History · Ch 2 — Kings, Farmers and Towns — Early States and Economies
Differences in rural society
Differences in rural society
The benefits of new agricultural technologies in early India were distributed very unevenly. While production increased, it did not improve life for everyone equally. Instead, rural society became more sharply divided, with clear differences in wealth, status, and power among those who worked the land.
Growing differentiation among cultivators
Buddhist texts (especially the Pali canon) describe three broad categories of people engaged in agriculture:
- Landless agricultural labourers — people who worked on others' land for wages or subsistence, owning no land of their own.
- Small peasants — those who owned or worked small plots, often barely enough to support a family.
- Large landholders — wealthy individuals who controlled substantial tracts of land and often had authority over other cultivators.
The term gahapati was used in Pali texts to refer to both small peasants and large landholders. A gahapati was the owner, master, or head of a household, exercising control over women, children, slaves, and workers who shared a common residence. He also owned the household's resources — land, animals, and other property. In some contexts, the term was also a marker of status for wealthy urban men, including merchants.
Powerful figures in the village
Large landholders and the village headman (whose position was often hereditary) emerged as powerful figures in rural society. They frequently exercised control over other cultivators, deciding matters of labour, land use, and possibly disputes.
Evidence from early Tamil literature
The Sangam texts (early Tamil literature) mention a similar three-tier division in villages:
| Category | Tamil term | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Large landowners | vellalar | Controlled extensive land and wealth |
| Ploughmen | uzhavar | Worked the land, likely as tenants or labourers |
| Slaves | adimai | Enslaved persons with no freedom or land rights |
These differences were likely based on differential access to land, labour, and new technologies. Those who could afford iron ploughshares, irrigation, or draft animals gained an advantage, widening the gap between rich and poor.
The question of land control
As rural society became more stratified, control over land became a critical issue. Legal texts of the period discuss land disputes in detail, showing how important boundaries and ownership had become. …
Source 6 — The importance of boundaries. The Manusmriti is one of the best-known legal texts of early India, written in Sanskrit and compiled between c. second century BCE and c. second century CE. This is what the text advises the king to do:
Seeing that in the world controversies constantly arise due to the ignorance of boundaries, he should … have … concealed boundary markers buried – stones, bones, cow's hair, chaff, ashes, potsherds, dried cow dung, bricks, coal, pebbles and sand. He should also have other similar substances that would not decay in the soil buried as hidden markers at the intersection of boundaries. …