Shudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order down to circa A.D. 600 c10.59

c10.59

We have no clear idea of land rights even in post-Vedic times. The law-books provide for the partition of property, but they never introduce land in this context. Gautama asserts that what is considered to be livelihood (*yogakṣema*) cannot be divided.³ This obviously includes land. The school of Gautama exercised some influence in later times; several smṛtis stress that land and water belonging to brāhmaṇas having common ancestor (*sagotra*) are indivisible up to the thousandth generation.⁴ What applied to brāhmaṇa families in ancient times may have been a mere survival of what applied to ancient society in general. In pre-Maurya times the idea of communal rights in land is also emphasised by Jaimini, who states in his *Mimāṃsā Sūtra* that the earth is common to all and, therefore, cannot be an item of gift.⁵ For practical purposes land may have been distributed periodically among the dominant clans as their size increased or as they proliferated into sub-clans. This possibly applied to families of brāhmaṇas, kṣatriya or vaiśya, for significantly enough in the Pāli texts no śūdra with land rights is mentioned. On the other hand we hear of kṣatriyas enjoying revenues, and of brāhmaṇas and seṭṭhis and gahapatis possessing fields and villages. In all probability they possessed the land on behalf of the families over which they presided as head or patriarch. The patriarchal family consisted of about three to four generations, as can be inferred from laws regarding partition in the Dharmasūtras; and as such it was a very large family.