Local Government in Ancient India c16.10

c16.10

It is further to be borne in mind that each of these principles of grouping seems to have evolved its own way of political development for the people in the growth of larger assemblies and federations in an ascending scale of democratic life and extending circles of territorial jurisdiction. Thus the Mahāsabhā was a development on some lines out of the Sabhā. The individual village is not a world unto itself, but is viewed as part of a larger whole. There is thus a widening of the sphere of interests and public service. Similarly, the general assembly of the village, representative of the entire people, the Ūrār, is carried to its next stages of development in the Nāṭṭār or District Assembly and the yet larger assembly of Nāḍu or Division. And yet larger than the assembly of a single Nāḍu, we have references to the great assembly of twelve Nāḍus (no. 600 of 1908, a Cola epigraph), nay of seventy-nine Nāḍus covering an area as vast as a province. In another inscription, as we have already seen, we have the number of men attending such a meeting given as 1,500. A list of seventy-nine Nāḍus making up a part of the Cola empire of Karikāla is given in an old Tamil document called *Thondai-Mandala-pad-dayam* (cited in *Madras Review* of 1896, pp. 94–95). The *Malabar Manual* (vol. I, p. 89) quotes the following words of the Honourable Company's representative at Calicut regarding these old institutions: ‘The Nad or County was a congeries of *taras* or village republics, and the Kuttam, or assembly of the Nad or County, was a representative body of immense power which, when necessity existed, set at naught the authority of the Raja and punished his ministers when they did unwarrantable acts’ (quoted in *Madras Review*, ib., p. 325). One inscription, as we have already seen (p. 240), refers also to this assembly of the Koṭṭam.