Local Government in Ancient India c15.38

c15.38

But the public spirit of the people generally flowed along other and diverse channels. It determined the character of the communal assembly also. Both the assembly as a collective body and the individual members often vied with one another for the promotion of the public good. To the public spirit, patriotism, and religious sense of both parties the villages owed all the public institutions in which was centred the intellectual and spiritual life of the community. The religious spirit decorated the villages with new temples and shrines; created liberal endowments for their repair, maintenance, and development; and made provision for the multifarious necessaries and accessories of worship elaborated or invented by a pious imagination. It is difficult indeed to enumerate the manifold forms assumed by the popular religious offering. The commonest form repeatedly evidenced in numerous epigraphic records was the provision of the sacred lamp eternally burning before the gods of the temples, implying the provision of a perennial supply of the necessary oil and wicks. Sometimes improvement was made upon that by the provision of camphor lamps. In other cases the piety of the people loved to associate itself with a more direct service to the gods: some took charge of their food, creating the necessary endowments for its constant provision; others concerned themselves with the supply of the proper bathing-water, worthy of the deity, for which the necessary scents were permanently assured; others interested themselves in the gods' anointing; others were more anxious to assure that the processions of the gods on festival days should always be carried out with due dignity and pomp, and must be under no risk of discontinuance due to want of funds; in others, again, the pious imagination seized upon the beating of drums at festivals as the fittest form of worship that could be offered. We have already cited the inscriptions recording these various forms of devout offering. There are again cases in which the gift of provision for processions is followed up by that for procession paths. No. 45 of 1914 (*Mad. Ep. Rep.*, 1914-15, p. 13), of Rājarāja II, found at Tiruppanandāl, records a grant of land for laying out a road called *Rājagambhīran-tiruvidi* for the god to pass through to the river Kollidam for the sacred bath festival. The inscription adds that 750 coco-nut trees were to be planted and cherished on both sides of the new road, and the income derived from them to be spent on providing lights and sundry other expenses in the temple. Similarly, no. 66 of 1913, App. C (*Mad. Ep. Rep.*, 1912-13, p. 77), of Kulottuṅga-Cola III refers to lands purchased by a private individual for the purpose of laying out a road through which was to be carried in procession the image of Śīrāla-Pillayār from the shrine of Śiruttoṇḍadeva at Tiruccheṅgāttāṅgudi to the village Marugal. These lands were removed from the list of taxable lands under orders of the king. No. 397 of 1914 (*Mad. Ep.