¹ Avineri, S., Karl Marx on Colonialism (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 451 (emphasis in original).Google Scholar

² Perry Anderson sums up Marx's views on the asiatic mode of production thus, after tracing the changes it underwent: “the absence of private property in land, the presence of large-scale irrigation systems in agriculture, the existence of autarchic village communities combining crafts with tillage and communal ownership of the soil, the stagnation of passively rentier or bureaucratic cities, and the domination or despotic state machine cornering the bulk of the surplus.… Between the self-reproducing villages ‘below’ and the hypertrophied state ‘above,’ dwelt no intermediate force.” Anderson also points out that Marx's view of the village communities is based on his study of India. Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), 483, 487.Google Scholar

³ Braudel, F., Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 73.Google Scholar Braudel is referring to Mughal India, and similar views are expressed by specialists. W. H. Moreland. the leading authority on Muslim India of his time, holds that the landholder did not have “rights of ownership in the ordinary sense,” but merely “rights to occupancy during the King's pleasure.” Moreland, W. H., The Agrarian System of Moslem India (Allahabad: Central Book Depot, 1929), 58.Google Scholar I have questioned these arguments in “Land Ownership in India.” Delhi School Working Paper, 1977.Google Scholar

⁴ For instance, the authoritative textbook by Smith, Vincent, Oxford History of India, 3d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 90–91.Google Scholar

⁵ Baden-Powell, B. H., The Indian Village Community (1896; rpt. Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1972), 206.Google Scholar There is in fact a vast literature on classical Hindu law, including sophisticated analyses of just the points Baden-Powell mentions, e.g., Derrett, J. D. M., Essays in Classical and Modern Hindu Law, 4 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), II,Google Scholar 89ff. A good general introduction is Lingat, R., The Classical Law of India, Derrett, J. D. M., trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).Google Scholar

⁶ Mendelsohn, Oliver, “The Pathology of the Indian Legal System,” Modern Asian Studies, 15:4 (1981), 840–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Cf. Max Gluckman on the Barotse: “In a society at this stage of development, where most transactions occur between persons already related by status, the law is interested in property as an incident of a social relationship, in addition to the property's material value.… Each piece of property, land or title or chattel, may be a link in a complex set of relationships between people who are bound to one another permanently.” Gluckman, Max, Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 151.Google Scholar

⁸ Instead of plunging at the outset into the problems of definition (as exemplified in Hohfeld's, W. N.Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays, Cook, W. W., ed. (New Haven, 1932), it seems preferable to describe first the Chola land system (since the essence of my argument is that there was a system) of rights, powers, obligations, privileges, and so forth. It should be sufficient to state here that by right I mean a relationship between people, perhaps in respect of a thing, such as land, secured by the social and legal system.Google Scholar

