Local Government in Ancient India c13.162

c13.162

¹ It is worth noting that the procedure regarding these royal grants as shown in the South Indian inscriptions follows closely the lines laid down in the Smṛtis. Yājñavalkya (I. 317-20) requires the king's order making a land grant to be written on a piece of cloth or copperplate together with a description of the size and boundaries of the land, the date, and the king's signature made by his own hand. Vyāsa gives the following further provision: 'The secretary for peace and war, by command of the king himself, may write down the royal mandate on a copperplate or cloth and the boundaries and measurement and the king should himself write with his own hand—"I, so and so, son of such and such a king, assent."' (See *Vyavahāramayūkha*.) On the general system of official records the following apposite remarks of Fleet may be quoted (*Imp. Gaz.*, 1908, vol. II, p. 12): 'Except on the hypothesis of such a system of day-books, it is difficult to account for the manner in which, for instance, the date of a record of A. D. 1008 at Tanjore (H. *S. I. I.*, III. 14) cites the 124th and 143rd days of the twenty-four year of the Cola king Rā̄ja-rāja I, and the date of a record of A. D. 1113, (*E. I.*, IV. 73) cites the 340th day of the fifth year of the reign of his descendant Vikrama-Coladeva; for such details to be cited conveniently there must have been available some such books, in which the days were entered and numbered, and the events of them were posted up as they ran.'