The Anuradhapura Kingdom - XII

The Anuradhapura Kingdom - XII

Contiued with part eleven   here to go previous one

By the ninth century, however, this picture begins to change. The inscriptions of this period refer to a form of tenure known as divel property granted to officials or functionaries in the employment of the state or of monasteries. (A divel holding from a monastery would be no more than the grant of the revenue of the land allotted to a functionary.) Divel holdings were, in effect, property rights bestowed on an individual as subsistence in return for services rendered to the grantor, and were terminable on the death of an employee or at the will of the granting authority. The recipient of a divel holding got the revenue which the king or a monastery had enjoyed earlier.

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As for the king's officials, the size of their divel holdings varied with their status the higher they were in the hierarchy, the larger the holding. The revenues enjoyed from such land holdings were significant enough in terms of their implications, not only for the economic strength bestowed on these officials but for other considerations as well, for over and above this revenue from land there could also quite often be the grant of the services of the people living on it, and transfer of land revenue to the king's officers carried with it unavoidably some administrative power over these plots of land or villages. Besides, rights held on land in consideration for services to the king could be transferred by individuals who held them. (The transfer of land, however, did not entail the transfer of services. This latter had to be continued by the original recipient of the grant.) Divel tenure was thus doubly significant; it marked a strengthening of rights to private property, and the emergence of a trend towards feudal rights, and of a class of landlord officials who became a powerful group of intermediaries between the cultivators and royal authority. Since the office by virtue of which divel was held could often in time become j hereditary, the relationship between divel holders and their tenants, though inherently deferential on the part of the latter, could well develop into one of mutual respect and cordiality, and when the connection remained unbroken for several generations there could also be a strong sense of attachment and loyalty.

This discussion of divel tenure brings us to another facet of incipient feudalism in the Anuradhapura kingdom: compulsory services, or what came to be known in later centuries as rajakariya, service for the king. The inscriptions of the ninth century and after offering us a glimpse of this system of compulsory services. There is very little evidence, however, on how rajakariya worked in the Anuradhapura kingdom. There was a close link between compulsory services and divel holdings, and between the former and caste: the duties performed were dependent on an individual's caste. We are not certain whether every layman in the country (unless specially exempted) was bound to turn out for service in the militia in times of war, and in general to perform gratuitous services on public works such as the construction of roads, bridges and tanks, which was the key feature of the rajakariya system in its maturity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is more evidence, however, about exemptions from compulsory services. Temple lands were generally exempt from royal service, and as in later centuries, those whose land holdings were not liable to service tenure were generally exempt from the demands of the rajakariya system. Inscriptional evidence from the ninth century and after reveals that one of the immunities granted to some lands and villages was that royal officials could not exact various types of labor from people living in them.

The closest approximation in ancient times to absolute ownership of 'private property', i.e. property not belonging to the state, were monastic holdings and estates with their proclivity for expansion unhampered by fragmentation. Monastic wealth accumulated gradually but steadily through donation and exchange as well as by purchase. Inscriptional evidence of the fourth and fifth centuries AD shows that monasteries could purchase a property. Property held by religious establishments could not be alienated by sale, and no villages or land belonging to them could be mortgaged or gifted away. By about the ninth century AD, monasteries had come to own, apart from movable possessions, a vast extent of property in estates, irrigation works and even salterns, some of them situated at considerable distances from the institution that owned them. While monasteries held land under a variety of tenures, they had over certain plots of land in particular grants made by kings out of their private land holdings and the donations of plots held by individuals under pamunu tenure the most unrestricted rights of ownership possible within the tenurial system. In most cases, a grant to the sangha would mention the monastery for which the donation was intended. Some grants were more specific than this and indicated a particular institution within a monastery such as an image house or a pirivena as the beneficiary. Lands granted to individual monasteries belonged to them alone and not to the sangha as a body, a fact brought into focus by the not infrequent boundary disputes between some of the most renowned and powerful monasteries of ancient Sri Lanka.

Religious establishments used in their landholdings a form of service tenure similar to that of the king: a share of the produce from the plots of land permanently held by them was given to those who worked for and in the monasteries. Some of the temple lands, however, were cultivated by serfs or slaves belonging to the monasteries, and there was no tenurial contract between such serfs and slaves and the monastery. Most of the inscriptions which recorded immunities granted by the king to religious establishments show that the peasants cultivating such lands were not expected to provide services to the king the grant of immunities from services due to the king implied that these obligations were to be performed for the monastery instead. Service in temples took three main forms occasional, continuous and periodical. It seems likely that land was given for maintenance mainly in consideration for continuous and periodic services.

We need to consider, at this stage, the implications of these developments. A form of monastic landlordism evolved, and the monasteries themselves developed into largely self sufficient economic units, their lands cultivated by tenant farmers while a multifarious assortment of craftsmen provided specialised services in return for land allocated to them. Some of the labour on monastic lands was performed by slaves but this was of limited scope and significance. In terms of the development of feudalism, much the most conspicuous of the immunities enjoyed by certain monastic properties was brahmadeya status. The increase in income which inevitably followed from this was less significant than the fiscal and judicial authority over the tenants of such properties, and the virtual exclusion of royal officials from them. As a result, such monasteries enjoyed 'the most complete property rights known in early medieval Sri Lanka . . .'; while there are instances of similar transfers of authority to the laity, these were rare.