142 G. A. Grierson —The Song of Manik Chandra. [No. 3, 
probably to be near her old Guru, the ruins of whose home are still shown 
in the neighbourhood. 
The further particulars regarding Manik Chandra will be gathered 
from the annexed poem. Who he was we cannot tell, we must be content 
with knowing that he was a neighbouring chief of Dharma Pala and his 
conqueror. 
He appears to have governed at first with vigour and success. We 
read of rustic wealth and security, and light taxation. The revenue 
system is worth noticing, it was a peculiarly elastic and simple land tax. # 
The land in those days was little more than a wild forest, and the soil poor 
and barely cultivated. The sparse prajds scraped with their flimsy ploughs 
the surface of the sandy soil immediately round their homestead and strug¬ 
gled lazily for bare existence. I suspect that, even in king Manik’s time, 
life and property were not over secure, and under these circumstances it 
was necessary that the taxes should be light. Each plough-owner was 
therefore required to pay for each plough in his homestead thirty kaovis per 
mensem.f Under the light taxation which may be inferred from this absurd 
exaggeration of the text, the prajas were necessarily happy and contented, 
until Manik Chandra did what was in Rangpur the most unpopular 
thing a zamindar could do. He engaged a Bangali Divan. I have in my 
previous paper enlarged on the hatred of the Rangpun peasantry for a 
genuine freshly imported native of the south, and I need not dwell upon 
it here. Suffice it to say that the new Divan fully bore out the character 
of his nation, for he immediately doubled the land-tax. The result was a 
rising of the peasants, and according to their account, the mysterious death 
of the king shortly afterwards from the effects of Rangpur fever. He left 
no living child, but his wife Mayana was subsequently confined of a pos¬ 
thumous one. The child was not born till eighteen months after Manik’s 
death,—and ill-natured people might feel inclined to consider Manik 
Chandra’s claim to the title of father not proved ; but the poem chivalrously 
comes to the rescue of Mayana’s reputation, and makes her pass through 
a long series of puerile adventures (the old tale of Orpheus and Eurydike 
with the characters reversed), and finally obtain from Gorakshanath, and 
his attendant gods, the boon of having a son of such perfect vigour and 
* The same system prevails to the present day in parts of Nipal, where the demand 
for land is not so great as it is in the more settled British territory. A plough is there, 
however, only considered as equivalent to eight higas, the average rent for a plough 
of land being considerably below that current on this side of the frontier. 
f The text says 1^ budis of Jcdoris. A budi is five gandas or twenty. One budi of 
Jcaoris — a pice. 1^ pice a month = 4 anas, 6 pie, per year per plough. In the light 
soil of Bangpur, one plough can easily cultivate fifteen bigas or five acres of land, so 
that the annual land-tax was, according to the text, less than 3§ pies per big a, or than 
a penny farthing per acre. 
