The 2024 Budget has caused an uproar with its proposed changes to taxation: increased taxes on salaried classes have proven particularly controversial. With the annual headache of IT returns looming, I got to thinking: how did taxes in medieval India work? It turns out that the problem of limited state capacity and public services, inordinate taxation of the middle classes, and tax avoidance by the super-rich is not exactly new in India. Perhaps the most famous premodern South Indian state—the Chola empire—struggled with exactly the same issues.
How much tax?
How much do we know about medieval taxation? Not a lot—and there’s debate about whether “tax” is even the right word for it. After all, medieval courts were not modern nation-states. They had no professional bureaucracies, no Constitution, and no legally binding commitment to provide their subjects with anything. The Cholas, for example, occasionally constructed clinics and schools, though primarily in elite Brahmin settlements. Historian Kesavan Veluthat, in The Political Structure of Early Medieval South India, suggests that “rent” is a better word. A king’s subjects were expected to pay him a share of all they cultivated and earned, simply because he was the king who maintained a divine order and kept anarchy at bay.
The mainstay of all premodern states was land revenue, and their scholars had many ideas on how to tax land. The writers of the Manusmriti, for example, ordained that a sixth of the harvest must come to the king. While many kings claimed to “follow the laws of Manu”, the only way to verify this is to actually look at tax records—which were written mostly on palm leaf and haven’t survived in most of India. In Tamil Nadu, though, we have an extraordinary archive of over 13,000 stone inscriptions on temple walls, recording the taxation, sale, and cultivation of land.
According to these records, the Chola court (c. 850–1279 CE) conducted remarkably detailed land surveys across much of north-central Tamil Nadu. Distinctions were made between dry and wet lands, barren and brackish lands. Tax assessments were conducted periodically to check how much land a village was cultivating. Significantly, instead of a percentage, medieval courts asked for a fixed weight of food grains to be handed over after harvest. Looking at inscriptions from about a thousand years ago, it turns out they demanded about 500 kg of rice per acre. Was this a heavy burden? It’s impossible to be sure because we don’t know how much rice an acre of land actually produced around 1000 CE. The Cambridge Economic History of India suggests that this may have worked out to a 25 per cent tax.
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Collecting tax
How was tax actually collected? This is where medieval courts ran into problems. Contemporary nation-states have vast bureaucracies of tens of thousands, dedicated to ensuring that taxes are paid and that defaulters are punished. Historian Y Subbarayalu, in South India Under the Cholas, studied inscriptions to understand the Chola bureaucracy. He found that around 1060, about a hundred officials worked for the Chola land revenue secretariat. Some remained attached to the court, collecting and auditing records. Others moved around the countryside, conducting surveys and reaching agreements with villages about taxes due. But even a hundred officials couldn’t supervise the collection of thousands of tonnes of rice every year.
The solution was to rely on local grandees for tax collection. Court officials would calculate the total weight of rice due, and an assembly of the village landholders were made responsible for it. This assembly would decide how much rice was handed over by each chunk of land in the village. Come harvest season, they would supervise the threshing areas and transport the court’s share.
In principle, it was a straightforward system. Unfortunately, since the court generally had less than a hundred officials dedicated to revenue matters, poor harvests could snowball into agrarian distress. Villages made petitions to reduce tax, but there were long waiting times before requests were approved or denied. If denied, villages were ordered to sell lands to meet arrears. Chola officials sometimes conducted public auctions, usually named after the reigning kings. In Land Grants and Agrarian Reactions in Cola and Pandya Times, historian R Tirumalai notes that especially after 1100 CE, there were many such instances.
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Avoiding tax
Who bought lands under agrarian distress? In the 12th century, it was the super-rich who benefited particularly. Chola inscriptions refer to them as rajakulavar, “lordly families”. Many of them were military entrepreneurs who had become rich fighting for the Cholas. Buying up lands from poverty-struck farmers, they indulged in various forms of tax avoidance. One favourite tactic was to donate lands to religious institutions. If this was not possible, they would appoint their dependents as cultivators, paying oppressive rents. Some cultivators simply fled, but the medieval super-rich were fine with leaving the land uncultivated because its value continued to increase anyway.
By the 1170s the Chola court realised that a disaster was looming. In Ancient to Medieval: South Indian Society in Transition, historian Noboru Karashima found many inscriptions where the Chola rulers demanded that “lordly families” should stop buying land, or imposed a cap on how much they could buy. Kings also tried to reduce taxes to bring cultivators back. But in many cases, it was too late: by the 13th century, Karashima writes, a full-blown agrarian crisis was driving families into penury, and people were selling themselves into slavery.
Tax avoidance continued to plague Indian states for centuries after. The Mughal Empire, for example, had a large bureaucracy, but it was still barely enough to administer its sprawling dominions. It relied on local intermediaries to collect tax, incentivising them by granting them rent-free lands. The result was exactly what you’d expect.
In the Cambridge Economic History of India, historian Irfan Habib criticises this practice as “regressive”. Landlords simply passed the tax burden to the “middle peasants”. And when they weren’t able to pay, the Mughal state, with its Rajput military manpower, evicted or outright massacred the peasantry. Worsening the situation was what Habib calls the “extremely regressive” jizya tax on non-Muslims, which amounted to a month’s wages. The Mughal bureaucracy collected vast amounts of tax for courtly luxuries, but it didn’t exactly translate to agrarian plenty. It just created a class of rich landholders who eventually dominated the countryside and undermined the state.
The grand sweep of Indian history reveals that bargaining with the super-rich helps states in the short run, but inevitably ends up oppressing middle-class taxpayers. This creates a situation where a wealthy class determines the fortunes of the majority of the population. As inequality worsens in India today, are we seeing history repeat itself?
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)