Gupta Administration, Economy and the Rise of Land Grants

Nature of the Gupta State: Kingship, Feudatories and Decentralisation

Gupta Kingship and the Imperial Titles

Kingship under the Guptas was normally hereditary, and the king was the focus of the administration. According to the Gupta records, Samudragupta chose his successor from among his sons and nominated prince Chandragupta II, born of queen Dattadevi.

Inscriptions and coins record the grand titles the Gupta rulers adopted, such as maharajadhiraja ("great king of kings"), samrat and chakravartin. These titles reflected their claim to supreme authority and set them above earlier rulers, who had used simpler titles such as rajan and maharaja. Kumaragupta I bore the titles maharajadhiraja and parama-bhattaraka. The Allahabad Pillar inscription goes further and describes Samudragupta as a human being only in so far as he performs the rites and conventions of the world, and otherwise as a god whose residence is this world.

These titles were more than flattery. They announced a claim to rule over other kings, and that claim describes how the empire was actually held. The empire of Samudragupta included a core territory in northern India that the emperor controlled directly, while the rulers of several frontier kingdoms and tribal oligarchies paid him tribute, obeyed his orders and performed obeisance before him.

Feudatories and the Rise of the Samantas

Not all of the Gupta Empire was governed directly. Many of the kings Samudragupta defeated were reinstated. In the south he defeated a Pallava ruler but did not take over the region, and he let the local kings keep their thrones as long as they accepted his rule and paid tribute. Rulers who kept their own kingdoms under Gupta overlordship in this way were feudatories, and in the later period the title maharaja was used by feudatory rulers.

The word for such a dependent ruler changed during this period. Samanta originally meant a neighbour, and in the Mauryan period it referred to the independent ruler of an adjoining territory. By the fourth century larger states had appeared, the Gupta Empire among them, and many of them depended on samantas, men who maintained themselves through local resources including control over land, and who offered homage and military support to the ruler. Powerful samantas could become kings, while weak rulers could be reduced to subordination. By the end of the Gupta period, in the sixth century, samanta had come to mean a vassal, and it was accepted as the title of the prince of a subjugated but reinstated tributary region.

Gupta and Mauryan Administration Compared

The Mauryan administration was an elaborate system built to regulate and supervise economic activities. The centuries from about 300 to 800 CE, which include the Gupta period, were marked instead by the decentralisation of power. Rather than controlling everything from a central authority, the Guptas divided their empire into provinces and granted land to local rulers, priests and chieftains. The Gupta bureaucracy was also less elaborate than that of the Mauryas.

The contrast should not be pushed too far, since the Guptas kept much of the older form of central government described in the Arthashastra and added new offices of their own.

Faxian's Picture of a Lightly Governed Land

The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, who visited India in the early fifth century CE during the reign of Chandragupta II, left a description of Gupta government as he saw it. He found that the people of the Middle Kingdom, the Gangetic plains, did not have to register their households or attend on officials, that those who farmed royal land paid a portion of their grain, and that the king's guards and attendants received salaries. Punishment was mild: Criminals were simply fined, the amount varying with the circumstances, and even repeated rebels only had their right hand cut off.

Faxian came to visit sacred Buddhist sites and collect manuscripts, not to study government, so his account reflects his own focus at one point in time and for a limited part of society. It still fits the decentralised State that the inscriptions describe, one that collected its dues without close supervision of daily life.

Central Administration of the Guptas: Ministers and Kumaramatyas

Mantrin, Sandhivigrahika and the Kumaramatya Cadre

At the centre, the mantrin was the head of the civil administration of the Guptas, and the other important officers included the commander-in-chief, the general and the chief of the palace guards. The Gupta period introduced a new office, the sandhivigrahika, the minister of peace and war.

The older class of officials, the amatyas, grew under the Guptas into a broader category that included the kumaramatyas, who served as administrators at the local or provincial level. Some of the highest officers at the court also held the title, and inscriptions record the careers of three of them:

• Harishena: The court poet of Samudragupta, who composed the Allahabad Pillar inscription, held three titles at once. He was sandhivigrahika, kumaramatya and mahadandanayaka, a high military title rendered as royal field marshal. His father, Dhruvabhuti, had also been a mahadandanayaka.
• Shikharasvamin: He served Chandragupta II as mantrin and kumaramatya.
• Prithivishena: The Karamdanda inscription of 436 CE shows that he, the son of Shikharasvamin, was first mantrin and kumaramatya of Kumaragupta I and later became his mahabaladhikrita, or general.

