attached to it. See U. N. Ghoshal, *Beginnings of Indian Historiography* etc., pp. 158—66.

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