It may be mentioned in passing that each caste had a
chief who supervised the performance of caste obligations and duties.
All these officials had an audience with the King
called varicai twice a year. Presents such as
plantains, fowls and butter were given to the sovereign in the name of the people under
their administration. This assemblage offered an opportunity, on the on hand, for the King
to receive 'Information on various aspects of life in all parts of his kingdom and to
ensure the continued allegiance of his subordinates who were either appointed or approved by him, and, on the
other hand, for the territorial administrators entrusted to work for the common good to
present petitions and requests on behalf of their people.
As far as the taxes levied by the King were
concerned, the following were collected:
- Land tax - paid partly in
money and partly in kind, included House tax
- Garden tax - on compounds where, among others, plantain trees, coconut
and arecanut palms were grown and irrigated by water from the well, and
- Tree tax - on such trees as palmyrah, margosa and iluppai
- Poll tax- it was called talaivari'
and collected from each individual
Professional tax- collected from members of each caste, and
- Commercial taxes - consisting
of, among others,
1. the stamp duty on clothes
(clothes could not be sold privately and had to have official stamp)
2. taraku or levy on items of food, and
3. Port and customs duties.
Columbuthurai, which connects the Peninsula
with the mainland at Poonakari with its ferry services, was the chief port, and there were
customs check posts at the sand passes of Pachilaippalai.
Perhaps a peculiarity of Jaffna was the levy
of licence fee for the cremation of the dead.
All citizens of the Kingdom, with the
exception of the old and the infirm, had to perform certain community services called uliyam. such as the construction of granaries and roads,
loan of beasts of burden, beating of drums for officials who traveled from one part of the
Kingdom to the other and provision of water and fire wood. Uliyam
was "a means of mobilizing resources for works of public utility and the royal
establishments".
A significant feature of the collection of
revenues in the Kingdom of Jaffna was the fact that the revenues were collected in money
and the officials were paid in cash, proving that there was a "considerable monetary
circulation". Indeed, in this respect, the Kingdom of Jaffna " had reached a
development higher than that found in the Southwestern and central parts of the
Island".
During this period, the Tamils of the North
and East began to develop a distinctive social structure and cultural tradition of their
own. Most of these were later collected into a code of laws called Tesavalamai
or Nadduvalamai.
Jaffna developed into a major trading centre.
This might have been due to the imaginative efforts of the rulers who, seeing that
revenues "from land and other sources were limited, devised ingenious methods of
collecting substantial income from commercial activities. They "exercised a
monopolistic control over the trade of some important items and organized fleets for
transporting merchandise to foreign countries". In the fourteenth century, exploiting
the political weakness of the Sinhalese Kings, the rulers of Jaffna "seem to have
succeeded in directing the flow of supplies in cinnamon through a port under their
control".
New ports came into being and the old ones
were expanded. Kayts became a center for shipbuilding and ship repairing.
Pearl fishery off the coast of Mannar was in
the hands of the King. Elephants from the Vanni region were exported from Jaffna to India.
Traders were also present in the southern parts of the Island. It is a tribute to the
trading expertise of the Tamils of the Kingdom of Jaffna that an inscription of a Chinese
admiral named Chen Ho is found in three languages: Chinese, Persian and Tamil.
Many industries flourished. Dyeing with chaya root was a notable occupation. A class of people
became experts in digging up large quantities of chaya root
in the Islands of Delft and Karaitivu and in the mainland villages such as Chulipuram and
Ilavalai, and this occupation became their trade.