⁹ About 9,000 Chola inscriptions have been noted; of the 3,500 published inscriptions, “roughly 40 per cent are records of the grant or sale of land or villages.” Karashima, N. and Sitaram, B. “Revenue Terms in Chola Inscriptions,” Journal of Asian and African Studies (Tokyo), 5 (1972), 87–117.Google Scholar When temples had to be reconstructed, the old inscriptions were transcribed and re-engraved, apparently with great care: “We have not come across a single instance wherein the text of the original record was altered or tampered with in recopying.” Subramanian, T. N., South Indian Temple Inscriptions, 3 vols. (Madras: Government of Madras, 1953–1957), III,Google Scholar Part I. xlix. Presumably, the proof of correct copying lies in internal evidence in the transcription, such as absence of obvious errors-deliberate changes of the originals could not be detected if no copies of the original remained. English summaries of the inscriptions are published in the Annual Reports on South Indian Epigraphy, issued by the Archaeological Survey of India, with some variations in title. Each inscription is identified by the sequence number of the year of acquisition by the Office of the Government Epigraphist, e.g., Inscription 12 of 1913. Some full texts have also been published in original and in translation in various series. The Tamil literature of the Chola period is also extensive, but apparently does not yield much direct data on economic matters. Sastri, K. A. Nilakanta, The Colas, 2d ed. (Madras: University of Madras, 1955), 11.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Burton Stein argues that the leading South Indian historians before Independence exaggerated the power and degree of organisation of the Chola state. While Nilakanta Sasti compares what he describes as a centralised and elaborate bureaucratic structure to Byzantium, a better analogy, in Stein's view, is provided by the segmentary societies of tribal Africa. In the Chola Kingdom, too, Stein argues, there were numerous centres of power, or segments; the Chola king had ritual sovereignty (rajadharma) over all of them, but political sovereignty (kshatra) only over a core area around the capital. Stein, Burton, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 273–75.Google Scholar Outside this core area, the segments, which were more or less contained as units of government, were administrative areas known as nadus. These nadus were small regions, since by 1300 there were more than 550 of them. Subbarayulu, Y., Political Geography of the Chola Country (Madras: Tamilnadu State Department of Archaeology, 1973), 46–47.Google Scholar Other historians, while agreeing that some correction of Sastri's account was necessary, argue that Stein seriously underestimates the scope of Chola administration, and correspondingly overestimates the independent power of the nadus. See Champakalakshmi, R., “Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18 (1981), 411–26;Google ScholarHall, K. R., “Peasant State and Society in Chola Times: A View from the Tiruvidaimarudar Complex,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 18 (1981), 393–410;Google ScholarKarashima, N., South Indian History and Society: Studies from Inscriptions, A.D. 850 to 1800 Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). All scholars agree that in outlying areas, and in times of trouble, there would be struggles for authority and revenues between rival powers, including local assemblies, when villagers would contract for protection. During the disturbed reign of the Chola Kulottunga III, the assembly of Vallanadu declared that they would protect the cultivators of a certain area, and if any of the assembly were to rob a cultivator, a stipulated amount of irrigated land would be given to the temple (Inscription 273 of 1914). Again a Pandya inscription records that a chief promised the headman of a village that if, in the course of fighting, the cultivation of the villages under his protection suffered, he would pay a fine of 500 panam, a considerable amount (Inscription 359 of 1914). The Pandyas were a rival Southern kingdom of the thirteenth century. Other kingdoms occasionally mentioned are the earlier Pallavas (eighth and ninth centuries) and the later Vijayanagar empire. circa 1350–1564.Google Scholar

¹¹ Stein, in keeping with his view of a decentralised system, suggests that the major part of the tax collections remained in the village or the locality or nadu. “The State and the Agrarian Order in Medieval South India,” in Essays on South India, Stein, Burton, ed. (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1975), 79. He gets some support from Nilakanta Sasti's description of the method of remunerating public officials. The more common method was to assign the tax revenue from a specific piece of land, and regular cash payments from the public treasury were practically unknown; but Nilakanta Sastri also describes the ruler's carefully maintained land records (The Colas, 464, and 464, 469).Google Scholar

¹² Land which had once been occupied, but was then abandoned, frequently lapsed to temples.

¹³ As far as we know, the Chola kings had no demesne lands. But in another part of South India, Karnataka, the records do refer to “royal estates or domains.” Gururajachar, S., Some Aspects of Economic and Social Life in Karnataka, A.D. 1000–1300 (Mysore: University of Mysore, 1974), 23–24. The Chola inscriptions do refer to land held by chieftains, however; for instance, the assembly of a village in Tiruchi district formed a committee to supervise the leasing of lands belonging to the “king,” Perumal Ulagudaiya-Nayanar (Inscription 204 of 1938–1939).Google Scholar

¹⁴ The Tamil word iraiyili is generally translated as “free of taxes.” It should be noted that even land given by the king could be liable to land tax. Rajarajadeva Chola once gave land to a temple for maintaining a feeding house and offerings to the deity, on condition that half the tax was paid by the temple and half by the village assembly (Inscription 186 of 1925).

¹⁵ There were even conventions about the division of spiritual merit between the donor and the ruler where the donor gave the land and the ruler made it free of tax. Sircar, writing of North India, states that the donor was required to compensate the ruler for the loss of revenue, whereupon five sixths of the religious merit went to the donor and one sixth to the ruler (perhaps because the customary land tax was one sixth the produce); if no compensation was paid, “the entire merit accruing to the donation was believed to go to the king.” Sircar, D. C., ed., Land System and Feudalism in Ancient India (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1966), 7. But if the king was compensated, why should he receive any merit at all? The statement in the inscription that in the absence of compensation the king would get all the merit was probably a threat made to increase the chances of compensation; the unauthorised conversion of revenue-paying into revenue-free land was an ever present danger up to British times—and indeed even today. Religion is the safest cloak for tax avoidance and tax evasion in India.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Note that various levels in the hierarchy were entitled to different taxes, and if someone at a higher level wanted to give land tax free to a temple, he still had to compensate lower-level authorities for their loss of taxes. Thus a queen gave land tax free to a temple, while giving the Brahmin assembly, the former “owners,” a sum (puracharam, literally “former usage”) to compensate for the loss of four specified taxes. South Indian Inscriptions, 4 pts. (Archaeological Survey of India, Madras, 1899–1929), III, No. 194.Google Scholar

