History · Ch 2 — Kings, Farmers and Towns — Early States and Economies
A Changing Countryside
A Changing Countryside
What did ordinary people think of their kings?
Inscriptions tell us a great deal about what rulers wanted to project, but they rarely record the voice of common subjects. To understand how peasants, herders, and villagers actually experienced royal power, historians turn to story collections such as the Jatakas and the Panchatantra. These were originally oral tales, later written down in Pali around the middle of the first millennium CE.
One story, the Gandatindu Jataka, is especially revealing. A wicked king disguises himself to learn what his subjects think of him. He hears curses from elderly women, cultivators, herders, village boys, and even animals. Their complaint is sharp: robbers attack them by night, and tax collectors by day. So oppressive is life that people abandon their villages and flee into the forest.
The story captures a real tension. Kings needed revenue and often demanded high taxes. Peasants found these demands crushing. Escape — into the forest or into the margins of settled society — was a real option, not just a literary device.
Strategies for increasing production
If peasants could not always run away, rulers and cultivators alike looked for ways to produce more from the land. Two major strategies emerged from about the sixth century BCE.
1. Plough agriculture with iron-tipped ploughshares
This technology spread in fertile alluvial river valleys — especially the Ganga and the Kaveri — where rainfall was high. The iron ploughshare could turn the heavy alluvial soil far more effectively than wooden ones.
But the iron plough was not used everywhere. In semi-arid parts of Punjab and Rajasthan, it was not adopted until the twentieth century. In the hilly tracts of the north-east and central India, cultivators continued to use hoe agriculture, which was better suited to the terrain.
2. Transplantation of paddy
In parts of the Ganga valley, rice production increased dramatically through transplantation. The method works like this: seeds are first broadcast in a nursery; when the saplings have grown, they are transplanted into waterlogged fields. This ensures a higher survival rate and higher yields — but it is back-breaking labour for the producer.
3. Irrigation
Irrigation was another key strategy. Wells, tanks, and (less commonly) canals were built. Communities and individuals organised these works. Powerful men, including kings, often recorded their irrigation projects in inscriptions.
The Sudarshana lake in Gujarat is a famous example. A rock inscription from about the second century CE (in Sanskrit, recording the achievements of the Shaka ruler Rudradaman) tells us that the lake — with embankments and water channels — was originally built by a local governor during Mauryan rule. A terrible storm broke the embankments. Rudradaman claimed to have repaired the lake using his own resources, without imposing any tax on his subjects. A later inscription (fifth century) records that a Gupta ruler repaired it again.
Differences in rural society
These technologies increased production, but the benefits were very uneven. Rural society was becoming sharply differentiated.
Buddhist stories refer to three broad categories:
- Landless agricultural labourers
- Small peasants
- Large landholders
The term gahapati was used in Pali texts for the second and third categories. A gahapati was the owner, master, or head of a household. He controlled the women, children, slaves, and workers who shared his residence, and owned the land, animals, and other resources of the household. Sometimes the term also marked status among urban elites, including wealthy merchants.
Large landholders and the village headman (often a hereditary position) emerged as powerful figures who exercised control over other cultivators.
Early Tamil literature (the Sangam texts) mentions a similar hierarchy in villages:
| Category | Term | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Large landowners | vellalar | |
| Ploughmen | uzhavar | |
| Slaves | adimai |
These differences were likely based on unequal access to land, labour, and new technologies. Questions of control over land became crucial, and legal texts discussed them at length.
The Manusmriti (compiled between c. second century BCE and c. second century CE) advises the king to bury concealed boundary markers — stones, bones, cow's hair, chaff, ashes, potsherds, dried cow dung, bricks, coal, pebbles, sand — at the intersections of boundaries. The idea was that these markers would not decay and could resolve disputes. Whether they were adequate is another question.
Land grants and new rural elites
From the early centuries of the Common Era, grants of land were recorded in inscriptions. Some were on stone, but most were on copper plates, which were probably given to the recipients as a record of the transaction. The surviving records are generally about grants to religious institutions or to Brahmanas. Most inscriptions were in Sanskrit; from the seventh century onwards, part of the inscription was often in Sanskrit and the rest in a local language such as Tamil or Telugu.
The case of Prabhavati Gupta
Prabhavati Gupta was the daughter of Chandragupta II (c. 375–415 CE), one of the most important Gupta rulers. She was married into the Vakataka family, powerful in the Deccan. According to Sanskrit legal texts, women were not supposed to have independent access to land. Yet her inscription shows that she had land and granted it. This may have been because she was a queen — an exceptional situation — or because legal texts were not uniformly enforced.
Her inscription commands the gramakutumbinas (householders/peasants), Brahmanas, and others living in the village of Danguna to obey the new lord of the village, the teacher Chanalasvamin. The grant includes exemptions typical of an agrahara — land granted to a Brahmana, usually exempt from land revenue and other dues to the king, and often giving the donee the right to collect those dues from local people.
The exemptions listed are detailed:
- The village is not to be entered by soldiers and policemen
- Exempt from providing grass, animal hides as seats, and charcoal to touring royal officers
- Exempt from the royal prerogative of purchasing fermenting liquors and digging salt
- Exempt from the right to mines and khadira trees
- Exempt from the obligation to supply flowers and milk
- Donated together with the right to hidden treasures and deposits
- Donated together with major and minor taxes
The inscription makes clear that the people of the village — Brahmanas, peasants, and others — were expected to provide a range of produce to the king or his representatives. Now they would have to pay all these dues to the new lord instead.
Historians debate the impact of land grants
Some argue that land grants were a deliberate strategy by ruling lineages to extend agriculture into new areas. By giving land to Brahmanas or religious institutions, kings encouraged the clearing of forests and the settlement of new villages.
Others see land grants as a sign of weakening political power. As kings lost control over their samantas (subordinate rulers or chiefs), they tried to win allies by granting land. The same kings who projected themselves as supermen (as seen in earlier sections) may have done so precisely because their actual control was slipping — the grand claims were a façade.