Vedic Index of Names and Subjects v2.c4.s5.229

v2.c4.s5.229

*The King as Landowner.*—The position of the king with regard to the land is somewhat obscure. The Greek notices,³⁰ in which, unhappily, it would be dangerous to put much trust, since they were collected by observers who were probably little used to accurate investigations of such matters, and whose statements were based on inadequate information, vary in their statements. In part they speak of rent being paid, and declare that only the king and no private person could own land, while in part they refer to the taxation of land. Hopkins³¹ is strongly of opinion that the payments made were paid for protection—*i.e.*, in modern terminology as a tax, but that the king was recognized as the owner of all the land, while yet the individual or the joint family also owned the land. As against Baden-Powell,³² who asserted that the idea of the king as a landowner was later, he urges for the Vedic period that the king, as we have seen, is described as devouring the people, and that, according to the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa,³³ the Vaiśya can be devoured at will and maltreated (but, unlike the Śūdra, not killed); and for the period of the legal Sūtras and Śāstras he cites Bṛhaspati and Nārada as clearly recognizing the king’s overlordship, besides a passage of the Mānava Dharma Śāstra³⁴ which describes the king as ‘lord of all,’ a phrase which Bühler³⁵ was inclined to interpret as a proof of landowning. The evidence is, however, inadequate to prove what is sought. It is not denied that gradually the king came to be vaguely conceived—as the English king still is—as lord of all the land in a proprietorial sense, but it is far more probable that such an idea was only a gradual development than that it was primitive. The power of devouring the people is a political power, not a right of ownership; precisely the same feature can be traced in South Africa,³⁶ where the chief can deprive a man arbitrarily of his land, though the land is really owned by the native. The matter is ultimately to some extent one of terminology, but the parallel cases are in favour of distinguishing between the political rights of the crown, which can be transferred by way of a grant, and the rights of ownership. Hopkins³⁷ thinks that the gifts of land to priests, which seems to be the first sign of land transactions in the Brāhmaṇas, was an actual gift of land; it may have been so in many cases, but it may easily also have been the grant of a superiority: the Epic grants are hardly decisive one way or the other.