Administrative System of the Marathas c11.s1.4

c11.s1.4

In those days people had to make numerous contributions to the state, to the village communities, and even to those criminal tribes whose protection or neutrality the commercial and agricultural classes considered necessary to purchase. An ordinary peasant, for instance, had to pay his share of the land revenue to the state, at the harvest time he had to give a certain measure of grains to the village officers including the artisans, and when he brought the green vegetables of his garden for sale at the market place, the Patil and the Kulkarni (the village headman and the village scribe) took a handful in pursuance of a very old practice. To appreciate properly the revenue reforms of Shivaji, it is essential to have a clear idea of the taxes and cesses that a peasant or an artisan had to pay. Elphinstone has given us a list of taxes and cesses that prevailed in the Peshwa period but unfortunately no such list is available for the preceding period. This deficiency can however be made up by a careful scrutiny of the Sanads or grant deeds published in Mr. V. K. Rajwade's *Marathyanchya Itihasanchi Sadhanen*, Mawji and Parasnis's *Sanads and Letters* and the Transactions of the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal of Poona. These papers mention no less than fifty taxes, cesses and abwabs (extra duties), a formidable list indeed. But it should be remembered that some of these taxes were levied probably once in a life time, others were collected on special occasions, while some of them were undoubtedly confined to a particular locality. About their nature and incidence the Sanads hardly enlighten us. They simply enumerate all customary cesses, taxes and obligations from which the grantee is exempted. It is clear that all the taxes mentioned below were not exacted by the state, nor did they all prevail in the same revenue area and never was the same man in any locality subjected to all the taxes, cesses and other financial obligations of his native Pargana.