Society 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. 26.1 The problem: land, rights and documentary evidence 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. 26.2 Copper plates as durable legal instruments Copper plates were not simply commemorative inscriptions. Their durability, seals, boundary clauses, lists of rights and warnings to future rulers gave them the character of documentary titles. The record could memorialise a royal order, a purchase followed by donation, or a ratified transfer. The Nandapur plate from the Munger district, dated Gupta year 169 (488 CE), shows how procedural this documentary world could be: an official wishing to acquire uncultivated land had to petition, pay the customary price, obtain verification from record-keepers, have the plot measured and bounded, and receive a copper-plate instrument. Such evidence cautions against imagining an abrupt medieval invention of landed documentation. The early medieval charters developed out of older administrative and legal practices while expanding the range and political importance of enduring grants. 281281 GAJENDRA THAKUR Figure 100 — Land grants: distinct evidence streams 26.3 The Nandapur antecedent in the Munger region The Nandapur charter is especially useful because its logic differs from a later royal donation of an already constituted village. The applicant sought four kulyavāpas of uncultivated land, paid eight dīnāras at the local customary rate, and intended to donate the land to a Sāmavedic Brahman for the regular performance of the five great sacrifices. Record-keepers checked that the land was revenue-free and that its sale did not injure royal interest. Survey and boundary marking were expressly required. This is evidence for priced land, documentary procedure and the administrative distinction between cultivated holdings and uncultivated land. It is not evidence that all agrarian land was freely alienable in a modern market. Rather, it reveals a controlled transaction in which local custom, public record and royal fiscal interest converged. 26.4 From sale-and-gift procedure to royal śāsana Across the following centuries, copper-plate charters increasingly present the king or a king-ratified donor as creating a durable śāsana. The change should not be reduced to a simple passage from private property to ‘feudal’ property. The documents show several forms: direct royal donation, requests by petitioner-donors, confirmation of transfers, and grants made from holdings associated with officers or magnates. Sanjukta Datta’s work on Pāla charters has stressed the role of petitioner-donors who could initiate a transfer while royal authority validated it. This is important for social history. A charter was a meeting point between court, intermediary, beneficiary and local residents. Its legal force came from the polity, but its social consequences depended on already inhabited and worked landscapes. 26.5 Tirabhukti as an administrative landscape Tirabhukti appears repeatedly in inscriptions as an administrative frame for north Bihar. It should not be treated as perfectly coterminous with any modern map of Mithila, yet it is one of the strongest period terms available for locating agrarian administration. Grants refer to subordinate units such as viṣaya, maṇḍala and village localities. These names matter because land was never donated in an abstract cultural region; the charter located rights within a hierarchy of jurisdictions and notified officials and residents. The recurrence of Tirabhukti in records from different dynastic contexts also shows institutional continuity across political HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II change. At the same time, boundaries and administrative reach changed, and a findspot outside Tirabhukti does not mean that the donated land lay at the findspot. 26.6 The Pāla charter system Pāla copper plates from the eighth to twelfth centuries developed a recognisable documentary form: royal genealogy and praise, the place of issue, an address to officials and residents, identification of the granted property, the beneficiary and purpose, specification of fiscal rights and exemptions, a command to inhabitants, and verses demanding future protection of the gift. The large official lists are evidence for the state’s imagined administrative reach, but should not be converted mechanically into an organisation chart in which every named office was active in every village. More securely, the lists show that a grant was meant to be communicated across several levels of authority. The charter publicly reclassified claims on a locality and stated who was henceforth entitled to receive specified dues. 26.7 Mudgagiri/Munger as a place of issue Mudgagiri, identified with Munger, was an important Pāla jaya-skandhāvāra or victorious camp from which charters were issued. Devapāla’s Munger plate, dated to his regnal year 33, records the grant of the village Meśikā in Kṛmilā-viṣaya of Śrīnagara-bhukti to a Brahman. A later Nālandā charter of Devapāla was also issued from Mudgagiri and granted five villages for the support of a monastery at Nālandā. These examples demonstrate that the place from which a ruler issued a charter, the findspot of the plate and the location of the donated property could be different. For the history of Aṅga and adjacent zones, Munger’s importance lies partly in its function as a political-administrative node connecting royal movement, the Ganga corridor and documentary transactions over land elsewhere. 