be recognized as the legal rate. Dr. Burn ell, in his South 

 Indian Palceography^ has stated "that the land tax (for such 

 it originally was in South India, not rent) should amount to 

 half the produce, has long been quoted as an instance of rapa- 

 • city of Muhammadan and English Governments, from the 

 illustrious B. Neiburh's early letters down to modern public 

 discussions, by people ignorant of Indian history. But it has 

 •nothing to do with either. . The inscriptions at Tanjore show 

 that the indigenous Chola kings of the II th century took about 

 half the produce, and F. W. Ellis long ago asserted, on other 

 grounds, that the tax was always more than the sixth or fourth 

 permitted by the Sanskrit lawyers. A consideration of royal 

 grants would also conclusively show (as Sanskrit lawyers as- 

 serted) that the Government never had any right to the land." 

 In the Northern Circars also the native dynasties, long before 

 the Muhammadan conquest, appear to have taken half the gross 

 produce as the land tax, and this rule was in force in several 

 zemindaries and principalities which had never, or only for a 

 short time, been under Muhammadan domination — the Eamnad 

 zemin'dari for instance. The only instance in which the rule 

 laid down by the Shastras was adopted in rating lands for the 

 revenue was in South Canara, and in this case, the Shastraic 

 rule was resorted to with a view to enhance the land tax which 

 had till then been levied. In South Canara, cultivationjias to 

 be carried on under more difficult conditions than elsewhere. 

 The country is extremely rocky and uneven, and^^ owing to 

 excessive rainfall, cattle are scarce and cannot be employed at 

 all seasons of the year. The ground has to be levelled at great 

 expense to make it fit for cultivation, and this operation has to 

 be continually repeated, as; owing to heavy rainfall and moun- 

 tain torrents, the land is constantly cut up into deep gullies. 

 Reclamation of land could, under these circumstances, have 

 been possible only if the land tax had been extremely mode- 

 rate, and accordingly the original land tax appears to have been 

 fixed at ^th of the gross produce till about A.D. 1252, when 

 the country was conquered by a Pandiyan prince. He ruled 

 that the ^th share should be delivered in rice and not in 

 unhusked paddy, and thus increased the tax by about 1 per 

 cent. When the country became a dependency of Vijianagar, 

 the king Ilari Har Eoy fixed the land-tax at |th of gross pro- 

 duce, i.e., ^th the king's share proper, and yV^h the share 

 allotted by the Shastras for the support of temples and Brahmins, 

 thus enhancing the tax by 50 per cent. From information 

 extracted by Dr. Buchanan from certain old accounts in the 

 possesion of a shanbogue at Gokurna and given in his " Journey 



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