¹⁷ In theory, the land was owned by the temple deity and managed on behalf of the deity by the temple trustees, whereas in a math, or monastery, the land belonged to the chief administrators and gurus. Burton Stein, “Economic Functions of a Medieval South Indian Temple,” Journal of Asian Studies, 19:2 (1960), 163–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Temple trustees were often supervised by village assemblies or the ruler. Hall, K. R., Trade and Statecraft in the Age of the Cholas (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1980), 24–56.Google Scholar

¹⁸ For instance, Inscription 172 of 1915 describes an arrangement under which the temple functionaries (vaikanasa) arranged for the cultivation of the garden lands themselves, employing men to carry water, dig, fence the field, spread a stipulated amount of manure, etcetera. The village assembly arranged for the cultivation of the paddy lands, giving a fixed amount to the temple.

¹⁹ The leasing out of land could itself take many forms. Thus David Ludden describes a Pandyan transaction: the king gave lands to the temple, the temple then “loaned” the land to the village assembly, which in turn contracted to give specified goods for ever after. Ludden, David, “Agrarian Organization in Tinnevelly District, 800–1900 A.D.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1978).Google Scholar

²⁰ Burton Stein describes the finances of the largest temple in South India, Tirupati, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries in “Economic Functions of a Medieval South Indian Temple,” also see idem, “Temples and Agricultural Development in Medieval South India,” Economic Weekly Annual, 13 (02 1961), 179–89.Google Scholar An interesting discussion of the economic functions of temples, including the storage of grain, is contained in Carol A. Breckenridge, “Land as Gift in the Vijayanagara Period” (Paper delivered at the 1981 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Toronto, 03 1981).Google Scholar For the Cholas, see Sastri, K. A. Nilakanta, “The Economy of a South Indian Temple in the Chola Period,” Molaviya Commemoration Volume, Dhruva, A. B., ed. (Benaras: Benaras Hindu University, 1932), 305–19.Google Scholar

²¹ On sectarian rivalries, as reflecting political struggles between different groups, in the post-Chola period, see Burton Stein, “Temples in Tamil Country, 1300–1750 A.D.,” and Arjun Appadorai, “Kings, Sects and Temples in South India, 1350–1700 A.D.,” both in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 14:1 (1977), 11–46, 47–74.Google Scholar

²² For instance, Inscription 231 of 1910 records that the temple at Tirumayanam bought the right to collect market fees from a village assembly for a lump sum.

²³ An obvious reason for exchange was convenience. Temples might be given lands that were far away, and hence difficult to manage; a migrant of today will sometimes donate land in his new village to the temple in his ancestral village, and the temple frequently sells such land. M. Atchi Reddy, “Tenancy in Nellore, 1870–1980,” manuscript in preparation.

²⁴ Temples also contributed to the maintenance and repair of village tanks. Appadorai, A., Economic Conditions in Southern India, 1000–1500 A.D., 2 vols., (Madras: University of Madras, 1936), I, 216.Google Scholar

²⁵ The inscriptions often refer to the god and the temple as the donor, e.g., Inscription 386 of 1916 (1578) registers a gift of land by the god, his servants, and the big assembly of the village to an individual for his services as kudavan (cowherd, shepherd). Chola inscriptions record the appointment of individuals as managers, scribes, etcetera by”the god and his servants assembled together” (e.g., Inscription 383 of 1916). On the general legal literature, see Sontheimer, G. D., “Religious Endowments in India: The Juristic Personality of Hindu Deities,” Zeitschrifi fair Vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, 67 (1964), 45–100.Google Scholar

²⁶ Apparently, non-Brahmin villages did not invariably have temples, though there must have been some place of worship. Karashima, South Indian History, analyses several Tanjore inscriptions. Of forty non-Brahmadeya villages, eighteen had temples.