These careers show high office passing within families, from Dhruvabhuti to Harishena and from Shikharasvamin to Prithivishena, and Harishena's three titles show one man holding several posts at the same time. The ruler himself often appointed high-ranking officers, but because such posts tended to stay in one family, their hereditary nature must have weakened royal control over the administration.

The Gupta Army: Cavalry, Horse Archers and the Five Arms

In contrast to the Mauryas, the Guptas brought new methods into Indian warfare, chief among them siege engines, heavy cavalry archers and heavy sword cavalry. Heavy cavalry formed the core of the Gupta army, supported by the traditional Indian arms of war elephants and light infantry.

Horse archers were a distinctive part of this army. The coins of Chandragupta II and Kumaragupta I show the kings themselves as mounted archers, a sign of the importance of mounted archery. The five arms of the Gupta military were infantry, cavalry, chariotry, elephantry and ships. The Gunaighar copper plate of Vainyagupta, a late Gupta record, mentions ships among the forces but not chariots.

War also had its cost. Skandagupta repelled a Huna attack around 455 CE, and the various wars he fought may have strained the State treasury, although this cannot be said with certainty.

Provincial, District and Village Administration of the Gupta Empire

Bhukti, Vishaya, Vithi and Grama: The Administrative Divisions

For administration, the Gupta kingdom (rajya) was divided into provinces called bhukti, also known as desha. Under Kumaragupta I the provinces were administered by governors, the uparikas, who bore the title maharaja. A governor could be a member of the royal family: Ghatotkacha-gupta, who governed the Eran region during the reign of Kumaragupta I, was probably a son or younger brother of the king.

Each province was divided into districts called vishaya or pradesha, governed by a vishayapati. A part of a vishaya was called a vithi, a group of villages, and the village (grama) was the lowest unit of administration. There the village headman, the gramadhyaksha, looked after the affairs of the village with the help of the village elders.

Bengal gives the clearest example of this ladder at work. Pundravardhana bhukti, in present-day north Bengal, was governed under Kumaragupta I by Chirata-datta, whose known dates run from about 443 to 447 CE, and under Budhagupta by two viceroys with the title Uparika Maharaja, Brahmadatta and Jayadatta. Within this province, Kotivarsha, identified with Bangarh in West Bengal, was the headquarters of a vishaya.

The District Board in the Damodarpur Copper Plates

The Gupta district was not run by the vishayapati alone. He was advised by a council, the adhikarana, on which sat the leading men of the town, and the district officers often made decisions only after consulting these important residents. A detailed record of this board comes from the Damodarpur copper plates, five plates found at Damodarpur, in the Phulbari area of present-day Bangladesh, which range in date from 444 to 543 CE and describe the government of Kotivarsha vishaya. The board had four members besides the officer:

• Nagarashreshthi: The chief banker, who also governed the city of Kotivarsha as its mayor.
• Sarthavaha: The chief merchant, the leader of the caravan traders.
• Prathama-kulika: The chief artisan, head of the craftsmen.
• Prathama-kayastha: The chief scribe, head of the writers who kept the records.

The plates also record the price of fallow State land in Kotivarsha, which stayed at three gold dinaras for one kulyavapa, a measure of land, throughout the period they cover, even while the coinage itself was being debased. A price that held steady for about a century points to stable local administration.

Law and Justice in the Gupta Age

Civil and Criminal Law and the Gupta Law Books

The judicial system was far more developed under the Gupta rulers than in earlier times. For the first time, civil and criminal law were clearly demarcated. Disputes over the various kinds of property came under civil law, which laid down elaborate rules of inheritance, while theft and adultery fell under criminal law. The king upheld the law and tried cases with the help of the Brahmanas.

Several of the Smriti law books belong to these centuries, and three of them deal at length with law and legal procedure:

• Yajnavalkya Smriti: A text most likely composed in the Gupta period, roughly between the third and fifth centuries CE. Its three books deal with customs (achara-kanda), judicial process (vyavahara-kanda) and crime and punishment with penance (prayashchitta-kanda), and it discusses evidence and legal documents at length.
• Narada Smriti: A purely juridical text, concerned only with procedural and substantive law, and called the juridical text par excellence. It is generally placed somewhere between 100 BCE and 400 CE.
• Brihaspati Smriti: A text that deals almost entirely with vyavahara (judicial procedure), probably composed around or after the fifth century CE.

