The Colas c26.45

c26.45

The responsibility for the details of local administration was, as pointed out before, vested in small executive committees appointed by the general assembly, and service on such committees was honorary. There was a small staff of paid servants in each village to assist these executive committees and maintain the records of the village. These village officials were called *madhyasthas*, a term often rendered into 'arbitrators';⁹⁵ the word does indeed mean 'arbitrators', but it is difficult to admit that this is its meaning in the Cōḷa inscriptions, or that the duties of the *madhyasthas* employed by the assemblies included the task of arbitrating among disputants. Perhaps the term was applied to village officers in order to emphasise their neutral position in all matters of rural politics. They attended the meetings of the assembly and assisted in the conduct of the proceedings, but took no part in the deliberations. Their duties and remuneration were fixed by the assembly at its discretion. In A.D. 923, for instance, the *sabhā* of Aiñjaṣṭasam resolved that their *madhyasthas* employed in writing up the accounts connected with the tank (*ēri*) were to be remunerated at the rate of four measures (*nāḷis*) of paddy per diem, and were to receive in addition seven *kalañju* of 'red gold' per annum with a pair of cloths each; that each of them had at the end of his year of office, to produce accounts and pass through the ordeal of red-hot iron (*maḷu*); that those who were declared pure after the ordeal should receive a bonus of a small amount of gold, and that those that failed in the ordeal should pay a fine of ten *kalañjus* of gold, the reason for the heavy fine being that the corpus of the tank-fund (*ēri-mudal*) was not of sufficient size; and that no corporal punishment (*śarīradaṇḍam*) was to be resorted to by the *sabhā* in such cases.⁹⁶ Generally it was a *madhyastha* that recorded the resolutions of the assemblies to the dictation of one or more of the prominent members present and taking part in the preceding discussions. Another class of officers was called ‘*karaṇattār*’, the exact duties in which each was engaged being indicated by the phrases like *Karai-kaḷukkuk-kaṇ-kāṇik-kaṇakku*,⁹⁷ the accountant who was supervising the boundaries (of lands?). In A.D. 1235, an accountant was dismissed by a *sabhā*, and his descendants and relatives declared unfit to hold the office again.⁹⁸ An inscription of uncertain date from Mannārkōyil in the Tinnevelly district mentions the *madhyastha*, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the goldsmith and the village-pariah as the persons on whom the representatives of the central government depended for demarcating the boundaries of a village Vindanūr, given away as *tiruviḍaiyāṭṭam*.⁹⁹ A curious inscription¹⁰⁰ from Tribhuvani (Pondicherry) dated in the forty-third regnal year of Kulōttunga I, A.D. 1113, contains a provision that the artisans and professional men should pursue their crafts and professions within the precincts of the village, and that such of them as served the residents of other villages would be deemed to have been guilty of a grave offence against the law. This is an interesting example of rural protectionism; but we have no reason to believe that it was universal, or even common. On the other hand, the occasions for service outside one’s own village or town could not have been very frequent. An inscription from Tirumāṇikuḻi (S.A.) records the endowment of a *śandiviḷakku* by an *ūrp-paṟaiyan* in A.D. 1221.¹⁰¹