DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

5.8J NEW FORMS OF PROPERTY 139
now coming into more general use,along with stone, for durable
construction. People cultivated family holdings which were an
inalienable right deriving from membership in a tribal or other
community group, and a mark of such membership. Yet a new type of
landholding Was about to develop, because the brahmin need not have
fixed ties with any tribe, though he too had always a caste-group. His
sacrificial gifts, once made, would be free from tribal control or
obligations, including the tribute-tax settlers had to pay. Thus, his
property, even when held in common with other brahmins, often
differed from ordinary tribal property. In the sixth century B. C.,
perhaps a century earlier, regular silver coinage made it? appearance,
signalling a new type of trade relationship along the entire route
from Magadha to Taxila and Persia. However, society did not
advance steadily to intensive commodity production, primarily
because the peculiarly self-contained Indian village later became the
norm. There was always plenty of undeveloped territory, though
wild beasts and tribesmen made it difficult for solitary individuals to
colonize it without group effort. It was inevitable that these new
developments in production should call for new ideologies, expressed
through religion. It was also inevitable that the state that controlled the
river route and the route to the only good supply of metals should
dominate the rest. It was not enough to know metals ; the problem
was to obtain them in quantity, to use their control to rule over a
population that needed metal tools to clear the forests of U.P. and
Bihar, thus producing a new and far greater surplus from India’s
best land.
The great eastern trade route went north from Rajgir to the Ganges,
which it crossed above Patna ; there was a branch in the opposite direction
to Gaya. Beyond the river, it went to Vai£ali (Basarh), headquarters
of the Licchavis, through Kusinara (Kasia) where the Mallas dominated
(and where the Buddha died on his last journey) to the Nepal Terai
somewhere near the Rummindei pillar of Asoka that marks Buddha’s
birthplace. The Sakyan capital Kapilavastu was not far from this spot.
Thence the route swung west, through the capital SravastI (Set-Mahet)
of the leading kingdom of the day Kosala, and so to the Delhi-Mathura