Documenta Nepalica

Commentary

Following a delay in revenue collection, the present executive order shifts the duty to collect the yearly owed quantity of animal hides in the area between the Kali Gandaki and the Marsyangdi rivers from the Siṃha Sardula Company, which had been reassigned to Butwal (south of the area designated in the present document) to the Raṇasera Palṭan.

Earlier documents of this type are covered in translation or as abstracts in the Regmi Research Series. Judging from its summary, one document, issued in VS 1865 (1808 CE) for a region west of the Kali and east of the Bheri, seems to have been addressed to a list of state functionaries similar to the one mentioned in the present one (Regmi 1987: 45). In it there is, however, no mention of the involvement of a military unit in the collection of the hides. Rather, it is said that the hides should be transported by jhārā labour. It furthermore stipulates that "each bhote, hunter, and sino-eating family" should supply one hide, whereas Sārkī families should supply two. Another document, issued in VS 1874 (1817 CE), referring to exactly the same area as the present document, names the same groups as the previous document and orders the Naya Sabuj Company to help the state functionaries carry out the collection (Regmi 1980). Thus over time the collection duties seem to have been shifted from civil functionaries to military personnel, and the groups obligated to provide the skins of animals seem to have been extended.

These documents testify to what was a general scheme for collecting animal hides for military purposes that M.C. Regmi found attested from 1794 CE onwards for different areas (Regmi 1971; Regmi 1975: 53–54; Regmi 1979a; Regmi 1979b). Hides were drawn from those communities who hunted wild animals or ate sino. These groups included "Bhote, Rai, Majhi, Murmi, Gurung, Chepang, Sunuwar, Hayu, Paheri, Baramu, and Thansi" (Regmi 1979b: 127), who had to deliver one hide per year or else pay a stipulated sum. The untouchable Sārkīs, whose traditional tasks also included the removal of dead animals, especially of such bovines as oxen and buffaloes, from their high-caste patrons’ households, and in the present document the Kāmīs, traditionally responsible for weaponry, seem to have had to deliver or pay at least double of what was expected from these ethnic communities.

Taxation on the hunting and eating of dead animals has been discussed as one of the ways in which certain groups’ divergent social practices were made a source of income for the state (Lecomte-Tilouine 2009: 299). Here groups were targeted whose livelihoods gave them access to animal hides, a commodity charged with impurity from a high-caste Hindu point of view, but needed by the state for weaponry. It seemed but right from the same high-caste perspective to tax hunters (i.e. persons who engaged in what was otherwise a royal privilege) and consumers of impure meat. Animals that died naturally or by accident rather than having been intentionally killed were regarded as inedible for higher castes. Regmi in his discussion of similar documents goes into the practice of eating sino flesh, discussing it in connection with the ban on the killing of cows, but he does not take up the question of hunting and the connection between the groups mentioned. Thus it remains unclear whether the arrangement targeted groups that either both hunted and ate sino flesh, or hunted or ate sino flesh, or else either of these plus certain tribal groups.

Notes