Administration and Social Life under Vijayanagar c11.29

c11.29

Besides being the agents of the government for the collection of the state revenues, these rural assemblies had certain inherent rights for the levy of fresh taxes and the remission of old ones. Thus according to an inscription at Tiruvaḍatturai in the South Arcot district the assembly and *Tantrimār* of Karippōkku nāḍu made a gift of the taxes on land.18 The assembly of Śiruvayal decided to exclude *sarvamānya* lands belonging to a certain deity and to include others for purposes of taxation.19 Again the people of Kūlaikuḷattūr gave away the right of levying certain taxes to goldsmiths.20 But the remissions made on the initiative of the local bodies concerned only the local cesses collected by the assembly for local purposes and had nothing to do with their contribution to the imperial exchequer; or if the taxes were imperial ones they had been farmed out to the local bodies. It would appear that if the local body which at times was the agent of the government for the collection of the state revenues, remitted the imperial revenues without the sanction of the government authority then it must have done so only at its own cost, for the government would not have been prepared to accept any amount less than that which they were obliged to take under the terms of the contract into which they had entered with the assembly.