4. WORKPLACES
DRAWING UP AN inventory of the goods discussed in the Arthashastra has given us a means of getting a sense of the scale of valuation that drives the economic policy of the ideal kingdom. In this chapter I will follow a similar strategy by drawing up an inventory in the workplaces at which goods are produced. What we will see is that kings arranged the land they inherited or acquired into different economic zones to provision the royal household and to defend the kingdom. Workplaces are not concentrated in cities (although there were some workshops there) but are mostly near the sources of raw materials, in the different economic zones, due to the high cost of transport in the age before the advent of steam power. This is very different from the present age of machine-based mass production in large factories, in factory towns or cities which house large workforces. We will also be examining the workforce itself, and the kind of labour which ranged from slavery and debt servitude to wage labour and skilled artisans organized in guilds. This pattern too is different from what we find in our own day, in which slavery and debt bondage have disappeared but in which artisan labour organized in guilds has mostly become extinct and the system of wage labour predominates.
The topography of production
The topography of production in the Arthashastra is not determined by the natural features of the landscape alone, but in combination with human objectives and improvements in different modes of transportation. To a considerable extent, the landscape of the ideal kingdom is made by human labour, actively shaped at the direction of the king to supply products the kingdom requires. This moulding of the land is brought out clearly in the chapter ‘Settlement of the Countryside’ at the start of Book Two, in which the king is to provide for farms, pastures, and trade-routes, corresponding to the three branches of vartta or the production of livelihood, and also mines and forests. Generally speaking, the king is to be an active agent in shaping what nature and history have given him by way of territory. The distributed nature of production provides that the ideal territory is one with a variegated landscape.
First among the economic zones of the landscape are the farms. The great strength of the kingdom is its capacity for capital formation through taxation, by which it surpassed individuals and private firms, and other political forms, such as republics. The bulk of economic enterprises being family farms, the bulk of taxation is levied upon agricultural crops. As we shall see, the farming village was the norm for human life in the Arthashastra, and a model from which every other mode of life is a kind of deviation. One consequence of the central importance of farming is that the kingdom as an enterprise is oriented toward land and away from the sea; and more specifically it is oriented toward agricultural land inhabited by industrious farmers. This is the root of the king’s wealth. It is virtually the opposite of the view of the merchant, for whom the largest profits lie in the luxury trade with distant lands across the seas.
In this chapter we will look at the places of work: farms, pastures, mines, forests and workshops for gold and for cloth. We will conclude with a look at the workers who work in them.
Farms
Because of the prime importance of agriculture for the wealth of the kingdom, Book Two of the Arthashastra opens with ‘the settlement of the countryside’. It is as if the kingdom began with newly conquered land suitable for farming, either already populated or untilled and unpopulated. This is a useful fiction by which to establish that the first business of the kingdom is farming, and to devise ways to turn empty land into wealth-producing and habitable land. From the beginning the Arthashastra makes it clear that the king not only levies taxes on farmers but is actively engaged in increasing the extent of farmed land to increase the kingdom’s wealth, thereby enlarging the tax base. Just to be clear, the all-important ‘land tax’ is actually a tax on the crops, not the land itself, and it takes the form of a king’s share (bhaga) of the crop.
He should cause settlement of the country, which had been settled before or which had not been settled before, by bringing in people from foreign lands or by moving people from overpopulated regions in his own country. He should cause villages to be settled consisting mostly of Shudra farmers with a minimum of one hundred families and a maximum of five hundred families, with boundaries extending over one krosha or two kroshas and affording mutual protection. (2.1.1–2)
The emphasis on shudras as desirable farmers, rather than a landed warrior aristocracy of kshatriyas, for example, is striking. It gives the impression of a separation of farming and warfare, and of a direct relation between king and farmer, unmediated by a landlord class. This is considered ideal from the king’s point of view, but often not achieved in practice. Besides giving land to farmers, the Arthashastra goes on to say that the distribution of lands should include tax-free grants to brahmins (Brahmadeya) in their capacity as priests, preceptors, chaplains and Vedic scholars, and to government servants, such as overseers and accountants, and to cowherds, sthanikas (heads of groups of villages), elephant-trainers, physicians, horse-trainers and couriers. However, most of the land goes to farmers.
