The Rashtrakutas and their Times c17.s3.34

c17.s3.34

It is, therefore, clear that our records do not prove the existence in Karnatak of any village council sub-committees or even an executive of the Mahājanas, and still we find them discharging the duties of trustees, bankers and managers of temples, tanks and schools. We can explain this anomalous state of affairs only on the assumption that the Mahājanas used to make some informal arrangement about the discharge of these duties; influential members of the village community were entrusted with some of these duties according to mutual convenience and trust; very probably the headman may have transacted much of such business with informal consultations with the leading lights of the village, and made the necessary arrangements for the collections of the public subscriptions and government taxes, for the deposit of the trust moneys at interest and for the management of the public schools and charity houses. This may have obviated the necessity of annual elections of the executive council and its sub-committees, as we find to have been the case in Tamil country in contemporary times. On occasions of importance all the Mahājanas probably met and expressed their views in order to guide the village headman and other influential members of the locality, who were normally discharging the various functions entrusted to them. Such meetings seem to have been fairly common, since responsibility is thrown by our records not on the headman or solitary individuals but on the whole body of the village Mahājanas.