A History of Agriculture in India v1.c27.s5.3

v1.c27.s5.3

The land might, at least in the kingdom of Magadha, be given away, and in that of Kosala, be sold. In the former case, a Brahman landowner offers a thousand *karisas* of his estate as a gift; in the latter, a merchant entangles an unwilling noble in the sale of a part. And in the law-books we read that land might be let against a certain share of the produce. The holdings too in the arable land, called the *khetta*, of each village would be subject to redistribution and redivision among a family, as one generation succeeded another. It is not clear whether any member of a village community could give or sell any of the *khetta* to an outsider. It is just possible that the old tradition expressed in the *Brahmanas* when a piece of land was given as a sacrificial fee—‘And the Earth said: Let no mortal give me away!’—may have survived in the villages as a communal, anti-alienizing feeling concerning any disintegration of the basis of their social and economic unity. It will be seen that conditions regarding land-holding were similar to those prevailing now in the Punjab, which is the land of peasant proprietors *par excellence*.