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A History of Agriculture in India v1.c29: Chapter 23. Rural Economy and Administration of Land in the Magadhan Empire

A History of Agriculture in India v1.c29

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Chapter 23. Rural Economy and Administration of Land in the Magadhan Empire

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THE Mauryan Government had a well-organized revenue administration, bureaucracy, army and police. There were Superintendents for various departments. Among them were Superintendents of Agriculture, Forest Produce, Pasture Lands, Cows, Horses and Elephants. The *Arthashastra* thus enumerates the qualifications and duties of the Superintendent of Agriculture.

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‘Possessed of the knowledge of the science of agriculture dealing with the plantation of bushes and trees or assisted by those who are trained in such sciences, the Superintendent of Agriculture shall in time collect the seeds of all kinds of grains, flowers, fruits, vegetables, bulbous roots, fibre-producing plants, and cotton.

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He shall employ slaves, labourers, and prisoners to sow the seeds on crown lands which have been often and satisfactorily ploughed.

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The work of the above men shall not suffer on account of any want in ploughs and other necessary implements or of bullocks. Nor shall there be any delay in procuring for them the assistance of blacksmiths, carpenters, borers, ropemakers, as well as those who catch snakes, and similar persons.’

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All these duties were enjoined upon the Superintendents of Agriculture because the Magadhan State started the clearance of jungles on a large scale. The king was the biggest land-owner. Land farmed directly under the crown supervision was called *sita* lands. The State derived substantial income from *sita* lands, which were settled with Shudras. They gave one-fourth of the produce to the State warehouses.

Formation of Villages

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How the villages were settled is thus described by the author of the *Arthashastra*.

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‘Either by inducing foreigners to immigrate or by causing the thickly-populated centres of his own kingdom to send forth the excessive population, the king may construct villages either on new sites or on old ruins.

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Villages consisting each of not less than a hundred families and of not more than five hundred families of agricultural people of Shudra caste, or agricultural people, with boundaries extending as far as a *krosa* (2,250 yards; 2,057 metres) or two, and capable of protecting each other, shall be formed. Boundaries shall be denoted by a river, a mountain, forests, or by trees such as salmali (silk-cotton tree), sami (*Acacia suma*), and kshira-vriksha (milky trees), possiby *Manilkara hexandra*.

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There shall be set up a sthaniya (a fortress) in the centre of eight hundred villages, a dronemukha in the centre of four hundred villages, a kharvatika in the centre of two hundred villages, and a sangrahana in the midst of a group of ten villages.

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There shall be constructed in the extremities of the kingdom forts manned by boundary-guards, whose duty shall be to guard the entrance into the kingdom. The interior of the kingdom shall be watched by trap-keepers, archers, hunters, chandalas, and wild tribes.

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Those who perform sacrifices, spiritual guides, priests, and those learned in the Vedas shall be granted Brahmadeya lands yielding sufficient produce and exempted from taxes and fines.

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Superintendents, accountants, gopas, sthanikas, veterinary surgeons, physicians, horse-trainers, and messengers shall also be endowed with lands, which they shall have no right to alienate by sale or mortgage.

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Lands prepared for cultivation shall be given to taxpayers only for life. Unprepared lands shall not be taken away from those who are preparing them for cultivation.

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Lands may be confiscated from those who do not cultivate them, and given to others; or they may be cultivated by village labourers and traders, lest those owners who do not properly cultivate them might pay less to the government. Cultivators may be supplied with grains, cattle, and money, which they may return at their convenience.

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The king shall bestow on cultivators only such favour and remission as will tend to swell the treasury, and shall avoid such favour which deplete it.

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Either on the occasion of opening new settlements or on any other emergent occasion, remission of taxes shall be made.

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He shall regard with fatherly kindness those who have passed the period of remission of taxes.

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He shall exploit timber and elephant forests, offer facilities for cattle-breeding and commerce, construct roads for traffic both by land and water, and set up market towns.

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He shall also construct reservoirs, filled with water either perennial or drawn from some other source. Or he may provide sites, roads, timber, and other necessary things to those who construct reservoirs of their own accord.