The guilds of merchants and artisans had laws of their own. A guild exercised quasi-judicial authority over its members under its own customary code, the shreni-dharma, and the Manusmriti advises the king to inquire into the law of guilds when he administers justice.

Gupta Revenue System: Land Tax, New Dues and Vishti

Land Revenue, Uparikara, Udranga and Other Taxes

The primary source of revenue of the Guptas was the land tax. This revenue paid for the administration, the army, the building of temples and public works, and the support of scholars and artists. During the Gupta period land taxes increased considerably, and a village could owe several kinds of dues:

• Bali: The land tax, which varied from one-quarter to one-sixth of the total produce.
• Uparikara and udranga: Two new agricultural taxes that appear in Gupta inscriptions; their exact nature is not clear.
• Other taxes: Fines, and taxes on mines, irrigation, trade and crafts.
• Dues to the feudatories: The demands of the local feudatories, which the peasants also had to meet.
• Supplies for the army: Food for the royal army when it passed through the villages.

An army on the move, with its soldiers, elephants, horses, cooks and support staff, needed supplies, and the tributary kings must have been asked to provide them as well. The land charters of the period, which list the dues a granted village no longer owed the king, show how many separate demands the State could make on a village.

Vishti: Forced Labour as a Source of State Income

Vishti was forced labour, work that people were compelled to perform for the government. In the Gupta period it was considered a source of income for the State, a sort of tax paid by the people in labour rather than in coin or grain, and the villagers owed it on top of the bali and the other dues. Late classical Dharmashastra texts specified the acceptable forms of vishti for each varna, and the same system, under the names veth and begar, was still practised in the Maratha Confederacy under the Peshwas and in princely states under British rule.

Land Grants in the Gupta Period: Agrahara and Brahmadeya

Agrahara Grants and the Immunities of the Donee

Grants of land are found from the early centuries of the Common Era, many of them recorded in inscriptions, and the Guptas and their contemporaries continued the practice. Most grants were recorded on copper plates, which were probably given to the people who received the land as a record of the transaction.

The surviving records are generally about grants to religious institutions or to Brahmanas. An agrahara was land granted to a Brahmana, who was usually exempted from paying land revenue and other dues to the king and was often given the right to collect these dues from the local people. A brahmadeya, literally "given to a Brahmana", was a similar tax-free gift of a plot or a whole village.

The grant of the village of Danguna by Prabhavati Gupta, daughter of Chandragupta II (about 375 to 415 CE) and regent of the Vakataka kingdom, shows what such a charter contained. She commanded the householders, Brahmanas and others living in the village to obey the new donee, the teacher Chanalasvamin, and conferred on him the exemptions typical of an agrahara:

• Freedom from royal entry: The village was not to be entered by soldiers and policemen.
• Freedom from supplies: It was exempt from providing grass, animal hides as seats and charcoal to touring royal officers, and from supplying flowers and milk.
• Freedom from royal monopolies: The king gave up his right to buy fermenting liquors and to dig salt, and his rights over mines and khadira trees.
• Transfer of income: The village was given together with hidden treasures and deposits and with the major and minor taxes.

The charter thus passed to the donee both the income of the village and freedom from royal officials, and the villagers now had to obey a new lord of the village and perhaps pay him all these dues. Grants also varied from region to region in the size of the land given, from small plots to vast stretches of uncultivated land, and in the rights given to the donee.

Spread of Land Grants and Their Consequences

Land grants spread across the subcontinent during and after the Gupta period. The Vakataka king Pravarasena II granted land to as many as 1,000 Brahmanas in a single district with a single charter, and Gupta vassals donated land to Brahmanas in north-eastern Madhya Pradesh during the fourth and fifth centuries. Grants to Brahmanas became frequent in northern Bengal and Assam in the fifth century and in eastern Bengal in the sixth.

The Gupta kings kept a careful record of each grant on copper plates, a system that helped them collect taxes while leaving local leaders some control over their regions. The last known inscription of a Gupta emperor, the Damodarpur copper plate of Vishnugupta of 542‑543 CE, itself records a grant of land in Kotivarsha.

The grants created new rural elites. In each granted village a donee now stood between the cultivators and the king, collecting dues that had once gone to the State and commanding the obedience of the villagers. Some people still lay beyond the reach of officials or samantas: Pastoralists, fisherfolk, hunter-gatherers, mobile or semi-sedentary artisans and shifting cultivators.

