________________
OCTOBER, 1911.]
EARLY SOUTH INDIAN FINANCE
269
II. Vijayanagara Kings.
During the 14th and the succeeding two centuries, the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar was supreme all through Southern India.31 The prime-minister of the first king Harihara I (13361343), was Madhava, the celebrated dialectician. He composed a work on law and government, which is still extant.33 It was intended as a manual for the officers of the newly created State and is founded on the text of Parâsara, with a copious commentary by Madhava, for which reason it is known as Pardiara-Malhaviyam or Vidyaranya-Smriti, from Vidyâranaya, or Forest of Learning, the surname of Madhava. In this treatise Madhava assigns the usual one-sixth as the royal share of the crop. But this share he was desirons of converting from a grain to a money payment and established fixed rules for the conversion, founded on the quantity of land, the requisite seed, the average increase and the value of the grain. "The result," says Col. Wilks, the well-known historian of Mysore,34 "literally conforms with the law of the Digest, viz., one-sixth to the king, one-thirteenth to the Brahmins, one-twentieth to the gods, the rest to the proprietor. It is unnecessary to enter farther into this detail, than to state that thirty is the whole number on which the distribution is made of which it is calculated that fifteen or one half is consumed in the expenses of agriculture and the maintenance of the farmer's family. The distribution of the remaining fifteen stands thus:
"The sovereign one-sixth of the gross produce
To the Brahmins one-twentieth
To the gods one-thirtieth
Remains proprietor's share, which is exactly th
... 73"
The share of the temples and Brahmins was collected by the State and paid over by it, so that the share payable by the land-holder was really 4th of the estimated gross produce,35 and of the result of the rules laid down for the conversion into money, Wilks remarks36:-"It is evident that Harihare Râja called in the aid of the Shastras for the purpose of raising the revenue and did actually raise it exactly 20 per cent. by his skill in applying that authority to his calculations, the result of the whole being that he received one ghatti pagoda for 2 kuttis of land, the same sum having been paid for 3 kuttis." The Bombay High Court describe the transaction as a thinly-veiled violation of the law7 and states that although he affected to adhere to the Shaster, he exceeded the prescribed limit of th of the gross produce.39 This system, according to Wilks, continued in South Canara, a province of the Vijayanagar kingdom, until 1618, when the hereditary governors declared themselves independent and imposed an additional 50 per cent, on the whole revenues.39 Even before that, it appears from the information extracted by Buchanan, who travelled in these parts about 1807, from a hereditary village accountant of North Canara, that according to the valuation of Krishnaraja, king of Vijayanagar between 1509-1530,10 while the tax on rice lands was th of the gross produce, that on cocoanut was quite half the supposed gross produce,
5
1
1
32 Ibid, 25-6.
31 Sewell's A Forgotten Empire, 5.
33 A portion of it, the section on Inheritance, was translated by the late Dr. Burnell and published in Madras under the name of Daya Vibhaga, in 1858.
Historical Sketches, Madras Ed. 1, 94-5.
Munro in his Minute on the "Condition and Assessment of South Canara" (Arbuthnot I, 63-4), writing in 1800 after careful local inquiries and examination of official papers. Wilks published his first volume just before the battle of Waterloo.
3 Loc. cit. I, 95.
37 Canara Land Assessment Case, p. 84.
Ibid. p. 120. 40 Sewell's A Forg. Emp., 120.
Loc. cit. 1, 95.
41 Buchanan's Journey through the countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar (Ed. 1807), III, 170-2.