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Whoever stays away from any kind of co-operative construction shall send his servants and bullocks to carry on work on his behalf, and shall have a share in the expenditure, but shall have no claim to the profit.

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The king shall exercise his right of ownership with regard to fishing, ferrying and trading in vegetables, in reservoirs or lakes.

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Those who do not heed the claim of their slaves (dasa), hirelings (ahitaka), and relatives shall be taught their duty.

Classification of Villages

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The Mauryan Government made a two-fold classification of the villages for the purpose of fiscal administration. The villages were grouped according to the number of tax-paying inhabitants, the caste of the people, the size and the commercial and industrial value.

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(i) Villages enjoying remission of taxes. These included certain newly founded villages and villages granted as Brahmadeyas and the like. This group included villages granted to royal servants, such as superintendents, accountants, gopas, sthanikas, veterinary surgeons, physicians, horse-trainers and messengers, without the right of alienation by sale or mortgage.

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(ii) Villages supplying soldiers or weapons of war. Villages that paid grains, cattle, gold and raw produce as tax, and supplied free labour instead of taxes, included the purely agricultural type as well as villages of low-caste people. The Mauryan Government pursued a policy of setting up villages tenanted solely by the people of the Shudra caste. Says Kautilya, ‘Villages should be formed, each consisting of from 100 to 500 agricultural families of Shudra caste.’ Men of low caste for such work were preferred on the ground that they were more efficient in manual labour than men of the high castes. Stringent measures were adopted to protect agricultural interests in these villages by way of forbidding impediments of different kinds. ‘No ascetic other than one who was taken to the fourth stage of life, no association other than one of the same origin (i.e. of agricultural caste), no guild devoted to a different object other than a guild of the same nature shall colonize a village. On account of the isolation of the villagers, and devotion of the people to cultivation there will be growth of wealth, labour, minerals, grains and drinks.’

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The seclusion of the villages belonging to the Shudra families was a Mauryan innovation. It gave a distinct stamp to the farmers as a whole. Megasthenes was thus led to believe that husbandmen formed a distinct caste. He says, ‘The second caste consists of the husbandmen, who appear to be far more numerous than the others. As they were exempted from fighting and other public services, they devoted the whole of their time to tillage. Nor would an enemy, coming upon a husbandman at work on his land, do him any harm, for, farmers were regarded as public benefactors and were protected. The land thus remaining unravaged, and producing heavy crops, supplies the inhabitants with all that is requisite to make life enjoyable. The husbandmen themselves, with their wives and children, live in the country and avoid going into town.’

The Different Parts of a Village

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During the Mauryan administration, an account of the different parts of a village was kept by the local officers for the purpose of assessment of taxes. They comprised cultivated plots of land, uncultivated fields, wet lands (*kedara*), gardens, vegetable gardens, fenced plots, forests, altars, temples, irrigation works, cremation-grounds, feeding-houses, *piaos* where water was supplied to travellers, places of pilgrimage, pasture ground, roads, boundary plots, threshing floors, house sites and stables of domestic animals.

Division of Land

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The division of land for various purposes, and the duties of the king towards farmers are thus described in *Arthashastra*.

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'The king shall make provision for pasture grounds on uncultivable tracts.

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Brahmans shall be provided with forests for soma plantation, for religious learning, and for the performance of penance, such forests being granted with safety for animate or inanimate objects, and being named after the tribal name (*gotra*) of the Brahmans resident therein.

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A forest provided with only one entrance, rendered inaccessible by the construction of ditches all round, with plantations of delicious fruit trees, bushes, bowers, and thornless trees, with an expansive lake of water, full of harmless animals, and with tigers, beasts of prey deprived of their claws and teeth, male and female elephants, young elephants and bisons—shall be formed for the king's sports.

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On the extreme limit of the country or in any other suitable locality, another game forest with game beasts, open to all, shall also be made.

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The king shall protect farmers from the molestation of oppressive fines, forced labour and taxes, herds of cattle from thieves, tigers, poisonous creatures and cattle disease.

