Land Grants and Changing Agrarian Society

Detailed chapter description

Land grants are among the most informative written records for the social and economic history of early medieval eastern India, but they are also among the easiest to overread. A copper-plate charter can describe a village, its boundaries and resources, the dues attached to it, the exemptions granted to a beneficiary, the officials and residents who were notified, and the religious or scholarly purpose of the donation. It does not, by itself, reveal the acreage actually cultivated, the proportion of households affected, the everyday bargaining power of cultivators, or the long-term success of the grant. This chapter therefore treats land grants as legal and fiscal interventions into agrarian society rather than as transparent photographs of village life. For Mithila–Tirabhukti and the Aṅga–Mudgagiri zone, the surviving charters are especially valuable because they can be located within identifiable administrative landscapes and compared across several centuries. Modern language often compresses a land grant into the statement that a king ‘gave a village’. The charters are more precise and more complicated. What could be transferred included claims to revenue, rights over specified resources, immunities from particular royal demands, authority to receive payments from residents, and in some cases judicial or policing privileges. The physical soil, the cultivators’ labour, the king’s fiscal claims and the beneficiary’s rights were not identical things. Historians therefore need to ask what exactly changed hands in each record. The wording of a grant is also formulaic. Repeated phrases are evidence for chancery practice and legal expectations, but their repetition does not prove that every listed privilege was enforced identically in every locality. The method adopted here is to read formula, geography, recipient, revenue terms and local society separately before asking how they combined.