The Colas c25.44

c25.44

Judicial procedure could not have changed very much between the time say of Rājarāja I and that of Kulōttunga II when Śēkkiḻār composed his great Purāṇa. In this *purāṇa* indeed Śēkkiḻār aimed at producing literature which should please and entertain the contemporary Cōḷa monarch better than the vulgar works of heretical Jains. Though he was handling ancient themes, therefore, it is proper to assume that in enlarging upon the holy lives of the Śaiva saints, from the meagre outlines preserved by his predecessors, Śēkkiḻār drew upon his intimate knowledge of contemporary life to lend colour and verisimilitude to his narration. The trial scene summarised above may, therefore, be treated as a fair specimen of the daily occurrences in the numberless villages of the Cōḷa kingdom. It is remarkable how little the presence of the supernatural is allowed to intrude into the account of the trial, and how much of the trial is borne out by inscriptions known to us. The village assembly acting as a judicial body, the dominance of senior and learned Brahmins in the proceedings on such occasions, and the role of the *karaṇattān* are quite in keeping with what we learn on these subjects from other sources. The procedure adopted is on the whole simple and apparently not governed by any fixed rules. The disputants state their own cases,—there is no trace of any employment of advocates,—and the emotion or certitude with which they present their pleas has its effect on the mind of the judges. There is no hard and fast rule that every statement of a relevant fact in the case must be established in the course of the proceedings, and the judges are expected to use their personal knowledge of facts relevant to the case before them. The three lines of evidence by which facts which are challenged may be established, the tests employed to ascertain the trustworthiness of a document, the only evidence produced in this trial, clearly represent contemporary practice. The hint that we get, incidentally, that the village had access to a well-guarded record-room where documents ranging over a period of several years were carefully preserved may appear incredible but for the emphasis laid on records of another type in the inscriptions to which attention has been drawn before. The result of the trial seems to be that an express document can override custom however well established, and no reasons of public policy could stop the enforcement of a specific agreement however opposed to public opinion and accepted morality. But we must not press this inference as, in the story, the conclusion of the trial is just rendered tolerable by the immediate revelation of the Divine element in it; for the judges, strangely as it seems to us, after delivering judgment, want the plaintiff who has won the suit as a resident of the village,—he is described as Pittan (Śiva) of Tiruveṇṇainallūr,—to show them his house and estate, and then the God leads them towards the temple, suddenly disappears, and soon after informs Sundaramūrtti of the reason for his miraculous intervention to stop his marriage. We may assume that in a real trial this question of the residence of the plaintiff would, if necessary, have been raised much earlier, and that an agreement in such flagrant violation of prevalent morality would not have been so readily enforced.