Topic- Historiographical debate of Ancient India

The 19th century British writings on interrelated aspects of landownership, caste and village
community went on to make a series of hegemonic assertions which easily acquired the character of
totalising constructs. The concept like Oriental Despotism and the Asiatic Mode of Production have
influenced historical construction of early India. B.P. Sahu argues that the imperialist perspectives
on India were motivated and were tools for British hegemony and colonialism. Indian historians,
both within and outside the nationalist historiography, questioned some of the basic premises of
colonial writings in the early decades of the 20th century. Aspects such as landownership , agriculture
and the revenue system attracted the notice of N.C. Bandyopadhyay, Pran Nath and U.N.Ghoshal.
They generally argued fir private ownership of land, absence of oppressive taxation, the happy
condition of the people and took a favourable view of the economic conditions in early India on
the basis of brahmanical literature. 1

A.N. Bose has used jatakas, Smrtis , epigraphic and numismatic evidence . He seems to have been
influenced by Marxism and in his work there is an awareness of the exploitative social relations in
early historical India. Almost during the same time K.M. Gupta, K.A.N. Sastri and A.Appadorai laid
the foundations for the study of land system and society in south India. While KM Gupta produced
more of a traditional treatise, Shastri’s work on the Cholas marked a definite advance in the study
of the economic history of South India. He provided a detailed discussion of agriculture, land and
taxation as well as the social-economic role of the South Indian temple.
B.P. Sahu argues that the dominant historiography have characterised the early Medieval in
opposition to early historical society and it is imperative to note that there are differences within the
Indian feudalism school at the level of analysis and explanation of historical processes and that all of
them do not subscribe to identical views. It is clear that the perspectives on early Indian agrarian
history have gone through changes and dimensions.

B P Sahu added that the concept of the ‘Indian village community’ with its well known postulates
of common ownership of land, political autonomy, self-sufficiency, both in terms of economy as
well as community structure; and flowing from these social homogeneity and an unchanging
character of the rural society was born in colonial administrative literature, which tried to simplify
the Indian reality to serve its own end. Marx’s often quoted writings on the Indian village within the
paradigm of the Asiatic mode of production strengthened the suggestion that the village was
autarkic, isolated and stagnant. B.P. Sahu criticise that Marx mostly used the British writings and
earlier travellers’ account which were flawed on account of their neglect of crucial aspects like
differentiation and domination within the villages and the complex web of conflict use as well as
complementary external linkages. BP Sahu added that the notion of the ‘village community’, an
imaginative construct, since its inception has been used in a variety of senses. “Nationalist historians
in their enthusiasm for equality, democracy and opposition to colonial rule projected these ideas
back into the past, inventing democratic government in the ‘village republics’ in the process.

The distortions associated with the facile notion of village community have been recognised and
addressed by historians within and outside the dominant historiography. Marxist historians have
extrapolated significant changes through the stages in early Indian history, including the village and
rural life , and exposed the inadequacies of the Asiatic mode of production. However, B P Sahu
added that a closed, self-sufficient rural units have been resurrected in the context of the early
Medieval situation. He further added that the communal ownership of land as the principal firm of
landholding has been consistently disapproved, following Baden Powell. There was emergence of
dominant groups in rural society at different stages. B P Sahu argues that even early Medieval

1 Abc
literary sources attest the growing stratification with the village elders/ landholders constituting the
dominant groups and hired workers and servants . BP Sahu further added that the landlessness as a
structural element can be noticed in rural India from the middle of the first millennium BC
onwards and what emerges is the different levels of interaction between social groups with
differential access to resources. He states that “the social mobility and stratification bring out the
limitations of the ‘village community’ in the sense of a static , cohesive community structure.

Within the dominant historiography rural society in the post-Gupta period, it is envisaged ,was
largely self-sufficient , localised and closed . BP Sahu says that we don’t know how self-sufficiency
worked in early Medieval times in North India. Nevertheless on the basis of inscriptional evidence
it has been shown by Karashima that every village in the far south did not have all the necessary
caste/ occupational groups to ensure self-sufficiency and that social interdependence functioned
beyond the boundaries of a settlement, encompassing wider areas during the Chola period.

Notions of village self-sufficiency and egalitarianism get further ruptured when examined on the
touchstone of caste. Marriages were territorially exogamous and thus they helped to establish a
wider network of linkages. Burton Stein while demonstrating that self-sufficiency of the village was a
myth in historical terms has gone on to substitute it by another kind of autarky related to the nadu.
The isolability of the nadu in South India has been refuted in such considerations as marriages
across nadus , among others. It is said that Inter-caste relations are inter-village relations, while
intra-village relations are inter-caste relations.

BP Sahu concludes that villages by no means were uniform. They varied from region to region and
time to time as also in terms of their size, land relations, social composition, placement in the
geographical profile and the hierarchy of settlements.

Sibesh Bhattacharya has studied the land system as reflected in Kautilya’s Arthasastra and founds
that the state found it impossible to put to direct cultivation all its land; the remainder has to be
leased out. There seems to have been two categories of lessee- one is peasants cultivating on half-
share basis and other seem to have been sharecroppers paying one-fourth or one-fifth of the
produce to the state. Sibesh Bhattacharya argues that the extent of the direct state farming in the
Arthasastra seems to have been overestimated. He argues that if the state had the requisite
administrative infrastructure for large- scale direct farming, then it would not depend so heavily on
private enterprise for bringing virgin land under cultivation . The amount of state land leased out to
cultivators thus could not have been very small.