At a distance from this normative human landscape, the king appoints chiefs in frontier forts to guard the gates of the kingdom. The territory along the borders and outside the farming zone is to be guarded by tribal people who live in the forest and not in the villages habited by farmers (2.1.5–6).
It is worth remarking that the king is advised to positively attract farmers to his kingdom from foreign countries, and to move people from overpopulated regions of the kingdom to new farms. The policy shows a desire to expand the extent of farmed land, and implies an abundance of land that can be turned to agriculture—a policy oriented toward the countryside and the farming village. The underlying demographic conditions have changed dramatically in recent times. The policy of the Arthashastra contrasts strongly with the main demographic fact of the past century, the shift of population from country to city, away from farming and toward factory work due to city-based industrial production. Clearly India was not heavily populated in the time of the Arthashastra, even though its population was large for the time, and overpopulation of the countryside has only become a problem for government in quite recent times.
In discussion of the distribution of land to farmers the emphasis is on the connection between possession and paying of tax:
He should allot to tax-payers arable fields for life. Unarable fields should not be taken away from those who are trying to make them arable. He should take away fields from those who do not till them and give them to others.
We see a very direct relation of the king to farmer, without the intervention of absentee landlords. Farmers have only life interests in fields that have been given by the king, but it appears that these life interest contracts eventually become hereditary, because in other passages of the Arthashastra we find that farmers have true private property rights in their lands, being able to sell, mortgage and bequeath. We will explore the matter of private property in the next chapter.
The king not only allots fields to new farmers, he supplies the things they need to bring them under cultivation for the first time.
He should favour them with grains, cattle and money which they should repay later at their convenience. And he should grant them favours and exemptions which would cause an increase to the treasury, but avoid such as would cause loss to the treasury. For a king with a small treasury swallows up the people of the city and the people of the countryside. He should grant exemptions at the time of settlement or as people come. He should, like a father, show favours to those whose exemptions have ceased. (2.1.13–18)
The king promotes agriculture by caring for the farmers as a class, with a paternalistic mix of kindness and discipline, advancing land, seed, and so forth, but taking back land that is not tilled and has stopped yielding tax. The primacy of the land tax for kingship is evident.
Besides promoting farming and farmers the king is a farmer himself, on a large scale. The king’s own farmland, called sita, is under the care of the overseer of royal farmland (sita-adhyaksha).
The Overseer of Royal Farmland, conversant with the practice of farming, water-divining and the science of rearing plants, or assisted by experts in these, should collect in the proper seasons, seeds of all kinds of grains, flowers, fruits, vegetables, bulbs, roots, creeper fruits, flax and cotton. He should cause them to be sown in land suitable for each, which has been ploughed many times, through serfs, labourers and persons remitting their fines through personal labour. And he should see that their work is not delayed by ploughing machines, implements and bullocks, and on account of the work of artisans such as smiths, carpenters, basket makers, rope makers, snake catchers and others. If they fail to create the product through their negligence, the fine shall be equal to the value of the product. (2.24.1–4)
We see from this that the king’s own farming operations are complex, starting from the collection of seeds for crops and carried out by labourers of different kinds and artisans with various skills. The duty of the overseer of royal farmland is to coordinate, oversee and discipline a large and complex body of labourers. Land is worked by labourers who are paid a wage, or let out to landless cultivators on terms of share-cropping, that is, the sharing of the harvest between the king and the cultivator on agreed terms. The text does not specify what these shares are. But note for later discussion this concept of sharing between the king and producers of different kinds, both parties, however unequal in power, having shares (bhaga) and being in a partnership relation. The Arthashastra has many instances of this concept, as we shall see.
