The Theory and Practice of Property in Premodern South Asia: Disparities and Convergences [prepress version] (original) (raw)
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The Land Ownership and concept of Land Grants in the Ancient India: A Reappraisal
ECB, 2023
According to Medhatithi and Vijnanesvara possession with a legal title was the proof of ownership. One might be in possession of property but as long as title to that property was not clearly proved, he could not become the owner of it. It is the duty of a purchaser to verify the title of the seller before purchase. 1 Whatever may be the facts about possession, in a case in which the property has been enjoyed by a person for three Generations that property cannot be confiscated by the king. In other words, the person in possession for three Generations of a property is treated to be the absolute owner of that property. Sukra holds that if a man enjoys the land for a period of 20 years and the owner in fit to file the suit in a law-court, still he does not do so, the previous owner cannot claim the land. In case a man is in possession of a plot of land for many hundred years and the real owner is found out, the king should punish him like a thief.
Journal of Advanced Zoology, 2023
The present research paper deals with the concept and the dynamics of land ownership and the provisions of land grants in Ancient India. The theoretical concept of the ownership of the land and the land grant underwent tremendous changes and transformation in this period. The private ownership of land with rights of alienation in Ancient India secured through land grants was mainly religious in nature and were enjoyed by the priestly class. In course of time the private ownership of the land became an important constituent of the social structure. However, this was not applicable for all the landholding classes. The other sort of assignees was under the strict control of the rulers. Their land was liable to be confiscated and transferred. In the later Gupta age land and the proprietary rights in the land grew in importance and was at the helm of all social, cultural, religious, economic and political activities till the establishment of Delhi Sultanate. The land grants were given to officers and religious groups and establishments in exchange of services rendered to the state which are indicatives of economic crisis in the period on the one hand and on the other denotes that land in this period was a medium of social mobilization and social position. The society became more stratified and complicated. The primary and the secondary sources used in this paper are immense and varied in volume and content. Epigraphs, inscriptions, coins, cowries, texts all have been used to prepare a monograph to shed light on this important aspect which in many ways shaped the social, political, religious and economic history of the country.
Property and Its Rule (in Late Indo-Islamicate and Early Colonial) South Asia: What’s in a Name?
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2018
This article sets out a framework for understanding two key issues in the history of early modern and modern South Asia. First, it addresses the vexed question of the generaliz- ability of the “Western” concept of property to Indo-Islamicate land systems. Rather than beginning from the idea of ‘Islamic property law/relations’ it proposes that we reconstruct concepts relating to the control of the earth’s material substrate in terms of four modes of idiomizing land in the Islamicate tradition. In light of how the latter reconstruction suggests that (Indo-)Islamicate modes of idiomization focused on the produce of land more than land itself, the article then turns to a second issue. This concerns the similarities and differences between the deontic cultures of rights and responsibilities that characterized early modern polities (both in Mughal India and England) and nineteenth-century ones (like metropolitan Britain’s and that emerging from the East India Company’s so-called rule of property in the subcontinent).
Critiquing the commodity-centered frames of reference, this paper looks at property not within an economic logic, but as a set of practices that served to structure and reconfigure social relations. Based on a study of property documents and court papers, the essay argues that property was not simply an index of wealth, but a medium through which social relations were affirmed, reproduced and contested. Owing to the identification of property with the honor of families and caste groups, transactions in property were socially regulated activities that bore the imprint of local power relations. Property documents were imbued with a plethora of meanings, and this was because the scribal-literate tradition in Mughal India co-existed with an oral-performative culture. Writing was used by social actors in a wide variety of ways, and for different sets of objectives, sometimes to reinforce the social order, on other occasions to disrupt it.