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The king shall keep roads clear for traffic, and protect travellers from molestation by the officials, robbers, and boundary-guards. He should also protect the roads from being destroyed by herds of cattle.'

The Headman

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The Jatakas refer to the headman generally under the designation 'gamabhojaka'. The Kulavaka Jataka refers to gamabhojaka who used to make money in sinful ways and who tried to harass innocent men. The appointment of the headman was either hereditary or was conferred by the village council itself. The villages of the industrial type appears to have had an elderman (*jetthaka*) as the head. The Suchi Jataka tells us that there was a 'jetthaka' at the head of the village of 1,000 blacksmiths. It indicates extensive use of iron for fabrication of agricultural implements. The headman appears also to have been sometimes a nominee of the king even during the Jataka period. According to the Kharassara Jataka the king appointed an 'amachcha' (minister) as the headman of a village and he collected the revenue (*bali*) from the village on behalf of the king. In the Gamani-Chanda Jatakas we are told that an officer named Chanda after retiring in old age from service took to farming in a village. The king made a grant of this village to him as a *Brahmadeyya* (full gift). Chanda thus became the headman of the village.

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The Kulavaka Jataka tells us that the members of the thirty families of a village met in the village to consider the common problems of the village community. We further learn that they kept the roads in repair, cut down trees that obstructed traffic, constructed cause-ways, dug water-reservoirs and built a hall.

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Kautilya refers to the headman (*gramika*) as well as to the village-elders (*grama-vriddhah*), who constituted the local assembly. The headman co-operated with the Gopa, a royal official, in maintaining the village register, which contained a full description of the tax-paying and non-tax-paying parts of the village, a record of gifts, sales, charities and remission of taxes. The Gopa attended to the accounts of five or ten villages. Villages were divided into the following categories: villages exempted from taxation, those that supply soldiers, those that pay their taxes in the form of grains, cattle, gold or raw material, and those that supply free labour and dairy produce in lieu of taxes. Kautilya enjoins: ‘When the headman of the village has to travel on account of any business of the whole village, the villagers shall by turn accompany him: those who cannot do this shall pay 1½ panas for every Yojana.’ This shows that the headman was assisted by the villagers in matters relating to the whole village. The village elders, with the *gramika* at the head, looked after the local administration. So far as affairs touching land were concerned, we notice them, in the first place, taking charge of property of the infants or minors and improving it. They looked after the temple-property (*deva-dravyam*). ‘In the absence of claimants to dilapidated religious buildings, villagers or charitable people may repair them. They also conducted the sale of buildings of different kinds, fields, gardens, lakes or tanks, etc. The property on sale was accurately described, so that the buyer could know exactly what he was going to and the sale was by auction. They decided disputes concerning boundaries of land within a village as well as those between two or more villages in consultation with the elders of other village. They also punished those who made encroachments upon the boundary-areas or destroyed the boundary-marks.

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The Prakrit inscriptions refer to the headman under the designations ‘gramika’, ‘gamabhojaka’, and ‘gamani’, and to a committee under the name ‘gotthi’ or ‘gotti’ which corresponded to the village assembly.¹

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¹ Gupta, K.N. *The Land System in South India*, p. 41-45

Cultivation of Land

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Fields that are left unsown may be brought under cultivation by employing those who cultivate for half the share in the produce (*ardhasitika*);

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or those who live by their own physical exertion may cultivate such fields for 1/4 or 1/5 of the produce grown; or they may pay to the king as much as they can without entailing any hardship upon themselves with the exception of their own private lands that are difficult to cultivate.

Farmer's Land Revenue

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The wasteland probably belonged to the Crown, but in the Arthashastra, Bk. II, ch. I, we find the injunction that the king shall not take away unprepared lands from those who are preparing them for cultivation. Proprietary right thus obviously lay with those who cultivated the land. The owner was, however, responsible to the king, if he failed to sow his land or if the crops were damaged due to his own neglect or that of his servants. This meant only an economic benefit both from the standpoint of the owner of the land and of the State; and it would certainly be a mistake to try to assert anything more than that the king had no proprietary right on land with this qualification that no land was allowed to lie fallow permanently, and that he was entitled only to a defined portion of the gross produce as tax. Manu allows 1/12, 1/8 or 1/6 part.² It was usually one-sixth; but made variable up to one-twelfth to ensure against over-taxation. In the time of Chandra Gupta Maurya, the rate was one-fourth with an additional water rate of one-fourth.