²⁷ Stein, , Peasant State and Society, 171.Google Scholar

²⁸ Thus, a Pandyan inscription describes the acquisition of land for a Brahmin settlement, and stipulates that land could be sold only to others within the settlement; if a sale outside was necessary, then it could be sold only to a particular kind of Brahmin—bhagavatars (in this context, probably a follower of Vishnu) and those of the same school of philosophy (darsana) (Inscriptions 47 and 49 of 1936–1937).

²⁹ Hall, , Trade and Statecraft, 35.Google Scholar

³⁰ E. Furubotn and S. Pejovich state that ownership in an asset has three element: usus, the right to use; usus fructus, the right to appropriate returns from the asset; and abusus, or the right to change the asset, including the right to transfer all rights in it, as by sale. “Introduction,” to The Economics of Property Rights, Furubotn, Eirik and Pejovich, S., eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Press, 1974), 4.Google Scholar

³¹ Honoré, R. M. “Ownership,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Guest, A. M., ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1961, 101–47Google Scholar. Lawrence Becker argues that Honoré's analysis is an adequate tool for all varieties of ownership, from tribal life to feudal societies. “The Moral Base of Property Rights”, in Property (Nomos XXII), Pennock, Roland and Champman, John W., eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 190–91.Google Scholar However, there are other ways of splitting up rights. Becker himself splits up the right to capital into the right (or liberty) to abuse or destroy the right to modify, and the right (power) to alienate, i.e., to carry out inter vivos transfers by exchange or gift and to abandon ownership. Becker, Lawrence C., Property Rights (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 8–11. There is in fact no unique way of specifying ownership since there are infinitely many ways in which things can give rise to transactions and relationships.Google Scholar

³² Thus, tiruppani-kani was the right to supervise repairs, obviously a profitable right since it was sold by temples (e.g., Inscription 209 of 1916).

³³ Nilakanta Sastri translates kani as “landed estate.” The Colas, 540.Google Scholar

³⁴ We therefore translate the Tamil words kani-atchi-karan or kaniyal (one having kani) as “owner.” Another Tamil word for owner is udaiyavan, literally “one who has.”

³⁵ Inscription 190 of 1925. Title deeds were issued by village assemblies, especially in cases of renewal of loss, as two Chola inscriptions (213 of 1925, and 291 of 1940–1941) show. It is possible that other authorities also issued them.

³⁶ E.g., the thirteenth-century Pandyan inscription, 86 of 1916.

³⁷ Inscription 539 of 1917.

³⁸ South Indian Inscriptions, III, No. 203.Google Scholar

³⁹ Kudi can be translated as “occupant” and by extension as “subject,” one liable to taxation: the grain crop was divided into the kudivaram, the kudi's share, and the melvaram or the upper share. Originally, the word melvaram referred to the ruler's share. Cf. kudi with raiyyat, “the settled population subject to taxation” (CambridgeHistory of Iran, V, 492).Google Scholar Later on, kudi came to be applied to a tenant, as distinct from a landlord, and melvaram was used to refer to the rent, though when the owner cultivated the land himself, the term kudi could be applied to him. Subbanryulu, , Political Geography, 103. There is also a specific Tamil word for cultivator: vellan.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ The term karanmai is particularly puzzling. Nilakanta Sastri translates it as “cultivators' right” in opposition to mikakchi or miyatchi, “landlords' rights.” As the landlord himself might be the actual cultivator, the term kil-karanmai-udaiyal-kudigal was sometimes used for occupants having subordinate cultivation rights. The Colas, 577. There are some instances of the sale of karanmai rights-several Pandya inscriptions record the sale of karanmai rights by temples (e.g., Inscriptions 103 and 104 of 1916, and 5 of 1924)-but karanmai was probably not invariably saleable, as kani was. It is possible that temples, rather than private individuals. sold karanmai rights. Ludden suggests that kani and karanmai are more or less interchangeable, both being translated as “primary land control.” It may be that kani was the wider term, occasionally including karanmai, but this issue can be settled only by analysing the terms in context. For example, one needs to know who were the buyers and sellers of kani and karanmai rights. One test of the differences in these rights, suggested by N. H. Stern, is the differences in their prices, and if sufficient data on prices for similar types of land are available it would be useful to make this comparison.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Appadorai describes variations in tenancy conditions and various stipulations regarding proper use of the land, the upkeep of ponds, etcetera. Tenants of temples also had to pay fees to the temple servants who supervised their work during the harvest. Appadorai also states that tenants could nut alienate their rights, citing inscriptions, but this prohibition is not as definite as he affirms. The epigraphists often refer to “hereditary tenancy” or “tenancy rights” being sold or given to temples (e.g., Inscriptions 337 of 1923, and 106 of 1924), but it is not clear to what category these refer because the epigraphists sometimes held the theory that all land belonged to the ruler, so that everyone else was a “tenant.” Appadorai, Economic Conditions in Southern India, I, 170–77.Google Scholar

