The Incidents of Ownership in Hindu-Buddhist India, Java, and Bali

Abstract

What did ownership of property entail in medieval South and Southeast Asia?  The very notion of private ownership of land is still sometimes contested on the supposition that the “Oriental despot” was sole owner of his territory.  This claim has been refuted, but questions remain about what sort of claims and rights such ownership entailed. In this paper, I take Tony Honoré’s famous 1961 enumeration of eleven “incidents of ownership” as a point of departure to determine the scope of ownership of durable property in the cultural sphere influenced by Indic legal concepts.  Apart from the ample scholastic legal literature in Sanskrit, the range of documentary sources is limited, but inscriptional documents attesting to property rights and obligations in this cultural sphere (mostly grant charters), record or prescribe such rights; in some cases, they can be inferred from these sources by implication. The analysis reveals a robust conception of ownership analogous to that described by Honoré, with some notable regional particularities.