Vedic Index of Names and Subjects v1.c3.s12.519

v1.c3.s12.519

Vedic literature tells us very little about the social economy of the village. There is nothing to show that the community as such held land. What little evidence there is indicates that individual tenure of land was known (see Urvarā, Kṣetra), but this, in effect though not in law, presumably meant tenure by a family rather than by an individual person. The expression ‘desirous of a village’ (grāma-kāma), which occurs frequently in the later Saṃhitās,¹⁹ points, however, to the practice of the king’s granting to his favourites his royal prerogatives over villages so far as fiscal matters were concerned. Later²⁰ the idea developed that the king was owner of all the land, and parallel with that idea the view that the holders of such grants were landlords. But of either idea there is no vestige in Vedic literature beyond the word grāma-kāma, which much more probably refers to the grant of regalia than to the grant of land, as Teutonic parallels show.²¹ Such grants probably tended to depress the position of the actual cultivators, and to turn them into tenants, but they can hardly have had this effect to any appreciable extent in early times.