There is considerable detail in this chapter that seems to come directly from the practical knowledge of farmers rather than from books. Here is a passage that is an example of that. It concerns the treatment of seed, and it has all the signs of knowledge passed down by practice and oral instruction in the vernacular from one generation to another of farmers, gathered and rendered into writing in the learned language by an interested non-farmer:
The treatment of seeds of grain is soaking in dew by night and drying in the heat by day for seven days and nights; for three or five days and nights for seeds of pulses; smearing at the cut with honey, ghee and pig fat mixed with cowdung for cuttings that serve as seeds; smearing with honey and ghee for bulbs; smearing with cowdung for stone-like seeds; and in the case of trees, burning in the pit and fulfilment of (the trees’) longing with cow bones and dung in season (when they send out buds). And when they have sprouted, he should feed them with dried fish along with the milk of the snuhi plant. (2.24.24–25)
According to a common folk belief, trees have cravings (dauhrida) that must be fulfilled when they are about to sprout buds, like the cravings of an expectant mother.
Thus the king is strongly identified with farming, as he is a farmer among farmers, albeit on a grander scale than the farmers, who moreover are mostly Shudras. The family farmer is the norm for productive humans who are at the heart of the kingdom. At the same time the king rules over farmers and extracts a tax from them which is the largest source of wealth for the kingdom.
Pastures
The settlement of farmland comes first. The next chapter is ‘Disposal of Non-agricultural Land’ (2.2), the title of which tells us that all other economic zones are secondary to farmland. Pasture is the next of these zones. The chapter opens thus:
On land unsuitable for farming, he should allot pastures for domestic animals (2.2.1),
which confirms the point that all other economic zones are designated only after land suitable for farming has been set aside. The text continues with the provision of wildernesses for Veda study by ascetics, forests for wild animals, forests for raw material and elephant forests. All these are secondary to designating land for farming and the settling of farmers on it. All these non-farming zones have different economic functions.
They also have different inhabitants. Farmlands are to be settled by farming families, mostly shudra farmers, in villages of one to five hundred families, grouped for administrative purposes into sets of 800, 400 and 200 villages. India is a country of small farms in which the family is the basic unit (even though there may be a landlord) and grows food for its own use, yielding a small surplus for the king and for acquiring necessities it cannot make for itself. This social and economic pattern relates to the farming villages, but outside that zone the conditions are quite different. The difference is observed in the description of the first duty of the overseer of pastures (vivita-adhyaksha):
He should establish pasture land in regions between villages. He should clear lowlands and forests of the danger of robbers and wild animals.(2.34.6–7)
Pastures, then, are not simply taken as nature gives them, but are deliberately established and improved. If they lack water, the overseer of pastures is to sink wells or make other provision for the livestock to drink from. Pastures are established where farms and farming villages are not situated, including marshy lowlands and forests; and their inhabitants are not farming-families but robbers and wild animals. In other passages we hear of forest people, hunters and birdcatchers, who are not settled in their environment by the king like the farmers but are already there, and have a loose and ambiguous attachment to the kingdom. By contrast, the cowherd (gopa), as we have already seen, is given a plot in a farming village and does not reside in the pasture land where he carries out his activities, but with the farmers.
As to the two dangers to livestock, namely robbers and wild animals who inhabit the pasture zone, the robbers must have been the worse, and cattle-rustling must have been a constant occurrence, as the text gives considerable attention to its punishment, which was severe: death for killing an animal or inciting another to kill one, stealing or inciting another to steal (2.29.17). On the other hand, someone recovering cattle stolen by thieves is to be rewarded, and someone rustling cattle belonging to people of another country shall receive half the cattle as a reward, the rest going to the king, a transaction something like the sharing with the king the spoils of war.
