Shudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order down to circa A.D. 600 c13.160

c13.160

It is possible to risk a hypothesis about the process which led to the peasanthood of the śūdras. Around the third century A.D. the vaiśya-śūdra social formation was afflicted with a deep social crisis. The crisis is clearly reflected in the descriptions of the Kali age in those portions of the Purāṇas which belong to the third and fourth centuries A.D. Emphasis on the importance of coercive mechanism (*daṇḍa*) in the *Śānti Parva* and description of anarchy (*arājakata*) in the epics possibly belong to the same age and point to the same crisis. The Kali age is characterised by *varṇasaṃkara*, i.e., intermixture of varṇas or social orders, which implies that vaiśyas and śūdras, i.e., peasants, artisans and labourers either refused to stick to the producing functions assigned to them or else vaiśya peasants declined to pay taxes and the śūdras refused to make their labour available. Since collection of taxes by royal officers was made difficult, religious and probably administrative services began to be remunerated through land grants. The process created a class of landlords between the king and the peasants who were mostly vaiśyas in the settled areas, and thus downgraded the vaiśyas. Similarly when tribal chiefs created difficulties, brāhmaṇas were planted in the tribal areas through land grants. In the backward and aboriginal areas the grants to brāhmaṇas and others led to the spread of iron-plough agriculture, preservation of cattle, spread of agricultural calendar, diffusion of the knowledge of *āyurveda* medicine and thus contributed to increase in overall agricultural production and also to the submission of the tribals to the state. In the process the grants brought to the brāhmaṇical fold a large number of aboriginal peasants who came to be ranked as śūdras. Śūdras therefore began to be called peasants and agriculturists in early medieval texts.