The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c11.t29: f) Miscellaneous Collections

The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c11.t29

Language: English

f) Miscellaneous Collections

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Several miscellaneous taxes remain to be discussed as minor sources of income. The port duties⁶ realized by the *nâvadhyakṣa* were distinct from both customs and excise. Villages on sea shores and on the banks of rivers and lakes were assessed at certain rates. The fishing license demanded by the state was one-sixth or 16⅔ per cent of the actual haul. Merchants had to pay the customary tax of port towns. Another group of minor collections came from currency. A premium of 13⅛ per cent was regularly charged on coins of private or foreign mintage.⁷ Besides, the same amount was realized by the government on every occasion that any body had to pay fine in cash.⁸ Lastly, we have to mention the escheats. Houses, fields, gardens, tanks and temples lapsed to the state, as we have seen, if the proprietors neglected to exercise their rights of ownership for five years.⁹ Similarly the Empire was the heir of prostitutes' property in the absence of daughters.¹⁰

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⁶ *Ind. Ship.* p. 106.

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⁷ *Ind. Ant.* 1905, p. 53.

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⁸ *Ibid*, p. 54.

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⁹ *Ibid*, p. 9; cf. Manu, VIII, 30.

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¹⁰ *Ibid*, p. 57.

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No conceivable resource of the people appears thus to have been left untapped by the Maurya Empire. The all-reaching tentacles of Hindu finance lie on the surface. And if, as Adam Smith remarks, there be nothing in which governments are so prone to learn of one another as in the matter of new taxes, the first and the last empires of pre-Moslem India can still give points to the latest specialists in public finance. For, the methods and principles of statesmen from Kautilya to Kulottuṅga were eminently matter-of-fact and realistic. Indeed, with the exception of stamp duties, national debt, postal receipts and a few others characteristically modern, the assets schedule of the first class powers of today can hardly exhibit any taxes and non-tax revenues in addition to what the Hindu *sumantra* (finance minister) and his board of experts hit upon pragmatically in the third and fourth centuries B. C. in order to "cover" the appropriations on the governmental machinery of what would hardly fall short of the largest and most extensive of all empires in the world's history.¹

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¹ See the map of the Maurya Empire in the third century B. C. facing p. 162 of Smith's *Early Hist.* Compare the area with that of any of the European Empires in Freeman's *Hist. Geŏ.* (with Atlas), or specifically with that of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent (third century A. C.) in the *Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography*. Note, in comparison, that India is all Europe *minus* the Russia of the Czars, and that Maurya India, although it excluded the southern fringe of the peninsula in a condition of semi-dependent autonomy, included the whole of Afghanistan and Baluchistan. *Vide supra*, p. 26.

Linked texts (1)

Mānava Dharmaśāstra — Manu & Bhṛgu, Sanskrit