Local Government in Ancient India c11.25

c11.25

The local courts took cognizance of both civil and criminal cases. In the *Kauṭilīya* there occurs a passage in which power seems to be given to the headman of the village to deport out of it criminals like a thief or an adulterer. In some of the South Indian inscriptions there are given interesting details regarding the administration of criminal law. Thus in no. 64 of 1900 (a Cola epigraph) we have the following : 'A certain individual shot [an arrow at] a man belonging to his own village by mistake. Thereupon the governor and the people of the district to which the village belonged assembled together and decided that the culprit should not die for the offence committed by him through carelessness.' He was not, however, allowed to escape scot-free, but was made to atone for his action by the penalty of providing for a perpetual sacred lamp at the temple, for which he had to assign sixteen cows to the village assembly. There are two other instances of similar trials connected with shooting accidents or unintentional homicide in which the assembly administered justice without troubling the governor, thus showing how the people ‘played a more important part at such trials than even the governor himself’. No. 80 of 1906 records the suicide of a woman whom a village officer had put through an ordeal for her refusal to pay certain taxes for which she did not hold herself liable. A meeting of the people from ‘the four quarters, eighteen districts and the various countries’ was held. The officer was declared guilty and fined. No. 77 of 1900 relates the case of a man who, while hunting, missed his aim and killed a man, whereupon the assembly, without troubling the king’s court or the governor, disposed of this case of accidental shooting by imposing a fine of sixteen cows to provide for a permanent light in the temple. No. 223 of 1902 records a gift, under similar circumstances, of forty-five sheep for a lamp, by the father of a boy of six years who accidentally killed another boy of seven years with his sickle in cutting wood. Two other Cola epigraphs, nos. 188 of 1906, and 257 and 352 of 1909 report similar cases of unintentional homicide similarly atoned for. No. 148 of 1906 reports an interesting case of a woman throwing a stick at her own daughter and accidentally hitting another girl who died on the twentieth day after the accident, whereupon the husband of the offending woman had to endow a lamp as the usual penalty. No. 91 of 1906 registers another tragedy: