Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c5.17

c5.17

The whole country was filled with a net-work of villages and towns, the former occupying a much larger space. As already stated, there were different orders of villages such as *gāma*, *gāmaka*, *nigamagāma*, *dvāragāma* and *paccantagāma*. *Gāma* means an ordinary village, *gāmaka* a small village, or more appropriately, a hamlet. *Nigama* ordinarily meant a town, "though there was not....any such hard and fast line between *gāma* and *nigama* to warrant the exclusion....of some *gāmas* which may have amounted to *nigamas*."¹ A *nigamagāma* thus means a village, astir with the bustle of a market town, as distinct from a *gāma* with its quieter life.² *Dvāragāma* obviously means a village near the gate of a city or a great town, that is, in other words, a suburb. The other order of villages was that of the *paccantagāmas* or border-villages. Economically speaking, all these orders can be classified into three main types which may be designated as: the mixed types, the special or the suburban types, and the border types.³ Under the first type, come those villages which were occupied by people of different castes and occupations. Perhaps these were in majority, and had the *gāmabhojaka* as their administrative head.