DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

8.31 RULES OF INHERITANCE; 257
king over many villages, would seem to have arisen, on internal
evidence (Ms. 2.17-24), out of the fragments of the Mauryan empire,
in its Gangetic heartland. Land continued to be cleared, but henceforth
by private enterprise, which bore the responsibility for lurther spread of
villages. Nagasena says to king Menander (MP. 4.5.15) : “And it is as
when a man clears away the jungle, and sets free (mharati) a piece of
land, and the people use the phrase : That is his land. But the land was
not made by him. It is because he has brought the land into use that
he is called the owner of the land”, Arth. 2.1 would not have granted
him ownership, only the right not to be driven off the patch he had
cleared, even if he did not plant it immediately ; if he failed to
produce a crop and revenue for the state, he would ultimately lose title.
The Manusmrti (9.44) agrees with the Milindapanha : The land belongs
to him who first clears it, as does the buck to him who gets in the first
arrow. However, the individual who cleared a patch of land would in
general be member of some community, based upon kinship and upon
a village, so that this clearing would be in marginal land. A solitary
cultivator in completely virgin wilderness is difficult to imagine at this
period, in view of the known extent of the settlement, and the need for
protection against sages, or of coming to terms with them. In the Ms.
rules of inheritance (9.219) say that pasture-land is indivisible, which
implies that other land could be divided if the heirs d ; d not wish to
continue as a joint household. At the same time, the sale of waterreservoirs
and orchards was as great an offence as selling orte’s own
wife and children (Ms. 11.61-2). Instead of the strong guards at the
frontiers of every janapada, we now have local police garrisons (gulma
discussed in chap. IX) for every two, three, five, and hundred villages
(Ms. 7.114). These were supposed to protect the villages, which thus
needed more defence against robbers than before. One suspects that
without the gulma, taxes would not have been easy to collect, light as
they were, from the indifferent countryside.
A watered down version of the Arth.- namely the Nitisara of
Kamandaki (TSS. 14), was produced for the new society. Its date