The Rashtrakutas and their Times c17.s3.27

c17.s3.27

A village assembly consisting of all the householders of a village would no doubt be quite an imposing body for ceremonial purposes, but it would be thoroughly unmanageable for deliberative and quite unthinkable for executive purposes. As will be soon shown, the Mahājanas in Karnatak used to perform the functions of trustees and bankers, manage schools, tanks and rest houses, raise subscriptions for public purposes and pay village dues to the central government. And yet apart from the two instances referred to in the concluding portion of the last paragraph, there is not a single instance of any mention of the executive or the sub-committee of the village assembly formed for any general or particular purpose. And these two cases also are rather doubtful; for the Nadwadinge record is fragmentary, and the five merchants, who are mentioned as being at the head of the 50 Mahājana agriculturists in the Hatti-Mattur inscription, may have perhaps been the executive of the guild of oilmen, to which the agriculturists may have belonged, if we assume that they were following oil-pressing as a subsidiary profession. The Nargund inscription⁵⁸ records an elaborate arrangement for compulsory contributions for a local tank on the occasions like marriage, thread-ceremony (Upanayana) etc., but it refers to no taxation committee of the Mahājanas, whose members were entrusted with the collection of these dues. The tank and its funds were to be managed, not by a tank sub-committee, as was the case in Tamil country at this time, but by the inhabitants of a certain street of the village which was apparently most contiguous to the tank. The Soratur inscription of 951 A.D.⁵⁹ records the assignment of certain taxes for a local temple, but it does not mention either a taxation or a temple committee. All the 50 Mahājanas undertake to protect the grant. The Salotgi inscription of Kṛṣṇa III⁶⁰ gives a detailed description of a local college, its boardings and professors, and the contributions the inhabitants had agreed to pay for the maintenance of the institution, but it nowhere refers to any executive committee of the Mahājanas to look after the college management or the fund collection. An inscription from Devi Hosur in Dharwar district, dated 962 A.D.,⁶¹ mentions the agreement of the Mahājanas of Posavur to raise a sum of 55 gadyāṇakas from the interest of which a certain number of Brahmanas were to be fed daily, but it nowhere refers to any committee to look after the endowment, its interest and utilisation. Two Alur inscriptions from Dharwar district,⁶² one dated 1091 and the other 1124 A.D. prove not only an absence of sub-committees or village council executives, but attest to the practice, prevailing in the locality, of entrusting village works of public utility, not to any sub-committee of the Mahājanas, but to the trusteeship of single individuals of known ability and character. Both these records mention certain gifts of money and land by 200 Mahājanas of the place and their conveyance to Sarvajña Mahādevayyanayaka and Sarvajña Permadiyarasa for village public works (grāmakārya). Mantrawadi inscription of Amoghavarsha I, dated 865 A.D., (63) supports the same conclusion. In this record we find the 40 Mahājanas of Elapunase (modern Mantrawadi), the Gorava Moni and the managers of a hamlet making a grant to a local Śiva temple, conveying 85 mattars of land to the honourable Gokarṇapandita saying, ‘He indeed is able to protect the property and to increase it.’ The record is not complete but the words just quoted show that the Pandit was a trustee selected by the donors.