Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c4.s2.43

c4.s2.43

The meetings of the village-committee must have been held in a hall (sālā) in the midst of the village, provided with boards, seats and a jar of water.⁶ As to the nature of work generally performed at these meetings (gāmakammam or gāmakiccam) the same Macala hamlet provides us with an interesting example. The members of this corporate body are found to be in complete agreement with their leader, who is credited with much initiative (te timsa janā Bodhisattena samānacchandā ahesum).⁷ Here the leader is said to have established the members of his committee in the Five Commandments and thenceforth to have gone about with them doing good works. Then the people too "doing good works always in the Bodhisatta's company used to get up early and sally forth with razors and axes and clubs in their hands. With their clubs they used to roll out in the way all stones that lay on the four highways and other roads of the village, the trees that would strike against the axles of chariots they cut down; rough places they made smooth; causeways they built, dug water tanks and built a hall."¹ A remarkable picture, this, revealing before us the healthy spirit of communal work, the sense of dignity of labour and the genuine public spirit. Observes Dr. Radhakumud Mookerji: "We have here in this short paragraph a most graphic and complete account of the evolution through all its stages of a village built up by the communal labour of its inhabitants. We may notice how the assembly hall of the village figures prominently in its public works as being the indispensable material requisite for the growth and sustenance of that larger public spirit or civic consciousness, which builds up the village itself."² Indeed the villagers of Macala provide us with a refreshing example through the gloom of the intermediate period of our history, specially when we are to-day bent upon planning a country-wide rural-reconstruction schemes. There is nothing to show that the workers of the Macala village had to depend upon state-funds or grants for their public works. The village was self-supporting.