Land also became a means of payment. Kings began to pay for services in land rather than cash, a change linked to the scarcity of coins after the Guptas, and under Harshavardhana, in the seventh century, officers and religious persons were paid mainly in land.

Indian Feudalism Debate: Land Grants and the Gupta State

R. S. Sharma's Thesis of Indian Feudalism

Grants that passed to a donee both the dues of a village and the obedience of its people lie at the centre of the question whether early India had its own form of feudalism. The concept was first applied to early Indian history by D. D. Kosambi, and the historian R. S. Sharma developed it in his book Indian Feudalism, published in 1965, which set off an intense debate.

The debate turns on four kinds of evidence from these centuries:

• Grants: Kings gave away land with its dues to Brahmanas and religious institutions.
• Local power: Samantas, who maintained themselves through control over land, and the donees of land grants became local holders of power beside the king.
• Trade and coins: Finds of gold coins taper off from about the sixth century CE, and some historians link this to a decline of long-distance trade.
• Towns: Sharma argued that urban centres decayed, and he set out a mass of archaeological evidence for it in a second book, Urban Decay in India (c. 300‑1000), published in 1987.

Arguments For and Against an Indian Feudalism

On the impact of land grants, one view holds that land grants were part of a strategy adopted by ruling lineages to extend agriculture to new areas. The other holds that they were a sign of weakening political power: As kings were losing control over their samantas, they tried to win allies by making grants of land, and they projected themselves as supermen to keep up at least a façade of power. Historians are divided in the same way on the coins and the towns.

Critics such as André Wink have argued that Sharma drew too close a parallel between European and Indian feudalism. The word itself is borrowed from medieval Europe, where a vassal held land from his lord in return for military service. What the evidence shows for the Gupta period is that land grants carrying the right to collect dues grew and that samantas became more important; how far this amounted to feudalism remains a matter of interpretation.

Gupta Economy: Agriculture, Crafts, Guilds and Trade

Agricultural Expansion and the Growth of Crafts

Rural prosperity grew in this period as knowledge of the iron ploughshare, manure and irrigation, and of the care of cattle, spread in backward areas. This prosperity brought no relief to the peasants, who continued to bear a heavy burden of tax, from the bali and the new dues to the demands of the feudatories.

Crafts continued to expand beside farming, supported by the availability of raw materials and the skill and enterprise of artisans. Literary and archaeological sources refer to a wide variety of textiles, including silk, cotton, wool and linen, and between the early centuries CE and about 1000 CE, Mathura, Kashi and Kamarupa emerged as important hubs of textile production. In the Gupta era India exported textiles such as silk, spices such as pepper, and ivory, pearls, gemstones, leather goods, fur and iron products.

The skill of Gupta metalworkers shows in the Mehrauli iron pillar, which bears the inscription of a king named Chandra, identified with Chandragupta II, and has stood under the open sky for centuries without rusting.

Shrenis: The Guilds of Merchants and Artisans

The shreni was an association of traders, merchants or artisans engaged in the same occupation, and the institution reached its greatest prominence under the Mauryan and Gupta empires. In the Gupta period the heads of guilds and the caravan leaders sat on the district board, as at Kotivarsha. Besides its authority over its members in law, a guild performed three kinds of work:

• Economic: It procured raw materials, organised production, controlled the quality of goods and fixed wages or prices.
• Financial: It received deposits, lent money and acted as custodian of religious and charitable endowments.
• Social: It supported charitable work and, through shared crafts and marriage within the group, may have helped harden occupational groups into castes.

A guild could also move as a body. The Mandsaur stone inscription of 473 CE records a guild of silk weavers who migrated from Lata in Gujarat to Dashapura, the present-day Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh, during the Gupta period, and who were skilled not only in weaving but also in archery, astrology and other occupations. Such a guild shows how mobile and versatile craft groups could be in this age.

Foreign Trade of the Gupta Empire: Ports, Rome and Southeast Asia

Trade linked the Gupta Empire to the Mediterranean world, Southeast Asia and China, and the Indian Ocean network connected Indian ports to distant markets. The great ports of the age lay on both coasts:

• Tamralipta: The main emporium of the Gupta period, near the Rupnarayan river in Bengal, from which ships left for Ceylon, Java and China as well as the west; roads linked it with Pataliputra, Varanasi, Rajagriha and other cities of the north.
• Bharuch: The ancient Barygaza in Gujarat, the principal port of its region in the first century CE. From Bharuch and from Kalyan, further south on the same coast, the Guptas exported their luxury goods to the Roman world.
• Ghantasala, Kadura and Chaul: Towns that handled foreign trade in the Gupta period. Ghantasala, near Machilipatnam in present-day Andhra Pradesh, was a flourishing town of Indo-Roman trade as well as a Buddhist centre. Chaul lies on the Konkan coast in present-day Maharashtra, while Kadura's exact site is not firmly identified.