Kautilya’s Arthasastra has been regarded by a number of scholars as heralding a new and radical
sociology-Economic policy. It has been asserted that Kautilya made a conscious attempt to
habilitated landless Sudra agricultural labourers and raise them to the status of peasant proprietors.
Similarly it has been argued that Kautilya’s economic policy had an open anti-landlordism stance and
that he took several measures not only to discourage the growth of landlordism but also to
undermine the economic position of existing landlords and that he favoured the growth of peasant
proprietors.

Sibesh Bhattacharya states that it is true that in establishing new settlements Kautilya showed a
clear preference of ‘ lower varnas’ and ‘farmers’ over others as more desirable settlers because
they were likely to make greater economic returns. Kautilya clearly perceived the fact and
appreciated the economic implication of it, that agriculture was the backbone of state economy and
that agriculture depended to a very large measure on the labour of Sudras and avaravarnas.
However,Sibesh Bhattacharya stressed that it cannot be definitely asserted that Kautilya advocated
a conscious policy to bring about any substantial economic improvement in the situation of Sudra
agriculturists or to cause any large-scale change in the existing land distribution and ownership
patterns. Our evidence therefore do not suggest that Kautilya envisaged any plan to abolish or
weaken landlordism. This is clear from the legal injunctions that Landholders leased out lands. Big
landholders either got their estates cultivated directly by labourers working for wage or by slaves..
Standard wage for such labourers seems to have been one-tenth of the produce. However, a
different rate could be fixed in mutual agreement between the employer and employee. Apparently
in these bargains the advantage generally lay with the landlord.

Sibesh Bhattacharya emphasised that Brahmans donees of gift land or state servants who granted
lands would engage others for tilling. Particularly the state officers gave their lands on short-term
basis to tenants for cultivation. Such a kind of temporary tenancy is indicated in the following sutra:
‘If one does not till land that is inalienable, another May use it fir 5 years and return it after receiving
compensation for his exertions’. At the time of the termination of this 5- yearly tenancy some
payment was made to the erstwhile tenant. The sutra succeeding the above quoted one is : ‘Non-
taxpayers living in a different place may live on the produce of their fields.’ As the donees of the
brahmadeya gifts and officers receiving land-grants did not have to pay taxes, the ‘non-taxpayers’
refers to such Brahmanas and officers.Many of the Brahmanas and state employees thus were
perhaps absentee landlords.

Sibesh Bhattacharya studied that there were some restrictions imposed on free sake of lands. As a
brahmadeya land could be sold only to a similar recipient of brahmadeya grant. He further added
that king’s personal estate, state farms and big landholders together must have accounted for a very
substantial amount of total holdings. Besides there were a large number of owner cultivators.
Sharecroppers and tenant’s were engaged not only by the state and big landholders but also by the
more prosperous owner cultivators. Slaves and hired workmen provided the main labour force for
agriculture to both private landholders as well as to state farms. In other words the picture of land
distribution that emerges from Kautilya’s Arthasastra does not seem to differ substantially from the
general pattern that characterised ancient India.

Lallanji Gopal had worked on the ownership of agricultural land in Ancient India and states that the
traditional Indian point of view on the question of the ownership of land is best reflected in the legal
texts. He states that the theories on the subject may be broadly divided into three: V A Smith , J.N.
Samaddar express the view that the soul was the property of the king. Others who support this
theory are B.Breloer, Shamasatry, Hopkins and Buhler. Maine is the chief propounded of the view
that agricultural land was owned and cultivated by men grouped in village communities. The
theory of individual ownership has been advocated among others by Baden- Powell, KP Jayaswal
and P N Banerjee .
He added that Arthasastra show the indication of private ownership of land. Firstly, Kautilya uses the
word svamyam or ownership while dealing with disputes about the sake of land and about a
person driving cattle through a field without informing the owner. Lallanji Gopal added that there
was a clear distinction between the concepts of ownership and possession and the pronoun svam
and its derivatives are used to express ownership , while the derivatives of the root bhuj indicate
mere possession or enjoyment. The smrtis indicates that land like other objects of private
ownership was a subject of legal disputes. The causes of dispute can be : claiming more land,
claiming that another person is entitled to less than he possesses, claiming a share, denying a share,
seizing possession when previously there was none and boundaries. The prevalence of peasant
proprietorship follows from many other rules relating to legal problems connected with agricultural
land.
Lallanji Gopal has states that the question of the proprietary claims of cultivators and the state is
found in the Mimamsa work. Two points which stands out are- first, a distinction between the
entire territory of the state and private fields, the former being incapable of individual ownership,
and second a recognition that a king receives taxes not because of a title if ownership but through
his function of protection as sovereign.Lallanji Gopal further argues that the general opinion of
legal authorities favoured the theory of peasant proprietorship , it would be wrong to suppose that
there was no dissenting voice. It appears that a group of thinkers , not considerable in number,
advocated state landlordism .

The account of two Chinese travellers, Fa-hsien and Hsuan Tsang while describing land-tenure in
India, used the expression ‘royal land’ for the whole territory of state. Dr. U.N.Ghoshal has shown
that the use of this expression indicates that the Chinese travellers believed the soul in India to be
state-owned , as in contemporary China. However , we cannot accept their testimony as correct. It is
just possible that the foreign travellers could not appreciate the fine points of the agrarian system
or interpreted the general theoretical claim of the king to all the property in his kingdom as proof
of his ownership in practice.

Thus our investigation shows that the peasant was the proprietor of the land in every sense of the
term. The King, as the universal sovereign of every thing in his state, had no doubt some claim
over the land. He received revenue from the peasant as the wages for the protection he afforded
to the people, but this is no way amounted to a proprietary right over the land.