ANTECEDENTS

3

Whatever was the nature of the Peasant’s right, his
immediate interest under the conditions which have been
described must have centred in the answers to two questions,
What share of his produce was claimed by the King?
and, How the share was to be assessed and collected? On
the first question the texts differ, a fact which justifies the
inference that practice was not uniform, but it may be said
that the rate regarded by the text-writers as appropriate
was one-sixth, falling possibly as low as one-twelfth, and
rising in times of emergency to one-fourth, or even onethird!
 On the second question the texts are practically
silent, and it is permissible to draw the natural inference
that these matters were regarded as lying outside the
Sacred Law, and within the discretion of the individual
King. Taking the texts as they stand in translation, it
might indeed be contended that they contemplate the
actual division of the produce, either by weighing or by
measuring, but I do not think they can be interpreted as
necessarily ruling out administrative expedients for simplifying
 the procedure such as we find in operation during
the Moslem period.
The fundamental Hindu system, as I understand it, was,
then, that the Peasants paid a share of their produce to the
King, who determined, within certain limits, or conceivably
beyond them, the amount of the share. and also the methods

t Manu (XXV. 236) has one-eighth, one-sixth, or one-twelfth of the
crop, but further on (427) it is allowed that a King who in times of distress
takes even the fourth part of the crops is free from guilt, if he protects
his subjects to the best of his ability. Gautama (II. 227) has one-tenth,
one-eighth or one-sixth. Vasishtha (XIV. 8), and Baudhayana (XIV. 199)
have one-sixth. In Narada (XXXIII. 221) we read of ‘what is called
the sixth of the produce of the soil,” an expression which suggests that
facts may have differed from theory, and that “the sixth’ may actually
have been some different fraction, just as the word tithe sometimes denotes
a fraction different from one-tenth. A commentator on the Arthasastra
(p. 108n) declares that the word rendered ‘one-sixth’ includes onefourth
 or one-third; and .the text of that work provides (p. 291) for
levying one-third or one-fourth in emergencies. The only statement of
fact I have found regarding the Hindu period in the North is that, in
Kanauj under Harsha, “the King’s tenants pay one-sixth of the produce
as rent "’(T. Watters, On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, i. 176); but it
is possible that the Chinese pilgrim reproduced his informant’s statement
of the theoretical figure of the texts, rather than the actual facts of the
time. As regards the south, Mr. C. H. Rao has shown (Indian Antiquary,
Oct. and Nov., 1911) that the proportion of one-sixth was exceeded
substantially in practice.