26.8 The Bhagalpur plate of Nārāyaṇapāla The Bhagalpur copper plate of Nārāyaṇapāla, regnal year 17, is the chapter’s central regional case because its findspot lies in Bhagalpur while the charter was issued from Mudgagiri and concerns property in Tīra- bhukti. It records the grant of Makutikā village to a Śiva temple or sacred establishment at Kalaśapeta/Kalāsapota and to an assembly of Pāśupata scholars. The endowment was meant to sustain worship, offerings, charitable feeding, construction, bedding, seats and provision for medicine required by the sick. The record therefore joins agrarian revenue to an institutional economy. It also warns against treating dynastic religious identity as exclusive: a Pāla ruler conventionally styled as a Buddhist sovereign could support a Śaiva establishment through a royal land grant. 283283 GAJENDRA THAKUR Figure 101 — The Bhagalpur plate: a bundle of agrarian and institutional rights 26.9 A village as a bundle of ecological resources The Bhagalpur charter does not define Makutikā merely as cropped acreage. Its formula includes boundaries, grass and pasture, flat and raised land, mango and mahua trees, watering places, ditches and saline or otherwise unproductive ground. Similar clauses recur in other Pāla records. Formulaic repetition matters, but the list is still socially revealing: the fiscal object called a ‘village’ encompassed multiple ecological niches and resources. Pasture connected cultivation to cattle; trees yielded food, fodder, oil, timber or other products; water shaped both agriculture and settlement; waste, pits or saline ground could carry future value. Agrarian history must therefore include common-use and non-plough resources rather than treating the countryside as a field of grain alone. 26.10 Bhāga, bhoga, kara and hiraṇya Pāla charters frequently transfer or redirect dues expressed through terms such as bhāga, bhoga, kara and hiraṇya. Their precise meaning could vary by place and period. Bhāga is commonly associated with a share of produce; kara is a general tax term; bhoga can denote provisions or other dues; hiraṇya points to a monetary or cash-valued component in many interpretations. The safest conclusion is not to assign one immutable modern tax category to each word. What the charters clearly show is a bundle of claims that normally flowed toward political authority and could be reassigned to a beneficiary. The social meaning of the grant therefore lay at least partly in changing the destination and authority of extraction rather than in physically moving land. 26.11 Exemptions and the reach of officials The same grants that transfer revenue often proclaim relief from specified burdens. A-cāṭa-bhaṭa-praveśa clauses exclude entry by cāṭas and bhaṭas, categories generally connected with state agents or troops. Other formulas concern additional imposts, fines, policing and freedom from ‘all burdens’. These clauses have sometimes been read as the state surrendering sovereignty. That inference is too strong. Exemption itself presupposed a sovereign authority capable of defining what was being exempted and of commanding subordinates to respect the new arrangement. Yet the exemptions could materially alter village experience by HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II limiting ordinary demands from itinerant officials or military personnel and by strengthening the beneficiary’s position within the local field of authority. 26.12 Fines, theft and local coercive authority Several charters transfer rights connected with fines for specified offences and with the apprehension of thieves. Such clauses complicate any narrow description of grants as ‘tax-free land’. Fiscal privilege and coercive jurisdiction could overlap. The beneficiary might gain claims that affected dispute, policing or punishment, while the crown retained the higher framework in which those privileges were authorised. The practical extent of local judicial power cannot be reconstructed from formula alone, but its appearance in charters is evidence that agrarian control involved more than rents. It included the capacity to command, to exclude some officials, and in some circumstances to benefit from or administer penalties. 26.13 Resident cultivators and the change of payee The Bhagalpur and Bangaon grants both address resident cultivators. The Bangaon plate states that cultivators should deliver the appropriate bhāga, bhoga, kara, hiraṇya and related dues at the proper time after becoming obedient to the donee’s order. This is among the clearest points at which a royal charter touches everyday agrarian society. The text does not say that cultivators were transferred as chattel, nor does it document the terms of every tenancy. It does show that existing residents were expected to recognise a new fiscal authority. A grant could therefore change the social relation between producing households and the person or institution entitled to claims on their surplus. 26.14 Religious endowments as agrarian institutions Temples, monasteries and communities of learned specialists depended on material support. Land grants converted flows from agrarian production into worship, teaching, maintenance, food, medicine, construction and hospitality. This did not make religious institutions economically separate from villages; it embedded them in rural production. The Bhagalpur grant is unusually explicit about the uses of the endowment, including care for the sick. Devapāla’s Nālandā grant, outside the immediate core but useful comparatively, supported monks, manuscript copying and monastery maintenance through five villages. These cases demonstrate how agrarian surplus could be institutionally channelled into religious and intellectual life. 26.15 Royal religion and plural patronage Pāla rulers are often described through Buddhist titles and invocations, but their grants do not support a model of sectarian exclusivity. Nārāyaṇapāla’s Bhagalpur charter benefits a Śaiva/Pāśupata establishment. The social historian should separate royal self-presentation, personal devotion, political legitimation and actual patterns of endowment. Supporting different institutions could integrate learned communities, ritual centres and local elites into a wider political order. The evidence is more useful for reconstructing networks of patronage than for assigning a whole territory a single religious identity. It also shows that land grants were part of the material history of religious plurality discussed in earlier chapters. 26.16 The Bangaon plate of Vigrahapāla III The Bangaon copper plate of Vigrahapāla III, regnal year 17, found at Bangaon in present Saharsa district, places Vasukāvartta in Hodreya-viṣaya of Tīra-bhukti. It grants a defined share of land to the Brahman Ghaṇṭūkaśarman. The charter again lists the property with boundaries, grass and pasture, trees, 285285 GAJENDRA THAKUR water, pits or saline land, exemptions, policing rights and the revenue bundle of bhāga, bhoga, kara and hiraṇya. It is particularly important because its regional location brings the legal language of Pāla grants directly into north Bihar. The record also preserves details about learned migration, lineage and settlement that allow agrarian history to be connected with intellectual and social mobility. 26.17 Ghaṇṭūkaśarman and scholarly mobility Ghaṇṭūkaśarman is described through gotra, pravara, Vedic affiliation and scholarly accomplishments in mīmāṃsā, grammar and reasoning. His family is associated with migration from Kolāñca and residence at Iṭṭāhāka. Such biographical clauses were part of the beneficiary’s credentialing and should not be treated as a census of Brahman migration. Nevertheless, they provide concrete evidence that grants could support the relocation or consolidation of learned households and that scholarly reputation was linked to landed endowment. This mobility belongs to the social history of medieval Mithila, but it does not justify projecting later Maithil Brahman sub-caste structures backward into the Pāla period. 26.18 The bhūmicchidra-nyāya formula The phrase bhūmicchidra-nyāya appears in Pāla grants and is often translated through the idea of land reclamation or entitlement associated with bringing uncultivated land into use. It has been central to arguments that land grants drove agrarian expansion. The formula is important, but it cannot prove that every granted village was virgin land newly cleared by the beneficiary. The same charter may concern inhabited places with resident cultivators. A safer reading is that reclamation language supplied a legal principle for durable enjoyment and fiscal privilege, while actual local conditions ranged from uncultivated tracts to established settlements. Archaeology and environmental evidence are needed before converting legal formula into a literal history of forest clearance. 26.19 The Bagaha grants and the Gandak zone Two copper-plate charters found at Bagaha in Champaran and dated 1020 and 1026 CE record grants by Saurāditya of the Malayaketu family. The 1020 charter grants Vanapalli-grāma, located in Vyalisi-viṣaya within Daradgaṇḍakī-maṇḍala, to the Brahman Yaśāditya. The record is important because it shows a non- Pāla ruling house issuing landed endowments within the broader Tirabhukti sphere. Early medieval agrarian change was therefore not the work of one dynasty. Local and sub-regional powers participated in the same documentary culture, using grants to bind religious merit, learned beneficiaries and territorial authority together. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 102 — Selected regional land-grant nodes and documentary connections 26.20 Donor plurality and intermediary power Not every grant originated as a king’s spontaneous gift. Petitioner-donors, ministers, local magnates and subordinate rulers could initiate or materially enable transfers that the king ratified. The Bangaon record itself contains additional verses concerning Ghaṇṭīśa, a figure connected to the donated tract and to the creation of a śāsana from his own plough-land. Such material warns against a two-actor model of king and peasant. Between court and cultivator stood officials, landed intermediaries, Brahman households, temple or monastic managers and local notables. Their relative power varied, but charters show them participating in the redistribution of fiscal claims and in the documentary definition of rural space. 