Beyond the Indian coasts, Socotra Island in the Arabian Sea was a significant stop on the way to the Mediterranean markets. Pottery, inscriptions in the Brahmi script and designs such as a Buddhist stupa show that Indian traders were present there over several centuries, beside traders from Egypt, Arabia, Rome and Greece.

The Guptas also had trading links with the Sassanid and Byzantine Empires. The Huna invasions are said to have seriously damaged India's trade with Europe and Central Asia, above all the Indo-Roman trade from which the Gupta Empire had greatly benefited, and they probably disrupted the tax revenues that came with it. India tried to make up the loss by trading with the countries of Southeast Asia, but this trade did not revive the economy substantially.

Gupta Coinage: Gold Dinaras, Silver Rupakas and Debasement

Dinara, Rupaka and Karshapana: The Gupta Currency

Gupta coinage of the fourth to sixth centuries followed the tradition of the Kushans, showing the king on the obverse and a deity on the reverse; the deities were Indian and the legends were in Brahmi. Some of the most spectacular gold coins of ancient India were issued by the Gupta rulers, and the earliest issues are remarkable for their purity. These coins made long-distance transactions easier, and the kings also gained from those transactions.

The gold coins also served the kings as a record of their reigns. They often commemorate dynastic succession, marriage alliances and the horse sacrifice, or the personal accomplishments of the kings, in types such as the King and Queen type of Chandragupta I, the Ashvamedha, the Lyrist, the Archer and the Lion-slayer. Chandragupta II was the first Gupta king to issue silver coins, which were modelled on the coinage of the Western Kshatrapas and replaced it after his conquest of these Saka rulers of Malwa, Gujarat and Saurashtra. Faxian noted that people also used cowrie shells, alongside coins, for buying and selling goods.

Declining Gold Content and the Scarcity of Coins After the Guptas

The gold coinage lost some of its quality in the later Imperial Gupta period, when the coins were debased. Skandagupta issued fewer gold coins than his predecessors, and some of them contain relatively less gold. Post-Gupta coinage, from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, is a monotonous and artistically less interesting series in which gold coins are rare.

Fewer gold coins have been found from these centuries. Historians who read this as a sign of declining long-distance trade presume that, with so little coinage, a self-sufficient economic system with limited trade prevailed after the downfall of the Guptas.

Sources

• NCERT: Understanding Society: India and Beyond (Grade 9 Part I), State and Society up to 1000 CE
• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond (Grade 7 Part I), The Gupta Era: An Age of Tireless Creativity
• NCERT: Themes in Indian History Part I (Class XII), Kings, Farmers and Towns
• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond (Grade 7 Part II), Empires and Kingdoms: 6th to 10th Centuries
• National Institute of Open Schooling: Senior Secondary History (315), Lesson 7, The Guptas and Their Successors
• Reserve Bank of India: Monetary Museum, Coinage of Ancient India
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• Wikipedia: Kumaragupta I
• Wikipedia: Budhagupta
• Wikipedia: Bangarh
• Wikipedia: Samanta
• Wikipedia: Brahmadeya
• Wikipedia: Shreni
• Wikipedia: Nāradasmṛti
• Wikipedia: Ram Sharan Sharma
• Wikipedia: Indian feudalism
• Wikipedia: Tamralipta Kingdom
• Wikipedia: Tamluk
• Wikipedia: Bharuch
• Wikipedia: Kalyan
• Wikipedia: Khambhat
• Wikipedia: Ghantasala, Krishna district
• Wikipedia: Indo-Roman trade relations
• Wikipedia: Mandsaur
• Wikipedia: Faxian
• Wikipedia: Allahabad Pillar
• Wikipedia: Samudragupta
• Wikipedia: Chandragupta II
• Wikipedia: Skandagupta
• Wikipedia: Veth (India)
• Wikipedia: Slavery in India
• Wikipedia: Yājñavalkya Smṛti
• Wikipedia: Dharmaśāstra
• Wikipedia: Feudalism
• Wikipedia: Rajgir
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers