Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times c47.30

c47.30

§ 345. This leads us on to the important Hindu theory on the proprietorship in land, which is connected with taxation. It is not so connected in Hindu politics in the slightest degree but in the controversy of the present day raised by Indianist politicians and scholars. Some of these writers have confidently asserted that property in the soil, according to the Hindu view, always vested in the Hindu sovereign. The fact on the other hand is that this is exactly the reverse of the Hindu theory on the subject. The writers unconsciously have read their own feudal law into Hindu jurisprudence. Nothing is so distant from Hindu law as this theory. Any one who is conversant with the general tendency of the principles of Hindu law in constitutional matters would not believe his eyes even if he be given a Śloka in support of the feudal theory. Numerous instances of gifts and sales of land by private individuals can be given from the earliest literature. Law books give provisions for sale of land and for acquirement of proprietory right (*svāmya*) by prescription. Inscriptions² proving to the hilt private property in the soil are extant. Above all it is expressly and emphatically declared that the king has no property in the soil and this is declared in no less an authority than the very logic of Hindu law, Mīmāṁsā. I give below the discussion from Colebrooke's essay on Mīmāṁsā.