Administration and Social Life under Vijayanagar c7.s2.2

c7.s2.2

Now before closing this chapter it remains for us to examine how the burden of taxation was felt by the people. Sir Thomas Munro in one of his letters observes: “However light Indian revenue may be in the books of their sages, only a sixth or a fifth, in practice it has always been heavy....No person who knows anything of Indian revenue can believe that the ryot, if his fixed assessment were only a fifth or a fourth of the gross produce, would not every year, whether good or bad, pay it without difficulty, and not only do this, but prosper under it beyond what he has ever done at any former period.......I never could discover the least foundation for the assumption that the Hindu assessment had been raised by the Mahomedan conquest, or for believing that the assessment which we find, did not exist before that period......The few imperfect records which have reached us of the revenues of Vijayanagar, the last of the great Hindu powers, do not show that the assessment was lighter under that government than under its Mahomedan successors.”³¹⁷ A study of the inscriptions of the period leads us to the conclusion that at certain periods of Vijayanagar history the taxes were heavy. The people could not bear the weight of such heavy taxation and hence were at times forced to sell their lands to meet the government demands. A record at Tirukkaḷakkuḍi in the Rāmnāḍ district registers the sale of land to the temple of Tirukkōḷakkuḍi Aṇḍa Nāyaṉār by the Maravas of Vēḷanguḍi in Pūṅguṉra nāḍu in order to pay the taxes due by them on their holdings. The lands were sold under very distressing circumstances, and the Maravas had no other means of discharging their dues to the government.318 In the year 1519 the owners of lands and pāḍikāval rights in and around Tiruvaraṅguḷam in the modern Pudukkōṭṭai State were forced to sell their lands for repaying a loan which they had originally taken from the temple treasury for clearing up certain dues. vēṇḍugōḷ, viniyōgam, ercōru, kūṛrarísi and veṭṭimuṭṭaiyaḷ. They had to sell their lands for they were otherwise unable to pay the demands made by the Svāmi Narasā Nāyakkar on behalf of the government.319