DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

320 INDIVIDUAL HOLDINGS [9.5
commit no treason against the state or any of its components, under succeeding
kings; that they are not brahmin-killers, nor thieves, adulterers, poisoners of kings,
and the like; that they do not wage war; that they do no wrong lo other villages. But if
they act otherwise, or assent (to such acts), the king will commit no theft in taking the
land away.”
The conditions are not unusual, only their explicit state-meijt.
The village had already been occupied by the brahmins who would
henceforth cultivate it without taxes. But dearly they had no rights over
previous occupation — obviously non-cultivating pastoralists — who
are carefully protected. The village was to be t)eaceful, never to take to
arms, nor encroach against other villages. Such disarmed villages were the
norm of settlement, the brahmin grants’ used only for seeding. Immunity
from entry by royal soldiery, officials, police is a veritable boon in all such
grants ; the very helplessness of the villages made it simple for any such
person to tyrannize over it. The seemingly perspicacious argument is put
forward that before the day of firearms, even a peasant’s tools would be
good weapons, and resistance “to the king’s soldiery was always possible
if tyranny went too far. The charters prove otherwise, while the argument
takes no account of the mutual isolation of villages, of the weight of
caste and state against arms for the peasants, and the special training of
the gulma soldiers denied the villagers. To thjs day, officials and police
can tyrannize over almost any Indian village with little show of force.
Other land-grants show how settlement was further developed plot
by plot in waste land. The sixth century Damo-darpur plates (EL 15.113-
145) are supposed to show purchase from the state, as are the Faridpur (IA.
1910, 193-216) plates. Both are quite clear, however, to anyone who has
no preconceptions. In both sets of charters, merchants who wished to
make a donation to brahmins for the acquisition of merit applied to
the local authorities. The registrars and elders were in attendance while
surveyors measured off plots, always in uncultivated and untaxed
waste land. The plot was then assigned to a brahmin (or temple),
after payment had been made as “the king’s sixth share” by the donor.
WHAT HAD BEEN BOUGHT WAS NOT THE LAND, BUT THE RIGHT TO
CULTIVATE IT IN PERPETUITY WITHOUT TAXES, which normally amounted