What is Property? Perspectives from the Historical Worlds of South Asia
What is property? Considered in the context of the contemporary societies of the developing world-with their bursting populations, pervasive land hunger, and ongoing tug of war between the urban and the agrarian-the answer may seem to go without saying. The question's extreme simplicity of form, however, should not conceal the great complexity it harbors, especially when examined relative to the histories of the non-West. Is there a difference between property and the right to property? Are rights, themselves, inherently proprietary? What is the relationship between the logic of property and the logic of commodity? Is property simply the reality of control over things in the world or is it a system for representing how control over such things in the world is organized, parsed, and reckoned with? Is there something inherently Eurocentric about calling all such conceptual systems by the name of 'property'?
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2018
The introductory essay to this special double issue on “Repossessing Property in South Asia: Land, Rights and Law Across the Early Modern/Modern Divide” reviews existing historical scholarship on land control and proprietary right in the Indian subcontinent in order to contextualize the contribution made by the articles that follow. Dividing earlier writings—by historians and anthropologists since the 1950s—into three phas- es/thematics, the introduction shows how work on South Asia has long grappled with property both as a material relation and as an alien cultural category. Making the case that we must think about property’s conceptual history as being necessitated by more than just the critique of Eurocentrism, the essay clarifies how the articles that follow both continue and extend past discussion. Overall, it argues that by providing integrated perspectives on property’s material and ideational dimensions, our articles will be illuminating both to scholars of Afro-Asia and those interested in law, political economy and political culture more generally.
Journal of Indian Philosophy 27:3, 159-213, 1999
The collection of Malayalam records entitled Vanjeri Grandhavari, taken from the archives of an important Namputiri brahmin family and the temple under its leadership, provides some long-awaited information regarding a wide range of legal activities in late medieval Kerala. The organization of law and the jurisprudence represented by these records bear an unmistakable similarity to legal ideas found in dharma s astra texts. A thorough comparison of the records and relevant dharma texts shows that landholding Namputiri brahmins, who possessed enormous political and economic power in the region, mediated the implementation of dharma s astra into the legal system. From this comparison arise new understandings of law and legal categories such as 'custom' and 'positive law'. Moreover, such comparisons begin to elucidate the problems involved in Western assumptions that it is textual law, not its interpretation and application by humans, which controls behavior. The Vanjeri records demonstrate not only the importance of dharma s astra as a historical document but also the manner and extent to which dharma s astra provided the foundation for legal systems in Kerala as well as in other regions of India.
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2018
The meaning of land revenue farming in Indian history has eluded consensus. Some view it as an administrative aberration indicating weak state control, while others see it as a strategy for consolidating authority. This essay traces the historical development of iqṭāʻ and ijārah, two Perso-Arabic terms frequently translated from the sources as ‘revenue farming estate’. I then suggest that existing perspectives do not capture the broader structure and significance of various entitlements to land revenue. Instead, I suggest that entitlements be schematized according to how regularized the right was, whether it was permanent, and how duty-bound the right holder was. In this formulation, revenue farm refers to a complex of rights and duties secured by contract in which a sovereign transferred the temporary exploitation of a holding for rent in ad- vance. It was one of four tenurial complexes under which entitlements fell, the others being estates from bureaucratic assignment, hereditary occupation or possession by grant/gift, and tributary or chieftaincy.
Journal of Ancient Indian History 27, 2010
Because of the mutually inextricable connections between politics and religion in premodern India, royal donations in support of religious institutions always constituted an important instrument of power. There is almost no early medieval dynasty that did not issue any copper-plate charters, the classical Indian medium for the recording of royal or official endowments in favour of religious donees since the 4th century A.D. These Sanskrit records, which regularly comprise three parts – 1st the account of the dynastic genealogy in prose or in verses, 2nd the description of the land grant [mostly] in prose, and 3rd stanzas for protecting the donation from confiscation-contain plenty of information about the political – ideology and the religious ideas fostered by Indian rulers and royal dynasties. Thus, many kings not only had their official land grants registered in these title deeds, but also revealed their personal religious affiliations. References to religious ideas and religious leanings occur in various contexts in these copper-plate charters and, therefore, have to be weighted differently, too. The evidence seems to have been determined by universally applicable concepts of political power and religious legitimization, by dynastic traditions, by the character of the particular grantees, and, finally, by the personality of the individual kings.