The Mauryan Polity c10.s1.t5: Districts and villages
The Mauryan Polity c10.s1.t5
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Districts and villages
c10.s1.t5.1
For purposes of administration the provinces were divided into districts and these again into villages. The term meaning a district is āhāla (Sanskrit āhāra), occurring in the Rupnāth Edict¹ and āhāla in the Sārnāth Edict.² There is again the mention of the district of Isila³ which was probably under the supervising control of the viceroy at Suvarṇagiri. For, the king’s orders were not directly communicated to the district officer at Isila, but went through the officials at the headquarters of the Suvarṇagiri province.⁴ The next administrative division was the grāma or a village, or a group of a number of villages which formed the political unit. That these were also under some sort of control of the district officials is borne out by an important record, viz., the Soghaura copper-plate inscription whose interpretation remained unsettled for a long time.⁵ This inscription which is accepted to be of the period of Aśoka is an order to the villages of Mānavāsitikṛtaśrīmanta and Ūṣagrāma by the mahāmātras of Śrāvasti. Śrāvasti was apparently a district. Though we are not at present concerned with the object of the grant, still it may be noted in passing that it was an order to the respective villages to put up two temporary storehouses on the road with full provisions. Thus we are enabled to see in an outline how the local government was carried on during the epoch of the Mauryas.
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¹ Corpus, p. 166.
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² Ibid., p. 162.
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³ Ibid., pp. 175 and 178.
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⁴ See for more details, the Mysore Edicts at Brahmagiri and Siddhapura, Corpus, pp. 175-179.
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⁵ For a discussion on the subject see the proceedings of A.S.B., 1894, p. 87ff: J.R.A.S., 1907, pp. 523ff: Annals of the Bh. R. Institute, Vol. XI, pt. 1, pp. 32-48.