The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s4.22

c2.s4.22

The settlements, it may be observed, of the Aryan population may be classed in three divisions. The largest, called city or town (*nagara, pura*), was an outgrowth of the village (*grāma, kheṭa*), and is represented as walled; while the village is a collection of houses around a fort (*durga*). The village itself is often no more than the natural development of the *ghoṣa*, or cattle-ranch, which the king is bound to have guarded, and seems to have converted in favorable places into a small village by erecting a fort like that around which the *grāma* naturally arose (compare xii. 69. 35). With this *ghoṣa*, and on a par with it, are sometimes mentioned the small barbarian settlements called *pallī* (*pallīghoṣāḥ*, xii. 326. 20). The radical difference between the *ghoṣa* and *grāma* appears to be usually not so much quantitative as qualitative. The *grāma*, being the earliest form of settlement, presupposes a durga or fort (defense) of some kind as its nucleus; while the *ghoṣa* (sometimes called *vraja*) is an outpost from city or village, and a cow-pen developed into a ranche, and hence into a village by the addition of a fort to protect it after it had become a centre of population. The word *grāma* is not, however, invariably applied to a natural growth from within, but may be used of a community artificially planted, as in ii. 5. 81, where we read: ‘to defend a city, towns (villages) are made, like unto the city; and border-villages (*prāntāḥ*), like unto the towns’ (though for *grāmavac ca kṛtāḥ prāntāḥ* the Calcutta edition reads *grāmavac ca kṛtā ghoṣāḥ*, 215). Characteristic of India is the recall the country, to guard against drought (ii. 5. 77). How the ommendation in this same passage of ponds, to be built over ‘cow-pen’ may practically become a village is illustrated verbally in the use of *goṣṭha*, etymologically a ‘cow-pen.’ This word is used of any general assembly, as in the proverbial verse: ‘The joy of him that liveth in a village is the mouth of death; but the god’s cow-pen (the place where gods assemble) is the lonely forest.’* As to the constitutional power of the villages, we have no reason to believe that they had any political rights beside the liberty given to them by the royal overseer. It is, however, an aphorism of the legal literature that villages shall be their own authority in matters so especially private or of such family interest as the observances at weddings and funerals. In such case no foreign rite is to be imposed, but local usage shall obtain (Pār. G. S. i. 8. 13).