⁴² Hoaoré, “Ownership.”

⁴³ Dahlman, Carl J., The Open Field System and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 209–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁴ Separate committees, with statutory constitutions, were set up to manage the irrigation channels, the garden lands, tax payments, and so on. Gros, F. and Nagaswamy, R., Uttaramerur: legendes, histoire, monuments (Pondicherry: Institut Francais d'Endology, 1970), describes one Brahmin village, Uttaramerur, in which over ninety inscriptions relating to the assembly were found.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Inscription 536 of 1921.

⁴⁶ Rotating cultivation was found occasionally even in the British period. Kumar, Dharma, Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 16.Google Scholar Nowadays the practice appears to be confined to tribal areas, especially in the hills. But rotation of fields within the family is still found. Beck, Brenda, Peasant Society in Kafka (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972), 189–90.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Inscription of 1916. The Tatacharya may have been a temple trustee; the motive for his action is not stated in the summary.

⁴⁸ Abandoned lands could revert to either the village assembly or the ruler, presumably depending at least in part on whether there was tax arrears owing on it, and to which authority. Such lands were sometimes given to the temple—again presumably with the consent of whichever authority was entitled to the land.

⁴⁹ See, for instance, Bayley, W. H and Hudleston, W., eds., Papers on Mirasi Right (Madras, 1892), 294–302.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ There are references both in the law books and in compilations of customary law to preemption rights. For instance, one text states that the land had to be offered first to full brothers, and then to a further six categories, ending with creditors and finally co-villagers. Kane, P. V., History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law), 5 vols. (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 1930–1962), III, 496. But how this procedure actually operated, and in particular how land prices were settled, is not clear.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Ludden, , “Agrarian Organization,” 173;Google Scholar also, on North India, see Banga, Indu, Agrarian System of the Sikhs (New Delhi: Manohar Publication, 1978), 175.Google Scholar

⁵² Macfarlane, Alan, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 29.Google Scholar

⁵³ Derrett, J. D. M., “The History of the Juridical Framework of the Joint Hindu Family.” Contributions to Indian Sociology, no. 2 (12 1962), 17–47;Google ScholarSontheimer, G. D., The Joint Hindu Family: Its Evolution as a Legal Institution (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1977).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ There is apparently no satisfactory explanation of why Bengal differed from the rest of India; Kane, , History of Dharmashastra, III, 559.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ To lawyers, a Hindu joint family includes all males, up to four generations, lineally descended from a common ancestor, as well as their wives and unmarried daughters. Sociologists define it differently, focussing on joint residence or joint household economy; Shah, A. M., The Household Dimension of the Family in India (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1973);Google ScholarTambiah, S. J., “Dowry and Bridewealth and the Property Rights of Women in South India,” in Bridewealth and Dowry, Goody, J. and Tambiah, S. J., eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Kane, , History of Dharmashastra, III, 591–93.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ “More than fifteen centuries passed (from Gautama to the Mitaksara) before the son's right to separate from his father during the latter's lifetime and against his desire was clearly, ungrudgingly and emphatically recognised.” Kane, , History of Dharmashastra, III, 571.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ “The written law of the sastras and the customary laws of the different groups of humanity thus existed side by side, equally respected though often in notable disagreement with each other. The former acted upon the latter and restricted its mobility; but the latter also acted upon the former through the medium of interpretation. The result was an extremely variable and diverse law.” Lingat, , Classical Law of India, 141–42. This question is further discussed in the next section.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Hiebert, P. C., Konduru (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1977), 33. Konduru is a village in another part of South India; unfortunately, this very important issue of the distribution of property rights within the family in rural South India has by and large been neglected by social anthropologists.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Das, Veena and Nicholas, Ralph, “Family and Households: Difference and Division in South Asian Domestic Life,” in Welfare and Well Being in South Asian Society, Das, Veena, McAlpin, Michele, and Nicholas, Ralph, eds. (Delhi: Oxford University Press,Google Scholar forthcoming). There is similar evidence for the region covered here. A survey of a village in Tiruchi district revealed old genealogies showing that many families had died out in the (unspecified) past, and many had only one heir, in contrast to the present. Tadahika Hara and Yoshima Komoguchi, Studies in Socio-cultural Change in Rural Villages in Tiruchirapalli District, Tamilnadu, India, No. 2 (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1981), 74–75.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Writing of the period 500 B.C. to A.D. 1200, William McNeill remarks on”the heavy parasitism characteristic of a climate as warm and wet as that of the Ganges Valley and of the rest of India's best agricultural land” (which would certainly include the rich delta land of the south). McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), 91.Google Scholar

