Administration and Social Life under Vijayanagar c7.4

c7.4

Inscriptions are our main source for the study of the revenue system under the Vijayanagar kings. Almost every Vijayanagar inscription refers to some assignment of land, remission of the revenues, income from land, levy of fresh taxes, or the renewal of obsolete ones. Though the number of such inscriptions bearing on this subject is very large, yet there is great difficulty in handling them. Many of the inscriptions still remain unpublished. and of these only summaries are available in the Epigraphy Reports. It is true that these summaries and the connected remarks in the Reports are valuable, but the lack of the texts of the inscriptions handicaps the student greatly. Further even in the study of the published texts of the inscriptions, we experience some difficulty, for, there are in them technical terms which still await explanation. Another difficulty is the use of several terms signifying almost similar ideas or ideas which differ only in certain minute details which it is difficult to understand now. A few of the more important of such words used in the inscriptions are kaḍamai, magamai, kāṇikkai, kaṭṇam, vari, pāṭṭam, irai, kaṭṭāyam, etc. Still another difficulty we meet with is that we see one and the same inscription mentioning not only various dues or obligations to be met by an individual or an institution towards the government, but also communal contributions for certain specific social purposes, certain local cesses for meeting particular local expenses, and payments made to the overlord by the tenant for the lands he held of him. When these different dues to different persons are jumbled together in one inscription, we find it very difficult to analyse them under different heads. To add to all this, many of these payments were of a customary character, and as we often hear nothing more than their names, it is not easy to make out the exact nature of the contributions.