Wild animals and forests are a matter of a different nature. Large carnivores, such as tigers and lions, require a considerable population of prey animals, such as the many kinds of deer, antelope and gazelle, which are the special richness of India’s forests and wetlands. When cattle and other domestic animals are grazed in forests or grasslands they compete for the same forage, and in turn become prey for the meat-eaters.1 It is here that the economy of the kingdom clashes with the natural ecology, and remoulds it for human benefit by clearing the forests where domestic animals are grazed. This certainly occurred in the time of the Arthashastra, and has become a sensitive issue today. Nowadays tigers must be protected against humans, not the other way around, through programmes such as Operation Tiger.
The different and more hard-to-control aspect of the human inhabitants of this zone add to the duties of the overseer of pastures that go beyond matters to do with grazing of animals. He must also monitor the problem of robbers and enemies through fowlers and hunters who patrol the forest and send warnings by sounding conch shells or drums. The overseer reports the movement of enemies and forest people to the king by messenger pigeons and through smoke signals.
Livestock that is herded includes cattle, buffaloes, horses, donkeys, camels, goats, sheep and pigs. Elephants are a special case as these are captured in the wild as adults. For all kinds of livestock the Arthashastra, following its pattern of model and variation, gives a detailed discussion of the two most important animals to the king, namely cattle and horses, and directs that herds of the other domestic species follow the same pattern.
Both the overseer of cattle (go-adhyaksha) and the overseer of horses (ashva-adhyaksha) are responsible for keeping track of the total number of animals in their charge and the different kinds and conditions of them. Herds of cattle owned by the king are given to herdsmen under two distinct kinds of contracts—wages and ‘tending with a tax and a fixed return’. In the first case, a cowherd, buffalo herdsman, milkman, churner and hunter (to provide protection against robbers and wild animals) look after a herd of 100 milk cows for a wage, and the entire yield of the milk and ghee goes to the king. In the second case, one person is put in charge of a mixed herd of old cows, milk cows, cows with calves, pregnant cows and heifers, and is paid a share, eight varakas of ghee, one pana per animal and the hide of cattle that die, once a year. Perhaps such a person hires his own assistants to deal with such a large herd. Here, we have yet another enterprise in which the king and the worker are co-sharers.
Trade routes
Farmland and pasture land are the economic zones for the first two of the three branches of vartta, economics or the production of livelihoods. The third branch, which is trade, appears in these early chapters of Book Two not in the form of marketplaces, but of trade routes. Markets do appear later in the text, and we will be examining them in the next chapter. But I need to mention the somewhat unexpected fact that the Arthashastra discussion of economic topography connects trade with routes and not marketplaces. Here and elsewhere, a close reading of the Arthashastra gives one the sense that trade is thought of not in terms of selling in marketplaces but in terms of the transportation of goods from workplaces to buyers in markets, which differs greatly from the present-day market-centred methods of analysing trade. We shall see in the next chapter that the text has an underlying idea of the fair or true price of things sold in markets, which in the case of trade goods is proportional to their distance from the market. It also accords with the fact that workplaces are usually located near the source of raw materials, and have to be brought to market.
In its discussion of trade routes the Arthashastra speaks of land routes, water routes, and market towns (panya-pattinam) (2.1.19). The roads are to be kept clear of harassments to traders by the king’s favourites, works officers, robbers and frontier chiefs, or from being crowded by herds of cattle, so that trade is not hindered (2.1.38).
Mines
The Arthashastra considers mines to be the source of all wealth and power for the king:
The treasury has its source in the mines; from the treasury the army comes into being; with the treasury and the army, the earth is obtained, with the treasury as its ornament. (2.12.37)
The overseer of mines (akara-adhyaksha), ‘conversant with the science of metallic veins in the earth, metallurgy, smelting and the coloring of gems, or having assistants who are experts in these, and having skilled workers and tools’, should examine old mines and new ones (12.1.1). Under his purview are the precious metals, gold and silver; the ordinary metals, bronze, copper, tin, vaikrintika, brass, steel, bell-metal, and iron; and gems. He has to not only actively manage the production of metals from ore, but also the workshops that produce the manufactured goods, and establish and oversee a trade in manufactured goods. The ordinary metals go to workshops established by an overseer of metals.
