Land Grants and Changing Agrarian Society

Research record

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.

Section index

1. 26.1 The problem: land, rights and documentary evidence
2. 26.2 Copper plates as durable legal instruments
3. 26.3 The Nandapur antecedent in the Munger region
4. 26.4 From sale-and-gift procedure to royal śāsana
5. 26.5 Tirabhukti as an administrative landscape
6. 26.6 The Pāla charter system
7. 26.7 Mudgagiri/Munger as a place of issue
8. 26.8 The Bhagalpur plate of Nārāyaṇapāla
9. 26.9 A village as a bundle of ecological resources
10. 26.10 Bhāga, bhoga, kara and hiraṇya
11. 26.11 Exemptions and the reach of officials
12. 26.12 Fines, theft and local coercive authority
13. 26.13 Resident cultivators and the change of payee
14. 26.14 Religious endowments as agrarian institutions
15. 26.15 Royal religion and plural patronage
16. 26.16 The Bangaon plate of Vigrahapāla III
17. 26.17 Ghaṇṭūkaśarman and scholarly mobility
18. 26.18 The bhūmicchidra-nyāya formula
19. 26.19 The Bagaha grants and the Gandak zone
20. 26.20 Donor plurality and intermediary power
21. 26.21 Land measurement, boundaries and memory
22. 26.22 Agrarian expansion without a single mechanism
23. 26.23 Forests, wetlands and the fiction of empty land
24. 26.24 Peasant agency and the silence of charters
25. 26.25 Women, households and landed production
26. 26.26 Social classification without retrospective caste projection
27. 26.27 Land grants and the “Indian feudalism” debate
28. 26.28 Grants, money and markets
29. 26.29 Mithila–Tirabhukti and Aṅga–Mudgagiri in one documentary zone
30. 26.30 Conclusion: from grant to agrarian society

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Land Grants and Changing Agrarian Society.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-26/