Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s9.1

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.