Shudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order down to circa A.D. 600 c12.445

c12.445

Notwithstanding Manu’s insistence on the servitude of the śūdras, they do not appear as slaves and labourers on the same scale as in the pre-Mauryan and Mauryan periods. We do not hear of big individual or state farms being worked with slave and hired labour. Presumably slaves and hired labourers working on the Mauryan state farms were now in the process of being transformed into tax-paying agriculturists. Manu is the first writer explicitly to describe the śūdra as a sharecropper,¹ a fact which can be only deduced from the Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya. While the sharecropper (ardhasitika) retains only 1/4th or 1/6th portion of the produce in the Arthaśāstra, in Manu he seems to retain half of the produce (ārdhikaḥ).² There seems to have been an increase not only in the share of the sharecroppers, but also in their numbers. Instead of the paid officials of the Arthaśāstra Manu gives a list of graded officers who are to be remunerated by grants of land.³ In the absence of references to slaves employed in agriculture, we may presume that these plots of land were cultivated by sharecroppers and hired labourers. Perhaps no text other other than Manu shows such a great accession to the numerical strength of the śūdras. In order to assimilate numerous aboriginal tribes and foreign elements Manu made a far greater use of the fiction of varṇa-saṃkara (intermixture of varṇas) than was done by his predecessors. In the majority of instances the mixed castes were lumped with the śūdras⁴ in respect of their hereditary duties. But the new śūdras do not seem to have been recruited as slaves and hired labourers like their old counterparts. They pursued their old occupations and were possibly taught new methods of agriculture,¹ which gradually turned them into tax-paying peasants. Thus while the aborigines benefited from the knowledge of civilised life imparted to them by brāhmaṇical society, the latter could overcome its internal weaknesses by the addition of new producing masses.