A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c13.47

c13.47

The organization which made for the continuity of life and tradition, held society together, and carried it safe through the storms and turmoils of political revolution was the autonomous, self-sufficient village. It was the primary cell of the body politic, and the vitality of its institutions is well-attested by hundreds of inscriptions from all parts of the country. Usually, it comprised a number of families, each occupying a house of its own in the residential quarter of the village, owning its own share of the arable land, and enjoying privileges like the right to graze cattle and gather firewood in the waste land and forest lying round about and held in common by the villagers as a body. A Pallava grant mentions some land in a village as the property of the king, which goes directly against the view sometimes expressed that all land belonged to the king in the ancient Indian State. A careful record of the boundaries of a village and of the individual estates in it was maintained. The villagers met periodically to consider matters of common concern and for the settlement of disputes and the administration of justice. Everywhere rural administration grew from timid and tentative improvisations to the more elaborate and complicated machinery of committees and officials that we find described in the Chola inscriptions of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and in this evolution the Tamil country appears to have been more progressive than the rest of South India. The village had a headman, variously called mutuḍa, kiḷān, grāmabhōjaka and so on, who was its leader and mediator with the royal government. How he was appointed and whether the office was hereditary cannot be determined. The village elders are also particularly mentioned besides the headmen and the assembly.