. A Changing Countryside . Popular perceptions of kings What did subjects think about their rulers? Obviously, inscriptions do not provide all the answers.
In fact, ordinary people rarely left accounts of their thoughts and experiences. Nevertheless, historians have tried to solve this problem by examining stories contained in anthologies such as the Jatakas and the Panchatantra . Many of these stories probably originated as popular oral tales that were later committed to writing. The Jatakas were written in Pali around the middle of the first millennium CE .
One story known as the Gandatindu Jataka describes the plight of the subjects of a wicked king; these included elderly women and men, cultivators, herders, village boys and even animals. When the king went in disguise to find out what his subjects thought about him, each one of them cursed him for their miseries, complaining that they were attacked by robbers at night and by tax collectors during the day. To escape from this situation, people abandoned their village and went to live in the forest. As this story indicates, the relationship between a king and his subjects, especially the rural population, could often be strained – kings frequently tried to fill their coffers by demanding high taxes, and peasants particularly found such demands oppressive.
Escaping into the forest remained an option, as reflected in the Jataka story. Meanwhile, other strategies aimed at increasing production to meet growing demand for taxes also came to be adopted. . Strategies for increasing production One such strategy was the shift to plough agriculture, which spread in fertile alluvial river valleys such as those of the Ganga and the Kaveri from c.
sixth century BCE . The iron-tipped ploughshare was used to turn the alluvial soil in areas which had high rainfall. Moreover, in some parts of the Ganga valley, production of paddy was dramatically increased by the introduction of transplantation, although this meant back-breaking work for the producer. While the iron ploughshare led to a growth in agricultural productivity, its use was restricted to certain parts of the subcontinent – cultivators in Transplantation is used for paddy cultivation in areas where water is plentiful.
Here, seeds are first broadcast; when the saplings have grown they are transplanted in waterlogged fields. This ensures a higher ratio of survival of saplings and higher yields. The Sudarshana (beautiful) lake in Gujarat Find Girnar on Map . The Sudarshana lake was an artificial reservoir.
We know about it from a rock inscription ( c . second century CE ) in Sanskrit, composed to record the achievements of the Shaka ruler Rudradaman. The inscription mentions that the lake, with embankments and water channels, was built by a local governor during the rule of the Mauryas. However, a terrible storm broke the embankments and water gushed out of the lake.
Rudradaman, who was then ruling in the area, claimed to have got the lake repaired using his own resources, without imposing any tax on his subjects. Another inscription on the same rock ( c. fifth century) mentions how one of the rulers of the Gupta dynasty got the lake repaired once again. Source Why did rulers make arrangements for irrigation?