The overseer of the mint (lakshana-adhyaksha) supervises the minting of coins, which is a monopoly of the king, of silver and copper (but not gold coins during this period). Individuals can bring silver and copper to be turned into coins, but the charges are high, and only the king may make coins. The overseer of mines also establishes workshops for goods to be made from conch shells, diamonds, gems, pearls, corals and caustics, and sets up the trade in these. Salt is a royal monopoly administered by the salt commissioner, though it appears the manufacture of salt from seawater is done by individuals, and the duty of the overseer of salt (lavana-adhyaksha) is to collect the king’s share, lease-rent and other royal dues, and to tax its sale. ‘The buyers shall pay the duty and a protective duty corresponding to the loss sustained by the king’s goods’ (2.12.32). Brahmins learned in the Vedas, ascetics and labourers may take salt for their food (that is, for their own use but not for sale) without tax.
The king has a monopoly of subsoil deposits of metal ore and salt. The treatment of the duties of the overseer of mines gives a first impression that the production of these assets is also monopolized, but here and there the text makes it clear that the king also licensed others for a fee, or partnered with private entrepreneurs on a basis of shares in the profit, to work the mines and extract salt, similar to the co-sharing arrangements in other enterprises that we have already mentioned. Here the king-centred focus of the text may leave an exaggerated impression of the king’s role, while in practice the role of private enterprise may have been greater. But there is no mistaking that metal ores and salt are considered specially important assets of the kingdom and that the king is closely involved in their extraction.
The taxing of salt is a royal privilege of great value. It touches the entire population of the kingdom without exception, since no one can live without salt. But the taxing of salt is, in our terms, very regressive, because the tax is a large proportion of the income of the poor, and a negligible proportion of the income of the rich, who eat no more salt than the poor. Indian kings regularly regarded salt as theirs to monopolize, license and tax. So did the British during their rule in India, and they took exceptional steps to prevent smuggling which always accompanies the taxing of salt, including an attempt to plant a continuous, impenetrable hedge around the borders of their territories.2 Mahatma Gandhi opposed this unpopular and unfair tax with a Salt March to make illegal salt from seawater, provoking the British to jail him and the many who accompanied him.
Forests
There are three main kinds of royal forests: forests for wild animals (mriga-vana), forests for raw materials (dravya-vana) and elephant forests (gaja-vana) (2.2.5). While pasture land is for domestic animals (pashu), forests are for wild animals (mriga).
He should cause an animal forest for the king’s recreation to be laid out, one goruta in extent, with a single entrance, protected by a moat, containing shrubs and bushes bearing sweet fruits, having trees without thorns, with shallow pools of water and stocked with tame deer and other animals, containing wild animals with claws and fangs blunted, and having male and female elephants and cubs useful for hunting. (2.2.3)
In addition to this kind of pleasure-grove the king establishes other animal forests in which all wild animals are protected from hunting. We should probably infer from this that hunting was going on at a scale that caused animal numbers to decline, and that kings took steps to protect animals because of it.
The king is to establish forests for materials, one for each of the kinds of produce (kupya), and workshops for goods made from them, with forest people (atavi) attached to the forests.
The Overseer of Kupya should cause forest produce to be brought in by guards in the materials forests; and he should start workshops for forest produce. And he should fix dues from those cutting materials forests, also penalties, except in cases of distress. (2.17.1–3)
Here the mention of distress suggests that the materials forest is something like the granary, in serving as a reserve from which to alleviate the distress of the people at large in emergencies.
Finally, there is the elephant forest. The provisions for these forests are given in considerable detail:
On the border of the kingdom he should establish a forest for elephants guarded by forest people. The Overseer of the Elephant Forest (naga-vana-adhyaksha; evidently different from the Overseer of Elephants, gaja-adhyaksha, who supervises the elephant stables) should, with the help of guards of the elephant forest, protect the elephant forest whether on the mountain, along a river, along lakes or in marshy tracts, knowledgeable of its boundaries, entrances and exits. They should kill anyone slaying an elephant. A person bringing in a pair of tusks of an elephant dying naturally shall be given a reward of four and a quarter panas (2.2.6–9)
Guards of elephant forests, aided by elephant keepers, foot-chainers, border guards, foresters and attendants, their own scent masked by the urine and dung of elephants, their bodies covered with branches of the bhallataki, and moving with five or seven female elephant decoys, should ascertain the size of the herds of elephants, by means of signs provided by sleeping places, footprints, dung and damage cased to river banks. They should maintain a record in writing of every elephant, whether moving in a herd, moving alone, lost from a herd, leader of a herd, and whether wild, maddened, a cub, or released from captivity. (2.2.10–11)
This vivid picture has several features deserving mention: the active protection of elephants and harsh punishment of poachers, the keeping of an ongoing census of elephants in the forest, of different classifications and the use of forest people for the work. However, reverting to the description of the farmlands and villages at the beginning of this chapter, we find the elephant trainer and physician are settled there (along with the cowherd) by grant of the king. They are not forest people, and live in villages, but they supervise and direct forest people who live where they work.
Workshops
We have seen that the overseers of mines and forest produce are to start workshops to turn raw materials into goods, and establish trade in these goods, both regulating and participating in the trade. As to the workshops (karmanta), we are not given much detail about their organization and workings, except when it comes to the precious metals, in the chapter ‘Overseer of Gold’ (2.13).
The duty of the overseer of gold (suvarna-adhyaksha) is to construct a workshop for working of gold and silver into finished goods, and also to establish a goldsmith (sauvarnika) in the market highway to supervise artisans who receive gold and silver from individuals from the countryside and the city, to be worked into jewellery for them on piece-rate contracts. The two chapters on these officials give us somewhat of a close view at a workshop (2.13–14). The overseer of gold supervises a body of artisans ‘doing the work of setting in gold’, blowers, servants and dust-washers, who are to be thoroughly searched when they enter and leave, their tools and uncompleted work remaining in the workshop. Besides the sources of gold and silver, and the processes of removing impurities, the chapter devotes attention to the different kinds of ornamental work, which give added value to the object. The chapter on the goldsmith devotes its attention to work contracts and the fines imposed upon workshop artisans who fail to fulfil the bargain or sequester some of the precious metal they have been given by the customer. The matter of pilfering gold and silver is a common occupational hazard, and there is an extensive listing of ways in which artisans cheat customers. As there is always some loss of material in the process of manufacture, the text states the allowable amounts of loss so that artisans are not wrongly blamed.
Gold and silver play a large part both in the kingdom, as a store of wealth useful for the costly ventures of the state, including war and diplomacy, and also as signs of the king’s pre-eminence. These precious metals are equally important to the people of the countryside and of the city as stores of wealth and as signs of status. There is nothing remarkable about this, as the same could be said about gold and silver in many countries. Gold and silver are useful measures of value and means of exchange internationally and it is because of this that gold and silver are highly valued in many countries. However, as we will see in the next chapter, India has a specially strong demand for gold and silver over a very long period of time, much more than other countries.
Another chapter of Book Two that invites us inside a workplace is the chapter on the duties of the overseer of textiles (sutra-adhyaksha, 2.23).
The Overseer of Textiles should cause trade to be carried out in thread, armour, cloth and rope through persons expert in the work. He should get thread spun out of wool, bark-fibre, cotton, silk-cotton, hemp and flax, through widows, crippled women, maidens, women who have left their homes and women paying off their fine through personal labour, through mothers of courtesans, through old female slaves of the king and through female slaves of temples whose service to the gods have ceased. (2.23.1–2)
There are several aspects about this passage that are very interesting. At the outset it is apparent that manufacture is divided by gender, women making thread and men making the finished product. Secondly, the finished product includes armour and rope, so an element of military supply is involved. Thirdly, the women involved in spinning are needy and lacking in protection or retired from service, and hence providing work for them is a way in which the king fulfils his duty to be the protector of those who have no families or are otherwise vulnerable. Protecting those who have none to look after them is widely recognized to be a royal virtue. Such women are not to be taken advantage of. Further on in the chapter it says that those who remain at home should be given work, through a female slave of the overseer who meets them in their homes, or, if they are able to come to the textile house, the overseer’s man should have an exchange of goods and wages at dawn, under a lamp for the inspection of the thread, and if he looks her in the face or converses with her on any matter other than business he is to be fined (2.23.11–14).
The overseer of textiles gets cloth made by weavers with contracts stipulating the amount of work, time and wage—it appears to be a ‘putting out’ industry. But the text also speaks of workshops for weaving cloth (sutrana-karmanta) from fibres called kshauma, and dukula, from silk, hair of the ranku deer and cotton, for the production of varieties of cloth, bedsheets and coverings, and also starting workshops for armour (2.23.7–8).
Workers
Having examined the workplaces, we need to complete the picture by saying a word about the people who work in them.
Farming constitutes the norm for the Arthashastra. It is organized on the basis of the small family-farm producing food for its own consumption—the form that is called subsistence farming, as opposed to modern-day commercial farming in which the whole of the crop is sold for money. The subsistence farmer must exchange some of his crop for goods the family cannot make for itself, and must produce a surplus for paying taxes. From the time of the Arthashastra to the recent past, India has been mainly a land of small-scale family-based farming. Large-scale plantation-farming occurred only to a limited degree (the king’s own farmland, worked by serfs, wage labourers and those remitting fines would be an example), though large holdings by landlords was common. Nevertheless the Arthashastra mentions many forms of labour that depart from the norm of the free farmer and his family. These include slavery, forms of debt servitude and the wage-labour or share-cropping by people who do not own farmland.
The Arthashastra considers the enslavement of a person who is Arya by his kin a crime punishable by a severe fine, and this appears to apply to all four castes, brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya and shudra (3.13.1). At the same time, the whole discussion of this matter would be unnecessary if enslavement did not occur in fact, perhaps among all castes. Among mlecchas (non-Aryans, foreigners, barbarians), slavery is permitted as it is customary among them (3.13.3).
Debt-servitude appears frequently in the text, under several forms, as a voluntary servitude or temporary slavery during which working for a creditor pays off a debt. Further, we read more than once of persons remitting a fine or paying taxes through labour for the king on his farms or in mines or in workshops. Such temporary enslavement, as it can be termed, is cheap labour, but it is the least desirable form of labour for an employer, the worker being unskilled and temporary.
The existence of labour at a wage or on terms of share-cropping in the king’s farms shows the presence of landless people in the countryside who must work for hire or for the use of farmland belonging to someone else. While debt and poverty drive many into temporary servitude, it is landlessness that creates the fundamental socio-economic division in the countryside, forcing the landless to work for the landowners on terms disadvantageous to themselves. While slavery has been abolished long ago in India, and indentured and bonded labour are very much things of the past, landless labour in the countryside continues to be a major presence, partly alleviated by the migration of the landless to cities in search of work.
One notices at many places in the Arthashastra that workers are frequently fined for substandard work by their employers, who seem to have the power to impose penalties at will. To illustrate this point, a good example would be those who take care of elephants:
Uncleanliness of the stall, non-receipt of fodder, making elephants sleep on bare ground, striking them at an improper place, mounting by another person, riding at an improper time, or on unsuitable land, leading down to water where there is no crossing, and taking them through a thicket of trees are reasons for penalty. The fine amount should be taken from their food and wages. (2.32.19–20)
However, at least as it concerns private individuals the king’s judges will hear suits regarding disputes between employers and workers over wages, indicating the king’s desire to find a balance between the interests of both classes. One gets an impression that while workers strike the best bargains they can get, there is a notion of customary rates of wages similar to the underlying notion we get of a just price for land and for the profits of the trader who brings goods to market, as we shall see in the next chapter.
In addition to unskilled or semi-skilled workers there is also the artisan class of people who possess skills of craftsmanship. This knowledge is their great asset and source of livelihood. Such workers may work on a piece-rate basis, receiving, say, gold from a customer to turn it into gold jewellery, or thread from the overseer of textiles to turn it into cloth, for an agreed price and in an agreed period of time, the artisan being responsible for the materials supplied to him and liable for an excessive diminution of the material during the process of manufacture. Or the artisan works at a wage in a workshop. There are some references to craft guilds of artisans who regulate prices and uphold standards among their members, showing that the artisans are more than workers at a wage, they are also owners of their tools and sellers of their work or of their finished goods, who enjoy, as a class, something of a collective monopoly of their kind of work, and therefore have some degree of control over the terms of their work. Merchants and traders are also organized into guilds and had a considerable amount of collective self-governing.
The economic landscape of the Arthashastra
Thus the landscape of the Arthashastra is divided into zones by the economy, and has a distinctive pattern. Farming comes first and everything else is assigned to land not taken up for farming. Farmers live in families, in villages. Others do, too. Cowherds, for example, are given land in villages; they do not live in the pastures where they do their work; pastures are inhabited by robbers and wild animals. Again, elephant-keepers and the physicians who care for them are given lands in villages—they do not live in elephant forests. On the other hand, forests contain forest people, who are very different from farmers, lying outside the caste system, organized in tribes. They are hard to control by the king but essential for the kingdom because they have valuable knowledge and skills pertaining to the forest that village-dwellers do not have. Troops for the army are recruited from forest people, but their loyalties are less certain for kings than other kinds of soldiers. They are especially useful as guides and scouts, fighting on certain kinds of terrain, countering certain modes of fighting, and fighting the enemy’s forest troops (9.2.6–8). This is a little enigmatic, but we can draw an inference from it that forest troops have special knowledge and aptitudes that most soldiers do not, and that the king is wise to have them at his disposal. The Arthashastra does not give us much detail about the forest people, but it is evident that they are both an essential part of the royal enterprise because of their specialized knowledge of the forest zone, and one that is difficult to control because of it.
The farming-centred pattern of economic zones in the Arthashastra has a long history behind it, but it is not eternal. Pottery, woven cloth, metal-tipped ploughs and farming villages are the economic pattern that created Indian civilization long before the Arthashastra, but within measurable time. It is a pattern that emerged sometime after the ending of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, and it predates the rise of the earliest Indian cities in the Indus Valley nearly 5,000 years ago. It created a stability of life and a food-production surplus that allowed the creation of cities, kings and kingdoms, monumental architecture, luxury and fine arts patronized by kings and the aristocracies that supported them.
Scholars used to think that the great domestications that created this pattern belong to the Middle East—the domestication, that is, of wheat, barley, cattle, sheep and goats, all of which are found there in a wild state. It now appears, with the advance of archeological study of the Indus Civilization and the farming villages that preceded it, that all of these domestications of wild species may have occurred in India independently. The archaeologist Gregory Possehl proposes that India should be thought of as a part of the same, semi-arid ecological zone as the Middle East, in various parts of which the primary domestications occurred.3 The domestication of rice, possibly in connection with early sites of rice domestication in South-east Asia, may also be an indigenous development. In any case, the economic pattern, and the shaping of the landscape into different economic zones in the Arthashastra, has ancient roots. It is the heart of the economy we find in the Arthashastra. And although it is ancient, it continues today. It is the basis upon which all subsequent economic development has been built.