Documenta Nepalica

Commentary

This rukkā instructs officers at Pāñca Khapana in Pallo Kirāta/Limbuvān to enjoy their properties and submit salāmī levies. The accompanying table specifies the tax rates per household based on different categories of land, ranked according to its agricultural productivity. The rates set do not vary between the categories, despite the fact that land in the first category can yield considerably more than land in the fourth category. The salāmī tax was levied by the pre-modern Nepalese state on many non-Hindu groups in order to fill its treasury (cf. Lecomte-Tilouine 2009: 297). Earlier local customs could be maintained in return for the payment of revenue.

It seems that some postpositions or genitive affixes are missing in the specification of the place, possibly due to the document being a copy. As a result, the relationships and administrative hierarchies between the places mentioned remain somewhat ambiguous. Nonetheless, it can be asserted that Pāñca Khapana was an administratively unified cluster of villages (thum) within Limbuvān that has traditionally been the land of the Yakkhas (Linkha 2024: 88). A Kiranti group culturally and linguistically closely related to the Limbus and Rais but smaller in population, the Yakkhas have lived in southeast Limbuvān, in an area east of the Arun within today's Sankhuwasabha and Dhankuta districts (Schlemmer 2010: 49; Van Driem 2001: 680).

It remains unclear whether the officers of Pāñca Khapana addressed in the present document were identified—by the state or by themselves—as belonging to a specific ethnic group. Rāī could serve as a title for Kiranti officers, as part of a name, or as an ethnonym, most commonly for the Khambu people, who in turn comprise an ensemble of populations in Majha and Pallo Kirāta (see Schlemmer 2010 for a discussion of the complicated history and use of Kiranti ethnonyms; see also the commentary to edition E_3420_0007). Similarly, jimidāra in this context could specifically refer to Yakkha officers. Following the conquest of the far-eastern regions, the Gorkhali kings conferred jimidāra or devāna as titles upon Yakkha leaders, the first term usually denoting a class of landowners and the second originally a royal office above the subbā (Van Driem 2001: 614). Van Driem calls these designations "hypocoristic," suggesting that they were part of a strategy to pacify and control local leaders through euphemistic Nepali office titles, "pet names" (ibid.). Akin to the titles rāī/rāya and subbā for the Khambu and Limbu respectively, these titles installed state-recognized Yakkha chiefs as local head administrators and tax collectors, for whom they provided opportunities for upward mobility within the new political order (ibid.), and could become synonymous with their respective population groups (Pradhan 2009: 59; Schlemmer 2010: 50). However, many details of how these distinctions between groups and the titles of local functionaries in eastern Nepal evolved and changed meaning during pre-modern times remain unclear, and there is not sufficient evidence to definitively establish and differentiate the early use of these terms as ethnonyms.

Notes