26.21 Land measurement, boundaries and memory A grant required the land to be made recognisable. Earlier transactions such as Nandapur specify measurement and durable boundary markers; later charters frequently invoke the property up to its established limits and list attached resources. Boundary making transformed landscape into legal description. Trees, water, paths, embankments, neighbouring plots and settlement names could become part of a durable documentary memory. Because rivers shifted and place names changed, the historian must resist false precision when identifying every medieval locality on a modern map. The important social point is that rights were stabilised through collectively intelligible markers and records, even in dynamic alluvial landscapes. 26.22 Agrarian expansion without a single mechanism Land grants could accompany agricultural expansion, but expansion had multiple agents. Cultivators cleared and reclaimed land; pastoral and forest-using communities negotiated or lost access; local chiefs and religious institutions sought revenue; rulers encouraged settlement; and existing villages could be reassigned without major new clearance. The Nandapur sale of uncultivated land provides direct evidence for bringing waste into a permanent endowment. By contrast, the Pāla charters’ references to resident cultivators demonstrate that some grants reorganised established production. Regional agrarian growth should therefore 287287 GAJENDRA THAKUR be reconstructed as a combination of extension, intensification, reclassification and redistribution rather than as one continuous march of plough agriculture into empty forest. 26.23 Forests, wetlands and the fiction of empty land Terms translated as waste, uncultivated or non-arable do not mean socially unused. Wetlands, grazing grounds, groves, scrub and seasonal flood zones could support fishing, fodder collection, hunting, craft materials, transport or shifting cultivation. Legal documents are written from the perspective of taxable and grantable resources; they can obscure uses that did not fit that frame. This is especially important in north Bihar’s riverine environment and in the forest–upland margins toward Aṅga and Munger. Agrarian expansion could create new production while also reducing flexible access to commons. The charters rarely allow the historian to identify who lost such access, so this consequence must be posed as a question rather than asserted as a documented outcome in every case. 26.24 Peasant agency and the silence of charters Cultivators appear in grants primarily as people who are informed, commanded or required to render dues. This is an archival imbalance, not proof that they lacked agency. Farmers could change cropping patterns, resist demands, migrate, negotiate with intermediaries, use kinship and village institutions, or exploit environmental mobility. Those actions are much less likely to be preserved in royal copper plates. The historian must therefore avoid turning the charter’s command language into a complete social description. The record establishes an intended legal order; everyday agrarian relations had to make that order workable. Later evidence on village communities and disputes can illuminate possible mechanisms, but it should not be projected backward without period control. 26.25 Women, households and landed production The surviving charters are overwhelmingly male-centred in their named donors, officials and beneficiaries. That documentary pattern cannot be equated with an exclusively male agrarian economy. Cultivation, animal care, food processing, storage, textile work, collection of fuel and fodder, and household management all depended on women’s labour, although royal grants rarely enumerate it. Nor should the absence of women as named recipients in a particular regional sample be generalised into a universal legal incapacity. The chapter therefore treats gender as a structural silence in the charter archive: indispensable to production, but under-recorded in the surviving instruments through which rulers described land and revenue. 26.26 Social classification without retrospective caste projection Pāla charters can list Brahmans, mahattamas, kuṭumbins and named occupational or social categories among the residents to whom royal orders were announced. Beneficiaries may be described by gotra, pravara and Vedic school. This evidence is valuable for the formation of hierarchy and learned communities, but it does not authorise the projection of later caste taxonomies backward. In particular, the later Maithil category Śrotriya must not be inserted into the Pāla-period record as a fixed Brahman sub-caste. The charters show historically specific forms of Brahman status, migration and landed privilege; the later organisation of Maithil Brahman society belongs to a different evidentiary and chronological problem. