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 one- 
third! 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 simpli- 
fying 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 one- 
fourth 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.