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² VII, 130. Medhatithi, Kullukabhatta, Gobindaraga, Nandanacharya and Raghabananda—Commentators of Manu, are all unanimous that a sixth part of the harvest is the king's share. See also Gautama X, 24-27; Vasistha, XIX, 26-27; Baudhayana, 1, 18, I, 13, 15; Vishnu, II, 22-25, 29, 30; and Apastamba, II, 26, 9.

Crop-Sharing System of Cultivation

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From the Mahavagga we learn that the Buddhist Sanghas sometimes cultivated lands belonging to private persons and used to get half of the produce as their share, or sometimes let out their own lands in lieu of half the produce. ‘Of the paddy seedlings belonging to the Sangha, grown upon private ground, half the produce, O Bhikku, you may have, when you have given a part to the private owner. Of seedlings belonging to private persons grown upon the land of the Sangha, you may have the use, when you have given a part to the owner.’³

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³ Gupta, K.N. The Land System in South India, p. 199

Payment to Workers

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The Arthashastra enjoins that provisions shall be supplied to watchmen, gardeners, slaves and labourers, in proportion to the amount of work done by them.

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‘They shall be paid a pana and a quarter per mensem. Artisans shall be provided with wages and provision in proportion to the amount of work done by them.

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Those that are learned in the Vedas and those that are engaged in making penance may take from the fields flowers and fruits for the purpose of worshipping their gods, and rice and barley for the purpose of performing agrayana, a sacrificial performance at the commencement of harvest season; also, those who live by gleaning grains in fields may gather grains where grains had been accumulated and removed from.’

Social Security

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The king provided social security for the aged, infirm and minors, etc. The *Arthashastra* states,

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‘The king shall provide the orphans, the aged, the infirm, the afflicted, and the helpless with maintenance. He shall also provide subsistence to helpless women when they are pregnant and also to the children they give birth to.

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Elders among the villagers shall improve the property of bereaved minors till the latter attain their age; so also the property of gods.

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When a capable person other than an apostate or mother neglects to maintain his or her child, wife, mother, father, minor brothers, sisters, or widowed girls, he or she shall be punished with a fine of twelve panas.

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When, without making provision for the maintenance of his wife and sons, any person embraces asceticism, he shall be punished with the first amercement; likewise any person who converts a woman to asceticism.

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Whoever has passed the age of copulation may become an ascetic after distributing the properties of his own acquisition among his sons, otherwise he will be punished.’

Farmers Not to Be Disturbed

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As the economy depended upon the work of the farmers, they were protected from intruders. Says the *Arthashastra*:

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‘No ascetic other than a vanaprastha, no company other than the one of local birth and no guilds of any kind other than local co-operative guilds shall find entrance into the villages of the kingdom. Nor shall there be in villages buildings intended for sports and plays. Nor, in view of procuring money, free labour, commodities, grains, and liquids in plenty, shall actors, dancers, singers, drummers, buffoons and bards make any disturbance to the work of the villagers; for helpless villagers are always dependent and bent upon their fields.’¹

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¹ Shamasastry, R. The Arthashastra of Kautilya, pp. 45-48.

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Gangopadhyay, R. *Some Materials for the Study of Agriculture and Agriculturists in Ancient India*, Calcutta, 1933

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Gupta, K.M. *The Land System in South India*, Lahore, 1933

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Kosambi, D.D. *The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in Historical Outline*, London, 1965

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Rapson, E.J. (Ed.) *Cambridge History of India*, Vol. I, Cambridge, 1922

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Sastri, K.A.N. and Srinivasachari, G. *Advanced History of India*, New Delhi, 1970

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