⁶² Faith, Rosamund Jane, “Peasant Families and Inheritance Customs in Medieval England,” Agricultural History Review, 14 (1966), 77–95;Google Scholar see also her review of Macfarlane in Journal of Peasant Studies, 7:3 (1979–1980), 384–85.Google Scholar

⁶³ Inscription 258 of 1926.

⁶⁴ Inscription 432 of 1924.

⁶⁵ Altekar, A. S., State and Government in Ancient India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1958), 287. Altekar argues that the tax on persons dying without an heir mentioned in some Chalukya and Yadava records was compensation for the “new right” (to maintenance or to the whole property) of the widow. “Death duties” are also mentioned in Chola inscriptions; Inscription 156 of 1942–1943, from Chittoor district, mentions a “death duty” in cash leviable on Brahmins, to be utilised for the benefit of the local tank.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Inscriptions 429 and 539 of 1919. This decree raises important questions. What force did it have, at least in the central core area? What light does it throw on the assertion that”now there never was in India, prior to the British period, a power able to pass legislation, in our sense of the word, at least in matters of private law.” Lingat, , Classical Law of India, 141–42.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Inscription 369 of 1914–1915.

⁶⁸ Kane cites a modem case where “a gift of a small portion of joint family immovable property by the father to his daughter on the ground that she looked after him in his old age was set aside at the suit of his grandsons.” Kane, , History of Dharmashastra, III. 593, n. 1122.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Derrett remarks that “the pre-British situation has been misjudged by some, who believed that written sources of law were never consulted by judges.…” He also cites a literary account of a fifteenth-century dispute in which large numbers of texts were consulted. Derrett, J. D. M., “Two Inscriptions concerning the Status of Kammalas and the Application of Dharmashastra,” in Prof. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri 80th Birthday Felicitation Volume (Madras: Felicitation Committee, 1971), 32–56.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Rocher, L., “Father Bouchet's Letter on the Administration of Hindu Law,” in Studies in Dharmashastra, Lariviére, Richard, ed. (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopodhyaya, 1984);Google Scholar also see idem, “Hindu Conceptions of Law,” The Hastings Law Journal, 29 (1978), 283–1305.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Galanter, M., “Remarks on Family and Social Change in India,” in Chinese Family Law and Social Change in Historical and Comparative Perspective, Buxbaum, David C., ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 492–93;Google Scholar a similar contrast between India and China is drawn by Stein, , Essays on South India, 77–78.Google Scholar

⁷² Modes of settlement of disputes in South Indian villages today are described, e.g., by Ishwaran, K., “Customary Law in Village India,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 5:4 (1964), 228–43;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sivertson, Dagfin, When Caste Barriers Fall (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963); as well as Hiebert, Konduru. Hiebert and Ishwaran both show how the poor and weak could secure rights against the strong-though of course there were many instances when the powerless lost.Google Scholar

⁷ One of the few descriptions we have of the actual operation of the law in pre-British India, the working of the Maratha judicial system from 1400 to 1800, suggests that once appeals were made, final settlements were difficult. V. T. Gune, The Judicial System of the Marathas (Poona: Deccan Postgraduate and Research Institute, 1953). Only a few of the cases Gune cites relate to land.

