State and Government in Ancient India c20.20

c20.20

Hopkins has advanced the view that the taxation in the Vedic period was oppressive and grinding. Instead of checking the predatory tendencies of the king, the priests of the age, he says, encouraged the king to devour his subjects.³ This view is however untenable. Hopkins is misled by the phrase *viśāmattā*, ‘the eater of the people’ used to describe the king. As observed in the *Vedic Index*, this phrase might have had its origin in a custom by which the king and his retinue were fed by the people’s contributions, a plan with many parallels’.⁴ In the Brāhmaṇa literature, the term *attā* is often used in the sense of the enjoyer; for instance, in one place the husband is described as the *attā* (enjoyer), and the wife as *ādya*, the object of enjoyment.⁵ It would be too far fetched to argue that these terms indicate that the husband was the eater or the oppresser of his wife. The expression ‘the eater of the subjects’, it must be further remembered, is obviously used metaphorically in a coronation proclamation intended to describe the pomp and power of the king in the most grand-eloquent manner; “Here comes into existence today the ruler of all people, the eater of the subjects, the breaker of forts, the destroyer of demons, the protector of Brāhmaṇas and *dharma*”. We have shown already in Chapter V how the king’s position was far from secure in the Vedic period and how the Assembly (*samiti*) exercised a fairly effective control over his actions. It is therefore unlikely that people would normally have suffered from grinding taxation in that age.