The Social Organisation in North-East India in Buddha's Time c11.60

c11.60

The taxes are paid to the official who represents the king in the province allotted to him; in the village they are given to the *gāmabhojaka*, the village superintendent, who "enjoys the revenue of the village." If the subjects did not pay willingly or if the king wanted—as seemed often to happen, according to the instances narrated (II. 240; III. 9; IV. 224)—to harass the people by enhancing the taxes, he sent his officials who had to use force in filling the coffers of the king. These tax-collectors (*balipaṭiggāhakas*, *niggāhakas*, *balisādhakas*), according to the Jātakas, did not play an unimportant part in public life; how they were looked upon by the people seems to me to be indicated by the conclusion of the Gagga Jātaka (II. 17), where the man-eating demon (*yakkha*) whom the Bodhisatta has subdued is given by the king the post of a *balipaṭiggāhaka*. In the Gaṇḍatindu Jātaka the condition of a land ruled by an unrighteous king and plundered by his officials is described. “Oppressed with taxes (*balipīṭitā*, V. 98) the inhabitants lived in the forest like beasts with their wives and children; where there was once a village, there no village stood any more. The men could not, for fear of the king’s people, live in their houses, they surrounded their houses with hedges and went after sunrise to the forest. In the day the king’s people (*rājapurisā*) plundered, at night the thieves.” Sometimes the king’s officers made common cause with the last-mentioned class, when these officers were really there to pursue and arrest this class. A minister, whom the king gave the position of a village ruler (*gāmabhojaka*) (I. 355) in a frontier village and who collected there the taxes for the king, came to an understanding with the robbers that he would go with his people to the forest and they would in the mean time plunder the village and share the spoils with him.