⁷⁴ There is some difference amongst the authorities on whether or not the king had any judicial officers. Arguing against Nilakanta Sast?, Subbarayulu asserts that there were no royal judicial officers, and that all judicial proceedings were local or communal. Subbarayulu, Political Geography, 422. But there are references in the inscriptions to arbitration by officials of the king, whether or not their positions were specifically judicial. Settlement officers used to look into the validity of title deeds. Thus in one Tanjore village, the village assembly had occupied temple lands for thirty-five years, and on a complaint the king sent an officer to look into the matter. He found the assembly guilty and fined it (Insc?ption 139 of 1935–36).

⁷⁵ This is somewhat different from ordeal by fire, where the accused proved his innocence by emerging unscathed from the trial; ordeal by fire was a recognised judicial procedure in India too. One might add that the difficulty of obtaining justice might well drive one to suicide in India today; indeed it was reported in the newspapers on 5 February 1982 that a man had immolated himself in order to shame someone who had occupied his land into giving it back, but shame was probably more efficacious in medieval times.

⁷⁶ Inscription 188 of 1925.

⁷⁷ Sastri, K. A. Nilakanta, “The Chalukyas of Kalyani”, in The Early History of the Deccan, Yazdani, G., ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), I, 427.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Generally referred to as kani, sometimes as pangu, or share. The inscriptions record a variety of other transactions too: gifts, mortgages, and exchanges of land (e.g., Inscription 117 of 1916), but these have not been analysed quantitatively as yet.

⁷⁹ Karashima uses as evidence his own analysis of 155 land sales and Subbarayulu's analysis of 260 sales in the Chola inscriptions. Subbarayulu found that over 80 percent of the sales in the early Chola period were by Brahmin assemblies (54 percent) or individuals (28 percent); whereas in the last period, the Brahmin assemblies sold 26 percent, Brahmin individuals only 4 percent, and non-Brahmin individuals as much as 37 percent. (The other categories of sellers were temples, mercantile assemblies, and “others.”) Karashima states that “individual landholding did exist on a rather large scale in the non-brahmadeya villages in the lower Kaveri valley towards the end of Chola rule,” and elsewhere refers to “many land transfers” by individuals, but we do not yet have sufficient evidence to enable us to estimate the significance of individual holdings or transfers as proportions of the total land occupied. Karashima, , South Indian History, 1–35.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Ludden describes the purchases by Shanar (toddy palm tappers) and others from the fourteenth century on, when immigration grew substantially, but adds that there was also immigration into the district earlier. Ludden, “Agrarian Organization,” ch. 2.

⁸¹ Several instances of purchases of land by weavers are cited in Ramaswamy, Vijaya, Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

⁸² It is also possible that some sales were concealed. Before the twelfth century, Marc Bloch comments, when the legality of land sales in Europe was doubtful, the sale of land to the church was disguised as a pious donation, the price perhaps being reduced. Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 132–33. Similar transactions may well have taken place in the early Chola period.Google Scholar

⁸³ A Vijayanagar inscription from Chittoor, Inscription 179 of 1924, states that an individual sold land to the temple to liquidate the debt he had incurred in worship and during a period of drought. It is not stated in the summary whether or not he borrowed from the temple; temples were large lenders of money.

⁸⁴ Inscription 151 of 1934–1935, cited by Hall, , Trade and Statecraft, 121. Hall does not state who bought the house sites or what happened to the shares of the migrants.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Granda, Peter, “The `Gift after Purchase' in Vijayanagara Inscriptions,” Journal of the Epigraphical Society of India, 6 (1976), 25–31.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ Inscriptions 15 and 16 of 1924.

⁸⁷ Hall, , Trade and Statecraft 61.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ Inscription 230 of 1922.

⁸⁹ Butterworth, A. and Venugopaul, V., eds., A Collection of the Inscriptions on Copper-Plates in the Nellore District, 3 pts. (Madras: Government Press, 1905), Gudur 4.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ On North India, see, e.g., Sircar, Land System and Feudalism; Gopal, L., “Ownership of Agricultural Land in Ancient India,” Journal of the Bihar Research Society, 46:1/4(1960), 27–44;Google Scholar on Bengal, , Morrison, B. M., Political Centers and Cultural Regions in Early Bengal (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978). Many of the leading historians of South India also hold that it is meaningful to talk of private landownership in the Chola period—the references I have made, for instance, to Nilakanta Sastri and N. Karashima, show this—but they have not analysed the content of the term extensively.Google Scholar