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ANCIENT KOSALA AND MAGADHA
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belong to the "herdsmen"), and they cannot follow any other profession; they can not enter the cities for any purpose, whereas the vaiśya could and did, being a leading citizen in the free city. So we have in reality a description of the südra. Once again this is confirmed by the Arthasăstra (42.1): The king should establish new settlements or repopulate deserted ones by inviting foreign immigrants or deporting settlers from his own overpopulated centers. Each village is to be made up of between a hundred and five hundred families of sūdra cultivators (sudra-karṣaka). Administrative centers are to be set up for groups of 10, 200, 400, 800 villages. A few priests actually serving in the locality are to be granted tax-free lands. Superintendents, functionaries, accountants, doctors, veterinaries, messengers and such officials may be endowed with land which the individual holds for life, cannot alienate by sale or mortgage; however, officials in general have a regular stipend, as do the watchmen and specially hired labourers (42.24). If the holder failed to cultivate it properly, the land would be reassigned by the state to someone else except perhaps when the holder had just brought waste land or wilderness under the plough. No ascetic other than one who has adopted a forest retreat for his own individual salvation is to be admitted to the villages; this means that no one proselyting for a monastic order could gain entrance. No place of communal entertainment, nor resting place may be built in the village; professional actors, dancers, singers, musicians, raconteurs, bards are also completely excluded. "For from the helplessness of the villages and exclusive preoccupation of the men with land comes wealth" of all sorts. This wealth is not for the cultivator, who can hardly use it, but for the state treasury. We are very far here from the idyllic life depicted by so many who wrote of Indian villages from modern observations made at a safe distance and from the property-owner's point of view. The 'idiocy of village life' was deliberately intensified as a method of exploitation.
There are two reasons for misinterpretation of the sûdrakarsaka-georgos as a vaisya. One is the projection of a supposedly immutable village system from 18th and 19th century India into antiquity. The other is that the Greeks were deeply impressed by the fabulous nature of a country which produced incredible beasts like the elephant, plants like cotton and sugarcane, sweet tasting rock crystals (sugar!), deciduous trees that never shed their leaves, tremendous rivers, and an extraordinary soil yielding two bumper harvests every year. On the same level (from the Greek point of view) as the fantastic, mythical, gold-digging ants was the attested truthful and law-abiding nature of the Indian in the absence of written law-codes or written contracts. Arrian 12 (M 217) says explicitly, "but indeed no Indian is accused of lying." This could never be said of the Graeculus esuriens. Most striking of all was the fact that the Indian economy flourished, so incomprehensibly to the Greek mind, without chattel slavery. "Of several remarkable customs existing among the Indians there is one prescribed by their ancient philosophers which one may
