You know very well what lagaan or tax means — slave the year long at the dry, unyeilding fields and give away precious grain without keeping enough for yourself. You get up with a start, sweating. Thank god, it was a dream! No British officer in sight, just your mother who is calculating how much income tax she has to pay, mumbling all the while about the pain she takes throughout the year to earn money just to give away huge sums at the end of the year to the government. ‘It’s our water but I have to pay for using it’, she says, looking at the water bill. Through your window, you see the dark smoke spiralling out of the factory chimney across the river. ‘Mom, does the factory pay for poisoning our air?’ you yell. Your mother just glares back.

Throughout history, lagaan or tax has always been taken from every person who earns, uses, buys or owns property and services. Names vary — land tax, forest tax, income tax, property tax, sales tax, road tax. Have you ever wondered who takes tax, and why is it taken? Just like your parents need to earn money to feed, clothe and provide shelter to you and themselves, so does a government need money to manage the country. In fact no lagaan,would mean no governments!

The history of human civilization has been the history of evolving systems of lagaan by the rich from the poor, the landlord from the peasants, the colonialists from the natives, the ruling class from the working class, governments from citizens. A history of conflict over resources, especially natural resources.

The earth’s land and water and its living resources was all that our ancestors had to survive on. Hungry? Just clamber up a fruit tree, or collect delicious berries and nuts from wild plants. What about honey from a beehive? Yummy! Or if you were a crack shot you could hunt animals in the jungle for their meat. Catch fish? If you were smart enough and knew how, you could grow crops and eat them. You could possibly also keep cattle and drink their milk and eat their meat.

‘How nice!’ you might exclaim. A few amongst our ancients, the more clever, shrewd and stronger ones, had other ideas. You scrap your knees when you climb trees, bees sting you when you collect honey, and ploughing a field in this heat? No way! Why bother with all this running around to survive. Just force the majority to pay a land tax or lagaan. In return we will provide you ‘protection’, they proclaimed. Thus the ruling class and their controlling armies were born. At the same time, this ecological heritage of forests, rivers, and the fruits and animals in them, still the basis of all the wealth in the world, ceased to belong to ‘everyone’.

Various lagaans were created by rulers to tax landlords, who in turn took the extra produce that peasants grew on their land. In exchange they provided protection and patronage. Just like our modern day governments.