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II 26.27 Land grants and the “Indian feudalism” debate R. S. Sharma made land grants central to a model of Indian feudalism, emphasising the transfer of fiscal and administrative rights, the growth of intermediaries and changing conditions of peasants. Harbans Mukhia challenged the applicability of European feudal categories to Indian history, while B. D. Chattopadhyaya redirected attention toward regional state formation, settlement, markets and political process. More recent studies, including Ryosuke Furui’s work on eastern India, reconstruct changing land relations without assuming that one label resolves the evidence. For this volume, ‘feudalism’ is therefore treated as a historiographical hypothesis, not a fact built into the sources. Each regional charter is first analysed in its own legal, ecological and social context. Figure 103 — Agrarian change through land grants: a controlled analytical model 26.28 Grants, money and markets Land-grant expansion should not automatically be equated with the disappearance of money or markets. The Nandapur transaction itself values uncultivated land in dīnāras. Pāla charters use fiscal terms that include hiraṇya, often linked with monetary payment or cash valuation. Religious institutions supported by villages could purchase goods, employ labour and participate in wider exchange. Chapter 15 showed that monetisation was uneven rather than all-or-nothing; the same principle applies here. A society could redirect agrarian revenues through landed endowments while retaining market exchange and monetary practices. The relationship between grants and commerce must be demonstrated regionally, not deduced from a general model of economic decline. 26.29 Mithila–Tirabhukti and Aṅga–Mudgagiri in one documentary zone The strongest regional lesson comes from reading charters relationally. Mudgagiri/Munger served as a place of issue for Pāla grants; the Bhagalpur plate found in the Aṅga zone concerns a village in Tirabhukti; the Bangaon plate documents a grant within north Bihar; Bagaha records show local rulers making grants along the Gandak side of Tirabhukti. These movements of plates, orders, beneficiaries and revenues cut across the modern habit of treating Mithila, Aṅga and Magadha as sealed compartments. Yet connectivity must not erase difference. The ecology, political history and density of surviving records vary across these zones. A connected documentary field is not the same as a uniform agrarian system. 289289 GAJENDRA THAKUR 26.30 Conclusion: from grant to agrarian society Early medieval land grants changed agrarian society not because a copper plate magically created cultivation, but because documentary authority could redirect revenue, define exemptions, privilege institutions, credential learned beneficiaries and reorder the obligations of residents. The surviving evidence shows both continuity with earlier land-sale procedures and new scales of royal and intermediary endowment. It also reveals the limits of the archive: cultivator voices, women’s work, informal access to commons and local negotiation remain only partially visible. The most defensible history therefore moves from document to relationship, not from formula to stereotype. Chapter 27 follows these transformations into the connected spaces of village, market and town, where agrarian surplus, exchange and settlement hierarchy can be examined together. Table 26.1 — Selected evidence for land grants and agrarian change, with limits of inference Evidence What it supports Limit of inference Source control Nandapur plate, Purchase of uncultivated Does not show that all DHARMA Gupta year 169 (488 land at a customary dīnāra land was marketable or Nandapur Plate; CE), Munger district price; record-keeper that later village grants N. G. Majumdar verification; measurement worked identically and permanent endowment Jīvagupta Tirabhukti Grant of localities with Dating and ruler D. C. Sircar, charter (date/dynastic water, trees, pits/barren identification are “Copper-Plate attribution debated) land and royal dues to a uncertain; formula does Grants from Cāmuṇḍā temple; not equal observed village Bihar”; administrative officers and practice Inscriptions of Tirabhukti geography Bihar Devapāla Munger Mudgagiri as issuing camp; Donated village lay DHARMA plate, regnal year 33 grant of Meśikā village to a outside the immediate Munger Plate; Brahman; Pāla charter form Munger find/issue locality Kielhorn; Barnett Nārāyaṇapāla Makutikā village in Bhagalpur findspot does DHARMA Bhagalpur plate, Tirabhukti granted for a not locate Makutikā in Bhagalpur Plate; regnal year 17 Śiva/Pāśupata Bhagalpur; formula Inscriptions of establishment; taxes, cannot quantify extraction Bihar exemptions, resources and cultivator dues specified Vigrahapāla III Vasukāvartta in Hodreya- Does not prove wholesale DHARMA Bangaon plate, regnal viṣaya of Tirabhukti; replacement of local Bangaon Plate; year 17 Brahman beneficiary; population or a later Sircar, resident cultivators to Maithil caste system Epigraphia render dues Indica 29 Saurāditya Bagaha Vanapalli in Daradgaṇḍakī- One grant cannot define Indian plate, Vikrama 1077 / maṇḍala granted to a all Gandak-zone Archaeology 1020 CE Brahman by a sub-regional settlement or polity 1960–61; Sircar, ruler Epigraphia Indica 35 Nālandā plate of Five villages endowed for Outside the core regional DHARMA Devapāla monastery maintenance, focus; used to clarify Nalanda Plate; (comparative control) monks and manuscript institutional economy, not Hirananda Sastri copying to generalise local conditions HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Evidence What it supports Limit of inference Source control Historiographical Land grants can illuminate No single model— Sharma; models agrarian expansion, especially “feudalism”— Mukhia; intermediaries, state should be treated as self- Chattopadhyaya; formation and institutional proving Furui patronage 291291